The Other Mountain: the Mt. Kōya Temple Complex in the Heian Era

Home , Ajari, Emakimono, Jian (era), Sanmon

The Other Mountain: The Mt. Kōya Temple Complex in the Heian Era

William Frank Londo

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2004

Doctoral Committee:

This dissertation is dedicated to Prof. Hinonishi Shinjō 日野西眞定, my sensei on Mt. Kōya. I am deeply grateful to him for his support and enthusiasm throughout this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As is always the case with projects of this kind, I owe a tremendous debt

to the many people who helped me along the way. My thanks start and end with

Prof. Hitomi Tonomura, who started me on this path when I took her course as a very green new graduate student in the M.A. program of the Center for Japanese

Studies at the University of Michigan. She gave me my first foundation in premodern Japanese history, patiently led me beyond simplistic ways of thinking, and continually urged me toward greater sophistication in my thinking about historical problems. I am grateful to her for taking a chance on me when I later moved to the history department to pursue my interest in premodern Japanese history in more depth, and though she must have often wondered if her confidence in me had been misplaced, she has always been there to help me

move to the next stage.

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I am also deeply grateful to the late Jackson Bailey, who probably took an

even more reckless chance on me. He recruited me to serve as a visiting

assistant professor in History and Asian Studies at Earlham College for the 1990-

91 school year. He must have hired me for the potential he saw more than the experience I had, for I had almost none of the latter. That year was exceptionally important in helping me set my future direction. At Earlham I had my first opportunity to teach premodern Japanese history, an experience that raised

questions for me that have defined my professional interests ever since. I regret

that his death several years ago has prevented me from sharing more of my professional development with him.

At the University of Michigan I have also enjoyed the longstanding support of Prof. Roger Hackett, now emeritus of Michigan’s history department. Besides teaching me the history of modern Japan, he also deserves a great deal of credit for seeing potential in me early in my career at Michigan and taking an active interest in my progress. Also at Michigan I have had the good fortune of learning

the history of medieval Europe from two of the very best, Prof. Thomas Tentler, now emeritus, and Prof. Marvin Becker, sadly, very recently deceased. I have always loved the history of medieval Europe admired its historians. The rich history they exposed me to, and the elegance with which they have handled it has left me both envious and inspired.

I have been equally fortunate to have had relationships with many wonderful scholars In Japan. I am first of all grateful to the NCC Center fot the

Study of Japanese Religions, Kyoto and its director, Prof. Yuki Hideo, for providing me a “home base” as I pursued my research from 1997 to 2000 and helping me gain the contacts I needed to carry out this project. My closest colleague at the Study Center was Dr. Martin Repp, who brings seemingly boundless energy to the study of Japan’s religion and gave me immeasurably valuable advice and assistance. The Study Center also deserves credit for encouraging me contact Prof. Taira Masayuki; though I only met him once, the

conversation I had with him pointed me toward Mt. Kōya as a potential research subject.

I am also indebted to the Itoh Foundation for providing me a grant in the summer of 1997. It enabled me to spend some time working on the problem of hijiri, which turned out to be extraordinarily valuable preparation for this project, though at that point I had not yet decided to study the history of the Mt. Kōya complex.

When it came time to work at my “research site,” Mt. Kōya, I could not have hoped for a more congenial environment. Prof. Ian Astley, a scholar of

Shingon Buddhism from the U. K., generously accompanied me on my first trip to

Mt. Kōya, and almost immediately upon our arrival I found myself sitting in the office of Prof. Namai Chishō, director of the Koyasan University graduate school, along with several other of Mt. Kōya’s most important scholars. This was made possible by Shizuka Haruki, a longtime friend of Ian’s who was associated with one of the cloisters and was a graduate student at the time. Shizuka-san has

always been a wonderful help. He often generously provides me with lodging

when I am visiting for short stints on the mountain, and he helped me find longer

term lodging when I came there to work in the summer of 1999. Before, during,

and since that summer, I have benefited from knowledge of several scholars on

the mountain, including Fujita Kōkan, Takeuchi Kōzen, Yamakage Kazuo, and

most of all, my sensei, Prof. Hinonishi Shinjō. Prof. Fujita provided me with

lodging at his cloister during some of my shorter visits, and though he is a scholar of Tantric Buddhism, he loves the history of Mt. Kōya and was always happy to talk about it. Prof. Yamakage generously gave of his time, helping me understand what resources were available and what I could hope to know about

the early history of the complex. Prof. Takeuchi took time to talk to me and gave

me offprints of some of his remarkable work. His knowledge, insights, and

academic rigor distinguish him as a scholar of the highest order. But my deepest

gratitude goes to Prof. Hinonishi. He accepted me immediately and began the

task of helping me understand the history of the Mt. Kōya complex the very first

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time we met. He has been a generous mentor and friend throughout this project,

and I am sure readers of this dissertation will clearly see the mark he has made

on my work. I could not have done it without him. Finally, I must express my

appreciation to the staff of the Kōyasan University library, who permitted me to

use their collection and helped me find the things I needed during my stay on the

mountain in 1999.

I must also thank the great number of friends and colleagues who

specialize in the literature, history, religion, anthropology and art history of Japan.

Indeed, the number is so great that I am likely to forget some of them, but they

include Mark Blum, Kevin Gray Carr, Clark Chilson, John Davis, Elizabeth Dorn,

Sherry Fowler, Sarah Horton, Christoph Kleine, William LaFleur, Elizabeth Oyler,

John LoBreglio, Morgan Pitelka, and Ronald Toby. Brian Ruppert of the

University of Illinois deserves special thanks for his unwavering enthusiasm for my work, and also for helping me with any arcane aspect of Japanese Buddhism that left me stumped. Kenji Niki, the curator of the Japanese collection of the

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University of Michigan Asia Library tirelessly helped me track down resources and information and often treated me to his fantastic cooking as well. Hiromi

Mizuno agreed to be my "writing buddy" at a critical stage when I was trying to finish up. She gave me much needed motivation, read everything I gave her, and never hesitated to tell me the hard truth when I needed to hear it. Terre Fisher brought her editing skills to bear on the introduction and provided assistance at a critical time. But as always must be said, the fault for any errors in this dissertation lies with me and no one else.

I am very grateful to my dissertation committee for taking time out of their busy schedules to read and comment on this dissertation, and to participate in the defense. I am truly fortunate to have such a patient and congenial group of mentors.

Finally, I must thank my wife Diane. This process was much harder on her than it was on me, and I am very grateful she never gave up, never stopped believing I could do it.

PREFACE

The research project presented in these pages indirectly owes its

existence to a group of nine Earlham College students who studied premodern

Japanese history with me in 1991. At the time, I was an inexperienced teacher

who had been introduced to that history only two years earlier in a graduate

course here at the University of Michigan. I based the course at Earlham on that course, and though I did reduce the amount of reading significantly, the students

nevertheless bore a much heavier load than most undergraduate courses require.

They were wonderful. They threw themselves into the material and did all I asked

with very little complaint. They thought deeply about the history they read and

asked insightful questions. Often they asked questions I could not answer, and in

some cases these were questions that, as far as I could tell, no one had really tried to answer.

One question in particular became especially significant to me. Toward the midpoint of the semester, we read an article by Amino Yoshihiko entitled “Some

Problems Concerning the History of Popular Life in Medieval Japan,” in which

Amino deals with the realities of life for ordinary villagers and farmers of twelfth to fourteenth century Japan. He notes, for example, that though rice is the staple cereal of Japan today, at that time it was a luxury most Japanese could afford

only rarely.

We had just dealt with the Heian era, the time of Japan’s first great cultural

efflorescence, only two weeks before, and as is typical in this kind of course, we

focused on the aristocrats and their political, artistic, and literary achievements.

This history was apparently still fresh in the mind of the student who led the

discussion on the article by Amino, for it wasn’t long before she asked, “Why

haven’t we heard anything about this until now?” by which I understood her to

mean, "This is the first time we've seen ordinary people in Japanese history.

Where have they been?" I could only answer weakly that the aristocracy, being

the only literate segment of the population, monopolized record keeping, that naturally enough they wrote mostly about themselves, and that as a result, historians today do not possess information about popular life in the Heian era of the kind that is available for the later times that were Amino’s subject.

That answer did not satisfy me, and so when I had the opportunity to return to the University of Michigan as a graduate student in history the following year, I decided that my goal would be to make a start at answering that student’s question. Early on I decided that Heian era religion would be a good starting point for my inquiry. The religious institutions of that time kept records in great volume and detail, and though most information about Heian religion, as with other aspects of Heian society, seemed to concern the religiosity of aristocrats, I hoped that evidence of popular participation might also come to light. Initially I attempted to look into rituals of the time relating to death and dying. A number of sources offered tantalizing information, but I soon came to the conclusion that these mostly literary sources would not yield the kind of historical information I

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felt I needed. In the process of examining Heian religion, I learned about engi,

stories usually dealing with the founding or miraculous history of one or another

temple. This avenue also turned out to be a dead end; as I read more and more

engi, I became less and less clear about how they might be brought together in a coherent historical study. Simply put, they were sources and not a subject.

At about this time I had the good fortune to have a chance to discuss my interests with Prof. Taira Masayuki of Osaka University, a prominent scholar of

premodern Japanese history whose work is largely concerned with the place of

religion in premodern Japan. He showed me more patience than I deserved

given my ignorance, and when I spoke of my interest in engi, he told me about

the goshuin engi of Mt. Kōya. His first major work, Nihon Chūsei no shakai to

Bukkyō, touched on the subject, and a footnote there led me to futher scholarship

on it. I soon became interested in the broader history of the development of the

temple complex on Mt. Kōya, and was then startled to find how little had been

written in English about this major religious site. Moreover, I soon came to the

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conviction that the history of how the temples and cloisters on Mt. Kōya

developed after the year 1000 CE – in concert with local religiosity rather than

divorced from it – would offer me a way to begin to understand how people outside the aristocracy lived their lives.

It took some more time for me to establish contact with the people on Mt.

Kōya who could help me with this project, but my good fortune in finding this project was multiplied by the unstinting helpfulness and generosity of many people on the mountain as I did my research. My first and most valuable contact on Mt. Kōya, Prof. Hinonishi Shinjō, has shown me marvelous collegiality,

sharing his research with me without reservation thoughout this project. Though

he is already retired from Kōyasan University, he is still active as a scholar and

as head of the Oku-no-In precinct of Mt. Kōya. His remarkable energy is truly inspiring, and I cannot overstate the value of his ability to engage the history of

Mt. Kōya Kongōbuji in a way at once historical, anthropological, and doctrinal. If I had a question that Prof. Hinonishi couldn't answer, I could be pretty sure there

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was none. I have already said it in the acknowledgements, but I want to say it again here: I could not have done it without him.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

PREFACE ...... x

LIST OF APPENDICES ...... xviii

INTRODUCTION HEIAN ERA MT. KŌYA AS A SUBJECT OF HISTORICAL STUDY...... 1

Japan Before and During the Heian Era ...... 5 The Mt. Kōya complex in Heian history...... 32

CHAPTER 1 MT. KŌYA: PREHISTORY AND HISTORY TO THE YEAR 1000 ...... 45

Kūkai and the founding of the Mt. Kōya complex ...... 46 Mt. Kōya after Kūkai...... 62

The goshuin engi 御手印縁起 in the History of Mt. Kōya...... 72 Conclusion ...... 77

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CHAPTER 2 THE EARLY ELEVENTH-CENTURY RISE OF MT. KŌYA...... 81

Who was Kishin?...... 83 Kishin's path to Mt. Kōya...... 92 Kishin on Mt. Kōya ...... 99 The anatomy of Kishin’s restoration efforts ...... 102 Mt. Kōya and the capital...... 114

CHAPTER 3 NATIONAL PROMINENCE AND BROAD APPEAL ...... 128

Annual Rites (nenchū gyōji 年中行事) on Mt. Kōya ...... 138 From Laity to Clergy: Other Avenues of Participation ...... 143 Conclusion ...... 170

CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION...... 173

Mt. Kōya in the History and Religion of Premodern Japan...... 177 Future directions ...... 197

APPENDICES ...... 200

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 223

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LIST OF APPENDICES

Appendix

A. Mt. Kōya as a Sacred Mountain An Anthropology and Folklore Studies-Based Approach...... 198

B. Hijiri 聖 and Kamakura Buddhism in the History of the Heian Era...... 208

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INTRODUCTION HEIAN ERA MT. KŌYA AS A SUBJECT OF HISTORICAL STUDY

There is probably no more famous sacred mountain in Japan than Mt.

Kōya (Kōyasan 高野山). Pilgrims by the thousands visit there year around as they make the last stop on the Shikoku pilgrimage (Shikoku henro 四国遍路) to pay their respects at the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi 弘法大師, founder of

Shingon Buddhism in whose honor they perform a circumambulation of the island of Shikoku. Stories and legends around Mt. Kōya and its monks are part of the popular culture of today's Japan; many of these are well known even to children.1

Moreover, the temple complex that sits atop the mountain, technically referred to

Kongōbuji 金剛峰寺 but usually referred to by the name of the mountain itself, has played a prominent role in Japanese history and religion from the mid- eleventh century to the present.

1 Japanese people often recall from their childhoods the story of Ishidōmaru 石堂丸, for example, in which a boy goes to Mt. Kōya in search of his father who has become a monk there.

Founded by one of Japan's most famous historical and religious figures,

Kūkai 空海 (posthumous name Kōbō Daishi), the temple complex became a popular pilgrimage destination for Heian aristocrats in the late 1100s as they began embracing the cult that had grown up around this famous monk. The Mt.

Kōya complex subsequently gained so much wealth and power in the course of the next three centuries that by the time Catholic missionaries from the West arrived in the later 1500s, it seemed to them to be a republic unto itself. By that time it was the de facto political authority for the entire Kii 紀伊 peninsula on which it stands and boasted considerable economic resources in the form of vast landholdings. The complex had grown so powerful by that time that even after central political control was re-established in the first years of the 1600s by the

Tokugawa 徳川 regime in Edo 江戸, it was expected to send monks to the capital as part of the alternate attendance system (sankin kōtai 参勤交代) established by the regime to maintain control over the provinces. In this system, Japan's provincial governors (daimyō 大名) were expected to travel to the capital

periodically to demonstrate their fealty to the Tokugawa regime. The government

required them to maintain residences in the capital as well, where members of

their families were expected to reside even when they were absent. The Mt.

Kōya complex likewise was obligated to send some of its monks to the capital,

and they maintained a residence there known as the Kōya yashiki 高野屋敷 where monks were expected to reside continuously.2

It was not until the Meiji Restoration (Meiji ishin 明治維新) that Mt. Kōya

lost its political and economic power. In 1871 the government decreed that all

religious institutions with large landholdings be stripped of them. At that time the

Mt. Kōya complex returned to being exclusively a site of Shingon learning and

practice and a destination for adherents of the cult of Kōbō Daishi.

Despite the importance of the Mt. Kōya complex in Japan's history,

religion, and culture, its history has been given remarkably little attention by scholars in the West. Aside from relatively brief accounts of its founding and early

2 The existence of the Kōya yashiki is common knowledge among the monks of Mt. Kōya today, but they have proved unable to direct me to any research on the subject.

history,3 only Mikael Adolphson's Gates of Power has dealt with the history of the

Mt. Kōya complex in any detail. This dissertation takes as its subject the first 300 years of the institutional history of the Mt. Kōya complex, with special attention to the course of its development from about the year 1000 to shortly after the year

1100. During this century, the Mt. Kōya complex went from a nearly extinct monastery to a thriving religious complex that was home to at least several hundred monks and a popular pilgrimage destination. The purpose of this dissertation, therefore, is to shed light on why and how this development occurred, and in the process add to the picture of how religious institutions functioned in Heian society. Simply put, in the case of the Mt. Kōya complex we see a religious institution that functioned not outside of society but rather in integral relation to it.4

3 These include Stanley Weinstein, "Aristocratic Buddhism," In Donald H. Shively and William H. McCullough, eds. Heian Japan. Vol. 2 of John Whitney Hall, Marius B Jansen, Madoka Kanai and Denis Twitchett, eds. The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1999) 478, 495f, and Hakeda, Yoshito S. Kūkai: Major Works (New York: Columbia UP, 1972) 46f. 4 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, Aldine Pub. Co., 1969) 107-108, sees the monastic as an example of "institutionalized liminality," a

Japan Before and During the Heian Era

Compared to its neighbors on the mainland of East Asia, Japan achieved centralized political authority rather late. The first great Chinese dynasty rises in the third century BCE (and even earlier Chinese states reflect a significant degree of political sophistication), and the earliest kingdoms in Korea appear one to two centuries later. Japan's first central polity, however did not coalesce until

at least the mid fifth century.5 Prior to this time, by all indications the Japanese

archipelago was populated with local or regional polities centered on a

preeminent familial group and its head. Over time, these began to interact and

coalesce into larger political units. More powerful clans ascended and expanded

their power, subjugating less successful clans in the process. By the sixth

categorization I believe obscures more than it reveals. Seeing Heian era temples and monasteries as functioning on the periphery of society in this way risks leading to serious misjudgements about their role and place in that society. 5 This is the opinion of Cornelius Kiley, "State and Dynasty in Archaic Yamato," Journal of Asian Studies 33:1 (1973) 26. Joan Piggot, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship, (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997), 12, says that "By the fifth century, collateral confederate rulers in mid- Honshū had formed a coalescent polity under Great Kings and regional leaders beyond this central zone were attracted to this confederation, which now dominated diplomacy and trade with the continent via the Inland Sea to Kyūshū."

century, the Yamato familial group had established itself at least as primus inter pares among the various groups vying for power, and lesser clans increasingly derived their own authority from their ties with the Yamato.6

By the seventh century the Yamato rulers had enough power to take steps toward a more highly elaborated polity. The major influence of that time and region was of course Tang dynasty China, with whom the Yamato had had steadily increasing contact, and the political system developed by the Yamato was closely modeled on that of China. Under the influence of the Soga, a branch of the Yamato lineage particularly knowledgeable about statecraft on the Asian mainland, the court had begun moving toward Chinese-style governmental structures in the late 500s. The passing of strong leaders in both the Soga and

Yamato in the first two decades of the 600s led to a period of instability as the two sides turned from cooperation to rivalry. The conflict was resolved in 645 when a coalition of powerful families lead by Prince Naka no Oe vanquished the

6 John Whitney Hall, Government and Local Power in Japan, 500 to 1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966) 19f, describes in detail how this worked in the case of the Kibi familial group in Bizen province in Western Japan.

Soga and issued the so-called Taika edict, a document showing clear Chinese

influence. It decreed that all lands under the control of the various families were

to be ceded to the court, and that an imperial city be established. It ordered a

hierarchical system of administration be established along with a corresponding

apportionment of land and office, and established a system of tax on land and

labor. Naturally, those families possessing lands and influence gave up their

prerogatives reluctantly to say the least, and periods of further instability marked

the ensuing decades. By the year 700, however, a Chinese-style system with the

Yamato hegemon at its head had become well established, and was made

explicit in the Taihō Code of 701 and the Yōrō Code of 720. These codes are

some of the earliest expressions of what is known as the ritsuryō 律令 system of penal and administrative law. Though much of the penal code has been lost, the administrative code has largely survived. It specifies a hierarchical system of

posts from the central to the local level. The central polity under the "Divine

Sovereign" (tennō 天皇, usually rendered as emperor) was composed of a

Council of State (daijōkan 太政官) served by eight ministries, which in turn

presided over provincial administrative structures that were hierarchies of their

own. Positions at all levels were filled based upon a system of eight aristocratic ranks, with high positions naturally being filled by men of high rank, and provincial and district posts by men of sixth rank and below. One's rank was determined primarily by lineage rather than merit. Persons of humble lineages faced a "glass ceiling" of sorts with respect to how far they could rise in rank and, therefore, position.

The hegemony of the government over all land, especially agricultural land, was reaffirmed, and the codes specified the system by which lands were parceled out to cultivators and yields of produce and corvée labor were collected.7 The system was never completely implemented, but nevertheless it does seem to have resulted in a transfer of wealth from the provinces to the capital.

7 This is described in detail in Piggot, 199.

The capital in the 700s was Nara 奈良 (also known as Heijō-kyō 平城京), generally regarded as Japan's first "permanent" capital. Prior to that time, the palace of the Yamato king moved with each successive enthronement, in order that each successive sovereign could be near his power base.8 This capital

turned out not to be permanent at all, however. Apparently as a consequence of

the instability of this capital, Emperor Shōmu 聖武 (r. 724-49) spent significant

periods of time away from it during his reign, and by 785 it had been abandoned and construction of the subsequent capital, Heian-kyō 平安京 (present-day

Kyoto) was begun in 795 to the Northwest of Nara.9 This capital, founded by

Kammu, did prove to be permanent, serving that function, if only in name at times,

until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The Heian era (795-1185), the period of

Japan's history into which this study of the Mt. Kōya temple complex falls, takes its name from this capital city.

8 Ronald P. Toby, "Why Leave Nara? Kammu and the Transfer of the Capital," Monumenta Nipponica 40:3 (1985) 337f, explains this process in detail. 9 Toby, 333, suggests that Nara was less the first permanent "capital" than the last of the mobile "courts."

Religion in Japan before the Heian era

The Kojiki 古事記 and Nihon shoki 日本書紀, two historical chronicles

composed soon after the founding of the capital at Nara, indicate clearly that the

Yamato sovereign ruled not simply as a result of political or military prowess.

These sources show a ruler who acted as leader of the religious machinery of the

polity as well. The Yamato lineage derived its legitimacy in part from the lineal

descent from the sun deity Amaterasu 天照 described in the chronicles. As such,

the Yamato sovereign acted as "ritual coordinator" of rites in areas under his (or

her) authority.10 The rites in question were aimed at the propitiation of kami 神,

Japanese divinities associated with natural phenomena or geographic features

on the one hand, or were the deified patriarchs of prominent families on the other.

It was therefore naturally in the interest of the Yamato king to both lend support

to and assert authority over the rituals carried out by the local kami cults. The

authority of the Yamato over ancestral kami reflected his sovereignty over the

populace, and support of rituals for the purpose of gaining good harvest or

10 Piggot, 208f. A few early Yamato sovereigns were women.

protection from illness or evil spirits, for example, offered obvious benefits to the

realm. Needless to say, the Yamato ruler was likewise obliged to perform rituals

in honor of Yamato ancestral deities, especially Amaterasu, and also rituals for

the protection and prosperity of king, court, and realm.

By the end of the sixth century, however, the kami cults were beginning to

share the ritual sphere with Buddhist rites imported from the Asian mainland. The

date of the "formal" arrival of Buddhism is given as 551 in the Nihon Shoki and

538 in another source, though given the level of interaction between the mainland and the archipelago of Japan, Buddhism must have been known informally in Japan before that time. Though sources disagree on the date of the event, they do agree on its details. The Yamato sovereign received images and texts from a Korean king along with a letter speaking of the favorable effect

Buddhism had had in other lands. Not surprisingly, the court was divided over the question of whether or not the new religion should be accepted. Given that the legitimacy of the Yamato ruler depended upon his religious standing as chief

arbiter of kami cult rituals, it is not surprising that some groups at court resisted

the adoption of Buddhism, seeing it as a challenge to the sacerdotal authority of

the ruler. On the other hand, the Soga the family group, with its closer ties to the

mainland, supported the embrace of Buddhism by the court in the same way that

they advocated the adoption of a Chinese-style political apparatus. Some conflict

between the conservative and progressive groups ensued, but by 587 Buddhism

was officially recognized by the court. In the years that followed, successive

Yamato sovereigns promoted Buddhism, some very enthusiastically, most

notably Empress Suiko 推古 and Prince Shōtoku 聖徳太子, who essentially ruled

in tandem.11 The Nara emperor Shōmu also contributed a great deal to the establishment of Buddhism in Japan. He saw to the construction of Tōdai-ji 東大

寺 (temple) in Nara and its monumental bronze statue of Vairocana (J. Birushana

毘盧遮那 or Rushana 盧遮那) Buddha. The Great Buddha symbolized the power claimed by the sovereign deriving from the official of Buddhism, in addition to his role as head of kami cults.

11 Piggot, 79-80.

Tōdaiji and the other temples established in Nara became Japan's first monasteries and centers of Buddhist learning and ritual, and carried on practice and study in six traditions of Chinese Buddhism. These are usually referred to as the "six schools of Nara Buddhism," though that designation is somewhat misleading. The six schools were in no sense exclusive; Nara monks typically did studies in more than one, and usually several, of the six traditions. In practice, the "six schools" functioned similarly to academic faculties, all of which were available to the monks cloistered there.

From this point onward, Buddhist ritual was established as an integral part of the machinery of state. The court funded the construction of temples and monasteries, the collecting and copying of Buddhist texts, the performance of rituals, and the livelihood of monks. In return, the monks were expected to perform rites for the protection of the imperial family, the aristocracy, and the state. In the middle of the 700s, Emperor Shōmu took steps that further raised the prominence of Buddhism. In addition to the construction of the Great Buddha,

he ordered the creation of the kokubunji 国分寺 system, a network of temples

constructed throughout the provinces where rituals of state protection were

replicated. The system also served as a further projection of court power into the

provinces; as such they functioned more as political institutions of interest to the

local administrative aristocracy than as spiritual centers for the local populace (a

role that continued to be filled by the kami cultic centers for the most part).

Japan in the Heian Era

The move of the capital to Heian-kyō beginning in 795 was carried out by

emperor Kammu 桓武. The ostensible reason for this last move was that the

Nara Buddhist institutions had come to wield too much influence in the

government and it was necessary to move the court out of their reach, though as

suggested above, there was almost certainly more to the story.12 For one thing,

Kammu showed no particular hostility toward Buddhism. He supported The

efforts of Saichō 最澄 to develop Tendai 天台 (Ch. Tiantai) Buddhism in Japan,

12 Toby, 1985, examines the question in detail and suggests that Kammu needed to move the capital in order to be near the groups, especially maternal relatives, that made up his power base.

and in 804 he dispatched an embassy to China that included Saichō and also

Kūkai, the eventual founder of Japanese Shingon Buddhism, the Buddhism of Mt.

Kōya. The new capital was constructed Northwest of the Kinai plain and Nara, on the Yodo river, providing it with a trade avenue to the inland sea (figure 1). It covered almost twenty times the land area of the capital at Nara and soon became the cultural center of the realm as well as the center of government.

But even as the court and country

achieved new levels of prosperity and stability,

the ritsuryō system began to erode. Pressure

came from two sides. On the one hand, the

power of the Yamato emperors was gradually

undermined by marriage politics. A branch of

the Fujiwara familial group came to hold a monopoly on the provision of imperial wives, meaning that a Fujiwara was always

the father-in-law or grandfather of the emperor. In cases where an emperor

ascended to the throne as a minor, the Fujiwara grandfather would rule as regent.

In time this became a permanent position held by the Fujiwara regardless of the age of the emperor, and over time more and more power was diverted from the throne to the Fujiwara house.

On the other hand, the government's ability to raise revenues from tax on land also began a slow, steady erosion. In the early Heian era the government effectively forfeited the right of direct sovereignty over rice lands as asserted in the ritsuryō code. Instead of court tax officers making direct remittances from the

provinces to the capital, the central government contented itself with holding

provincial governors responsible for the remittance of levies. Initially, the main

mechanism they used to raise taxes was interest paid on seed rice lent to

cultivators. By the late ninth century, however, the interest assessment had

evolved into a direct tax based on land area, and taxes paid in the form of other

goods (raw and finished) and corvée labor increasingly were seen as well.13

13 The early Heian tax system and its evolution are described in detail in Dana Morris, "Land and Society," In Donald H. Shively and William H. McCullough, eds. Heian Japan, Vol. 2 of John

By the tenth century, the shōen 荘園 (also written 庄園) system, various forms of which defined land tenure for the rest of Japan's premodern

history, began to develop. At this time, the government began having lands

removed from the tax roles and their produce forwarded directly to specified

beneficiaries rather than passing through the apparatus of the relevant provincial

government. The earliest beneficiaries of this system were temples and shrines

whose continued well-being was assured by the government in this way.

Exemptions (both full and partial) were initially temporary and subject to renewal,

but eventually they became permanent, with the holder of the tax exemption

gaining a much higher degree of control over the produce of the land. These

exempt lands were called shōen. As a result of lost revenues from shōen exemptions and also changes in the way taxes were assessed on the provinces, the aristocrats who staffed the central government began seeing shortfalls in their stipends. In response, they took steps to establish shōen of their own so as

Whitney Hall, Marius B Jansen, Madoka Kanai and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of Japan. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1999) 199f.

to stabilize their incomes.14 By the end of the eleventh century, the aristocracy

staffing the central government were remunerated by a mixture of shōen

proceeds and provincial tax revenues.

The shōen of Japan differ from the great estates of medieval Europe in

obvious ways, but perhaps the most striking difference is that shōen proprietors

were typically absentee. Though the rise of the shōen system is often pointed to

as a chief marker of the decline of ritsuryō-based government, it is remarkable that even as the system experienced significant strains as sources of revenue

shifted (and often were lost), its remittance mechanisms were reliable enough

that a proprietor need not be physically present to be assured of receiving his (or

her) due. This stands in contrast to landed class of Carolingian Europe, who

almost invariably resided in the countryside on the lands he owned.15 In Japan,

as a consequence of this absentee landlordship, the divide between the

14 Morris, 224f. In later centuries, shōen revenues became partible and alienable, but before 1100, this simpler system obtained for the most part. 15 Robert Fossier, "Rural Economy and Country Life," In Timothy Reuter, ed. New Cambridge Medieval History Vol. 3. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 39f, describes the corresponding scene in eleventh century Europe.

metropole and the provinces was sharp. The capital was the unrivaled center of

culture as well as being the seat of government, and rare was the aristocrat who

willingly left the capital to live in an outlying province.16

Though it is sometimes said that no temples were built inside the new

capital so that the government would not be vulnerable to the corrosive influence

of Buddhism that it had experienced in Nara, this was true only in the narrowest

sense. Two temples, known as Saiji 西寺, or "Western Temple," and Tōji 東寺, or

"Eastern Temple," were constructed on the western and eastern sides of the

southern border of the capital. They were constructed for the purpose of

protection of the realm, as the formal name of Tōji, Kyōōgokoku-ji 教王護国寺,

"Temple of National Protection by Esotericism" suggests, and they were located

on the southern border because of negative associations with that direction

suggested by Chinese geomancy. Though Saiji eventually disappeared, Tōji

16 For example, in The Tale of Genji, when Prince Genji is on his way to a period of self-imposed exile in Suma on the seaside some days' journey from the capital, he looks back toward the capital: "Looking back he saw the mountains behind them melting into the mists and truly felt 'three thousand leagues from home." He could not bear the drops from the boatman's oar." Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji. Royall Tyler, trans. (New York: Viking, 2001) 239.

survived and thrived mainly because it effectively served as the head temple of

Shingon from the time Kūkai was named abbot in 823.

In a similar way, the central temple complex of Tendai Buddhism, under the leadership of the Tendai patriarch Saichō, grew up on Mt. Hiei 比叡山 to the northwest of the capital, the other direction seen as geomantically unfavorable.

As noted above, Saichō traveled to China with the embassy of 804 with the support of emperor Kammu 桓武, who hoped to see Tendai 天台 (Ch. Tiantai)

Buddhism develop in Japan and supercede the still influential Nara schools.

Saichō had been ordained a monk at Tōdai-ji in Nara, but soon after had withdrawn to Mt. Hiei for a period of meditation, study, and practice. He later

gained the attention of Kammu owing to his involvement in some high profile

lectures on Tendai and its central text, the Lotus Sūtra, leading to Kammu's

sponsorship of his trip to China and Mt. Tiantai.

Upon his return from China, Saichō requested that Tendai be granted

official standing alongside the six Nara schools, and his request was promptly

granted. He returned to Mt. Hiei and began developing the Enryaku-ji 延暦寺

temple complex there as the headquarters for Tendai. Before long he was writing

treatises arguing that Tendai was the true universal Buddhism and superior to all

others. Needless to say, he quickly came into conflict with the extant Nara schools. Relations steadily worsened as he attempted to institute an entirely new system of ordination for Tendai monks that was free of the involvement of the

Nara Buddhist establishment. The court at first failed to grant his request that independent Tendai initiations be permitted on Mt. Hiei, but a few days after his death in 822, emperor Saga granted the request in a petition signed by some of

Saichō's most influential supporters, and also provided some funding for the construction of an ordination hall.

Despite its success in gaining the right to ordain its monks independently,

Tendai struggled to gain popularity in the decades after Saichō's death. At that time, esoteric rituals of the kind Kūkai specialized in were all the rage with the capital aristocracy, offering as they did remedies for everything from illness to

drought. After his return from China in 806, Kūkai requested permission from the government to transmit the esoteric teachings of Shingon 真言 (Ch. Chen-yen)

Buddhism he had learned from his Chinese master Hui-kuo, on the grounds that

Shingon rites could contribute to the protection of the realm. He initially faced some political reversals, but upon the enthronement of emperor Saga in 809, his fortunes changed. Saga was very interested in Chinese culture and arts, areas in which Kūkai had significant talent. Kūkai soon persuaded Saga to designate certain temples in the area of the capital such as Takaosan-ji 高雄山寺 (and later

Tōji) designated as sites exclusively for Shingon study and practice. Also, unlike

Saichō, Kūkai always maintained good relationships with the Nara Buddhist establishment, even succeeding in establishing a hall for esoteric initiations at

Tōdai-ji.17 And finally, a year before his death in 835, he succeeded in

establishing a Shingon chapel (known as the Shingon-in 真言院) on the grounds

of the imperial palace where the emperor could undergo esoteric rites. After

17 Kūkai's activities with respect to the founding of Mt. Kōya are discussed in more detail in Chapter 1, p. 45f.

Kūkai's death, Tōji became the de facto head of the Shingon school and succeeded in acquiring large areas of shōen lands as a consequence of its close

ties to the imperial house and the success of its rituals.

In the course of the Heian era, both Tendai and Shingon established themselves as robust religious institutions that became integrated into the ritual and political machinery of the government, as had the Nara schools before them.

Both performed rites for protection of the realm as part of their annual ritual calendars, and as described below, Tendai in particular developed close familial ties with high-ranking aristocracy in the capital. They both also came to wield influence more directly in those provinces where their landholdings were particularly extensive. Moreover, in the early eleventh century, the relationship

between the government and the temples began to be expressed in a more

formal way, whereby the Imperial Law (ōbō 王法) and the Buddhadharma (buppō

仏法, the teachings of the Buddha and the natural law they embodied) were

regarded as wholly congruent and interdependent.18 Shingon and Tendai both

benefited significantly from this formulation, and over time received extensive

shōen grants to sustain them in their ritual function. The Nara temples also continued to wield significant influence in similar ways. Tōdai-ji continued to participate in the ritual work of the state and also had large shōen, and Kōfuku-ji,

the traditional family temple of the Fujiwara, also gained prominence as the

Fujiwara rose in stature.

Problems in the Study of Heian History and Religion

Presentations of the Heian era in standard histories of Japan primarily

focus on aristocratic politics and culture. In some respects, given the nature of

the historical sources available, they can do little else. Only the aristocracy was

literate, and they of course were the ones who kept the records. It is no surprise,

therefore, that we know a great deal about them and relatively little about the

remaining ninety percent of the population. At the same time, the remarkable

18 The development of this idea is discussed in Kuroda Toshio, "The Imperial Law and the Buddhist Law." Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 23:3-4 (1996) 275f.

achievements of the Heian aristocracy in the realms of both statecraft and culture

have made them deserving subjects of study. In the Heian era, Japan achieved

an extended period of relative peace and stability resulting from the

establishment of an integrated system of central and regional governance featuring workable mechanisms for taxation and the maintenance of law and

order. In the cultural sphere, the Heian era spawned many outstanding literary

works, especially by women, including the well-known Tale of Genji (Genji

monogatari 源氏物語) of Murasaki Shikibu 紫式部 and the Kagerō nikki 蜻蛉日記

of Michitsuna no haha 道綱の母 (the mother of Michitsuna), both of which contain

prose and poetry of the finest quality. Masterworks of sculpture and painting,

mostly religious in nature, were also produced a this time, the influence of which

has been felt throughout the rest of Japanese history.

Because of the tendency of standard histories to emphasize the

achievements of Heian high culture, an impression is conveyed that the Heian

era gave rise to great cultural achievements but otherwise lacked important

social changes. In this image, the aristocratic world of 1000 C.E., the time of the composition of the Tale of Genji becomes emblematic of the entire age. Good

histories of the period do of course track the evolution of the governmental

system in the course of time, notably the rise of the Northern Fujiwara (Hokke

Fujiwara 北家藤原) clan to a position of preeminent power and their de facto

usurpation of the imperial clan, and also the steady increase in the percentage of

land under the control of shōen 荘園. In the sphere of religion, Shingon and

Tendai Buddhism and the currency they gained among the aristocracy, as

described above, are given the most attention, with the implication that the extant

Nara schools were eclipsed in influence. These new schools did give the

aristocracy the opportunities for more direct participation in Buddhist practice via

their esoteric rituals aimed at securing more individualized this-worldly benefits in

addition to their rituals of state protection, but here too the picture sometimes

seems static, as if Heian esoteric Buddhism burst forth fully formed from the

hands its founders Kūkai and Saichō. This approach to Heian religion has offered

an oversimple and misleading picture of Heian religiosity in general and aristocratic religiosity in particular.

Heian religiosity as hybrid

In his contribution to the Heian volume of The Cambridge History of Japan,

Allan Grapard notes, in his inimitable alliterative way, that "the life of aristocrats during the Heian period was punctuated by a plethora of practices and precautions of a ritual character."19 These practices drew from a variety of traditions and beliefs in addition to Buddhism, including Daoism, yin-yang belief, and traditions of reverence for indigenous deities known as kami 神 or myōjin 明

神.20 I therefore regard and refer to Heian (and all Japanese) religiosity as

"hybrid," in order to highlight its multivalent character. This hybrid is clearly

19 Allan Grapard, "Religious Practices," In Donald H. Shively and William H. McCullough, eds. Heian Japan, Vol. 2 of John Whitney Hall, Marius B Jansen, Madoka Kanai and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1999) 517. 20 The term Shintō is typically applied to the worship of indigenous Japanese deities, but Kuroda Toshio, "Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 7:1 (Winter, 1981) 1-21, has argued that it is misleading to use this term in the premodern context, noting that the term was not used at the time, and that it carries with it a set of implications that do not apply in the premodern era. Allan Grapard, The Protocol of the Gods: a Study of the Kasuga Cult in Japanese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) 5, 11-13, reinforces this point.

reflected in the following description of some of the daily practices engaged in by a Heian aristocrat.

Upon arising, first of all repeat seven times in a low voice the name of

the star for the year. [There are seven-the seven stars of the Great

Bear.] Take up a mirror and look at your face, to scrutinize changes in

your appearance. Then look at the calendar and see whether the day is

one of good or evil omen. Next use your toothbrush and then, facing

West [i.e., in the direction of Paradise], wash your hands. Chant the

name of the Buddha and invoke those gods and divinities whom we

ought always to revere and worship. Next make a record of the events of

the previous day, [Throughout the document much stress is laid on the

careful use of the calendar for noting engagements and on the accurate

recording of the day's business as soon as possible after the event.]

"Now break your fast with rice gruel. Comb your hair once every three

days, not every day. Cut your fingernails on a day of the Ox, your

toenails on a day of the Tiger. If the day is auspicious, now bathe, but

only once every fifth day. There are favourable and unfavourable days

for bathing.21

In the course of a day, let alone a given month or year, an aristocrat might

sponsor a Buddhist ritual or the copying of a sūtra, visit his clan shrine to pay

respects to his ancestors and the deity of his clan, seek divination from a yin-

yang practitioner concerning some decision he needed to make, and at the end

of the day find it necessary to follow a circuitous route home in order to avoid

violating a directional taboo. None of these practices were viewed as being in

conflict with any of the others even if they might seem to be on strictly doctrinal

grounds, nor were they formally woven together in any kind of overarching system. Simply put, the observant Heian lay aristocrat was obliged to maintain

practices originating in a variety of different traditions. Each was embraced owing

to its own particular efficacy, and the practitioner moved among them effortlessly.

21 George Sansom, A History of Japan to 1334. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958) 180-181.

Even the rites of Buddhist clerics were not exclusively "Buddhist." As a practical matter, formal clerical rituals also might include elements of geomancy or divination, and they also could be called upon to participate in rituals of reverence for kami. Grapard, for example, notes that monks from Kōfuku-ji 興福

寺 (temple ) read sūtras in front of the kami of Kumano shrine as early as 859,22

representing a situation that was very much the norm. His detailed explanation of

the development of jingūji 神宮寺, or Buddhist temples established at the sites of

shrines and the theological thought that was brought to bear to explain the

relationship between the kami of the shrines and the bodhisattva of the temples

makes clear the high degree of continuity between the ritual spheres

encompassing kami and Buddhas respectively.

Likewise, Neil McMullin has documented the takeover of the Gion 祇園

shrine complex, located on the east side of the Heian capital, by Mt.

Hiei/Enryaku-ji in the mid-Heian era. He explains that

22 Grapard, 1992, 73f.

The rituals performed at Gion were directed to "disease-causing

divinities" (ekijin 疫神) – namely the…Gozu Tennō, Barime no Miya, and

the Hachōji – and to the "departed spirits" goryō 御霊 of deceased

people. In ancient beliefs the goryō, especially the departed spirits of

people who died untimely deaths by disease, drowning, etc., had the

power to torment the living in the form of natural disasters, especially

epidemics of such deadly diseases as smallpox, tuberculosis, dysentery,

and others. By way of "departed spirit rituals" (goryō'e 御霊会) the

troublesome spirits could be assuaged and placated, and the participants

spared the diseases and calamities that they and the ekijin caused.23

Again, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Tendai’s head temple

Enryaku-ji attempting to gain control of a shrine complex devoted to warding off disease-causing evil spirits; indeed, protection from evil spirits was doubtless seen as part of Tendai's broader mandate to provide state protection. This is not to say that Enryaku-ji was seizing the Gion shrine simply out of duty; rather, its purpose was at least in part to increase its presence in the capital, and especially to strengthen ties with the Fujiwara 藤原 family.

23 McMullin, 1987, 167.

In the following chapter, I lay out how the hybrid nature of Japanese religiosity is reflected in the founding of the Mt. Kōya temple complex as well, not so much to prove Grapard's point as to demonstrate the ways in which the Mt.

Kōya complex was integrated with its local religious context. Rather than being simply an edifice of aristocratic Buddhism divorced from the concerns of local people, I believe it was in a position to be a part of the religious lives of the people in its vicinity from its inception.

The Mt. Kōya complex in Heian history

The most basic misimpression concerning the Mt. Kōya complex given by survey histories of premodern Japan is that it played an important role in Japan's history and religion from the time of its founding early in the Heian era. Standard accounts frequently mention its founding as one of Kūkai's major achievements,24 giving the impression that it was thereafter the focal point of

Shingon esoteric scholarship and practice. In fact, as will be clear in the following

24 See, for example, H. Paul Varley, Japanese Culture, 4th Ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000) 51.

chapters, the central edifice of Shingon Buddhism during Kūkai's lifetime and for several centuries afterward was not the Mt. Kōya complex but Tōji 東寺 in the capital, close at hand to do the bidding of the aristocracy and to draw patronage from it in return. Although Kūkai expressed his desire to leave the cares of the capital behind and retreat to the mountain, it appears that few others in the

capital shared this feeling at that time or for some time afterwards. Residents of the capital rarely showed an awareness of Mt. Kōya, let alone an interest in it before the year 1000, especially during the tenth century when it was fully under the control of Tōji and at times barely functioning at all. By contrast, the period in its history after point at which it had become an influential religious edifice of

significant economic means has been mostly neglected in favor of the more

recently arisen forms of "New" Buddhism.25 Simply put, the message of Kuroda

Toshio, that old-line aristocratic Buddhist institutions figured prominently in

25 Richard K. Payne, in his introduction to Re-Visioning Kamakura Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, iii, registers this complaint explicitly.

Japan's history long after the Heian era has yet to affect how survey histories

present the history of Buddhism in Japan.26

Mt. Kōya and Mt. Hiei

The history of Mt, Kōya after about the year 1100 is beyond the scope of

this project, however. Rather than surveying the longue duree of its history, this

study covers the period in which the complex moved from being a minor and struggling religious edifice in the hinterlands to becoming a well-known and financially stable institution that attracted a steady stream of pilgrims. Because of its isolated location far from the capital and a general lack of interest on the part of the Shingon leadership at Tōji, the development of the Mt. Kōya complex proceeded much more slowly than that of the headquarters of Tendai Buddhism at Enryaku-ji on Mt. Hiei. By virtue of its close proximity to the capital and steady efforts on the part of its leaders, by the late 900s Enryaku-ji had established itself as a powerful religious institution capable of wielding significant influence in the

26 For an overview of Kuroda's view, see Kuroda Toshio, "The Development of the Kenmitsu System as Japan’s Medieval Orthodoxy," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 23:3-4 (1996) 233-69.

capital. Much of the credit for this belongs to Ryōgen 良源 an extremely capable leader who became abbot (zasu 座主) of Enryaku-ji in 966. Very soon after he took the position, he faced a catastrophe, a fire that destroyed many of the

central structures on Mt. Hiei.27 The speed with which he was able to raise funds

and rebuild demonstrated his exceptional skill in attracting financial support from

the aristocracy. By the time of his death in 985, not only had he rebuilt and

expanded the physical plant of Enryaku-ji, he had succeeded in completely reconfiguring and expanding the system by which it was financed.28 Whereas previously it had been funded by government grants and relatively small

individual donations, even before he became abbot, Ryōgen had begun to attract large contributions from the most powerful aristocratic clans, and in particular the

Fujiwara, who as regents where the de facto rulers of Japan at that time.

Fujiwara no Morosuke 藤原師輔, who began contributing to the Mt. Hiei complex

early in Ryōgen's career, funded the construction of several halls built before the

27 Paul Groner, Ryōgen and Mount Hiei: Japanese Tendai in the Tenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002) 167f. 28 Groner, 2002, 190f.

fire, and bequeathed some sizeable landholdings to Enryakuji, which it gained at

his death in 960. It appears that because of the size of his contributions,

Morosuke sought to maintain close ties with Enryaku-ji by making Ryōgen

responsible for the education and ordination of his son Jinzen 尋禅. This marked

the beginning of the trend on Mt. Hiei toward recruiting the sons (usually junior

sons) of leading aristocrats as a way to attract steady support and raise its profile

in the capital. By 980, when the reconstructed Central Hall (Konpon Chūdō 根本

中堂) was dedicated, Enryakuji possessed significant financial resources and was widely influential, as indicated by the array of luminaries who attended the

dedication.29

As will be clear from the following chapter, the situation on Mt. Kōya could

scarcely have been more different. About the only thing it had in common with Mt.

Hiei at that time was the occurrence of severe fires. However, because Mt. Kōya

was not the headquarters of Shingon in the way that Enryaku-ji was for Tendai,

the Shingon leadership at Tōji in the capital felt no urgency about its

29 Groner, 2002, 186.

reconstruction, and no one of Ryōgen's abilities stepped forward to undertake it.

Moreover, as chapter 3 shows, the recovery and rise to prominence of the Mt.

Kōya complex began not with the aristocracy in the capital, but rather seems to

have started amongst the populace in the vicinity of the mountain in a

"grassroots" fashion. It was not until the mid-1000s that it began to attract the

large contributions of land that Enryaku-ji had begun receiving a century earlier. It

is for these reasons that I refer to Mt. Kōya as "the other mountain"; though it

was a major monastic institution by the end of the Heian era, it never achieved the stature of Enryaku-ji on Mt. Hiei. Moreover, Mt. Hiei's prominence was cemented by being the de jure if not de facto progenitor of nearly all the major

strands of Buddhism that figured prominently in Japan's later religious history.

Shingon and Mt. Kōya, for whatever reasons, never produced any similar

offspring.

Finally, as noted above, the only other major work in English to deal with

the history of the Mt. Kōya complex in detail is Mikael Adolphson's Gates of

Power. Adolphson's interest lies in the ways in which the most powerful monastic

institutions in premodern Japan interacted with the political regime and competed

among themselves for influences and resources. He takes Enryaku-ji, Kōfuku-ji,

and Mt. Kōya as his subjects, tracing the measures these institutions took to

strengthen and expand their political and economic standings from the late

eleventh through the fourteenth centuries. Though Mt. Kōya was a significant

power during this time, Adolphson's grouping of it with the other two is a bit

puzzling; Compared with Enryaku-ji and Kōfuku-ji, and even Shingon's Tōji, Mt.

Kōya was a relative latecomer to the game and was not as significant an economic or political player on the national level as the others.30 In any case,

Adolphson's account picks up essentially where this dissertation leaves off. His

account how the Mt. Kōya complex behaved on the religio-political stage of

premodern Japan and mainly focuses on its institutional machinations. That is,

Adolphson's interest is in the political interactions between the government and

30 Brian Ruppert has made this point in his review of Gates of Power, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 29:1-2 (Spring, 2002) 160f.

nationally prominent temples (Tōdaiji, Mt. Hiei/Enryaku-ji, and Mt.

Kōya/Kongōbuji), rather than the way in which any particular temple acted as a source for and focus of religious expression on the part of common people in its vicinity. This dissertation, by contrast, attempts to show how the Mt. Kōya complex made it onto the national stage via the cultivation of religious devotion irrespective of social class.

The geography of Mt. Kōya

Mt. Kōya stands on the Kii 紀伊 peninsula in the northern part of present- day Wakayama prefecture (Wakayama-ken 和歌山県). Today the train trip to the

mountain south from the city of Osaka takes slightly more than two hours, and

the trip from Kyoto, Japan's capital in the Heian era, takes an hour more. A

journey to Mt, Kōya from the capital in the year 1050, however, when aristocrats

were beginning to make the trip, was much more arduous, requiring at least two

days. That trip was done mostly on water, down the Yodo 淀 river to Sumiyoshi

shrine (Sumiyoshi Taisha 住吉大社), where the travelers would spend the night.

The next day, the journey would

continue south along the Eastern

coast of the inland sea to the mouth

of the Ki river (Ki no kawa 紀ノ川),

which follows the Northern face of

the mountain range in which Mt. Kōya stands. At the foot of the mountain, near

present-day Hashimoto 橋本 city, the travelers would disembark and first pay a

visit at Jison-in 慈尊院, later the location of the so-called Kōya mandokoro 高野政

所 that administered Mt. Kōya's landholdings. From Jison-in, the path up the mountain was, and still is, marked by stone pillars called kekkai ishi 結界石,

kekkai being the term for a sacred space off limits to certain activities and people,

notably women.31 The kekkai ishi led travelers to the gateway marking the

boundary of the sacred space, the Daimon 大門, or Great Gate.

The Mt. Kōya complex itself lies in a long, narrow valley creasing the top of the mountain from West to Northeast (figure 2). The Daimon marks the West

31 For more on kekkai, see below, p. 57.

end of this valley, and the Garan 伽藍 central temple precinct (sometimes

referred to as the Danjō 壇上 or Danjō Garan 壇上伽藍) lies about a kilometer to

the East of the Daimon (figure 3). The main structures here have the longest

history of any on the mountain and include the Konpon Daitō 根本大塔, or Great

Central Pagoda (usually referred to simply as the Daitō), the Kondō 金堂, or

Golden Hall (formerly known as the Kōdō, 講堂 or Lecture Hall), the Miei-do 御影

堂, or Image Hall, and the Saitō 西塔, or Western Pagoda. The Chumon 中門, or

Central gate, marked the entrance to the Garan, but it no longer stands. A

number of other buildings added in later eras also stand in the Garan today.

The site on which the temple today called Kongōbu-ji 金剛峰寺 stands,

adjacent to the Garan and Northeast of it, was occupied by what was called the

Central Cloister (Chuin 中院) from the Heian era onward. As its name implies, it

served as the residence of the leadership of the complex and its administrative

headquarters. Maps dating from this era show no temple labeled Kongōbu-ji;32

apparently at that time the label Kongōbu-ji covered the entire complex, such that

32 See, for example, the map included in the goshuin engi, KDDZ 1.

when visitors were said to pay their respects at Kongōbu-ji, it indicates a visit to the Chuin.

Not surprisingly, the earliest monks' cloisters were constructed in the vicinity of the Garan central precinct. Some of the earliest cloisters marked

compass points, such as the Higashimuro-in 東室院 (East Cloister) and the

Kitamuro-in 北室院 (North Cloister).

Today the area around the Garan is

dotted with these cloisters, and

numerous others can be found further

along the valley to the West of the central

precinct. The Mt. Kōya complex is therefore best understood as a "cluster of

cloisters"; all of them can be thought of as being under the umbrella of Kongōbu-

ji, but they are not strictly speaking part of it. It is for this reason that I refer to "the

Mt. Kōya complex" in this work rather than simply as "Kongōbu-ji."

The valley containing the rest of the complex narrows as it continues East and angles to the North. About five kilometers to the Northeast of the central precinct stands the other major area of the complex, the Oku-no-in 奥ノ院.

Though it was at first rather isolated from the Garan, because it was and is the site of the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi, it has been tended by Mt. Kōya's monks almost continuously throughout the history of the complex. Chapter 3 explains how it became a major pilgrimage destination in the course of the eleventh century as the cult of Kōbō Daishi gained popularity. The mausoleum itself is rather humble, and the building that serves as the focus of devotion is the Tōrō- dō 燈籠堂 (Lantern Hall), or Haiden 拝殿 (Shrine of Worship).33 Today the path to the Oku-no-In passes through a huge graveyard that extends nearly two kilometers to the Southwest of the Tōrō-dō. Memorial markers for many of

Japan's most famous historical figures can be found here. Though they do not mark the location of actual remains in most cases, they offer testimony to the

33 These two names have Buddhist and Shintō connotations respectively; the significance of the application of these two different names is taken up in chapters 3 and 4.

significance of the cult of Kōbō Daishi and the place of Mt. Kōya in Japan's religious history.

CHAPTER 1 MT. KŌYA: PREHISTORY AND HISTORY TO THE YEAR 1000

As noted in the previous chapter, when standard histories of Japan refer

to the Mt. Kōya temple complex in the Heian era, they imply that it immediately became prominent and played a significant role in Heian history and played a significant role thereafter. However, a closer look at its early history tells a rather

different story. This chapter reviews the first two hundred or so years of its history,

from its founding in 816 to about the year 1000. Documentary materials relating

to this period are scarce, but this is not surprising given the difficulties the complex experienced during this time, especially in the tenth century. The purpose of this chapter is to establish the situation out of which the temple rose to prominence in the subsequent eleventh century. In the process, I will draw particular attention to ways in which the temple was integrated with the religious landscape of the local populace.

Kūkai and the founding of the Mt. Kōya complex

Given Kūkai's personal history, it is perhaps not surprising that he would be drawn to the relatively isolated Mt. Kōya site far from the capital. Early in his religious quest, he wrote in his Sangō shiiki 三教指帰 (Demonstrating the Goals

of the Three Teachings) that he "despised the fame and fortune of city life" and

"longed to live in mountains and forests embraced by clouds and mists."1 At age

24, Kūkai dropped out of the state university (daigaku 大学), where he had been

pursuing a course of study leading to government service, and entered the

liminal world of the ubasoku 優婆塞 (skt. upāsaka), a kind of free-lance

professional Buddhist practitioner who operated outside the authority of the state-

controlled Buddhist institutions. In particular, he seems to have taken up the

mantle of the shidosō 私度僧, or unordained monk, and lived the life of a

wandering ascetic in isolated mountains and forests. According to one of his

1 Quoted in Ryūichi Abé, The Weaving of Mantra (New York: Columbia UP, 1999),75. The Sangō shiiki appears in TKDZ 7, 41f.

letters,2 it was during this period of wandering that he first discovered Mt. Kōya.3

It was much later, however, after his return from his study in China in 806, when the events recounted in the Kongōbuji konryū shugyō engi 金剛峰寺建立修行縁

起,4 (dated 968, hereafter shugyō engi) took place. According to this account,

when Kūkai was in Uchi-gun 宇知郡, Yamato 大和 province, he met a hunter,

called the nanzan no inukai 南山ノ犬飼, "the dogkeeper of the Southern

mountain." Kūkai was led to Amano Shrine 天野社(Ito-gun, Katsuragi-chō 伊都郡

かつらぎ町), where an incarnation of the Niu myōjin 丹生明神, the deity of that

shrine, appeared to him as a mountain man (yamabito 山人). Later, as Kūkai and

his disciples were preparing the site for construction, they discovered the higyō

2 The letter appears in Shōryō-shū, 性霊集 fascicle 8, in TKDZ 8, 169-70. 3 Abé, 83. 4 This account appears in KDDZ 1, 53f, and in English translation in George Tanabe, trans, "The Founding of Mount Kōya and Kūkai's Eternal Meditation," in George Tanabe, ed., Religions of Japan in Practice (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 354-359. The date of composition of the shugyō engi is given as 959 and attributed to the Tōji monk Ningai, though that is probably incorrect.

sanko 飛行三鈷, or "flying vajra,"5 which tradition says he threw from China

toward Japan, hanging from a pine tree.

Hunters are often mentioned in connection with the opening of sacred

spaces in rural areas, and it is possible that these hunters might have been

"primitive shugenja 修験者."6 Here Mt. Kōya suggests a characteristic of the

Japanese sacred mountain, that of being a site of shugendō ascetic practice.7 In

the end, the traditional account of the founding of Mt. Kōya gives the impression

that its selection was for rather "unBuddhist" reasons, having mostly to do with the religious practices Kūkai absorbed during his time of mendicancy, rather than

on account of a vision (of a bodhisattva or patriarch, as is sometimes the case) or

for geomantic or other reasons of the kind usually offered. For example, the

mention of his discovery of the higyō sanko comes rather late in the account, and

seems to be almost an ex post facto confirmation that Mt. Kōya was the proper

choice rather than as the primary marker of such.

5 A vajra is a ritual implement used in Tantric and Shingon esoteric rites. 6 Hinonishi 1997, 99. 7 See Appendix A for more on Mt. Kōya as a sacred mountain.

It is not surprising that Kūkai took pains to found the Mt. Kōya religious

edifice in accord with local customs. In addition to the obvious practical benefits

for doing so (so as to foster its acceptance by the local populace), as has been

noted above, his approach was probably informed by the time he spent as a

mendicant in Japan's nether regions as a young man. Even at its inception, then,

the Mt. Kōya complex was integrated with the local religious landscape rather

than being set apart from it.8

Much of the preceeding is based on the assumption that the story of the

founding of the Mt. Kōya complex that appears in the shugyō engi originated close to the time of the founding itself. Given that the composition of the shugyō

engi is dated to 968, nearly 150 years after the founding, this assumption is

problematic. Moreover, the fact that the Niu and Kōya kami are never mentioned in Kūkai's writings raises further doubts that the story appeared at the time of the founding or soon after. It is possible, for example, that the idea that Kūkai

8 Hinonishi, 1997, 102-7, discusses at length the extent to which local deities were and are represented in both the structures and rituals of the Mt. Kōya complex.

interacted with the local deities arose in the later 900s as a result of cooperation between Gashin 雅真, who was abbot (kengyō 検校) of Kongōbuji (that is, the Mt.

Kōya complex) at the time, and the locally prominent Sakanoue 坂上 clan.9 It may be the case that the link between Kūkai and the Mt. Kōya kami was

constructed at this time as a way for the Mt. Kōya complex, which was in dire

straits at the time, to ingratiate itself with this major local clan in order to attract

financial support from it. The Amano Shrine 天野社 (formally known as the Niu-

tsuhime Jinja 丹生都比賣神社, figure 2) at the foot of Mt. Kōya was and is the

seat of the Niu and Kōya deities and also was the clan shrine of the Sakanoue,

meaning that that the construction of a link between Kūkai and the Niu and Kōya

deities might have been intended as a way to accomplish this.10

9 This is the argument of Wada Akio (Shūjō) 和多昭夫 (秀乗), "Kōyasan to Niu-sha ni tsuite 高野山と丹生社について [Concerning Mt. Kōya and the Niu Shrine]," Mikkyō bunka 73 (1965) 14. Gashin's time on Mt. Kōya is discussed in more detail below, p. 67 10 It is also worth noting that Amano shrine stands at the foot of Mt. Kōya, matching in another way the arrangement of the sacred space Katsumoto-ura as described by Namihira.

Figure 1 Amano/Niu-tsuhime Shrine. Today the shrine has four halls, two for the Niu and Kōya deities, and two for deities added in the 13th century. Photo by author.

Nevertheless, other evidence suggesting that Kūkai may have in fact been concerned with the local kami cult does exist. A study by Takeuchi Kōzen 武内孝

善, who otherwise rejects the shugyō engi account of the founding of Mt. Kōya, suggests a plausible alternate theory as to why Kūkai selected Mt. Kōya and how the founding of the Mt. Kōya complex might have become linked to the Niu and

Kōya kami early on.11 Takeuchi focuses his attention on a particular letter written

11 Takeuchi Kōzen 武内孝善, "Kōyasan no kaisō o megutte – Kōbō Daishi to Niu tsuhime no mikoto 高野山の開創をめぐってー弘法大師と丹生津比売命 [Concerning the Founding of Mt. Kōya – Kōbō Daishi and the Deity Niu tsuhime]," In Okada Shigekiyo 岡田重精 ed. Nihon

by Kūkai which, though lacking both a date and an addressee, was an appeal for support for the development of a religious edifice at Mt. Kōya intended for some locally prominent person in Kii province.12 Kūkai begins the letter by mentioning

that one of his ancestors, one Ōna Gusahiko 大名草彦 (比古), was from the clan

credited with founding Kii province 紀伊国. He goes on to explain that he has

been granted the Mt. Kōya site in Kii province by emperor Saga and will soon be

dispatching two of his disciples who will begin developing it. He closes the letter with a request that its recipient will assist the monks in their work, and that he is

planning to come to the mountain himself the following year. The identity of the

recipient of this letter is of course of great interest because it may point to other

reasons for Kūkai's selection of Mt. Kōya.

shūkyo e no shikaku 日本宗教への視角 [Perspectives on Japanese Religion] (Tokyo: Tōhō shuppan, 1994), 213-47. 12 The letter appears in the Kōya zappitsu shū 高野雑筆集 , TKDZ 7, 100-101. The Kōya zappitsu- shū is a collection of miscellaneous writings by Kūkai.

After reviewing the work of several other scholars on this question,

Takeuchi presents his own case for who the recipient might have been.13 He begins by offering documentary evidence showing that Ōna Gusahiko was in fact an early and direct ancestor of the Ki 紀 clan, which by virtue of its close ties to the imperial family had long controlled the post of kuni-no-miyatsuko 国造, or

provincial governor. Another clan in Kii province, the Niu Hafuri 丹生祝, while not

as powerful as the Ki, nevertheless shared its progenitor. Its main clan deity was

Niu-tsuhime, the same Niu deity associated with Mt. Kōya. Ōna Gusahiko does not appear in the Niu Hafuri clan lineage records, but his son Ujihiko 宇遅彦 (比

古), who also appears in Ki clan genealogies, does. These family genealogies

are complex, but the lineage of the Niu Hafuri clan, whose ties to the Mt. Kōya

Niu deity date back to before the time of Kūkai's arrival, can be traced back to

Ōna Ujihiko, and by extension, to Ōna Gusahiko. If we accept that a tie existed

between the Ki and Niu clans, as their respective lineages seems to suggest, the

selection of Mt. Kōya, and the traditional linkage between Kūkai and the Niu deity

13 Takeuchi, 1994, 223f.

reflected in the shugyō engi becomes much clearer. The letter was probably intended for a member of either the Ki or Niu Hafuri clan, either of which he might have approached for help in developing the site, but both of which had ties to the

Niu deity. Takeuchi believes the letter was probably intended for a Niu Hafuri

clan member, because although the Ki clan would have had greater resources,

their perspective was more province-wide and they might not have been as interested in a local project such as this. The Niu Hafuri, by contrast, were based

right at the foot of the mountain and so were best situated to lend direct support.

In either case, Takeuchi's genealogical analysis accounts rather well for why the

Niu-tsuhime deity figures so prominently in the story of the selection of Mt. Kōya.

Simply put, if Kūkai could show he had the consent of the deity to develop the site, the local clan or clans related to that deity would be more likely to permit and support it.

Seen in this way, the concern that Kūkai may have shown for Mt. Kōya's

kami arose more from political expediency rather than the result of a

thoroughgoing concern for the propitiation of local deities. Scholars who argue that Kūkai generally lacked interest in indigenous religion and was primarily interested in promoting Shingon esoteric Buddhism are generally specialists in the thought of Kūkai or Shingon philosophy, which leads them to rely heavily on the writings of Kūkai and give less weight to evidence of heterodox beliefs or practices. Other scholars of a more anthropological bent, Hinonishi Shinjō in particular in this case, are critical of the former group of scholars, and point to

evidence outside the writings of Kūkai that suggests that he did in fact respect and embrace a broader range of religious expression.14 The evidence in this regard is hard to ignore: it seems clear that in the process of establishing his religious retreat on Mt. Kōya that Kūkai did show a great deal of concern for local deities and mountain-religious (sangaku shugen 山岳修験) practices, as reflected,

for example, in the earliest construction on the mountain described below. It is

never clear how legends such as that of Kūkai's being guided to Mt. Kōya come

14 Hinonishi, 1997, 108-110, explicitly criticizes Wada and Takeuchi for ignoring this other evidence. Hinonishi is, I think, correct in his criticism, but it is equally a mistake to dismiss these scholars' findings out of hand.

into existence, but it seems reasonable to say at least that the seriousness with

which he took the local religious landscape may have led to a story developing early on that reified his relationships with the local deities. This, however, does

not directly contradict the conclusions of those who reject the founding story in

the shugyō engi because of a lack of supporting evidence in Kūkai's own writings.

It may be the case, as noted above, that the real origin of this legend can be

found in Gashin's efforts to attract the support of the Sakanoue clan for the

restoration of the complex in the later 900s, but it is also possible that the story

did date from the time of Kūkai or shortly thereafter and was not invented but

revived at the time of Gashin. Indeed, Takeuchi's analysis of the relationship

between Kūkai and the Niu deity indeed supports the contention made by

Hinonishi that they were in fact linked early on. As has been noted, Takeuchi attributes this linkage to what we might call political expediency on the part of

Kūkai as he worked to establish the Mt. Kōya edifice, but it may just as well be

seen as another reflection of his general concern with the local religio-political

context. In the end, seeing Kūkai's approach to the founding of the Mt. Kōya complex as what we might call a "religious hybrid" seems to make the most sense, especially given the thoroughly hybrid nature of Japanese religion at the time.15

Early construction on Mt. Kōya

In the sixth month of 816, Kūkai requested that Emperor Saga 嵯峨 grant him Mt. Kōya as a site for Shingon esoteric practice. The request was granted the next month,16 and by all indications, Kūkai quickly set to work on the site. The

Kōyasan hiki 高野山秘紀17 suggests that one of his first moves was to lay out the

kekkai 結界, or sacred precinct, which still today defines the boundaries of the Mt.

Kōya complex.18 Likewise, construction of the first buildings in the central

15 This subject has been treated in more detail in the introduction, p. 27f. 16 Dajō kanpu-an, HI 436, Hinonishi 1999, 103. 17 The Kōyasan hiki, which begins with a description of how Kūkai laid out the kekkai, is attributed to Dōhan 道範 (1184-1252). It can be found in Abe Yasurō 阿部泰郎, Chūsei Kōyasan engi no kenkyū 中世高野山縁起の研究 [Studies of the engi of Medieval Mt. Kōya], (Nara: Gangōji bunkazai kenkyūjo, 1983), 87f. 18 Hinonishi, 1997, 99. According to the Kōyasan hiki, Kūkai based his kekkai on that of Gundari (skt. Kuṇḍalī) myōō 軍茶利明王, one of the five great myōō bodhisattvas portrayed in the kongōkai mandala 金剛界曼荼羅, giving the precinct a clearly Buddhist provenance. Hinonishi

precinct, or Garan 伽藍 of Mt. Kōya seems to have begun soon after Kūkai's initial visit in 816.19 The shugyō engi indicates that a "treasure-stupa" (Tahōtō 多

宝塔), in this case the central pagoda or Daitō 大塔, was constructed during

Kūkai's lifetime, as was the Kōdō 講堂 (Lecture Hall) and monks' residences.

During the lifetime of his successor Shinnen 眞然, construction continued with

the addition of another treasure-stupa later known as the Saitō 西塔 (Western

Pagoda), a bell tower, a cafeteria, and a sūtra repository. In cooperation with

Kūkai and Shinnen, Jichie (or Jitsue) 実恵 built the Image Hall (Miei-dō 御影堂),

the Middle Gate (which marked the entrance to the Garan), and a pagoda in the

Oku-no-In precinct some distance to the Northeast of the Garan. With the

completion of these structures, the basic outline of the Garan was essentially

complete.20 In addtion, although the shugyō engi does not mention it, the Daimon

大門, or Great Gate, which marks the boundary of the kekkai sacred space to the

notes that Kūkai followed the contours of the Gundari myōō Buddha field, as laid out in the Darani jikkyō (or shūgyō) 陀羅尼集経 sūtra quite closely, if the Kōyasan hiki is to be believed. 19 Hinonishi, 1997, 110. 20 A diagram showing the layout of the Garan central precinct can be found on p. Error! Bookmark not defined..

west of the central precinct, also was constructed at this time.21 Initially, the

Daimon stood on a spot some 500 or 600 meters below its current location and

had the form of a torii 鳥居, unlike the present-day structure, which dates from

the mid-1100s, when a multistory gate more typical of Buddhist temples was constructed. In the context of the process of laying out the kekkai, it is not

surprising that a torii style gate, which is commonly used to indicate an entry

point into a sacred space, would be used. As with other elements of the kekkai

discussed previously, we see here a symbol most commonly associated with indigenous religious tradition, mountain-religious practice in particular, again pointing to the hybrid nature of the Mt. Kōya complex in its inception. The Kōdō lecture hall has likewise undergone a similar transformation. As its name implies, a Kōdō functions primarily as a gathering and teaching space, and Gorai Shigeru has argued that typically one would expect to find such a structure in an edifice

21 Hinonishi, 1997, 101. The construction of the Daimon is recounted in the Kongōbuji junrei shidai 金剛峰寺巡礼次第, also known as the Kongōbuji junrei ki 金剛峰寺巡礼記. The monk Myōe 明慧 (1173～1232) is credited with authorship. Copies of this document are held by several cloisters on Mt. Kōya including Kongōzammai-in 金剛三昧院院. Further research on this original torii-style gate is in order.

where mountain-religion, rather than formal Shingon Buddhism, was practiced.22

Today the central hall in the Garan is called the Kondō 金堂, indicating that over

time it evolved from a gathering place into a more formal ritual space more of a

piece with formal Shingon Buddhist practice.

Though Kūkai expressed a desire to reside on Mt. Kōya rather than in the

capital, for the most part the various demands placed on him by the government

and the other edifices of Shingon Buddhism he had established prevented him from doing so. He attempted to settle on Mt. Kōya as early as 818, but within months he had been summoned back to the capital, and in 823, shortly before the retirement of Emperor Saga 嵯峨, he was put in charge of Tōji 東寺, one of two important temples that stood at the southern boundary of the capital.23 Kūkai

was much in demand in the capital owing to the remarkable variety of talents he

22 Gorai Shigeru, "Kūkai no genzō 空海の現像 [The Development of Kūkai]," Bessatsu Sumi 別冊墨 Vol. 3, “Kūkai no sekai 空海の世界 [The World of Kūkai],” (March, 1983), 36f. 23 Tōji’s large five-story pagoda dating from the 1600s is clearly visible to shinkansen rail passengers arriving in Kyoto today. The other temple on the south side of the capital, Saiji 西寺, or “West Temple,” is no longer in existence. It was as a result of Kūkai's abbacy at Tōji that it became the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism. See chapter 1, p. 32f.

possessed, including his ability to perform esoteric (mikkyō) rituals regarded as

conferring a variety of benefits much sought after in the capital, including

protection of the emperor and the aristocracy from political threats and insuring

the prosperity of the realm, as in the case of rainmaking rituals, for example.24 As a consequence, it was not until 832 that Kūkai was finally able to take up permanent residence on Mt. Kōya, where he died less than three years later.25

Kūkai continued to maintain a presence in the capital to some extent even during his last years on the mountain; it was during this time that he got permission to establish a Shingon chapel in the imperial palace, thus further deepening the ties between Shingon and the imperial family, and he also gained authorization to carry out two official annual ordinations on Mt. Kōya, signaling a pronounced rise in prominence for it.

24 Weinstein, 479; Yoshito S. Hakeda, Kūkai: Major Works, (New York: Columbia UP, 1972), 51-2. 25 The death of Kūkai and its significance of the tradition that grew up around it for the history of Mt. Kōya is examined in detail in the following chapter.

Mt. Kōya after Kūkai

The situation left behind by Kūkai upon his death was a rather confused

one. Rather than leave the Shingon school in the hands of a single clear

successor, he opted to place different Shingon temples in the hands of different

disciples. Jichie was appointed abbot of Tōji in the capital, and Shinzei 真済 was

put in charge of Takaosanji 高雄山寺, one of the retreats Kūkai used early on

after his return from China, and Kūkai’s disciple Shinga 真雅 was installed as

abbot of the Shingon’in 真言院 at Tōdaiji in Nara.26 The Kongōbuji complex on Mt.

Kōya in turn was left in the hands of Kūkai’s nephew Shinzen 真然. The effect of this arrangement was that no single temple could make an unambiguous claim to being the leader of Shingon, leaving them disunited and in competition with one

another in the never-ending struggle to gain the patronage of the powerful

families in the capital. Mt, Kōya, being by far the most distant from the capital,

26 Unlike Saichō, Kūkai maintained a good relationship with the so-called “Nara Schools” of Tōdaiji and Kōfukuji, seeing them as the original representatives of esotericism in Japan. This good relationship culminated in Kūkai being permitted to establish a Shingon cloister at Tōdaiji. Abe, 1999, 205f, offers a detailed explanation of Kūkai’s attitude toward and relationship with the Nara schools.

was at a distinct disadvantage in this competition, as its subsequent fortunes reflect rather clearly.

The relationship between Tōji and Mt. Kōya in particular quickly became very strained. Within twenty years of Kūkai’s death, Shinzei, who succeeded

Jichie, managed to have Mt. Kōya decertified as a site for annual ordinations and

had those ordinations transferred to Tōji. It was relatively easy for Shinzei to

persuade the court to do this; distant and humble Kongōbuji on Mt. Kōya was not

in any position to challenge the dominance of Tōji.27 This could have marked the

beginning of a long decline for Mt. Kōya, but when Shinzen later became abbot

of Tōji concurrently with his post as abbot of Kongōbuji, he made a successful

appeal in the never-ending struggle to gain the patronage of the powerful families

in the capital.to have Mt. Kōya’s allotment of official annual ordinands restored.

The struggle for these annual ordinand slots, the number of which (in principle at

least) was sharply limited and strictly controlled by the government, continued

until a compromise settlement was reached in which four were allotted to Tōji,

27 Weinstein, 498-9.

three to Takaosanji, and three to Mt. Kōya. Moreover, in 889, Shinzen persuaded

the court to grant the title of zasu 座主 to the abbot who succeeded him on Mt.

Kōya. This was important because zasu was the appellation for the abbot of the

very influential Tendai complex on Mt. Hiei, thus placing Mt. Kōya on a more

nearly equal footing with it.28 Finally, in order to signal the prominence he felt Mt.

Kōya was due, Shinzen also put in the hands of Mt. Kōya’s abbot Juchō 寿長 a very important collection of documents known as the Sanjūjō sasshi (or sakushi)

三十帖策子 among which were a number of holographs of Kūkai, creating yet another source of friction between Tōji and Mt. Kōya. Very soon, Tōji began pressing for the return of this collection, while at the same time taking steps to increase its stature in the capital. It conferred the denbō kanjō 伝法灌頂, or

“initiation for the transmitter of the dharma,” the highest initiation in Shingon

28 The title held by the head of a temple depended on the temple. The abbot of Mt. Hiei/Enryaku-ji was and is known as zasu, and this was the most common title for the head of a major temple. Tōji is an exception; its abbot held the title of chōja. The title held by the abbot of Mt. Kōya was at various times kengyō, zasu and shigyō 執行, During the period when the abbot of Tōji jointly held the abbacy of Mt. Kōya/Kongōbu-ji, he was referred to as kengyō (which might be translated as ”overseer”) of Kongōbu-ji. His representative on Mt. Kōya was called shigyō, the meaning of which is strictly speaking something like “intendant.” Later the resident head of Kongōbu-ji held both the shigyō and kengyō titles, and later still, he regained the title zasu.

Buddhism on emperor Uda 宇多 in 901. Uda's attentions were not entirely monopolized by Tōji, however. He was interested enough in Mt. Kōya to pay a visit there in the tenth month of the year 900, the first recorded visit of an emperor to the mountain,29 though the complex does not seem to have greatly benefited economically from his visit.

The sanjūjō sasshi finally returned to Tōji in 918, and the next year the abbot of Tōji was designated as kengyō 検校, or overseer, of Mt. Kōya complex by imperial decree. This consolidation of authority may have prevented the kind of schism that plagued Tendai at the time,30 but it also had the effect of relegating

29 Kōya shunjū, Hinonishi, 1982, 38. George Tanabe, “Kōyasan in the Countryside,” in Richard K. Payne, ed. Re-Visioning Kamakura Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, 44, makes the claim "beginning in 900, when the cloistered emperor Uda made the first imperial trip to the monastery, persons of high rank ascended Koyasan forty-four times during the Heian period for an average of about once very 6.5 years…" This may be true, but it is a nearly meaningless statement. It is not clear which “persons of high rank” Tanabe is referring to, and in any case, the vast majority of visits by such persons of high rank occurred after the year 1100. As the following discussion shows, no emperor (or retired emperor) or regent visited Mt. Kōya between Uda’s visit in 900 and the visit of Fujiwara no Michinaga in 1023, and there were only ahandful of visits in the eleventh century. Offering the average number of years between visits by persons of importance over such a long time period gives the impression that Mt. Kōya was a conisistently popular pilgrimage destination throughout that time, in fact it was not. 30 The Sanmon-Jimon schism has been discussed in detail by Neil McMullen, The Sanmon-Jimon Schism in the Tendai School of Buddhism: A Preliminary Analysis," The Journal of the

the Mt. Kōya complex to second-class status and can be seen as marking the

beginning of the hard times it suffered in the course of the 900s.31

The decline of Mt. Kōya after this point seems to have been rapid. the

Kōya kōhaiki 高野興廃記 states that the complex lay in ruins during the five years

following 917, and that in 928, Saikō 済高, who was abbot of Tōji at the time,

requested funds for renovation.32 This resulted in the creation of the post of

intendant, or shigyō 執行, for Mt. Kōya, who was initially charged with oversight

of the renovation of the complex. Records in this connection are sparse, but the

renovation seems to have proceeded sluggishly at best. The complex suffered

another setback in 952 when the Oku-no-In precinct was destroyed in a lightning

fire; by this point there seems to have been few monks resident on the mountain,

and few visitors to it.

International Association of Buddhist Studies 9:1 (1984), 83-105 and Paul Groner, Ryōgen and Mount Hiei: Japanese Tendai in the Tenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002), 15-44. 31 Ninnaji 仁和寺 and Daigoji 醍醐寺, two other very prominent Shingon centers in or near the capital, also enjoyed increasing prominence at this time. See Weinstein, 500f. 32 Kōya kōhaiki, DNBZ 120, 133, authored by Shōso 尚祚 (?-1245); See also Miyazaka Yūshō 宮坂優宥勝 and Satō Tamotsu 佐藤任. Kōyasan shi 高野山史 [History of Mt. Kōya (Tokyo: Shinkōsha, 1984), 37-8 and Weinstein, 503.

Despite its hard times, however, Mt. Kōya was never without its patrons in

the capital. At the time of the 952 fire, the Tōji abbot Kankū 貫空 had a monk

named Gashin 雅真 sent to the mountain to undertake the reconstruction.

Gashin's background is mostly unknown. There is little information available

about his early life or how he became a Shingon monk, except that he was a

disciple of Junyū 淳祐 at Ishiyamadera 石山寺. The Oku-no-In dōtō kōhaiki 奥院

堂塔興廃記 refers to Gashin as the "Izumi hōshi" 和泉法師, Izumi being the

province more or less contiguous with present-day Osaka.33 This places Gashin's origins rather far outside the aristocratic sphere of the capital and suggests they were rather humble. Shingon's clerics tended to be relatives of the capital aristocracy, so Gashin's appointment to this post is something of a surprise.

Gashin arrived on Mt. Kōya with two junior ordinand monks in 952 and began the work of restoring the Oku-no-In in the sixth month of that year, completing the work in about 960. According to Kōya shunjū, he constructed

33 Hinonishi Shinjō, "Oku-no-In dōtō kōhaiki 奥院堂塔興廃記 [Record of the Vicissitudes of Oku- no-In]," Kōyasan daigaku ronso 219 (February 1994), 155. Shōso is credited as author.

shrines for the Niu and Kōya deities to the left of the mausoleum of Kūkai in the

Oku-no-In, suggesting that Gashin took seriously the obligation to honor the deities of the mountain, and again reflecting relationship between the complex and the local religious landscape.34 This, of course, is not the only possible

interpretation. Wada Shūjō (Akio) claims this is the earliest instance of an explicit move to honor the two deities appearing in the records of Mt. Kōya, and as has been noted above, rather than seeing this as an indication of Gashin's concern with honoring the Niu and Kōya deities, he believes it has more to do with his efforts to raise funds from locally prominent families who had ties to these deities.

He bases his claim in part on the fact that the finances of the Mt. Kōya complex began to show marked improvement at about this time.35

The renovation of the Oku-no-In precinct was the first of several successes Gashin had in his effort to revive the complex and build its prestige.

34 The Kōya shunjū entry for 957/3/21 (Hinonishi, 1982, 155) notes the celebration of the completion of the main hall at the Oku-no-In as well as that of "shrines of the two deities," that is, the Niu and Kōya deities. 35 Wada, 1965, 14

Another important step in this respect occurred in 983 when he was granted the title kengyō,36 the first time that title had ever been bestowed upon the resident

abbot of Mt. Kōya, signaling it was no longer under the full control of Tōji.

Unfortunately, Gashin suffered a devastating setback when another lightning fire

swept through the Garan central precinct in 994, destroying everything but the

Miei-dō 御影堂 (Image Hall). After the fire, it seems that Gashin first approached

the imperial court for assistance in rebuilding, but this support was not forthcoming. In response, Tōji sent out Kanchō 寛朝, to assist with restoration efforts. He solicited the help of Higashisanjo-in Senshi 東三条院詮子, probably

the most powerful woman in the capital at the time.37 As the daughter of Fujiwara

no Kaneie 藤原兼家, the elder sister of Fujiwara no Michinaga 藤原道長, the wife of emperor En’yu 圓融, and the mother of emperor Ichijō 一条, she was at the center of both court and Fujiwara. Senshi managed to donate some surrounding

36 Kōya shunjū, Hinonishi, 1982, 56 37 Matsumoto Akira 松本昭, Kōbō Daishi nyūjō setsuwa no kenkyū 弘法大師入定説話の研究 [Studies of Tales of the Continual Meditation of Kōbō Daishi] (Tokyo: Rokkō shuppan, 1982), 253.

landholdings to Amano shrine and the support of the Kōya complex,38 and in 998

the provincial governor (kokushi 国司) of Kii province, Ōe no Kagemasa 大江景理,

was designated by the court to act as superintendent (bugyō 奉行) for the

reconstruction of the central building in the Garan, the Lecture Hall (Kōdō). It

seems likely that Kagemasa was asked to help because of his power and prestige, but rather than work for the reconstruction of the Garan, Kagemasa used his position as superintendent to embezzle some of the landholdings that were already in the possession of Mt. Kōya, which further impoverished it. It was therefore left without adequate funds to support resident monks, making it necessary for Gashin to move its administrative headquarters off the mountain to

Amano (Niu-tsuhime) shrine, where a temporary Mandala-in 曼荼羅院 and monks' quarters were set up (figure 3). And if this wasn't enough hardship, at the

same time the complex was also hit with the loss of almost all of the key players

in its revival. Kanchō died that year, Gashin in 999, and Senshi in 1001, and the

38 Wada, 1965, 14-5.

Figure 2 Amano/Niu-tsuhime Shrine, main gate According to Prof. Hinonishi, Mt. Kōya's monks resided on one side of the gate, the Amano Shrine monks on the other. Photo by author. revival of the Mt. Kōya complex stalled.39 It was an ignominious end to what had been a difficult century for the Mt. Kōya complex, and in the year 1000, it was still in ruins and mostly unoccupied. The Oku-no-In area, being well away from the area affected by the 994 fire escaped damage, and some records suggest that a

39 Akamatsu Toshihide 赤松俊秀, Kamakura Bukkyō no kenkyū zoku hen 鎌倉仏教の研究続編 [Studies in Kamakura Buddhism, addendum] (Tokyo: Heirakuji shoten, 1966) 488; Matsunaga Yūkei 松永有慶 Takagi Shingen 高木訷元, Wada Shūjō 和多秀乗, and Tamura Ryūshō 田村隆照, Kōyasan: sono rekishi to bunka 高野山ーその歴史と文化 [Mt. Kōya: Its History and Culture] (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1984) 170.

cleric may have resided there to tend it.40 Despite the embezzlement by

Kagemasa, some restoration work was carried out after the fire, particularly on

the Kōdō, but this work was left half- finished.41 When Kishin shōnin 祈親上人,

whose story is taken up in the next chapter, arrived on Mt. Kōya around the year

1012 then, all he would have found in the Garan was the intact Miei-dō, a half-

built Kondō, and the ruins of several other buildings, most notably the Daitō 大塔,

probably the most important building in the precinct given the priority Kūkai

placed on its construction.

The goshuin engi 御手印縁起 in the History of Mt. Kōya

Before leaving the subject of the early efforts to rebuild the Mt. Kōya

complex after the 994 fire, it is worth considering in somewhat more detail the

role a particular set of documents known collectively as the goshuin engi may

40 The Oku-no-in dōtō kōhaiki 奥院堂塔興廃記, section 5 (end), describes the activities of the yamagomori no sō 山籠の僧, who were apparently charged with the care of the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi, and Kōya shunjū, Shōryaku 5 (994), reports that the monks at Amano who had been forced off the mountain by the fire continued to diligently climb the mountain and hold the required rituals. A yamagomori no sō therefore may have been present at least some of the time even when no other monks were resident on the mountain. 41 Kōya shunjū 4, entry for Kankō 4 (1007).

have played in efforts to strengthen the financial situation of the Mt. Kōya

complex. The component documents making up the goshuin engi are as follows:

a prime ministerial edict (dajō kanpu 太政官符) dated 816/7/8; an edict from the

government of Kii province (Kii kokufu 紀伊国符) dated 816/7/28; a record of the

four boundaries of (the landholdings of ) Mt. Kōya; a map of the main edifices on

Mt. Kōya; some notes (okibumi 御記文) of (Kōbō) Daishi dated 834/9/5; and a

provincial proclamation (Kii kokuban 国判) dated 836/7/27. The name goshiuin

engi or "handprint" engi42 derives from the handprints that appear on the copy of

the ministerial edict and the notes of Kōbō Daishi Kūkai. The handprints are

supposed to be those of Kūkai himself, and were intended to serve as evidence

of the authenticity of these documents, though scholars universally agree that all

the documents of the group are forgeries. The goshuin engi is permanently

42 The term engi is sometimes translated as "legend," but this is not entirely apt. Engi do typically contain the legends of the founding of temples and shrines, as in the case of the shugyō engi discussed previously, but as the above list shows, the term is also sometimes applied to a variety of kinds of documents including maps and legal declarations relating to such a founding. Lacking any Western equivalent, I have opted to leave it untranslated.

housed in the Miei-dō and is never shown, though its contents have been reproduced in the Teihon Kōbō Daishi zenshū 定本弘法大師全集.43

For nearly a century historians have been puzzling over when and why

they were created. The first historian to take an interest in these questions was

Asakawa Kan'ichi, who published an article on the subject in 1920.44 Others have tackled the question since, with the most influential analysis probably being that of Akamatsu Toshihide 赤松俊秀 in 1959.45 Estimates of the creation date of the collection range from the latter 900s, proposed by Wada Akio (Shūjō), to as late as 1159.46 However, most of the dates proposed tend toward the earlier end of this range, with the last few years of the 900s or the first few years of the 1000s

43 TKDZ vol. 1 This is a collection of documents that includes the writings of Kūkai and other documents relating to the early history of Shingon Buddhism, compiled by a group of scholar monks charged by the Shingon leadership with producing an updated version of this collection, the previous such collection being nearly one hundred years old. 44 Asakawa Kan'ichi 朝河貫一, "Chūsei Nihon no jiin-ryō 中世日本の寺院領 [Temple Landholdings in Medieval Japan]," Rekishi chiri 35:3 (March, 1920) 219-36. 45 Reproduced in Akamatsu Toshihide 赤松俊秀, Kamakura Bukkyō no kenkyū zoku hen 鎌倉仏教の研究続編 [Studies in Kamakura Buddhism, addendum] (Tokyo: Heirakuji shoten, 1966) 482-498. 46 Wada, 1965, 14f; An overview of all the various scholars' approaches to these problems can be found in Takeuchi Kōzen, "Goshuin engi no seiritsu nendai ni tsuite 御手印縁起の成立年代について [Concerning the Date of Origin of the Goshuin engi]," Mikkyōgaku kenkyū 27 (1995) 71f.

being suggested by several scholars. Though the arguments made for these

earlier dates vary in their details, most who settle on this time period believe that

the goshuin engi was created in an attempt to bolster the financial situation of the

Mt. Kōya complex at that time by advancing claims over the lands adjacent to it.

The content of the documents themselves shows this rather clearly: they include

copies of official proclamations relating to the founding of the complex, and in

particular to the resources to be made available for its construction. Likewise, the document outlining the "four boundaries" of the Mt. Kōya complex is aimed at indicating those lands over which it claimed control. That is, all the lands within the specified boundaries were alleged to be shōen 荘園 (manorial) holdings47 of

the complex. However, the land area falling within the boundaries is huge,48 and there exists no evidence that Mt. Kōya Kongōbuji had ever asserted this claim

47 As explained in the introduction, though shōen rights became partible in later centuries, given that the temple was (or may have been) asserting its rights as the result of a very early grant, the expectation in this case would have been that the temple was the sole holder of such rights and fully exempt from land taxes. 48 A map showing the land area encompassing the boundaries specified in the document can be found in Mikael S. Adolphson, The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in Premodern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000) xxii.

before, let alone any indication that it had actively administered any of these

lands or derived resources from them before the eleventh century. As Akamatsu

points out, by all indications the landholdings of the Mt. Kōya complex prior to the

year 1000 were quite modest,49 and it is certainly hard to account for the

straitened financial circumstances of the Mt. Kōya complex had it had such

extensive holdings. The various scholars who locate the creation of the goshuin

engi at about this time differ on whether or not it was produced before or after embezzlement of funds by Ōe no Kagemasa, or before or after the death of

Gashin,50 but the few years immediately following the 994 fire seem a very likely

time for what seems to have been a desperate attempt to gain revenues for the

renovation and support of the Mt. Kōya Kongōbu-ji complex.

49 Akamatsu, 486f, lays out what evidence there is concerning the pre-1000 landholdings of the complex, noting that Mt. Kōya had clear title to little else besides the Ishigaki 石垣 and Hanazono 花園 shōen but little else. The subject of Hanazono-shō is taken up in a different regard in Ch. 4. 50 Wada, 1965, 14-16, place its development during the time of Gashin, While Akamatsu, 491, and most others fix the date at 1004 or shortly before.

Though these documents were used in a number of later cases in which the Mt. Kōya complex had cause to demonstrate its claims over the lands adjacent to it, if it was actually used in the wake of the 994 fire, its claim must have been unsuccessful, for efforts toward the revival of Mt. Kōya did not begin to bear fruit until after the arrival of Kishin sometime between the years of 1012 and 1016. The next chapter is devoted to showing how the approach he took to the revival of the Mt. Kōya complex seems to have been quite different from those of earlier leaders who relied primarily on support from the capital.

Conclusion

Some of the things that appealed to Kūkai about Mt. Kōya are conveyed in his description of the place:

There is a quiet, open place called Kōya located two days' walk to the

west from a point that is one day's walk south from Yoshino. I estimate

the area to be south of Ito-no-kōri [Ito-gun] in Kinokuni [Wakayama-ken].

High peaks surround Kōya in all four directions; no human tracks, still

less trails, are to be seen there. I should like to clear the wilderness in

order to build a monastery there for the practice of meditation, for the

benefit of the nation and of those who desire to discipline themselves.51

We can gather from this that the remoteness that caused the Mt. Kōya

Kongōbuji complex so much difficulty in the struggle for survival it faced early in

its history was for Kūkai a major attraction of the place. He believed that this

isolated location was precisely what was needed for those who sought to develop their skills in esoteric practice and meditation.52 As Wada and Takeuchi have

argued, his reasons for selecting Mt. Kōya may have been no more than this. But

it is hard to believe that the rich local religious landscape that Mt. Kōya was a

part of had no effect on his decision to locate there. We need not believe he was

literally led to the mountain and granted it by a pair of local deities to

acknowledge that the mountain's sacred character was part of what drew him to

it. The presence of the Niu deity may have served merely as an avenue by which

Kūkai could enlist local support, but it is hard to believe that this "place for

51 Quoted in Hakeda, 47. 52 Hakeda renders the term shuzen 修禅 as "the practice of meditation," but my feeling is that the "practice" Kūkai had in mind included esoteric practice in general, including but not limited to meditation. Shuzen therefore might more accurately be rendered as "practice and meditation."

practice and meditation" could have been established in isolation from its social

and religious milieu. At the same time, Kūkai's ambitions for the mountain

reached well beyond anything there before, meaning that the means to his end

would also have to be gotten from parts beyond. In the Japan of Kūkai's day,

carrying out such a project required the support of interested parties with significant resources, and during the first 200 or so years of the existence of the

Mt. Kōya complex, that support came primarily from the capital, albeit irregularly.

The most remarkable aspect of that part of the story of the Mt. Kōya complex is

not all that it became during that time, but that it managed to survive at all.

Though Kūkai felt that the "practice and meditation" that would take place there

was to be "for the benefit of the nation," Mt. Kōya fell so far outside the vision of

that "nation," by which we can only mean the aristocracy in the capital, that it

could not promote itself as effectively as such an institution needed to in order to thrive. It was not until the eleventh century that Mt. Kōya finally began attracting

serious and continuing attention from the capital, and as the next chapter shows,

the role of the Mt. Kōya complex as protector of the nation figured less in its prosperity than its power to satisfy personal spiritual quests.

CHAPTER 2 THE EARLY ELEVENTH-CENTURY RISE OF MT. KŌYA

The year 1000 marked the end of a difficult century for the Mt. Kōya complex. As a consequence of the 994 fire, Ōe no Kagemasa's interference in

revival efforts, and the death of Gashin (in 999), it was still in ruins and mostly

unoccupied, most of Mt. Kōya's monks being in residence at Amano shrine at the

foot of the mountain. Some restoration work was carried out after the fire,

beginning with the Kondō 金堂, the largest of the halls in the Garan, but this work

was left half-finished as a result of Kagemasa's misdeeds, as described in the

previous chapter. When Kishin shōnin 祈親上人, who did much to reverse the

fortunes of the Mt. Kōya complex, arrived on the mountain around the year 1012,

all he would have found in the Garan were the intact Miei-dō, a half-built Kondō,

and the ruins of several other buildings, most notably the Daitō 大塔, the great

stupa of the Garan. He also would have found an intact Oku-no-in, which may have had a caretaker at least seasonally.1

It is not too much to say that in the first decade of the 1000s, the Mt. Kōya

complex teetered on the brink of extinction. It was far from the capital and its

well-being depended upon support from the leadership of Tōji and the patronage

of courtiers interested in it, both of which had been at best intermittent up to that

time. Without the presence of someone working to raise the profile of Mt. Kōya

and garner support for it, as Gashin had done in the latter 900s, its continued

existence inevitably hung in the balance. But the Mt. Kōya complex did not

disappear at this time; despite its impoverished state in the year 1000, it soon

recovered. By the end of the 1000s, Mt. Kōya was the site of a prosperous and

1 Kōya shunjū hennen shūroku 高野春秋編年輯緑 (hereafter Kōya shunjū) 4, Shōryaku 5 (994), in Hinonishi Shinjō 日野西新定, Shinkō Kōya shunjū hennen shūroku 親交高野春秋編年輯録 [New edition of the Kōya shunjū hennen shūroku], (Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 1982), 60, which reports that the monks at Amano who had been forced off the mountain by the fire continued to diligently climb the mountain and hold the required rituals. However, a yamagomori no sō may have been present at least some of the time even when no other monks were resident on the mountain. An edited version of the Oku-no-in dōtō kōhaiki appears in Hinonishi Shinjō, “Oku- no-in dōtō kōhaiki 奥院堂塔興廃記 [Record of the Rise and fall of Oku-no-in],” Kōyasan daigaku ronsō 219 (February 1994): 149-193.

influential religious institution, and the first steps toward its recovery were taken by Kishin on Mt Kōya in the early decades of the eleventh century.

Who was Kishin?

Relatively little is known about Kishin or his life before he arrived on Mt.

Kōya when he was about 60 or 61, and in fact, information about his time on the mountain is rather sketchy as well. The information that is available, however, strongly suggests why Kishin might have been interested in the Mt. Kōya complex and what resources he would have been able to draw upon as he undertook the work of reviving it.

Historical records containing information about Kishin's early life all agree that he was born in Katsuragi-gun 葛城郡 in Yamato-no-kuni, 大和国 that is, not far southwest of present-day Nara. The Heike Kōya-kan 平家高野巻, for example,

gives his birthplace as Yamato-no-kuni, Kuzumo 葛下.2 The Higashimuro-in

Kishin-den 東室院祈親伝 is still more specific: “His family name was Kawai 河井

2 Abe Yasurō 阿部泰郎, Chūsei Kōyasan engi no kenkyū 中世高野山縁起の研究 [Studies of the engi of Medieval Mt. Kōya], (Nara: Gangōji bunkazai kenkyūjo, 1983), 136.

and he was born in Wa-shū (Yamato), Katsuragi-gun, Kusunoki-motomura 楠本

邑.”3 There is no way to verify his family name, but the investigations of Prof.

Hinonishi Shinjō suggest that Kusunoki-motomura was in the center of Katsuragi-

gun, Nara.4 As will be discussed in more detail below, it is likely that the

atmosphere of this area may well have influenced him later in life.

There is no information available on what Kishin's name was as a child; he

took the name Kishin ("one who prays for or reveres one's parents") for himself

later in life, as a result of the deaths of his parents during his childhood.

According to the Genkō shakusho 元亨釈書, the earliest source containing

information on Kishin's life, 5 his father died when he was age seven, and he

entered Kōfuku-ji 興福寺 as a novice at age 13. Not long after that, his mother fell ill and died as well. It is not clear how old he was when he left Kōfuku-ji, but it

3 The Higashimuro-in Kishin den appears in KZF vol. 5, Kōya-san no bu 高野山之部 37, Kōsō gyōjō 高僧行状 4. the Kii zoku fudoki is the gazetteer of Kii province, compiled in the Edo era. 4 See Hinonishi Shinjō, “Kishin shōnin den oboegaki 祈親上人伝覚え書 [Recollections Concerning the Holy Man Kishin],” Parts 1 and 3, Kōyasan jihō (July 1, 1962 and August 1, 1962). 5Genkō shakusho 14, KT 31, 208-9 contains the account of the life of Kishin. The Genkō shakusho is a history of Buddhism in Japan written by the monk Kokan Shiren 虎関師錬 in approximately 1322. One section is devoted to the lives of illustrious monks.

was at that time that he took the name Kishin, to indicate his intention to honor

and aid his deceased parents. He left the formal religious establishment and became a jikyōsha 持経者, a type of wandering ascetic specializing in the

memorization, chanting, and preaching of the Lotus Sutra (J. Hoke-kyō 法華経), an identity he seems to have maintained throughout the rest of his life.6 Without understanding Kishin's identity as a jikyōsha, it is impossible, I believe, to

understand his success in revitalizing Mt. Kōya. A closer look at who jikyōsha were and the kind of life Kishin led after he departed Kōfuku-ji is therefore in order.

Kishin the jikyōsha

Given that there were any number of ways that Kishin could have

expressed his devotion to his parents, what led him to the life of the jikyōsha in

particular? Though the Genkō shakusho makes a point of noting that Kishin

6 The term jikyōsha, unlike terms such as hijiri, does appear historical documents with some regularity. It denotes a particular kind of expertise that a practitioner has developed, but says nothing about that practitioner’s relationship to society or religious institutions. The Genkō shakusho explicitly calls Kishin a jikyōsha

excelled in the study of the consciousness-only philosophy (yuishiki 唯識,

vijnapti-mātratā) of Hossō while at Kōfuku-ji, his time there was probably more important for having acquainted him with Maitreya (J. Miroku 彌勒) worship and

the chanting of the Lotus Sutra. Consciousness-only thought was brought to

Japan and Kōfuku-ji by Dōshō 道昭 (629-700), who studied in China under the monk Hsüan Tsang 玄奘 (J. Genjō). Hsüan Tsang was a proponent of Maitreya belief,7 and this naturally became a part of Dōshō's teachings as well. Kōfuku-ji,

as a center of Hossō thought, therefore harbored some of the earliest forms of

Maitreya belief. In early Heian era, however, Maitreya belief came to be more and more a part of Tendai Buddhism and practices associated with the Lotus

Sutra, though it continued to be closely associated with Hossō. The Lotus Sutra

offers the possibility of belief in Maitreya and the hope for birth into the heaven of

7 See the Daitō daijionji sanzō hōshiden 大唐大慈恩寺法師伝, T 50, 277b.

Maitreya, meaning that Maitreya belief would have been a natural part of the repertoire of the jikyōsha.8

This convergence of Maitreya belief and Lotus Sutra practice appears

concretely in the person of Jōshō 定昭 (906-983, also written 定照) who was

appointed to the post of Kōfuku-ji bettō 別当 (overseer) in 970, very close to the

time Kishin arrived there to study. The Kōfuku-ji bettō shidai 興福寺別当次第

informs us that Jōshō, who was Tōji chōja 東寺長者 (abbot of Tōji) at the time,9

was a scholar of both Hossō and Shingon who also chanted the Lotus Sutra “day

and night.”10 In fact, he was devoted enough to the recitation of the Lotus Sutra

to have his biography appear in the Hokke genki 法華験記, a chronicle of the

8 Maitreya is referred to in the Lotus Sutra in its Fugen bosatsu kanpatsu hin dai nijūhachi 普賢菩薩勸發品第二十八 section, which contains a description of the Tuṣita heaven (J. tosotsuten 兜卒天) of Maitreya. Matsumoto Akira 松本昭, Kōbō Daishi nyūjō setsuwa no kenkyū 弘法大師入定説話の研究 [Studies of Tales of the Continual Meditation of Kōbō Daishi], (Tokyo: Rokkō shuppan, 1982), 46-7, briefly describes how Maitreya belief came to be a part of Tendai. 9 For a brief explanation of the titles held by abbots or chief administrators of temples, see Chapter 1, note 28. 10 Kōfukuji bettō shidai, DNBZ 124, 5-7.

lives of monks who made use of the miraculous powers of the Lotus Sutra.11

Kishin's presence at Kōfuku-ji at this time, then, brought him into contact with

both Maitreya belief and the chanting of the Lotus Sutra, and his decision to take

up the life of a jikyōsha was doubtless influenced by this experience.

Furthermore, as will be discussed below, Kishin's experience with Maitreya belief

doubtless influenced his later decision to go to Mt. Kōya.

Jikyōsha or characters that likely fit the definition of a jikyōsha appear

early on in Japanese literary and historical records. In the Nihon ryōiki 日本霊異

記, a collection of stories about the miraculous powers of the Lotus Sutra which

dates from the early 800s, there is the story of a jikyōnin 持経人 who had a prior

life revealed to him because he had memorized and recited the Lotus Sutra.12

Other stories in Nihon ryōiki point specifically to the power of the sutra, when in

11 Dainihon hokekyō genki II:1. NST 7, 103 f. See also Yoshiko Dykstra, Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sutra from Ancient Japan: The Dainihonkoku Hokkekyō kenki of Priest Chingen, (Hirakata, Japan: Intercultural Research Institute, the Kansai University of Foreign Studies, 1983), 66f. 12 Nihon ryōiki I:18. SNKBT 30, 31f. See also Kyōko Motomichi Nakamura, Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon ryōiki of the monk Kyōkai, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1973), 129. The main character in the text is called jikyōnin in the text.

the hands of a devout ascetic, to ease suffering or remit sin. For example, Nihon

ryōiki I:11 tells the story of Jiō 慈應, a Lotus Sutra practitioner whose incantations

(ju 呪) relieved a fisherman of suffering resulting from the killing of living things

that his occupation required.13

Kikuchi Hiroki 菊地大樹14 believes that many of the figures portrayed in the

Hokke genki were in fact jikyōsha, despite the fact that relatively few of them

were explicitly referred to that way. If this is true, it suggests, as in the story of Jiō and the fisherman, that ascetics who had mastered the Lotus Sutra were seen as having incantational power and the power to remit sin. Furthermore, there is

evidence that as early as the first part of the eighth century, specialists in

chanting incantations (shōju 誦呪) whose practices fell outside formal religious

doctrine were included in official tribute offerings of sutra reading and chanting

aimed at protecting the nation. The reading and chanting of the Lotus Sutra also

13 SNKBT 30, 14f; Nakamura, 122. 14 Kikuchi Hiroki 菊地大樹, “Jikyōsha no genkei to chūseiteki tenkai 持経者の原形と中世的展開 [The Origins and Medieval Development of Jikyōsha],” Shigaku zasshi 8 (August, 1995): 5. The following overview of jikyōsha is drawn from this article.

figured prominently in these tribute offerings, and it is very likely that both were

done by the same people, people who would fit the definition of a jikyōsha.

By the early tenth century, the system in which jikyōsha enjoyed official

status was abandoned, and they drifted toward the fringes of Japan's institutional

religion. As they lost their official positions, however, far from disappearing, they

became much more active in ordinary society.15 In particular, they came to play a

leading role in the Shugendō cults that developed on Mt. Ōmine 大峯山 and in

the area of Katsuragi.16 The Shozan engi 諸山縁起, which covers Mt. Ōmine and

Katsuragi, contains place names that include the term jikyōsha, suggesting that

one or another jikyōsha had made a significant impact there,17 and a kanjō

kechimyaku 灌頂血脈 for Mt. Ōmine18 lists several jikyōsha as having officiated at

kanjō initiations.

15 Kikuchi, 12-13. 16 Kikuchi, 14-15. 17 NST 20: 351, 354, 356. 18 The Ōmine shugyō engi 大峯修業縁起 appears as part of the Kumano sansho gongen Kinpusen Kongō zao suijaku engi hei Ōmine shugyō engi 熊野三所権現金峯山金剛蔵王垂迹縁起并大峯修業縁起, in Gorai Shigeru, Shugendō shiryōshū 修験道史料集 [Collection of

Three points are of particular interest here. First, given that the Katsuragi area was Kishin's birthplace, it is likely that he would have been familiar with

jikyōsha from a very early age, which probably influenced Kishin to choose the path of the jikyōsha when he left Kōfuku-ji. Secondly, one of the Shugendō

practitioners listed as officiating at the kanjō initiation rite, a certain Jugan 寿元, is

described in the Shozan engi as being a disciple of the Kōfuku-ji monk Ninsō 仁

宗, another indication that Kōfuku-ji monks were not only purveyors of "official"

Buddhism (eg. Hossō), but also had ongoing and significant ties with ascetic

communities in the area. The relationship between Ninsō and Jugan likewise indicates that it was not unusual for jikyōsha of this time to have had some formal

monastic training, as Kishin had had before he embarked on the jikyōsha path. It is not clear when Jugan's kanjō took place, but given that Ninsō was active in the late 900s and early 1000s,19 both he and Jugan would have been close

contemporaries of Kishin and may have influenced him as much as or more than

Shugendō Historical Documents], vol. 18 of Sangaku shūkyōshi kenkyū sōsho 山岳宗教史研究叢書 [Compendium of Studies in Mountain Religion] (Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 1983), 317-8. 19 See KDJ 11:284, entry on Ninsō. Ninsō was an expert in sukuyō 宿曜, a type of astrology.

Jōshō did. Finally, though jikyōsha of this time did conform to some extent to the

image of the hijiri 聖 or "holy man" who lived a mostly isolated life outside formal religious structures, the record of the Ōmine kanjō initiation rite indicates they did

in fact sometimes participate in religious organizations, often in leadership roles.

As will be discussed below, it is possible that Kishin made use of networks of his

fellow jikyōsha practitioners as he worked to gather funds for the restoration of Mt.

Kōya.20

Kishin's path to Mt. Kōya

We have very little direct information about Kishin's activities between the time he left Kōfuku-ji, sometime in the 970s, until he went to Mt. Kōya some 40 years later. However, there is evidence that he spent a fair portion of that time in

the area of Nara, at temples such as Kojimadera 子島寺, Tsubosakadera 壼坂寺,

and Hasedera 長谷寺. Both the Minami Hokkeji korōden 南法華寺古老伝 and

20 Historians in both Japan and the West commonly treat jikyōsha as a kind of hijiri, but I believe it is a mistake to do so, because they did relate amicably to the formal Buddhist institutions of the day, and because they did show a degree of organization. I have given a more detailed treatment of this issue in Appendix B.

Kōya shunjū say he was a disciple of Shingō 真興 (934 or 935-1004).21 Like

Kishin, Shingō spent his early years at Kōfuku-ji, but had left the formal monastic

structure after rising steadily through its ranks.22 Though he started out studying

Hossō, over the course of his career he also studied Tendai and Shingon.

However, he is perhaps best known for establishing the Kangaku-ji 観覚寺

temple at Kojimadera, where he came to reside after leaving the institutional

Buddhist hierarchy in the early 980s. Based on the activities of Shingō’s various

disciples and his residence at Kojimadera, Oishio Chihiro 追塩千尋 concludes

that Shingō chose to settle at Kojimadera in order to pursue the study of magico-

21 Kōya shunjū hennen shūroku, entry for Chōwa 5 (1016), Hinonishi, 1982, shunjū 64. The Minami Hokkeji korōden appears in Nagai Yoshinori 永井義憲, Nihon Bukkyō Bungaku 日本仏教文学 [Japanese Buddhist Literature] vol. 3, vol. 12 of Shintensha kenkyū sōsho 新典社 (Tokyo: Shintensha, 1985), 716-728. Kishin is mentioned as being at Kojimadera on p. 722. His name is written 喜心 here, but the reference is to Kishin jikyō, so it is clearly the same person. 22 Oishio Chihiro 追塩千尋, Chūsei no Nanto Bukkyō 中世の南都仏教 [Nara Buddhism in the Medieval Era] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1995): 48-9. Shingō reached the rank of gon shō- sōzu 権正僧都, That is, he was a temporary member of the council that oversaw Buddhist institutions.

religious practices. Kojimadera had long been associated with such supernatural

powers, especially powers related to healing.23

Historical records give no information about where or when Kishin was

associated with Shingō, but it seems likely that Kishin joined Shingō at

Kojimadera sometime after Shingō took up residence there. Given that Shingō

had followed a path similar to Kishin’s, first studying at Kōfuku-ji and later

adopting a more ascetic lifestyle, it would not be surprising for Kishin to have

sought him out as a teacher. However, Oishio believes that Kishin, who probably

had been an active jikyōsha for some time by then, did not settle at Kojimadera,

but rather used it as a sort of “home base” as he continued his mendicant

activities. His affiliation with Kojimadera may have continued even after Shingō’s

death in 1004.24

23 Oishio, 60. Kojimadera was enlisted to pray for the recovery of retired emperor Seiwa 清和太上天皇 in 880, and in 885, Ōkura no Yoshiyuki 大蔵善行 made a request to court for additional support for Kojimadera by virtue of its standing as a reigen jiin 霊験寺院, a temple harboring supernatural powers. Furthermore, Shingō himself offered prayers for the recovery of emperor Ichijō 一条, the success of which prompted the court to donate a maṇḍala to Kojimadera. 24 Oishio, 55.

Though Shingō’s asceticism initially may have been what attracted Kishin to him, Kishin’s association with Shingō also put him in a position to learn more about Shingon. Shingō had written several treatises on Shingon themes, and

Kishin was probably exposed to Shingon thought while at Kojimadera; this may have played a role in Kishin’s later decision to move to Mt. Kōya. Being at

Kojimadera also would have put Kishin in a position to interact with other monks

like himself, and the Kannon pilgrimage that linked Kojimadera with Hasedera

and other temples would have further broadened his contact with other ascetics

who occupied no formal position in the hierarchy of established Buddhism.25

Tradition tells us that it was during a period of secluded meditation at Hasedera

that Kishin had the vision that drew him to Mt. Kōya, and so we must next turn

our attention to Hasedera as it was when he was there.

25 Oishio, 66.

Kishin at Hasedera

According to the Genkō shakusho biography of the life of Kishin,26 in his

60th year, on the third day of a 17 day observance at Hasedera, Kishin has a vision in which he sees a person. In the dream there appears a mountain to the southwest, identified as Mt. Kōya/Kongōbuji. The person who appears in the vision instructs Kishin to go and reside there. The vision continues with Kishin making the journey to Kii province, but when he arrives at Mt. Kōya, he finds it in ruins. His first act is to clear up the thorns that choke the place and set up a stupa. He then makes an appeal to the Hase Kannon and does a one-day

“purification of sight” 根眼 ritual. During the ritual he sees inside the precincts of

Tuṣita (here toshi 覩史). Inside he sees the three-part Lotus Sutra. He also sees

two bodhisattvas sitting on flower [lotus] dais, who his guide (presumably the

Hase Kannon) identifies as his parents. A third flower dais, not yet open, is also

present. Kishin inquires about the unopened blossom, and his guide replies that

26 See note 5 above.

Kishin is to be seated there as a reward for his devotion to the Lotus Sutra. As a

result of this vision, Kishin travels to Mt. Kōya and undertakes its revival.

In Kishin’s vision we again encounter the Lotus Sutra and the Tuṣita

heaven of Maitreya. As we have seen above, the Lotus Sutra defined jikyōsha

practice, and the appearance of the Tuṣita heaven points again to Kishin’s

interest in it. But the fact that Kishin’s vision situated Tuṣita on Mt. Kōya in

particular seems no mere coincidence. According to the Shugyō engi 修行縁起,

discussed above, which recounts the history of Kūkai’s relationship with Mt. Kōya, as Kūkai enters continual meditation (nyūjō 入定), he says that he will be in the heaven of Maitreya as he meditates, and will then return to earth with Maitreya

when Maitreya descends.27

But perhaps as important as the content of this vision is where it occurred.

By the early 1000s, when Kishin was at Hasedera, it was already a popular destination for people of both high status and low who sought the favor of the

27 The shugyō engi is found in KDDZ 1, 53-55. Prof. George Tanabe has provided an introduction and translation to this work in George Tanabe, ed., Religions of Japan in Practice (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 354-358.

Hase Kannon. As noted above, like Kojimadera and Tsubosakadera, Hasedera had been regarded as a locus of supernatural powers almost from the time of its founding in the 700s, and by this time, there existed quite a number of stories

reflecting the power of the Hase Kannon. Hasedera was known in particular for

having survived six major fires from 944 to 1094 which, rather than diminishing

the prestige of Hasedera, enhanced it.28 While it was probably primarily by virtue of support from the Fujiwara and Kōfuku-ji that Hasedera was rebuilt after these

disasters, it seems likely that kanjin (alms-collecting) monks were involved as

well,29 meaning that Hasedera would have been still another place where Kishin

could have encountered ascetic monks, and alms-collecting monks in particular.

In fact, it is probably the case that Kishin was part of a community of such monks

which was defined by its members’ efforts to cultivate and manifest the special

28 Hasedera was not a monastery but a was branch temple of Kōfuku-ji outside Nara. Tsuji Hidenori 逵日出典, Hasedera shi no kenkyū 長谷寺史の研究 [Studies in the History of Hasedera] (Tokyo: Gannandō shoten 1979), 79-80, recounts a story concerning the Hasedera fire of 944 in which the head of the Hase kannon icon flies out of the burning temple and lands on a rock atop the mountain behind the temple. The head was later restored to the icon, and this miraculous event seems to have further enhanced the popularity of Hasedera. 29 Tsuji, 84, documents the presence of kanjin monks at Hasedera in the latter 1100s, but it is not unreasonable to believe that they were a fixture at Hasedera earlier as well.

powers of Kojimadera, Tsubosakadera, and Hasedera. These monks probably circulated among these three temples, performing incantations for and collecting

alms from the many visitors who came seeking palliation or blessing.

Kishin on Mt. Kōya

As noted at the beginning of the chapter, the Mt. Kōya complex Kishin

found upon his arrival was in a state very similar to what he had seen in his

vision. It seems clear that Kishin did in fact promptly set about the work of

restoring the temple complex, but the concrete details of when he arrived, what

renovations he carried out, and how he managed to fund them, are largely

lacking.

The various accounts of Kishin’s work on Mt. Kōya give differing dates for

his arrival on the mountain. Documents dating from the Edo era, such as Kōya shunjū and Shakamon-in kakochō 釈迦門院過去帳30 state that he arrived in 1016

at the age of 60, but the Kōya kanpatsu shinjin shū 高野勧発信心集 of Shinken

30 Kōyasan University Library archives.

信堅 (1259-1322) suggests that he arrived at least two or three years earlier.31

The date of 1016 is assigned based on documents32 stating that Kishin

performed the kiribi 燧火 fire ritual in honor of Kōbō Daishi and as a pledge to

revive the Mt. Kōya complex. However, it is likely that Kishin had been busy in

the area of the mountain for some time before that, preparing to undertake the

revival he pledged. He probably used this time to do such things as begin the

building of a base of support and persuade the monks in residence at the Amano

shrine at the foot of Mt. Kōya to return.

It is not clear, however, where the fire ritual took place. Kōya kōhaiki and

Higashimuro-in Kishin den seem to indicate it took place at the Miei-dō, but both

shunjū and the shakamon-in section of setsufu-shū indicate the ritual took place in Oku-no-in in front of the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi. Gorai believes the latter

31 shinjin shū says he arrived sometime in the late Kankō 寛弘 or early Chōwa 長和 eras. The Chōwa era began in 1012 (Abe, 125). See also Hinonishi Shinjō, “Kishin shōnin den oboegaki 祈親上人伝覚え書 [Recollections Concerning the Holy Man Kishin],” Part 4, Kōyasan jihō (August 21, 1962). 32 See for example the shunjū entry for Chōwa 長和 5 (1016)/3. Hinonishi, 1982, shunjū 64.

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was the case,33 and Hinonishi also offers six reasons why it most likely took place at the Oku-no in,34 including the fact that within 77 years of Kishin’s arrival

on Mt. Kōya, three monks were assigned to permanent duty tending the eternal

flame which tradition says was offered by Kishin soon after his arrival on Mt.

Kōya. Given the identification of Kōbō Daishi’s eternal meditation with Maitreya

and Maitreya’s Tuṣita heaven, and Kishin’s clear interest in Maitreya and Tuṣita,

it seems logical that Kishin would have been drawn toward the Oku-no-in despite

its relatively isolated location. Subsequent to the performance of the fire ritual,

shunjū records that Kishin’s first performance of the higan-e 彼岸会 on Mt. Kōya

occurred in the second month of 1020 in front of the Miei-dō.35

In the same entry for 1020/3, shunjū notes some of the monks who

assisted Kishin in his restoration efforts and their accomplishments. Kishin himself is given credit for the revival of Higashimuro-in, and Gyōmyō 行明 and

33 Gorai, 92. 34 Hinonishi Shinjō, “Kishin shōnin den oboegaki 祈親上人伝覚え書 [Recollections Concerning the Holy Man Kishin],” Part 9, Kōyasan jihō (November 11, 1962). 35 Hinonishi, 1982, shunjū 65.

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Kōin 興胤 for work on the Kita- and Nishimuro-in respectively. It appears then,

that by 1020, cloisters and lodging for monks adjacent to the Garan had been completed, and it is probably the case that other edifices in the Garan, particularly the Kondō, were also at least nearing completion as well.

The anatomy of Kishin’s restoration efforts

In a few short years, Kishin managed to turn the nearly moribund Mt. Kōya

complex into a place once again inhabited by active clerics, and a central question of this chapter concerns how he managed to do it. According to the

shunjū account of his ascent of the mountain, Kishin was guided up by a certain

monk Eiyo 永誉 of Hitotsui 一ッ井 who was associated with the Kōya mandokoro

高野政所 at Jison-in 慈尊院 at the foot of the mountain. As its name implies, at the time this was the administrative headquarters of the Mt. Kōya complex, and as such administered the landholdings and finances of the mountain. Kishin’s appearance at the Kōya mandokoro was no doubt in part to assess the

resources he would have at his disposal as he commenced his restoration plans.

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But the coffers of the Kōya mandokoro probably had little to offer. As Akamatsu

Toshihide 赤松俊秀 has demonstrated,36 Mt. Kōya’s resources were quite meager at the time, and it would have been necessary for Kishin to raise additional funds if his efforts were to bear fruit. Though direct evidence is lacking, it seems clear he succeeded in gathering the resources he needed to carry out his restoration by drawing on the network of ascetic monks he was long associated with prior to his ascent of the mountain. At first glance, these monks, who were defined in no small measure by their independence from the formal hierarchy that characterized Japanese Buddhism at the time, seem unlikely candidates for an organized effort of the kind that Kishin would have had to employ. Could he have done so? To answer this question, we must consider whether or not there were any precedents for such an effort at this time in

Japan’s history.

36 Akamatsu Toshihide 赤松俊秀, Kamakura Bukkyō no kenkyū zoku hen 鎌倉仏教の研究続編 [Studies in Kamakura Buddhism, addendum], (Tokyo: Heirakuji shoten, 1966), 486f.

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Kanjin campaigns in the Heian era

Kanjin campaigns seem to have been relatively common in the Kamakura

era, and some of the more prominent of these have been the subjects of

academic study. Perhaps the most famous of these is the campaign undertaken

by Shunjō-bō Chōgen 俊乗房重源 (hereafter, simply Chōgen) aimed at the

restoration of Tōdai-ji after it was burned by the Taira in 1180.37 This particular

campaign is in turn linked to an earlier alms-collecting campaign mounted to fund

the original construction of Tōdai-ji, allegedly carried out by Gyōki 行基. As Janet

Goodwin notes, however, it is likely that this bit of history was invented around the time of Chōgen’s campaign, perhaps as a way to link Chōgen and his work to one of the most famous of Japan’s early Buddhist figures.38 But even if the

campaign by Gyōki never occurred in the mid-Nara era, there are examples of

concretely documented kanjin campaigns from as early as the mid-Heian era.

37 See Nakanodō, 404-410, and Janet Goodwin, Alms and Vagabonds: Buddhist Temples and Popular Patronage in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 67-106 for studies in Japanese and English respectively. 38 Goodwin, 79-80.

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Nakanodō Kazunobu 中ノ堂一信 treats several of these, including a kanjin

campaign mounted in 1062 by the monk Zenbō 善芳 for the renovation of

Mandara-ji 曼荼羅寺, in Sanuki province 讃岐国 (present-day Shikoku).39 While

staying at Mandara-ji for a period of practice, Zenbō noticed that it had become

quite dilapidated and was in need of restoration. Being a follower of Kōbō Daishi, who was credited with the founding of Mandara-ji, Zenbō undertook its restoration. He approached the provincial governor with a request to carry out a

kanjin campaign. The resulting campaign was successful as a result of

miraculous efficacy (reigen 霊験), and he took what he collected to Aki province

安芸国 (present-day Hiroshima prefecture) and used it to buy lumber. However,

he lacked the funds he needed to hire carpenters to carry out the repairs, and

because the term of the current provincial governor was in its last year he was

unable to obtain further official backing, and his restoration effort stalled.

39 Nakanodō, 420f. Information concerning Zenbō’s restoration efforts comes from HI 3, doc. 1020.

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A few years after Zenbō’s attempt to restore Mandara-ji, another monk,

named Zenban 善範, attempted to do the same, in 1075. Zenban was a monk

who first came to practice at Mandara-ji from Chinzei 鎮西 (Kyushu). Like Zenbō,

he also seems to have been a mendicant monk who roamed some of the

provinces of Kyushu. According to documents dated 1072,40 Zenban circulated

through a number of provinces on a kanjin campaign in support of renovations at

Mandara-ji and subsequently submitted to Tōji a book, called a kanjin chishikichō

勧進知識帳, listing the people who had donated. He cooperated with Zenbō in renovating several of the buildings at Mandara-ji, indicating that the restoration was of such a scale that substantial funds must have been gathered.

Nakanodō highlights two particular aspects of the campaigns of Zenbō and Zenban. First, he notes that neither of these monks was resident at

Mandara-ji but rather had stopped there for a period of meditation only, apparently treating it as a way-station as they circulated through the region. In fact, Zenbō and Zenban seem not to have had any permanent residence at all,

40 HI 3, #1077 and #1088.

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and apparently ranged rather widely, given that Zenbō traveled from Shikoku to

Honshū to buy lumber, and Zenban had made it to Mandara-ji all the way from the islands west of Kyushu. Secondly, Nakanodō believes that these campaigns were not carried out by Zenbō and Zenban alone, but that they, or at least

Zenban, must have enlisted the help of a whole group of alms-collecting monks fanning out across Shikoku and beyond. He draws this conclusion for two reasons: 1) the document describing Zenbō’s activities states that he had disciples, who could have been enlisted in his fundraising efforts, and 2) the amount of funds required to carry out a restoration project of the size of Zenban’s would have been more than he could have gathered working alone.41

The efforts of Zenbō and Zenban to raise funds to restore Mandara-ji suggest how Kishin might have gone about doing the same for the Mt. Kōya

41 Nakanodō, 422. Nakanodō refers to Zenbō and Zenban as hijiri, though it is hard to see how they qualify as such. Neither is never referred to as hijiri, and in contrast with the ascetic living deep in the mountains who cut himself off from all other people, especially those who were part of the formal religious structure (Chapter 1, p. 32f), they both frequented temples. Zenbō certainly had disciples and Zenban probably did. Furthermore, far from eschewing either temporal or religious authority, Zenbō didn’t hesitate to contact the provincial governor for help, and Zenban reported his results to Tōji, of which Mandara-ji was a branch temple (matsuji 末寺).

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complex. Like Zenbō, Kishin was an itinerant monk who was based in an area inhabited by a number of other such monks. Moreover, though there is no indication Kishin had disciples as Zenbō did, he was a jikyōsha, a type of religious practitioner who upon occasion did act as part of an organized group, as noted above.42 As such, Kishin was probably in a position to call upon monks with whom he had associated at Kojimadera, Tsubosakadera, and Hasedera for help with the kind of fundraising effort that the restoration of Mt. Kōya would have required.

Japanese scholars who have considered the question of how Kishin was able to fund the restoration of Mt. Kōya complex are unanimous in the opinion that Kishin collected contributions via kanjin campaigns. Gorai Shigeru, who views Kishin as a prototype for the Kōya hijiri who become prominent about a century later, believes that Kishin had become experienced with kanjin campaigns while at Kojimadera. Gorai also claims that Kishin was recruited by the Tōji monk Ningai 仁海 to undertake restoration of the Mt. Kōya complex,

42 See p. 85 above

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though he offers no documentary evidence for this contention or his assertion

that Kishin raised funds by means of kanjin campaigns. He supports the latter of

these two claims by pointing out that there is evidence that construction did occur

and must have been financed somehow.43 Matsumoto Akira 松本昭, in Kōbō

Daishi nyūjō setsuwa no kenkyū,44 quotes Gorai approvingly and makes note of a

passage in shunjū45 that mentions two of Kishin’s “right hand men” (kokō 股肱)

named Jōin 性因 and Hōken 法兼. He believes that these two probably assisted

Kishin in kanjin campaigns, though shunjū is not explicit about this.

Though evidence in support of Kishin’s having used kanjin campaigns is

largely circumstantial, in the absence of any other satisfactory explanation for

how Kishin was able to finance the restoration work that did occur, it would seem

that kanjin campaigns must have played some role. At the same time, the

contention that Kishin did carry out kanjin campaigns is weakened if we are unable to adequately account for how these campaigns worked. We have

43 Gorai, 90-91. 44 Matsumoto, 261. 45 Hinonishi, 1982, shunjū 65.

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already seen how Kishin’s prior experience meant he was familiar with how such campaigns were performed, and that experience put him in a position to mobilize groups of mendicant monks. It seems, therefore, that he could have managed the mechanics of a kanjin campaign, but a question remains as to what the religious basis was for the kanjin campaigners’ appeals. In other words, it seems unlikely that people of any social station, high or low, would have donated to a temple restoration for no reason. Clearly, those who solicited alms would have had to offer something in return, some benefit the donor would gain by virtue of their participation in the project. In contrast to a straightforward economic transaction in which goods and services are exchanged for cash, however, the campaigners would have offered what Pierre Bourdieu has termed symbolic capital. Bourdieu defines symbolic capital as anything that is “rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation,” 46 and symbolic capital in particular refers to intangibles such as political or religious power, or the promise of a better life. The kind of symbolic capital held by mendicant kanjin

46 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), 178.

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campaigners at this time was typically the promise of a closer connection or bond

between a donor and one or another religious figure or object recognized as

possessing the power to ease burdens in this life or assure salvation in the next.

In kanjin campaigns, donors saw their donations as leading to such a link with a religious figure or object and the benefits derived from such an association.

What, then, was Kishin’s kanjin campaign based upon? What salient

symbolic capital did those who carried it out have to offer? These questions are

difficult to answer, because there is little direct information about how appeals

were made to potential supporters. We have no information, for example, about

what attracted people to donate to the Mandara-ji campaigns of Zenbō and

Zenban. However, a look at Kishin’s life up to the time of his arrival on Mt. Kōya

and the religious climate in which Kishin would have worked suggests some of

the spiritual resources he might have brought to bear. First, both his time at

Kōfuku-ji and his later life as a jikyōsha suggest that Maitreya and Maitreya’s

Tuṣita Pure Land figured prominently in his system of belief and practice,

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especially given that it was Tuṣita that appeared in the vision that drew him to Mt.

Kōya.47 Kishin’s interest in Maitreya made Mt. Kōya a natural fit for him, given

that according to the shūgyo engi, Kūkai entered constant meditation on Mt.

Kōya to await the arrival of Maitreya on earth. This image may have been what

inspired in Kishin a reverence toward Kōbō Daishi that led him to offer a flame to

Kōbō Daishi soon after arriving on Mt. Kōya. In fact, there is evidence suggesting

that Kishin was not alone in his veneration of Kōbō Daishi at this time. By the late

tenth century the figure of Kōbō Daishi in constant meditation on Mt. Kōya had

become an object of faith among people in its vicinity and in parts of Shikoku.48

These believers would have been a natural constituency for Kishin’s initial appeals for contributions for the restoration of Mt. Kōya, but Kishin likely drew on the charisma of the mountain itself as well. In the vision that drew him to Mt.

Kōya, once he arrived on the mountain, Kishin was able to see inside the

47 It is not necessary to believe that the vision actually occurred in order to draw the conclusion from it that something caused Kishin to make an association between Mt. Kōya, and Maitreya and Tuṣita. 48 Shirai Yūko 白井優子, Kūkai densetsu keisei to Kōyasan 空海伝説形成と高野山 [Mt. Kōya and the Development of Kūkai Legends] (Tokyo: Dōseisha, 1986), 130.

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precincts of the Tuṣita heaven by virtue of the ministrations of the Hase Kannon.

Mt. Kōya had been regarded as sacred well before Kūkai chose it as the ideal

site for Shingon practice,49 and Kishin would have been in a position to make use

of this, portraying Mt. Kōya not only as sacred but also as a proxy for the Tuṣita

heaven.

From this we can see that Kishin and his assistants could have made appeals for the support of Mt. Kōya by offering a bond with the efficacious figure

of Kōbō Daishi and postmortem salvation in the Tuṣita heaven of Maitreya.

Moreover, Kishin may have attracted donations by recounting his vision, which

would have allowed him to extend his appeal to adherents of the Hase Kannon

as well. In short, having both the organizational and religious tools he would have needed, Kishin was well equipped to mount a kanjin campaign in parts of

western Japan.

49 See Hinonishi Shinjō, “Kami no yama kara hotoke no yama e: Kōyasan o shuten toshite 神の山から仏の山へー高野山を主点として [From Kami Mountain to Buddha Mountain, with a Focus on Mt. Kōya],” In Setsuwa ikai toshite no yama 説話ー異界としての山 [Mountains as Stories and Other Worlds], ed. Setsuwa denshō gakkai 説話・伝承学会学会 (Tokyo: Kanrin shoten, 1997), 91-128.

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Mt. Kōya and the capital

In contrast to the situation in the vicinity of Mt. Kōya, where the campaign likely began, such a campaign mounted in the environs of the capital would have confronted rather different circumstances. Besides the fact that Mt. Kōya was far

distant from the capital, Kōbō Daishi was revered primarily as the founder of

Shingon and one who possessed supernatural spiritual powers by virtue of his

mastery of esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō) rather than as a figure in constant

meditation who offered religious palliation. For example, Kūkai’s reputation as a

master calligrapher, the “god of the brush,” was understood to be a reflection of

the supernatural powers he possessed by virtue of his mastery of esotericism.50

Shirai believes that as the kanjin campaign for the restoration of Mt. Kōya spread

to the capital, as seen in the efforts of the Tōji monk Ningai in particular, this

50 Shirai 1986, 133f. The account of the life of Kōbō Daishi Kūkai in the Honchō shinsen den (NST 7) reflects this view. See Christoph Kleine and Livia Kohn, “Daoist Immortality and Buddhist Holiness: An Annotated Translation of the Honchō shinsen den,” Japanese Religions 24:2 (1999).

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image of Kūkai was soon eclipsed by that of the continuously meditating Kōbō

Daishi on Mt. Kōya.

In the first two decades of the eleventh century, Ningai was one of the most prominent and influential clerics in the capital. He held high offices in both the Shingon establishment and the government and had contact with the most eminent courtiers of the day. But Ningai was unusual in that he lacked the aristocratic pedigree that monks of his station usually had to have at that time.

More typical were Ningai’s Shingon peers Jinkaku 深覚 and Saishin 済信.

Jinkaku was the eleventh son of Fujiwara no Morosuke 藤原師輔, and Saishin was the son of Minamoto no Masanobu 源雅信, who was Minister of the Left

(sadaijin 左大臣). Ningai’s origins, by contrast, are more obscure. According to the Himitsu ke shūtai yōmon 秘密家宗體要文, attributed to Ningai himself, he was the son of Miyamichi Korehira 宮道惟平 of Uji 宇治, Yamashiro province 山城国.51

Other sources say he was the child of a Miyamichi clan in Izumi province 和泉国

51 KDDZ 1, 79.

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(present-day Osaka).52 But whether Ningai was a product of the Yamashiro or

Izumi, the Miyamichi clan in either place was of gōzoku 豪族 class, that is, they

were locally prominent but not of high rank. His early training likewise took place

outside the capital, beginning on Mt. Kōya at a very early age. He spent three

years there under the tutelage of Gashin, who was overseer (kengyō 検校) of the

Mt. Kōya complex at the time. Ningai studied sanskrit (shittan 悉曇, skt. siddaṃ) with Gashin and also participated in rituals honoring the constantly meditating

Kōbō Daishi at Oku-no-in. His subsequent studies took him to the Enmyōin 延命

院 cloister of Kami Daigo-ji, where he studied under Gengō 元杲 and received

denbō kanjō 伝法灌頂 initiation.

He later became part of the Shingon establishment at Tōji, and achieved

the rank of jogakusō 定額僧 at Tōji in his mid 30s.53 By the year 1000 he was

52 Some sources also say that Ningai’s place of birth is unknown. Shirai Yūko, “Ame sōjō Ningai to Kūkai nyūjō densetsu 雨僧正仁海と空海入定伝説 [The Rainmaking High Priest Ningai and the Tradition of Kūkai in continual meditation],” Nihon Bukkyō 41 (April, 1978): 52-56 gives a more detailed discussion of the various theories about Ningai’s origins. 53 Jōgaku-ji were temples like Tōdai-ji that were formally recognized, or licensed, by the government, for the purpose of performing national rituals of state protection, etc. Jōgakusō were the monks who made up the administrative leadership of these temples.

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serving on the Naigū 内宮, the ten member board of monks in the service of the

imperial court. In 1016 he was given the post of gon risshi 權律師, making him a

provisional member of the Sōgō, the body charged with the oversight of all

Buddhist institutions and monks, and was appointed Tōji chōja 長者 (abbot of

Tōji) in 1023. In 1038 he reached the rank of sōjō 僧正, one of the highest clerical

ranks at that time, and after his death in 1046 he came to be regarded as the

patriarch of the Ono branch 小野流 of the Shingon school, which was associated

with Ono Mandara-ji, (today known as Zuishin-in 随心院), a temple founded by

Ningai sometime during the last two decades of the 900s.

Ningai owed his rise to prominence neither to his family background nor his mastery of Shingon philosophy, though he did compose several treatises on

jisō 事相, or mikkyō (esoteric Buddhist) practice. Rather, Ningai became an

important cleric in the capital because of his incantational powers. By the time he

was in his 40s, courtiers were asking him to perform kaji kitō 加持祈祷 prayer

rituals of repentance and supplication, as when Fujiwara no Sanesuke 藤原実資

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sent his family to the Ono Mandara-ji in 993 in order to receive from Ningai rites

aimed at protecting them from illness and calamity.54 Ningai also performed

ekizei 易筮 divination rites on several occasions, including an effort to correct the

eye problems of emperor Sanjō 三条 in 1015.55

But Ningai was best known for his rainmaking rites (kiu 祈雨 or shōu 請雨).

Rainmaking had not been associated with Shingon prior to the eleventh century, but this changed in 1016 as a consequence of a successful rainmaking ritual performed by Jinkaku in the Shinsen-en 神泉苑 near the imperial palace.56

Though Jinkaku performed the ritual without official sanction, it was successful and as a result rainmaking became increasingly identified with the Shingon school, as well as giving rise to the idea that Kōbō Daishi himself had performed successful rainmaking rituals.57 Ningai followed Jinkaku’s success with no fewer

than nine successful rainmaking rituals from 1018 onward. His success was so

54 Shirai 1978, 56. 55 Shōyūki, Chōwa 長和 4, intercalary 6th month, 3rd and 4th days, ZST Shōyūki I, 451. 56 Shōyūki, Chōwa 長和 5, 6/11, 12, ZST Shōyūki 2, 105-6. 57 Shirai 1978, 52.

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extraordinary that history remembers him as the ame sōjō, the “rainmaking high priest.”

As Ningai’s life story suggests, he was not the typical high-ranking cleric serving in the capital. Although the positions he held did require him to perform a standard repertoire of rituals in the service of the state, his real interests and abilities tended toward incantational practices such as divination and rainmaking not usually cultivated by clerics of his status. In contrast to the monk Ryōgen 良

源 who was able to bring about the revival of the Tendai temple complex on Mt.

Hiei at the end of the tenth century by virtue of his formal scholastic prowess and debating skills,58 Ningai’s influence was based on religious practices more

commonly associated with popular and mountain religion. His decision to locate

the Ono Mandara-ji in Uji, Yamashiro province rather than in the capital also

suggests that Ningai was interested in religion as it was practiced outside the

capital at lower levels of society

58 The work of Ryōgen is discussed briefly above, Chapter 1, p. 35f.

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This orientation toward popular religion is also reflected in Ningai’s interest

in mendicant religious practitioners who arrived in the capital from the provinces.

For example, Shōyūki reports that he spent time with Kyōchō 経重, a monk from

Tajima 但馬 who had come to the capital and gained a reputation for performing successful incantational rituals.59 In all, it is probably not too much to say that

Ningai would have felt very much at home in the company of the kind of

religionists who inhabited Kojimadera and Hasedera, monks like Shingō and

Kishin.60

As a consequence of his early training on Mt. Kōya and his having been

exposed to the figure of the constantly meditating Kōbō Daishi, Ningai also took

an active interest in the disposition of the mountain. In 1006 he petitioned for

permission to conduct a kanjin campaign to fund the restoration of Mt. Kōya. 61

59 Shirai 1978, 59-60. 60 Gorai, 91, suggests that Ningai in fact recruited Kishin to undertake the restoration of the Mt. Kōya complex. He offers no evidence for this, however, and though Kishin and Ningai may have known each other, I believe Kishin’s decision to go to Mt. Kōya was his own. 61 “Kankō sannen Kongōbuji daitō kanjin mon 寛弘三年金剛峰寺大塔勧進文,” part of Kongōbuji zatsubun, in KDDZ 2.

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This effort seems to have failed, or at least there is no record of it producing any

results, probably because Mt. Kōya was far away and generally unfamiliar to

capital aristocrats. And as noted above, the image of Kōbō Daishi common in the

capital was that of a very gifted founder rather than that of a supernatural figure

who lived on in meditation as he awaited the return of Maitreya. But despite this

initial failure, Ningai’s efforts to advance the fortunes of Mt. Kōya bore fruit when

Fujiwara no Michinaga 藤原道長 decided to visit Mt. Kōya in 1023.

Michinaga and Mt. Kōya

An account in Kōya shunjū hennen shūroku, probably apocryphal, tells of

a dream Michinaga had in which he saw himself on Mt. Kōya. According to this

story, Michinaga requested that Ningai explain the dream to him, and Ningai used the opportunity to urge Michinaga to visit the mountain. Though the story of this dream does not appear in more contemporary sources (Shōyūki 小右記, a

court diary dating from the time of Michinaga and much concerned with his

activities, for example, does not mention it), Ningai almost certainly played a

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major role in prompting Michinaga to visit Mt. Kōya.62 Jinkaku, who was

Michinaga’s uncle, had also offered prayers for a bout of illness Michinaga suffered in 999 and was the second highest ranking cleric at Tōji at the time behind Saishin, who was Tōji chōja (abbot).63

According to the Oku-no-in dōtō kōhaiki, Michinaga’s trip to Mt. Kōya was in the end organized by Saishin, who besides having been Tōji chōja for 10 years held the rank of dai sōjō 大僧正.64 The fact that he officiated at Michinaga’s funeral in 1027 furthermore suggests a close relationship between the two. In contrast to Ningai and to a lesser extent Jinkaku, Saishin was very much the typical capital cleric. As has been noted, he came out of a high-ranking aristocratic family; he also had long been associated with Ninna-ji 仁和寺, a

62 Tsuchiya Megumi 土谷恵, “Ono sōjō Ningai zō no saikentō 小野僧正仁海像の再検討 [A Reconsideration of the Rainmaking Monk Ningai],” in Aoki Kazuo sensei kanreki kinenkai, ed., Nihon chūsei no seiji to bunka 日本中世の政治と文化 [Politics and Culture in Medieval Japan] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1987), 576, n. 140, argues that Michinaga did not in fact have much to do with Ningai, noting that Ningai was not among his inner circle of clerical advisors after Michinaga’s tonsure in 1018. While this may be true, it is hard to believe that Michinaga would have been unaware of or uninterested in Ningai’s activities. 63 Tōji chōja honin 東寺長者補任 1, ZZGR 2, 511. Ningai was the third highest ranking monk at this time. 64 Oku-no-in dōtō kōhaiki, Hinonishi, ed. 1994, 158.

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temple with close ties to the imperial house owing to its founding by emperor

Kōkō 光孝天皇 in 886. It is possible he felt that Jinkaku and Ningai were not

appropriate guides for Michinaga on this trip because of their heterodox views,

but a rivalry that had been brewing between Saishin and Jinkaku since an

incident in 1013 may also have contributed. According to shunjū, Jinkaku was

serving as Tōji chōja at the time but ran into problems which caused him to be

absent for the performance of the go shichinichi mishi ho 五七日御修法.65 Saishin took his place, which seems to have angered Jinkaku and prompted his later retreat to Mt. Kōya.

Michinaga apparently originally planned to visit in the 8th month of 1023,

but his trip was delayed by two months.66 When he did finally embark on his journey, he made stops at some of the prominent temples in the Nara area

65 Hinonishi, 1982, shunjū, 63; see also Tōji chōja honin 1, ZZGR 2, 510. The go shichinichi mishi ho was a ritual that the emperor underwent annually for the benefit of the realm. It was carried out in the Shingon-in chapel on the grounds of the imperial palace. Jinkaku’s absence doubtless offended the court. 66 In Shōyūki, Jian 3 (1023), 9th month 14th day, we read, "because of the dedication of the zenoku 禪屋, the visit of Michinaga to Mt. Kōya was postponed." DNK Shōyūki 6, 205-6

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before reaching Mt. Kōya on the 22nd day of the 10th month of 1023. According to

Fusō ryakki 扶桑略記, he paid a call at Kongōbuji 金剛峰寺 the day he arrived, and the next day paid homage to Kōbō Daishi at his mausoleum in the Oku-no- in.67 Other details about his visit are sketchy, but the most important thing

Michinaga did for Mt. Kōya's future was donate some lands at the foot of the mountain, to the Mt. Kōya complex.68 This contribution, along with, restorations, ordered by Saishin, carried out on some of Mt. Kōya’s halls and bridges in preparation for Michinaga’s visit, marked a major step toward the long-term viability of the religious edifice on Mt. Kōya.

Though it was the prototypical Shingon cleric Saishin who led Michinaga on his journey to Mt. Kōya, it was not Shingon doctrine or philosophy of the kind that Saishin represented that drew Michinaga to Mt. Kōya, but rather the images of the living Kōbō Daishi and Mt. Kōya’s Pure Land that attracted him. By this

67 Fusō ryakki 28, Jian 3 (1023), 10th month, 27th day, KT 6, 776-9. 68 Kōya shunjū 4, Jian 3, 10th month, 22nd day. The entry says that Michinaga ordered that Ka’nan 河南, that is either land known as Ka’nan, or land “south of the river” be designated jike 寺家, that is, temple lands, and exempted from taxation in perpetuity. As noted above, at this point in Japan’s history, this effectively gave the Mt. Kōya complex exclusive control of the lands.

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point in his life, Michinaga had been suffering bouts of ill health for some time,

and in fact had been ill earlier in 1023.69 These repeated periods of illness seem

to have turned his thoughts from this life toward the next and stimulated his interest in postmortem birth into a Pure Land (jōdo ōjō 浄土往生). He seized on

the Pure Land of Amida in particular; in 1019 he took tonsure and began construction of Hōjōji 法成寺 with its central Amida Hall after a particularly serious bout of illness the year before. Michinaga did not limit himself to Amida belief, however, embracing Kannon and Maitreya belief as well.70 For a powerful

man confronting his own mortality, the opportunity to experience the presence of

Kōbō Daishi, still alive after more that two hundred years, must have had strong

appeal indeed. Likewise, a mountain identified with the Pure Land of Maitreya

must also have tugged on Michinaga’s imagination. The “Utagai” chapter of Eiga

monogatari 栄華物語, for example, reports that when Michinaga peeked at the

69 Shōyūki, Jian 3/7/6. This entry indicates that Michinaga summoned Jinkaku and Saishin upon falling ill. For more on Michinaga’s illnesses, see Cameron Hurst, “Michinaga's Maladies,” Monumenta Nipponica 34:1 (1979): 101-112. 70 Tsuji, 278-83; Miyata Noboru 宮田登, Miroku shinkō 弥勒信仰, (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1984), 148f, discusses Michinaga’s involvement with Maitreya belief.

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body of Kōbō Daishi during his visit, “the head [of Kōbō Daishi] had a bluish tinge, the robe looked clean and new, and the color of the skin was remarkable. The great teacher (ie. Daishi) seemed asleep….”71 There are no other accounts which report Michinaga actually getting to see Kōbō Daishi and it is unclear that he actually did, but this story nevertheless provides a striking illustration of what drew Michinaga to the mountain.

In addition to the economic contribution Michinaga made to Mt. Kōya, his visit also signaled the beginning of its rise to a dominant position in Japan’s religious landscape. From that time forward, Mt. Kōya complex became a popular destination for prominent aristocrats and other powerful leaders, who saw to it that it continued to be economically stable and thriving. The figure of the meditating Kōbō Daishi continued to be central to its appeal, and continued to attract the devotion of people at all levels of society. In the chapter that follows,

71 This translation from Helen Craig and William H. McCullough, Tales of Flowering Fortunes: Annals of Japanese Aristocratic Life in the Heian Period, (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1980.), 513. The “Utagai” chapter appears in NKBT vol. 75.

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we will trace the variety of ways in which this devotion expressed itself as Mt.

Kōya continued to evolve and establish itself as an independent religious entity.

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CHAPTER 3 NATIONAL PROMINENCE AND BROAD APPEAL

The early and mid-eleventh century history of Mt. Kōya is in some ways perplexing. Though Kishin is generally given credit for the revival that occurred at this time, at critical points, most notably at the time of the visit of Michinaga, he is absent from the historical record. It is hard to imagine that Michinaga did not meet Kishin, though it is possible that Saishin prevented them from meeting on the grounds that Kishin was not of the proper pedigree. Nevertheless, the work

Kishin started before the visit of Michinaga continued after Michinaga’s departure.

Though information on Kishin’s continuing efforts to reconstruct the Mt. Kōya complex is scant, even before Michinaga’s visit we see him taking steps to put in place a successor, so that the renewal of Mt Kōya would continue after he was gone.

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Two years before Michinaga’s visit to Mt. Kōya, Kishin encountered a

newborn child, who he would choose to succeed him as overseer of the temple

complex. The standard account of how this came about is found in the “Chūin

Meizan-den”中院明算伝 section of Kii zoku fudoki.1 According to this story, on one of the several journeys Kishin seems to have undertaken in the vicinity of Mt.

Kōya, while traveling through the Ouzu 麻生津 pass, he saw a cloud of gas rising in the west. He followed the cloud, and when he reached the Kanzaki 神崎 crossing point (on the Kii river), he saw the character “a” 阿, colored gold, floating

on the river but not swept away by the current.2 The white cloud of gas rose from

1 KZF 4, Kōyasan gyōjō 1: 38. This also appears in ZSSZ 39: 1176. Wada Shūjō 和田秀乗, “Kōyasan kyōdan to ki-shū shusshinsha toku ni Meizan shōnin o chūshin ni shite 高野山教団と紀州出身者―特に明算上人を中心にして [The Mt. Kōya Organization and Those who Joined It from Kii Province ― with Special Attention to Meizan],” In Ando Seiichi sensei taikan kinenkai 安藤精一先生退官記念会 ed. Wakayama chihōshi no kenkyū 和歌山地方史の研究 [Studies in the Local History of Wakayama], 99, has shown that the KZF account of the life of Meizan is generally reliable despite its relatively late (Edo era) provenance. 2 The Sanskrit character “a,” written 阿 in Japanese, is of central importance in Shingon. It is the first syllable in the Sanskrit alphabet and plays a major role in Shingon practice as an object of meditation and a marker of truth. Its significance is dealt with at length in the Mahāvairocana Sūtra (J. Dainichi-kyō 大日経), the most important sūtra in the Shingon tradition. See Taikō Yamasaki, Shingon: Japanese Esoteric Buddhism (Boston: Shambala, 1988) 68, 190f, and Minoru Kiyota, Shingon Buddhism: Theory and Practice (Los Angeles: Buddhist Books International, 1978), 71f. See also footnote 3 below.

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the north bank of the river as if in the form of the characters of the “Five

Character Mantra of Vairocana.”3 Following the cloud, Kishin soon arrived at the

nearby house of a villager, inside of which he could hear a baby crying. The Kii

zoku fudoki account says that the cry sounded like an invocation (ju 呪) of Aizen

愛染 (or Aizen Myō-ō 愛染明王, skt. Ragārāja). This prompted Kishin to enter the house, the home of the Satō 佐藤 clan. The crying baby had in fact been born that very day, and Kishin, as a consequence of the signs he had seen, promised to care for and raise the child. When this child, who later became Kishin’s successor Meizan 明算, reached the age of eleven, he climbed Mt. Kōya and became the charge of Kishin, who at the time was residing at Higashimuro-in 東

室院.4 In 1039 Kishin and Meizan moved to the Chuin and began restoring it, a

3 Birushana goji shingon 毘廬遮那五字真言. The five character mantra of Vairocana (Jp. Dainichi), a-bi-ra-un-ken (阿毘羅吽欠, skt. a-vi-ra-huṃ-khaṃ) is the recitation of the five Sanskrit characters representing the five basic elements of the universe. When used as a mantra, they are understood to reveal the secret wisdom of Dainichi. This mantra also reflects the importance of the character “a” 阿. 4 Cf. Kongōbuji shoinke setsufu shū, ZSSZ 34, 148.

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move precipitated by a vision, apparently witnessed by both Kishin and Meizan, in which Kōbō Daishi appeared and directed them to do so.5

Kishin’s undertaking of the education of Meizan and his working with

Meizan to restore the Chu-in seem to have been the beginning of the end of

Kishin’s work on Mt. Kōya. Kōya shunjū gives no indication of any other restoration projects occurring at this time. The last construction-related item mentioned in shunjū for a period of several decades is that of the completion of the Kondō 金堂, which was celebrated in the second month of 1017.6 It seems likely, therefore, that by the 1030s Kishin was devoting most of his energy to the training of Meizan rather than to the physical revival of the Mt. Kōya complex.

Kishin was already 81 years old by this time, and it is not surprising either that the pace of his work would slow or that he would devote more energy to developing a capable leader to succeed him. Though Kishin lived until 1054,

Meizan is commonly understood to have assumed de facto responsibility for the

5 Cf. shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 69. 6 shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 65.

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management of the Mt. Kōya complex in 1044, the year in which he chanted from

memory the Kongōkai daihō 金剛界大法 with the aid of the Jūhachidō shidai 十八

道次第.7 Wada Shūjō believes this also marks Kishin’s transmission of the Kojima

lineage of Shingō to Meizan.8 As noted in the previous chapter, Shingō, like

Kishin himself, left Kōfuku-ji at an early age and adopted an ascetic lifestyle,

which, like Meizan’s own humble local origins, points to the continuing distinctly

non-elite character of the Mt. Kōya leadership.

Information about Meizan’s activities on Mt. Kōya is only slightly less

scanty than that concerning the work of Kishin. The Kōya shunjū entry for 1044,

the year of Meizan’s putative rise to leadership, makes no mention of him at all,

but rather notes that Shinnen 真念 was appointed kengyō (superintendent) that

year, and that later the same year, Gyōmyō 行明 succeeded to the post of

7 The Kongōkai daihō is one of the four rites performed in the process of initiation into Shingon clerical life. The Jūhachidō shidai is a series of 18 mudras, or ritual hand gestures, performed in support of this rite and prior to it. 8 Kishin’s relationship with Shingō is discussed in the previous chapter. Wada 1987, 99, draws this conclusion from the fact that Ryūkō-in has in its holdings the Jōyuishiki-ron 成唯識論 of Shingō.

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kengyō. It is not clear if Shinnen died or merely resigned.9 After Gyōmyō held the

post for several years, it subsequently passed through the hands of Kōin 興胤

and Yuihan (or Ihan) 維範 before finally coming to Meizan in 1089. Nevertheless,

owing to his thoroughgoing affiliation with the Chu-in, Meizan is generally

regarded as having been instrumental in the continued efflorescence of the Mt.

Kōya complex during the eleventh century.

Meizan rose steadily through the ranks of the clergy on Mt. Kōya. He

received the denbō kanjō 伝法勧頂 initiation, the highest in Shingon, in 1049 at the age of 28. In 1056, Meizan had an audience with Seizon 成尊 at Ono mandara-ji 小野曼荼羅寺, and later left Mt. Kōya for a period of study with him.

While at Ono mandara-ji, he received the transmission of a number of esoteric rites and also received denbō kanjō initiation in the Ono branch, thus further

establishing his formal Shingon esoteric credentials. In doing so, Meizan

reconnected the Mt. Kōya complex with the mainline transmission of Shingon

9 shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 70. Kōyasan Kengyō-chō 高野山検校帳, part of Yūzoku hōkanshū 又続宝簡集 94, in DNK 1/7 p. 405, gives a different impression, that Shinnen served at least two or three years, including the time at which Fujiwara no Yorimichi visited Mt. Kōya.

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esotericism, a necessary step toward establishing a more prominent place for the mountain within Shingon. He returned to Mt. Kōya in 1072, and soon after began undertaking both further renovations of the temple complex itself, and perhaps more importantly, continued to work on the revival and reconfiguration of its ritual life.

Judging by the contents of shunjū, few building projects were completed until very near the end of the 11th century. However, those that were completed were some of the central buildings on the mountain, including the Kanjō-in 潅頂

院 (in 1086) and the Daitō 大塔 (in 1100) in the central temple precinct (the

Garan). Construction on the Kanjō-in began in 1084 and was supported by funds from emperor Shirakawa at the request of Shōshin 性信 (1005-85), the second head of Ninna-ji and the fourth son of emperor Sanjō 三条.10 Shōshin requested its construction to mark the beginning of a new sixty-year astrological cycle,

10 shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 78. Shōshin is referred to as “Kannon-in sōzu 漢音院僧都 in the text.

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which 1084 was.11 The restoration of the Daitō was completed as a result of a

declaration by retired emperor Shirakawa 白川; according to Kōya shunjū, work

on the Daitō had stretched over more than 30 years.12 Construction also

progressed in the Oku-no-in, most notably with the completion of the Haiden 拝殿

(or Tōrōdō, in front of the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi) in 1097. Meizan officiated at the completion ceremony, which featured the participation of 30 monks.13

As these various halls were completed, it was necessary to staff them with monks responsible for the maintenance of both their physical structures and the rituals that were native to them, a process that occurred throughout the 1000s. In

1057, Meizan installed six yamagomori 山籠 monks (discussed in more detail

below) at the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi, and also three monks at the Kanjō-in,

11 Saiji-ki 歳時記, in KZF 5. ZSSZ 39, 403. 1084 was a kōshi 甲子 year, the first year of the sixty year cycle. 12 shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 84. Shirakawa’s order for the restoration of the Daitō was given when he visited the mountain in 1088, noted in the shunjū entry for 1088 (Kanji 寛治 2), Hinonishi, 1982, 79. 13 shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 82. The Haiden stands in front of the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi; today it is more commonly known as the Tōrodō 燈炉堂. See p. 43 above.

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himself being one of the latter three.14 Likewise, once the Daitō was completed in

1100, twelve yamagomori were placed in residence there. Also, according to the

Oku-no-in dōtō kōhaiki, yamagomori had been present in the Oku-no-in since the time of the death of Kūkai. As noted in the previous chapter, this is one of the few

places on the mountain that continued to be attended, though perhaps only

seasonally, during the time that the complex was abandoned in the period after

the year 1000. Extant historical records do not indicate where these new monks

came from. Traditionally, monks and postulants came to the mountain in order to

engage in rigorous ascetic practice, and by the mid-1000s, the cult of Kōbō

Daishi may have been an additional attraction. Nevertheless, given the increase in number of personnel witnessed at this time, is seems likely that at least some of these additional clergy came from communities in the vicinity of the mountain.

One avenue by which this happened will be discussed in more detail later in this

chapter.

14 shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 73. For more on yamagomori, see the section on gakuryo, p. 145 below.

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In the course of the 1000s, the Mt. Kōya complex experienced growth in both its physical plant and in the number of resident monks. This growth was funded by the steadily increasing numbers of aristocrats from the capital who visited the mountain in the course of the century. Mention has already been made of Shōshin, who solicited funds for the construction of the Kanjō-in. He cloistered himself in a hut near the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi for a time in the year 1069, and it seems clear that the practice of cloistering oneself on Mt. Kōya and sponsoring rites at one or another hall became increasingly popular with aristocrats during the course of the eleventh century. One of the most important visitors to Mt. Kōya, after Fujiwara no Michinaga, was his son and successor

Yorimichi 頼道. Yorimichi visited in 1048, sponsored a performance of rites including the rishu zammai 理趣三昧 and the hokke hakkō 法華八講,15 and donated lands at the foot of the mountain that complemented those donated by his father some twenty-five years before, siginficantly strengthening the financial

15 Yorimichi’s motivation for visiting and performing these rituals is less clear than that of his father. There is no indication that he was in ill health, and it is hard to say what political benefit or other there might have been for doing so. Further investigation of this question is called for.

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base of the complex.16 As suggested in the previous chapter, the aristocrats who visited Mt. Kōya were likely drawn to it in part because of the figure of Kōbō

Daishi as Michinaga seems to have been. But there is also evidence that the evolution and elaboration of the rituals on Mt. Kōya, carried out by Meizan

(doubtless with the assistance and support of the other kengyō who led the

complex during the 1000s), may have also contributed to the mountain’s appeal

as a pilgrimage destination. It is to this subject that we now turn.

Annual Rites (nenchū gyōji 年中行事) on Mt. Kōya

Along with the physical development of the Mt. Kōya complex came important developments in its ritual life. More and better staffed halls meant that an annual round of ritual observances, or nenchū gyōji, of the kind found at most

16 shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 71. The lands donated consisted of some wasteland (arano 荒野, i.e. land not under cultivation at the time) north of the Ki river and probably directly across the river from the lands donated by his father Michinaga. According to Kōya shunjū, this land was also designated jike and by all appearances was held exclusively by the Mt. Kōya complex, as would have been typical of temple lands at the time. The name of the resulting shōen is not given in Kōya shunjū. See Matsunaga Yūkei 松長有慶, Takagi Shingen 高木訷元, Wada Shūjō 和多秀乗, and Tamura Ryūshō 田村隆照, Kōyasan: sono rekishi to bunka 高野山―その歴史と文化 [Mt. Kōya: Its History and Culture] (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1984) 172.

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major temples, could be developed. But though the form of the nenchū gyōji that developed on Mt.Kōya followed the standard general pattern of such observances, some of the rites included in the Mt. Kōya version seem to have been adapted or adopted in order to serve patrons visiting the mountain.

The earliest record of a nenchū gyōji observance on Mt. Kōya appears in

the Kōya zatsu nikki 高野雑日記 with the date of 1072; there does not seem to be

evidence that an established nenchū gyōji cycle was in place on the mountain much before this time.17 This 1072 cycle is fairly basic, listing no more than three

rites for any month, and no information about their content is given. Among these

is the shushō-e 修正會, a rite performed in the first month of the year.18 In 1091,

this rite was lengthened from three to seven days by Meizan, and the Kōya

kengyō-chō reports that the earlier three day ritual had lacked dignity (sōgon

17 Mizuhara Gyōei 水原堯榮, Kongōbuji nenchū gyōji 金剛峯寺年中行事 [The Cycle of Annual Observances at Kongōbuji], Vol. 7 of Mizuhara Gyōei zenshū (Tokyo: Dōhōsha, 1982) 3. 18 Today the shushō-e is performed on New Year’s day in the Kondō, a practice apparently begun by the kengyō Rōzen in 1119. See Mizuhara, 81 and Kōya kengyō-chō in DNK 1/7, 407.

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nashi 荘権無).19 More importantly, the basic meaning of the ritual seems to have

changed along with its length. A later, more detailed description of the Kongōbu-ji

nenchū gyōji dating from 1291 states that the shushō-e was originally a Yakushi

keka 薬師悔過, a rite for the confession of sin.20 However, after 1091, this rite on

Mt. Kōya came to be aimed at gaining this-worldly benefits, in particular, state

protection and the prosperity of the people.21

The fudan-kyō 不断経, a continuous sutra reading seven days in length,

was also added to the nenchū-gyōji by Meizan. The first recorded performance of

this rite, in 1094, was funded by means of a kanjin campaign by a yamagomori monk named Jōjin 定深. In this original form, it was held on the seventh day of the seventh month to mark the end of the ango 安居 summer retreat. This first

observance took place in the Daitō of the Chu-in, but once it became an

19 DNK 1/7, 404; shunjū, Hinonishi, 1982, 80. 20 Wada Shūjō 和多秀乗, “Shōō yonnen Kongōbuji nenchū gyōji chō 正應四年金剛峯寺年中行事帳 [The Kongōbuji Annual Ceremony records in Shōō 4 (1291)],” Koyasan daigaku ronsō 14 (1979) 66. 21 As Mizuhara, 82, notes, this is not without precedent. KZF 4/49 records that emperor Saga ordered that a shushō-e be performed on the first day of the New Year for state protection and plentiful harvest.

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established part of the ritual life of the complex, it was moved to the Kondō.22

Though this ceremony was aimed at the remission of sin and the promotion of fundamental goodness in the world (metzuzai shōzen 滅罪生善) as opposed to

the accrual of this-worldly benefits, the fact that it was initially made possible as

the result of a kanjin campaign carried out by one of the monks of Mt. Kōya

suggests it featured popular involvement from the time it first appeared.

One other rite added to the nenchū gyōji at just the same time was the

kechien kanjō, today perhaps one of the best known rituals on Mt. Kōya. It

currently takes place twice a year, once in the Spring (May 3-10) and once in the

Fall (October 19-21) and serves as an initial ordination which can be taken by

any layperson. Meizan added it to Mt. Kōya’s round of observances in 1094, but

its first performance seems to have taken place on the seventeenth day of the

eighth month of 1086, in recognition of the work of Kan’i 寛意, who oversaw the

22 Saijiki, in KZF 5, ZSSZ 39, 416; Wada 1979, 91; shunjū, Hinonishi, 1982, 81. Jōjin became kengyō of Mt. Kōya in 1106.

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construction of the Kanjō-in.23 The purpose of this ritual is to establish a karmic

connection with a Buddha or bodhisattva in the cosmos of Dainichi, a prospect

which probably drew participants then as it does today.

The efforts of Meizan and the other eleventh century leaders of the Mt.

Kōya complex to establish a nenchū gyōji cycle were probably motivated by a variety of factors. For one, equipping Mt. Kōya with the nenchū gyōji would signal it had a well developed ritual life comparable to that of any other prominent

temple. But more significant were the decisions these leaders made about the content of the Mt. Kōya nenchū gyōji. Though it did follow the pattern of standard

nenchū gyōji of the type found at any number of temples of the time, many of the

rites were conducted in such a way as to create openings for lay participation,

whether by the contribution of alms or participation in the ceremony itself.

Furthermore, some rites were recast so as to be more attractive to participants

23 Saijiki, in KZF 5, ZSSZ 39, 403. These rituals were later designated as being in memory of Kan’i (Spring) and Jōshin (Fall), two who were responsible for the construction of the Kanjō-in.

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and patrons, as was the case with the shushō-e, which was changed from a

confessional rite to one aimed at acquiring this-worldly benefits.

From Laity to Clergy: Other Avenues of Participation

Participation by the laity in the ritual life of Mt. Kōya was not limited to

attending rites or supporting them with patronage or alms. In the course of the

eleventh century, mechanisms developed whereby common people in the vicinity

of the mountain could enter its service full-time. What follows here is an outline of

the development and structure of the clerical system on Mt. Kōya and a brief

discussion of one of these mechanisms.

Clerical hierarchy on Mt. Kōya

As the complex expanded and the numbers of clergy grew, a formally

organized clerical hierarchy developed. As discussed in chapter 2, the highest

administrative post on the mountain was that of shigyō, and later kengyō. The post of shigyō was created when the abbacy of Kongōbuji (the Kongōbuji zasu) was absorbed by the abbot of Tōji and the mountain complex was therefore

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without local oversight. At the end of the 900s the title kengyō, or overseer, was

added to this post at the time when Gashin was in charge of the complex. Until

the mid-1000s, however, the other clerics who occupied the mountain seem to

have been relatively undifferentiated. It was during the late tenth and early

eleventh centuries that formal clerical ranks began to be adopted on Mt. Kōya.

The clergy on Mt. Kōya is traditionally understood to have fallen into three

major categories: gakuryo 学侶, gyōnin 行人, and hijiri 聖. The gakuryo and the

gyōnin were the two formally recognized types of monks, and the hijiri were free-

lance, though organized, religious operatives that fell outside the formal clerical

structure. The standard view is that the gakuryo were scholars and ritualists and the gyōnin were mainly administrators. While this is roughly the case, the

gakuryo class in particular was more diverse than this characterization implies.

Wada Shūjō24 has noted that the gakuryo category contained both monks who

24 Wada Akio (Shūjō) 和多昭夫 (秀乗), “Chūsei Kōyasan kyōdan no soshiki to dendō 中世高野山教団の組織と伝道 [The Organization and Perpetuation of Clerical Orders on Mt. Kōya in the Medieval Era],” in Nihon shūkyōshi kenkyūkai, ed., Nihon shūkyōshi kenkyū I: soshiki to dendō

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were following formal courses of study and those who were not. This distinction

was marked by the terms gakushū 学衆 and higakushū 非学衆, and the gakushū were further subdivided into a rather complex system of ranks based upon their level of training, with advanced monks confined to the lower rungs of the hierarchy. The exception to this pattern was in the appointment of the kengyō, who could be and sometimes was drawn from outside the formal clerical training system. This was because the kengyō was seen as a link between the sacred

and mundane worlds, and so needed experience in both to be effective.

gakuryo

In addition to the rather intricate gakushū ranking system, and apparently

overlaying it, was the simpler gakuryo ranking system, which is diagrammed in

figure 1. Those at the second rung of this system, the ajari, were responsible for

the training of younger monks in ritual and doctrinal matters. Because a central

tenet of Shingon Buddhism is direct transmission of the dharma from master to

日本宗教史研究 I: 組織と伝道 [Studies in the History of Japanese Religion: Organization and Perpetuation] (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1967) 62. Much of the following is drawn from this article.

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disciple, the post of ajari was seen as no less than the avenue by which Shingon

was perpetuated. The imperial court recognized the importance of this post to such an extent that it regulated the number of ajari that could be installed at a

given temple. kengyō 検校 ∣ The first instance of an ajari being ajari 阿闍梨 ∣ installed on Mt. Kōya was in 1086, when yamagomori 山龍 ∣ three ajari were posted to the Kanjō-in.25 nyūji 入寺 ∣ Soon after this, in 1088, Meizan likewise sanmai 三昧 ∣ gained the rank of ajari at the time of the daihōshi 大法師 (shūbun 衆分) visit of retired emperor Shirakawa to Mt. figure 1 Mt. Koya Clerical Hierarchy Kōya and the year before he was

appointed kengyō. Yuihan reached the rank of ajari at this time as well, though

he was the current holder of the post of kengyō,26 suggesting that the nature of

25 Wada, 1967, 65; 1987, 101. Wada draws this conclusion from the Shirakawa jōkō Kōya gokō-ki 白河上皇高野御幸記, though shujū and Kōya kengyō-chō report only that gusō 供僧, or “ritual monks,” were installed. 26 Kōya kengyō-chō, DNK 1/7, 403-404.

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the position of ajari was still somewhat ambiguous, having something of the

nature of both a clerical rank and an administrative post. Perhaps because of the

ambiguous nature of the post, or possibly owing to court regulation, the number

of ajari on Mt, Kōya stayed small for quite some time. Even one hundred years

later, in 1192, there were only about a dozen on Mt. Kōya, compared with some

two hundred on Mt. Hiei.27

As to the position of yamagomori, the term originally referred to those who

spent a limited period of seclusion on the mountain. By the Engi era (~920s),

however, it seems to have come to denote the class of monks who were based

on Mt. Kōya indefinitely and were following the formal clerical curriculum. Some

of the early kengyō, specifically the seventh, eighth, and ninth holders of the post

(whose terms span most of the 1000s), are referred to as yamagomori, but it is

not clear if this means they were promoted from the post of yamagomori or simply that they were chosen from among the ranks of the monks resident on Mt.

Kōya. The first case in which we see the title yamagomori applied to what

27 Wada, 1967, 65

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appears to be a formal administrative position is a case in which six were installed as such at the Miei-do in 1057.28 These monks were charged with overseeing the conduct of rituals at the halls to which they were assigned; the documents indicate this by classifying them as gusō 供僧, or “ritual monks.” By the end of the 1100s, the rank of yamagomori seems to have become quite prestigious; as indicated by figure 1, by this time it was the third highest rank, behind only kengyō and ajari.

It is more difficult to be as specific about the functions and duties of lower ranks of the gakuryo, the nyūji and daihōshi, or shūbun. The term nyūji suggests a monk at entry level, but more precisely, it was probably the designation given to promising postulants who were sent to Mt. Kōya by the heads of Shingon temples elsewhere.29 The shūbun likewise seem to have been postulants who qualified for clerical training by way of some other standard (but unspecified) mechanism.

28 Kōya kengyō-chō, DNK 1/7, 401; shunjū, Hinonishi, 1982, 73; Chūin Meizan-den, ZSSZ 39, 7. 29 Wada, 1967, 66.

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gyōnin

The gyōnin were charged with overseeing the ongoing everyday

operations of the various halls on the mountain, including maintenance, security,

tending offerings, gathering flowers and arranging them on the altars, lighting

lamps, cooking, cleaning, and other such tasks. The monks who performed these

tasks were referred to variously as jōji 承仕, geshū 夏衆,30 dōshin 道心, dōshū 堂

衆, nagatokoshū 長床衆, and chūhō 中方, among others. The term jōji is

relatively non-specific with respect to the duties that it covers as compared with

some of the others, and it appears in the documentary record of Mt. Kōya rather

early. According to the Sansōki ruiju 三僧記類従, at the time when the Tōji chōja

Kangen was engineering the merger of the post of Kongōbuji zasu with his own,

the monks of the mountain vacated it in protest, leaving jōji behind to take care of

the bell-ringing marking the beginning and end of a day. There is no reference to

gyōnin per se at this time, but it seems likely that these early jōji and others who

held similar responsibilities eventually coalesced into the category of practitioners

30 sometimes written 花衆; a more detailed discussion of this group appears below, p. 167.

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that came to be known as gyōnin. Wada Shūjō believes that the gyōnin had what

he calls a “strongly ubasoku-like character,” which is to say that gyōnin probably consisted mainly of devout laypersons rather than monks who had formal clerical training.31

Most of the concrete information we have concerning the gyōnin comes

from documents dating from the 1200s; by that point the gyōnin had become

quite powerful as a consequence of their handling the collection and

disbursement of revenues derived from Mt. Kōya’s landholdings, which by then

were extensive. This seems to have led to conflicts between them and the

gakuryo; however, in the 1000s this power, to the extent that they had it, would

not have yet become significantly greater than that of the other groups.

Furthermore, in the 1000s they were probably still relatively undifferentiated with

respect to job category or status.

31 Wada, 1967, 67. The Sansōki ruiju is held by Ninnaji.

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Kōya Hijiri

The Kōya hijiri, despite being perhaps the most difficult group to

characterize, and despite a relative scarcity of hard historical data owing to their

particular lifestyle, have nevertheless been the subject of a good deal of scholarly

attention. The reason for this is easy enough to understand: itinerant Kōya hijiri appear a number of times in the course of Japan's medieval and early modern history.32

As discussed in Appendix B, applying the term hijiri to one or another

group of Heian era religious practitioners is fraught with problems. The term

rarely appears in the historical records of the era, and its use by present-day

scholars tends to be imprecise and inconsistent. Though Kōya hijiri can be found itinerating throughout the country later in Japan's history (that is, in the medieval era), the best we can do in the Heian era is identify their possible antecedents.

Gorai Shigeru suggests that the first glimmerings of the hijiri lifestyle can be

32 The historical and historiographical issues concerning hijiri in Heian Japan is treated in Appendix B.

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found in the life of Kūkai himself. He speculates that Kūkai may have engaged in

hijiri-type between the time he reached adulthood and the time he departed for

Tang China. Information on this period of Kūkai’s life is sparse, leaving Gorai free

to speculate that he lived the life of an ubasoku (lay devotee) and embraced or

absorbed elements of the commoner Buddhism (shomin Bukkyō 庶民仏教) of the

time. Gorai is careful to point out, however, that there is no record of hijiri being on Mt. Kōya before the arrival of Kishin in the early eleventh century,33 and goes

on to argue that that the Kōya hijiri most directly grew out of the gyōnin groups

discussed above, particularly the jōji and the geshū. He believes that some of the

members of these groups were originally involved with mountain religious practices (sangaku shinkō 山岳信仰) predating the establishment of the Mt. Kōya

complex, but were drawn into service in the complex over time. Gorai may be

33 Gorai Kōya hijiri, 80. As noted in Ch. 3, I do not feel that Kishin fits the definition of a hijiri particularly well. He is referred to as shōnin 上人 or 聖人, but never as hijiri. The meaning of term shōnin is much broader than that of hijiri, covering all manner of religious practitioners from full ascetics to distinguished monks. Gorai may be correct in connecting Kishin’s advocacy of Kōbō Daishi belief to the activities of the later Kōya hijiri, but he is not clear how the Kōya hijiri evolved from this to Jōdo-kyō nenbutsu practice.

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correct about the origins of the Kōya hijiri, or he may not. In any case, later in Mt.

Kōya’s history, these gyōnin became quite powerful as a result of their control of

the finances of the complex and their oversight of its shōen holdings. In time, however, some gyōnin had started to follow a different course: they began to

leave the service of the Mt. Kōya complex and embrace (or return to) ascetic

practices and alms-collecting (kanjin) campaigns. According to Gorai, it is this

group that evolved into what came to be known as the Kōya hijiri.34 This

explanation, while plausible on its face, is left unsupported with concrete

evidence, however. Another possibility Gorai doesn’t consider is that the hijiri

class developed as some of the pilgrims who visited the mountain opted to

remain there and assume an eremitic life in devotion to Kōbō Daishi. Indeed, the

Kōya hijiri may have been a product of both processes. The Kōya hijiri

themselves left no records as to who they were before they became hijiri, so there is no way to know. In his work on Kōya hijiri, Gorai in part is concerned with

their origins. In this dissertation, however, this is less of an issue, especially since

34 Gorai, Kōya hijiri, 81.

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the Kōya hijiri probably did not play a prominent role on Mt. Kōya before the year

1100 or so.

Kōya hijiri are are prominently identified with nembutsu practice, seen as

being those who carried Shingon to the non-aristocratic populace via a the

"Shingon nenbutsu." Nembutsu practice had always been an observable element of Shingon, and Gorai traces the development of Kōya hijiri nembutsu practices

back through Shingon history to some of its earliest patriarchs, as far back as

Mukū risshi 無空律師 (894-916).35 At the same time, however, Gorai claims that the nembutsu practice of the Kōya hijiri was not the "mainstream" practice

traceable back to the traditional origins of Jōdo-kyō on Mt. Hiei, whereby

practitioners aim for birth in the next life in the Pure Land of Amida (ganshō 願生).

Rather, he sees the nembutsu of Mt. Kōya as having its origins in what he calls a

"mountain nembutsu" (yama no nembutsu 山の念仏) which permeated town and

35 Gorai, Kōya hijiri, 82. Gorai seems to draw this conclusions largely from accounts of the life of Mukū appearing in Hokke genki and Nihon ōjō gokurakuki. Given that the intention of the authors of these works was to demonstrate the efficacy of the nembutsu rather than to record accurately the lives of pious monks, Gorai's interpretation is open to question.

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countryside. Unfortunately, Gorai sheds little light on the character of this

"mountain nembutsu" instead turning his attention to various luminaries

associated with Mt. Kōya who seem to have engaged in nembutsu practice at

one time or another.36 Further work is needed to clarify the nature of

the ”Shingon nenbutsu."

Though Gorai believes that these nembutsu hijiri began to appear at the

time of Kishin in the early 1000s, the first certifiable nembutsu practitioner on Mt.

Kōya seems to have been Kyōkai 教懐, popularly (and in fact retrospectively) known as the Odawara hijiri 小田原聖. Two very similar accounts of the life of

Kyōkai appear in both the Shūi ōjōden and the Kōyasan ōjōden.37 The Shūi

ōjōden account says that Kyōkai entered monastic life as a child, residing first at

Kōfukuji. After reaching adulthood, he left Kōfukuji and settled in Odawara, in

Kuse-gun 久世郡, Yamashiro province 山城国, which is how he came to be

36 Again, Gorai seems to be speculating; he offers no evidence for this assertion and no sense of how the yama no nembutsu differs from any other kind of nembutsu. 37 Both versions appear in Inoue Mitsusada 井上光貞 and Ōsone Shōsuke 大曾根章介, ed, Ōjōden, Hokke genki 往生伝・法華験記, NST vol. 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1974), p. 296-7 (Hokke genki) and p. 696 (Kōyasan ōjōden).

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known as the Odawara hijiri. Later in life, he retreated to Mt. Kōya, where he

resided for about 10 years (20 years according to the Kōyasan ōjōden account).

There he practiced rites centering on the ryōbu mandara 両部曼荼羅 and Amida

(an Amida kuyō 供養 is specifically mentioned.) He also regularly performed the

Daibutchō darani 大仏頂陀羅尼38 as well as the Amida mantra (Amida shingon 阿

弥陀真言). The ōjōden accounts report that at the time of his death (which the

Kōyasan ōjoden reports as 1093/5/27) he made several hundred replicas of

Fudōson and performed the eye-opening ceremony for them. He then gathered

together the monks (presumably his followers) and had them chant the nembutsu

together, and lying on his right side facing west, he died. Gorai argues

convincingly that the way Kyōkai carried on standard Shingon practices such as

maṇḍala and dhāraṇī rites along with those dedicated to Amida marks him as a

transitional figure who stood between the mainline Shingon practitioners and the later nembutsu hijiri who came to be known as the Kōya hijiri.39 The rites relating

38 The butchō is the lump atop the head of the Buddha indicating his wisdom. 39 Gorai, Kōya hijiri, 100.

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to Amida during his lifetime were part of Shingon tradition, though his emphasis

on them was probably unusual for the time. His deathbed nembutsu practice,

however, was probably well out of the ordinary, and if these ōjōden accounts are reliable, would have been one of the earliest instances of such on Mt. Kōya.

Later Kōya hijiri increasingly moved away from esoteric Amida practice and

toward what looks like more or less standard Jōdo-kyō practice with its primary

goal of posthumous birth into the Pure Land of Amida.

According to the Shūi ōjōden account, Kyōkai was 93 years old at the time

of his death, meaning that he was no younger than his early 70s when he first

reached Mt. Kōya. It may be the case that Kyōkai lived the life of an ascetic or

practitioner of mountain religion from the time he left Kōfukuji until he reached Mt.

Kōya (in the way Kishin seems to have done), but information about this period in his life is lacking. Regrettably, the story of Kyōkai does not seem to shed much light on the nature of the "mountain nembutsu" that Gorai claims was influential in the development of the practices of the Kōya hijiri. The rites that Kyōkai is said to

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have focused on all have clear and unremarkable precedents in the Buddhist

practice of the time.

It is not clear where Kyōkai settled during his time on Mt. Kōya, but

according to Kōya shunjū he did have an organization of some kind. An entry for

1088 reports that during the visit of retired emperor Shirakawa to Mt. Kōya that

year, Kyōkai and another monk requested and were granted formal recognition

for themselves and a group of 30 shōnin 上人.40 This group may have been the

forerunner of groups known as bessho hijiri 別所聖 (or "separate cloister" hijiri),

and in fact Gorai offers evidence that one of these groups, located on or near the

present-day site of the Kongō zanmai-in, had historical ties with Kyōkai.41

Nevertheless, Kyōkai himself does not seem to fit the image of the

reclusive, ascetic hijiri standing outside of established religion and society. As has been noted, accounts of his life in Shūi ōjōden and Kōyasan ōjōden portray

Kyōkai engaging in standard, if not mainstream, esoteric practices; furthermore,

40 shunjū 5, Hinonishi, 1982, 78. 41 Gorai, Kōya Hijiri, 100-102.

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the references to him in shunjū refer to him as shōnin, which has much broader

connotations than the term hijiri.42 In short, though Kyōkai may have been the

progenitor of later bessho hijiri groups on Mt. Kōya, perhaps by way of one or

another of the 30 disciples who received recognition from Shirakawa, it does not

appear that Kyōkai himself was a hijiri. I believe this is generally the case: while the origins of the hijiri may be found in the eleventh century, I believe it was at

least another 50 to 100 years before clearly identifiable Kōya hijiri appeared.

In addition to Gorai's work on the subject, the Kōya hijiri are also dealt with

by Inoue Mitsusada 井上光貞 in the last chapter of his Nihon Jōdo-kyō seiritsushi

no kenkyū 日本浄土教成立史の研究 [A Study of the History of the Establishment

of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism]. As the title of this book indicates, Inoue's

goal is to present the history of Jōdo-kyō in Japan rather than with the history of

the Kōya hijiri per se, though for Inoue the two subjects are of course closely

42 In addition to the entry for 1088, Kyōkai's death is reported the entry for 1093. The entry gives a very brief account of his life which does not include information about his practices while he resided on Mt. Kōya. It states that the higashi bessho was later known as the "Odawara dani," thus making its link to Kyōkai explicit. The location of the higashi bessho is not clear, but the site identified by Gorai is a likely candidate.

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related. Like Gorai, Inoue traces out the history of the Jōdo-kyō strains that

appear in the history of Shingon and Mt. Kōya, noting the activities of monks such as Mukū, Jinkaku and Shōshin, accounts of whose lives appear in one or more ōjōden collections.43 He is careful to note that it is difficult to judge the

actual extent of Jōdo-kyō-type practice on the part of these monks, but also

argues that in any case, their practices were probably of the kind the Kōyasan

ōjōden reports Kyōkai to have engaged in and differed from those of the later

nembutsu hijiri who became known as Kōya hijiri. He traces the origins of this

latter group, as does Gorai, to the point when Shirakawa gives formal recognition in 1088 to the 30 shōnin led by Kyōkai as described above. Interestingly, Inoue

makes note of a grant of financial support for this group by Shirakawa during his

43 Inoue Mitsusada 井上光貞, Nihon Jōdokyō seiritsu shi no kenkyū 日本浄土教成立史の研究 [A Study of the History of the Establishment of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten) 1985, 363-5. A discussion of Jinkaku and his tribulations appears on in this dissertation on p. 115f; Shōshin is discussed on p. 134.

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second visit to the mountain, in 1101, which Gorai overlooks,44 but here as well, there is no indication of what the purpose of this group actually was.

Like Gorai, Inoue sees links between Kishin and those who worked to revive Mt. Kōya at the beginning of the 1000s, and these later shōnin associated with Kyōkai, and like Gorai he fails to demonstrate an explicit connection between the two. Given that there is no evidence that Kishin embraced any kind of Amida practice (though a faint inference of it might be drawn from his Lotus

Sutra practice), it is hard to understand why these scholars felt the need to make this connection other than to maintain a tidy flow of history. Inoue is, I think, more careful in treating the life of Kyōkai specifically, noting that there is no information about Kyōkai's activities during the 20 (possibly 10) years he spent on Mt.

Kōya.45 In the absence of such information, he points to evidence that later nembutsu hijiri revered him as their projenitor, as indicated by Daijōbō 大乗房

44 Inoue 395, n. 40. The grant, a shōen in Aki province (present-day Hiroshima prefecture) called Nōmi-shō 野美庄, is reported in Kōyasan gokō gyoshutsuki 高野山御幸御出記, ZGR 28 上, p. 292. This is an account of the visits of cloistered emperors to Mt. Kōya in the early 1100s. 45 Inoue 366.

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and others performing an urabon-kō 盂蘭盆講 at the Kyōkai shōnin-dō 教懐上人

堂 in 1149.46 Inoue also draws from another historical source, dated slightly

earlier (1132) than Daijōbō's observance, an image of Mt. Kōya suggesting that

the so-called bessho ("separate cloister") hijiri 別所聖 were already populating the mountain in significant numbers. The description is of the scene one saw when looking eastward from the Garan toward the Oku-no-in, an area in which numerous huts occupied by "senrai bonryo" 仙来梵侶 could be seen.47 The meaning of senrai bonryo is unclear, but Inoue suggests that senrai indicates the presence of hijiri, a not entirely unreasonable conclusion given that the character sen 仙 is sometimes read as hijiri.48 Whoever these new residents were, they

46 Inoue 395, n. 44. An urabon-kō is a memorial service for a deceased person. Since it was performed at the Kyōkai shōnin-dō, or the "hall of the Holy man Kyōkai), it was certainly a memorial service in his honor. This event is mentioned in the Omuro Kōyasan gosanrō nikki 御室高野山御参籠日記, in Yūzoku hōkan-shū 又続法簡集 30, Kōyasan monjo 4, p. 466. It is worth noting, however, that only seven other shōnin participated. 47 Inoue, 395 n. 45, identifies this passage as coming from the Daidenbō-in kuyō ganmon 大伝法院供養願文 dated 113510/17, which he says is found in the Negoro yōsho 根来要書 of Kakuban. His annotation is incomplete, however, and I have been unable to verify the source of this quote. 48 The character sen 仙 (hijiri), however, usually refers to Daoist immortals rather than Buddhist ascetics. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Christoph Kleine and Livia Kohn, "Daoist

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were clearly not part of Mt. Kōya's formal clerical organization, though I doubt they were hijiri. Indeed, the passage gives no indication of who these people were, where they came from, or what religious observances they engaged in.

They may have been nembutsu practitioners, but given that they were arrayed in the direction of the Oku-no-in, they could just as easily have been lay devotees of

Kōbō Daishi.

The next step Inoue takes is to attempt to identify common traits shared by the thirty-eight figures who appear in the Kōyasan ōjōden, while at the same time acknowledging that ōjōden are not particularly reliable sources for historical information. He acknowledges that they have a variety of backgrounds, and that almost all of them come from outside Mt. Kōya. Some were from Kōfuku-ji, pointing up the ongoing close ties between it and Mt. Kōya; others were from prominent Shingon temples such as Ninna-ji, and still others were out of the

Immortality and Buddhist Holiness: A Study and Translation of the Honchō Shinsen-den," Japanese Religions 24:2 (July 1999) 124f.

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warrior class, as in the case of san'i Kiyohara no Tadakuni 散位清原正国.49

Secondly, Inoue notes that nearly all these characters cloistered themselves on the mountain, in contrast to the itinerant peddlers identified as Kōya hijiri in the

medieval and early modern eras. It is probably the case that as times changed

and shōen revenues dried up, the Kōya hijiri were forced to leave the mountain

and support themselves in other ways. Third, Inoue argues that as these hijiri

gathered in the various valleys that crease the top of the mountain, over time they coalesced into lineage groups of their own, Kyōkai and his band of thirty being an early example of the kind of groups discussed in detail in the later

chapters of Gorai's Kōya hijiri.

Finally, Inoue presents a discussion of the content of the thought of the

various figures in Kōyasan ōjōden. To the extent that this is possible based only

on these brief biographies, he finds that their ideas and ritual emphases were

quite varied, not surprising given their varied backgrounds and the fact that their

49 Though some of the figures who appear in Kōyasan ōjōden were active in the late 1000s, most date from later eras.

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emphasis was on practice rather than thought. Inoue concludes that the nenbutsu that developed on Mt. Kōya was a world apart from that arising out of

Tendai, as can be seen in the appearance of myōgo 名号 such as Amida

Shingon 阿弥陀真言 and namu sanshin sokui Amida nyorai 南無三身即一阿弥陀

如来. The latter of these two is associated with Rentai 連待 (1012-1098), whose story appears in both Kōyasan ōjōden and shūi ōjōden. The shūi ōjōden reports that in addition to expressing his devotion to Amida, Rentai uttered two other similar phrases, namu Kōbō Daishi henjō kongō bosatsu 南無弘法大師遍照金剛

菩薩 and namu daiji daihi kanjizai bosatsu 南無大慈大悲観自在菩薩, expressing reverence for Kōbō Daishi and Kannon respectively.50 Taken together these three hōgō reflect in words the familiar schematic of the Amida triad, known as the Amida sanzon 阿弥陀三尊, in which Kannon and Seishi 勢至 are portrayed as

50 See Hinonishi Shinjō, "The Hōgō (Treasure Name) of Kōbō Daishi and the Development of Beliefs Associated with It," Japanese Religions 27:1 (January 2002) 5-18 for an overview of the evolution of the phrases chanted in honor of Kōbō Daishi. Inoue uses the term myōgō, which is appropriate for referring to the nembutsu in particular, but hōgō 宝号 (lit. "treasure name") is the term used more generally to refer to such chants. Hōgō expressing reverence for Kōbō Daishi began to appear in the latter Heian era and continued to evolve until the present form of the Kōbō Daishi hōgō, namu Daishi henjō kongō 南無大師遍照金剛, emerged in the Nanbokuchō era.

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attendant on Amida, in this case with Kōbō Daishi being substituted for Seishi.

This suggests a certain malleability in the figure of Kōbō Daishi: whereas early in

the century we find an association with Maitreya, by late in the century, and

corresponding with the rise in Amida practice, we find Kōbō Daishi being

associated with Amida.

Though people from all walks of life populated the ranks of the later Kōya

hijiri who itinerated about the country in later times, the account of Kakuban

noted above51 and the backgrounds of the characters appearing in the Kōyasan

ōjōden suggest that their predecessors for the most part had clerical

backgrounds and only resided on Mt. Kōya. While it is possible that commoners could be found these early ascetics, aside from the occasional warrior (such as the aforementioned Kiyohara no Tadakuni), there is little or no evidence of their presence. I refer to them as predecessors of the Kōya hijiri because I don't feel

these characters themselves fit the definition of a hijiri (Kōya hijiri or otherwise).

The antecedents of later Kōya hijiri groups may be found at the end of the

51 Page 162, note 47.

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eleventh century, as in the case of the group of 30 associated with Kyōkai, but

the Kōya hijiri as a distinct entity had yet to emerge. In identifying points of

popular participation in the life of the Mt. Kōya complex, therefore, we must look

elsewhere. It is in fact in Mt. Kōya's gyōnin class where the best evidence of such

participation lies, one of the better-studied gyōnin subgroups being the geshū .

The geshū

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the geshū 夏衆 (literally, “the

confraternity of summer”) is their specificity: their orgin was specific, their function

was specific – even the time of year they were active (clearly indicated in their

title) was specific.52 The specific function of the geshū (earlier written as 花衆, or

the “flower confraternity,” and sometimes called hanatsumi 花摘) was to make

offerings of flowering anise (shikimi 樒) branches. They came to be known as

52 The geshū are touched on in Gorai, Kōya hijiri, 81f, and are examined in more detail by Hinonishi Shinjō in "Kōyasan no geshū to geango 高野山の夏衆と夏案居 [The Geshū and Geango on Mt. Kōya]," Sangaku shugen 11 (March, 1993) 1-21, and "Kōyasan no geango to Karukaya dōshin 高野山の夏案居と刈萱道心[The Geango of Mt. Kōya and the Worthies of Karukaya], Bukkyō bungaku 18 (March, 1994) 1-20. The following discussion is based mainly on the articles by Hinonishi.

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geshū (夏衆) because early on these offerings coincided with the geango 夏案居, the summer observance purported to date back to the earliest days of Buddhism, when followers of the Buddha stopped their itinerations during the rainy season so as to not harm any sentient beings. Though the geshū were regarded as a

part of the jōji (ritual manager) class, they did not reside in the Mt. Kōya complex,

but rather seem to have been deployed from Hanazono-shō 花園庄, a shōen

held by Mt. Kōya from the mid 900s and located in its foothills. Hinonishi believes it was the residents of hamlets like Hanazono-shō who acted as jōji during the

1001-1016 period when the mountain was vacated and maintained its rituals,

including the geango.53 The Gyōnin jireki 行人事暦 section of Kii zoku fudoki54

says that those jōji who maintained the flower offering during the geango came to be known as geshū. However, at this point these offerings were not yet tied to

the geango, and it seems that if this group had any explicit designation at all, it

53 Hinonishi 1993, p. 2-3, 12. I have discussed the 1001-1016 period in Ch. 3, p. 81. During this time, monks were able to occupy the Mt. Kōya complex only in the summertime. 54 Gyōnin jireki, ZSSZ 39, 290, citing the Bun'ei (1269) nenchū gyōji. This darani-e is also discussed in Mizuhara, 306-7, though the presence of geshū is not mentioned.

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was probably geshū written 花衆. The term geshū, written 夏衆, first appears in

1097 on the occasion of the inauguration of the fudan sonshō darani-e 不断尊勝

陀羅尼会 by Meizan. It was held for three days beginning the first day of the

seventh month in the Miroku-dō 弥勒堂 (and later moving to the Juntei-dō 准胝

堂). This initial ritual is said to have included four jōji and that this marks the first appearance of the term geshū 夏衆, written with the character for "summer"

rather than "flower." It goes on to describe other rituals that the geshū were involved in, most of which were likewise summertime rites.

The geshū appear in the historical documents at least one more time in

the Heian era, in the Kongōbuji shūto gonjō jōan 金剛峰寺衆徒言上状安 of

1160.55 They are reported to have been part of a continuous (fudan) flower

offering that took place in the Kondō, again in the seventh month. By this time the

number of geshū had increased dramatically; sixty-four are reported to have

55 Hinonishi 1993, 4. The Kongōbuji shūto gonjō jōan appears in Yūzoku hōkanshū, DNK 1/8, 156-157.

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participated. From this time onward, the historical record shows that geshū were

present continuously well into the Edo era.

It is not clear how much mobility was possible in the clerical system of Mt.

Kōya. However, given that much of the talent it had seems to have been recruited in the area of Mt. Kōya (sometimes even high-ranking officials, as in the case of Meizan), it seems likely that the gyōnin class was a well traveled avenue

to full-time clerical service there. A great deal of work remains to be done on the

other gyōnin groups mentioned in this chapter, to determine their responsibilities

and also to gain a clear picture of the extent to which they were able to rise in the

clerical ranks.

Conclusion

After the time of Kishin in the early eleventh century, Mt. Kōya evolved

quickly into a viable and active religious institution. It began to attract a steady

stream of well-to-do visitors whose patronage put the complex on a much firmer

economic footing, aided by the generally effective management of the kengyō of

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the time. It took strides toward reintegration into mainstream Shingon, as seen in the training sought out by Meizan at Ninnaji and elsewhere, and also began to develop an annual round of ritual observances (nenchū gyōji), though of a form which seems at least in part to have been aimed at meeting the religious or ritual needs of Mt. Kōya's visitors. We also see the reconstitution of the gakuryo scholar-monks as well as the development of the gyōnin class, the latter of which may have come to serve as a way of entry into the ranks of the clerical corps of the Mt. Kōya complex. At the end of the century we also find the rise of Amida- centered (Jōdo-kyō) rituals and practices which, though seeming to mark a shift away from devotion to Kōbō Daishi, in fact appears to have produced new forms of it. As has been noted, the deathbed hōgō of Rentai, for example, explicitly links Kōbō Daishi and Amida by inserting Kōbō Daishi into the well established schema of the Amida triad. In all these ways and doubtless more besides, in the course of the eleventh century, Mt. Kōya became a diverse religious institution which drew patronage from wealthy who could afford it, and service from those

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who could offer it, providing in return opportunities for the expression of Buddhist

religiosity and a variety of different kinds of participation in the life of a Buddhist institution to people at all levels of society.

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CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION

Despite having had as its founder one of Japan's most illustrious historical figures, the early history of the temple complex on Mt. Kōya was difficult indeed.

It never received the attention of that founder, Kūkai to the extent that it needed, and as a result, at the time of his death it consisted only of a few buildings and monks' residences in or near the central precinct. Kūkai's responsibilities in the capital kept him away from the mountain for all but the last few years of his life, and moreover, its location so far from the capital put other potential constituents and patrons mostly out of its reach. Furthermore, after Kūkai's death it seems for the most part to have been viewed with indifference by those who were most likely to have worked for its support and development, the Shingon clerical leadership based at Tōji in the capital. To the extent that the Tōji leadership took any interest in Mt. Kōya at all, it was only to take control of it, as happened in 918

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when formal control of the complex was placed in the hands of Tōji's abbot

Kanken 観賢 in 918.

The subsequent tenth century was such a difficult time for the complex,

and it was so lacking n patronage that in retrospect its survival seems something

of a miracle. It suffered devastating fires and periods of desertion during that

period that by rights should have spelled its extinction. Though the work of

Gashin is rather shrouded in mystery, especially with respect to the means by which he accumulated funds for reconstruction in the aftermath of the 952 fire, it seems possible that had the complex been without him at that time, it might indeed have gone out of existence then. But even the work of Gashin could have come to nothing in the aftermath of the 994 fire had Kishin not stepped in a few years later to take up the cause. The full story of the means by which the Mt.

Kōya complex survived will probably never be known given the sparseness of relevant historical records concerning that time. Perhaps it was bound to survive in some form or another owing simply to the fact that it was the location of the

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mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi. What is striking, however, is how it went from the

brink or extinction to being a thriving and diverse religious center in the course of

the 1000s, and that is the main focus of this dissertation. I have tried to show in

the foregoing chapters that the moving forces behind its development had less to

do with formal Shingon doctrine than with the cult of Kōbō Daishi that seems to

have begun to catch fire early in the century. And initially at least, its improved

economic well-being may have had less to do with aid coming from the capital

than with revenue yielded by the kanjin campaigns spearheaded by Kishin

among the populace in the general vicinity of the mountain, in Yamato province to the north, and possibly reaching as far as the capital. A request by Ningai in

1007 for funds for the revival of the Mt. Kōya complex seems to have been in vain,1 but Kishin somehow managed to commence reconstruction less than a

decade later with no visible means of support. This part of the history of the Mt.

Kōya complex has been overlooked probably as a result of its association with a

1 Quoted in Taira Masayuki 平雅行, Nihon chūsei no shakai to Bukkyō 日本中世の社会と仏教 [Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Society] (Tokyo: Hanawa shobō, 1992) 136.

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major school of Japanese Buddhism and, more significantly, on account of its later national prominence. It should be stressed, however, that its early development was very much tied to its local social environment. In fact, this is true not only at the time of the beginning of its rise in the early eleventh century also from the time of its founding by Kūkai. This is a major point of Chapter 1, which tries to show how Kūkai sought to integrate and harmonize his edifice with the local religious landscape, as reflected in his cooperation with the local Niu and Kōya deities in its founding.

But even in the mid- and later 1000s, when the complex was beginning to

attract pilgrims and patronage from the capital, it retained and deepened its ties

to its locale. Though Kishin himself was not from the area, his hand-picked

successor Meizan was. The geshū, residents of one of the shōen manors of the

complex at the foot of the mountain, also became formally involved with the ritual

life of the complex toward the end of the century, and the early Kōya hijiri who were disciples of Kyōkai were probably most active in communities in the vicinity

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of the mountain at least initially.2 Simply put, the Mt. Kōya complex offered a variety of avenues for religious participation to common people living in the

vicinity of the mountain, as well as serving as a site for the practice of formal

Shingon Buddhism.

Mt. Kōya in the History and Religion of Premodern Japan

In "Historical and Historiographical Issues in the Study of Pre-Modern

Japanese Religions" published in 1989, Neil McMullin raises four "broad issues concerning the study of religion in premodern Japan. They are:

the relation between Buddhism and Shintō

the relation between the development of religious institutions, rituals and

doctrines, and developments in the society-at-large of the time

the comparative importance of religious institutions, rituals, and doctrines,

as well as the main purposes of ritual

the relation between religion and politics3

2 Kyōkai and the Kōya hijiri are discussed on p. on page 155f. 3 Neil McMullin, "Historical and Historiographical Issues in the in the Study of Pre-Modern Japanese Religions," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 16:1 (1989) 3.

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First, with respect to the relationship between Shintō and Buddhism, he

reiterates a point credited to Kuroda Toshio and one restated in the introduction

of this dissertation, that "…in the minds of the premodern Japanese, Buddhist

and Shintō views were thoroughly integrated," and that "Buddhism and Shintō

were amalgamated institutionally, ritually, and doctrinally to such a degree that to

treat them as distinct, independent traditions is to misrepresent the structure of

pre-modern Japanese societies."4 The institutional aspect of this integration can be seen in Saichō's selection of Mt. Hiei for the site of headquarters of his Tendai school, as well as the annexation of the Gion shrine complex in the capital.5

Other examples of the integration of Buddhism and Shintō are too numerous to mention but include the regular participation of the monks of Kōfuku-ji in rituals at

Kasuga Grand Shrine and monks on Mt. Hiei reciting sūtras in honor of the deity of that mountain.6 The case of Mt. Kōya is no different; there too we see a

temple-shrine complex between Kongōbuji and Amano (Niu-tsuhime) Shrine

4 McMullin, 1989, 5. 5 Introduction, p. 30. 6 McMullin, 1989, 6.

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resulting from Kūkai's cooperation with the Niu and Kōya deities in the founding

of the Mt. Kōya complex. And as with Mt. Hiei, rituals in honor of Mt. Kōya's

mountain deities were held from early in the history of the complex at Mt. Kōya's

Sannō-in 山王院, or Hall of the Mountain King, including the Sannō-in inori 山王

院祈.7

McMullin's second issue addresses the fundamental dialectic between

religion and society in premodern Japan. He argues that the evolution and

development of religious institutions at that time cannot be understood without

reference to contemporary social and political changes For example, there are a

number of well-documented cases in which the outcomes of high-profile religious

debates between monks were determined as much or more by political factors

than by strictly religious factors. Conversely, as competition for power among

aristocratic clans intensified in the course of the Heian era, they frequently turned

to purveyors of rituals believed to be efficacious in advancing their power. This

7 See Mizuhara Gyōei 水原堯榮, Kongōbuji nenchū gyōji 金剛峯寺年中行事 [The Cycle of Annual Observances at Kongōbuji]. Vol. 7 of Mizuhara Gyōei zenshū (Tokyo: Dōhōsha, 1982) 239f.

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was certainly true in the case of Mt. Hiei of the late 900s under Ryōgen,8 but this was less so in the case of Mt. Kōya. As noted in the introduction, the center of

Shingon ritualism was Tōji in the capital; it was there that aristocrats seeking efficacious rituals would go. Mt. Kōya had to rely on other means to garner support, and its difficult first 200 years show how that support was slow in coming.

Because Mt. Kōya was as far outside the aristocratic sphere as it was, it had to turn to more local sources, as has been emphasized above. In this respect, the history of Mt. Kōya adds another dimension to McMullin's assertion about the relationship between religion and society, what might be called the local or

"provincial" dimension. the case of the Mt. Kōya complex shows that the ties between society and institutions was just as important in the provinces as it was in the capital, but the nature of those ties was different. In the capital, it was the job of the religious institutions to meet the needs of the aristocracy through rituals promising the buttressing of their political power. In the provinces, appeals would need to be more personal, based on religious devices promising to meet

8 Chapter 1, p. 35f.

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individual needs. For the Mt. Kōya complex, initially this was less a matter of ritual than of the image of a person, Kōbō Daishi, and the prospect that he could intervene on behalf of any who turned to him.

Thirdly, McMullin offers a weighting, or more accurately a reweighting, of the relative importance of institutions, rituals, and doctrines. The importance of religious institutions in premodern Japan is clear throughout, but what of the relative importance of ritual and doctrine? McMullin correctly observes that rituals aimed at gaining this-worldly benefits were much more significant in the society as a whole than those performed for the purpose of achieving ultimate goals such as awakening or salvation, that is, those rituals arising from the application of what we might call "orthodox" doctrine. The latter were of interest only to a small number of professional clerics able to pursue such goals full-time, whereas rituals offering more immediate benefits clearly predominated. In short, says

McMullin, "were we to rank religious institutions, rituals, and doctrines in order of their relative importance in pre-modern Japanese societies, institutions would

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rank first, rituals second, and doctrines last."9 Mt. Kōya bears this point out as well. Though it was Kūkai's intention for Mt. Kōya that it be a place of Shingon

study and practice, it was not until it was able to reach out to the populace with

broadly acceptable rituals such as the Kōbō Daishi hōgō that it began to gain

stature and become a stable religious institution.10 It was only through promotion

of the cult of Kōbō Daishi that it was able to support the activities of those

devoted to orthodox Shingon doctrine. Moreover, increased lay participation in

the activities of the complex, such as the appearance of like the geshū, occurred

mainly in the ritual sphere. Though it appears it was possible for geshū to

eventually become a professional cleric and rise in the ranks, it was probably

uncommon.

Finally, McMullin discusses the relationship between religion and politics

in premodern Japan. This discussion also shows overlap with his other points,

but here he focuses on the formal religious ideologies that were mobilized in

9 McMullin, 1989, 12. 10 The development of the Kōbō Daishi hōgō is described in Ch. 4, p. 165f.

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support, such as clans' assertion of authority based on their descent from one or

another prominent ancestral kami, and the court's use of rituals of state

protection, both Buddhist and Shintō. He furthermore reiterates Kuroda Toshio's

kenmon taisei 検門体制 analysis, which sees political power taking a tripod form

made up of the court, the military elites, and the nationally powerful temples and

shrines.11 This fourth point speaks more to the structure of national power than to local modes of governance, and is more applicable to subsequent eras of the history of the Mt. Kōya complex, but it is worth pondering the ways in which these power relations may have been replicated on the local level in the Heian era. In the case of the founding of the Mt. Kōya complex for example, it might seem that once the emperor granted Kūkai permission to establish it, no other formal political arrangements would be necessary. However, the the fact that the Niu deity, a deity associated with important local clans, figures so prominently in the founding of the complex suggest that it was also necessary for Kūkai to enlist the

consent, at least, and perhaps the support of local clans such as the Ki and Niu

11 McMullin, 1989, 19.

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Hafuri.12 As did the nationally prominent clans, locally or provincially powerful

clans and family groups also would have drawn a portion of their legitimacy from

locally prominent ancestral deities. The Ki and certainly the Niu Hafuri clans

doubtless asserted their status in this way, which is why they could report their

genealogies in detail and why Kūkai would have invoked a common ancestor in

his appeal for support in founding the complex.

In general, McMullin's four assertions concerning the place and nature of

religion in premodern Japanese society are for the most part borne out in the early history of the Mt. Kōya complex. Moreover, because at this time in its

history it was not a player on the national stage, it suggests ways in which

McMullin's paradigm (if it can be called that) can be elaborated and extended to

the local level. We can clearly see the Buddhist-Shintō amalgam manifest itself at

the local level as much as it does at the national level, and we can see that as

with nationally prominent temples and shrines, local temple complexes also

succeeded owing to their ritual efficacy rather than their doctrinal sophistication.

12 Described in Chapter 1, p. 51.

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Heian Buddhism and Kamakura Buddhism

In addition to the problems McMullin identifies, at least one other barrier to

a proper understanding of religion in the Heian era also exists. The analytical

framework known as "Kamakura Buddhism" has defined and dominated the

study of religion in the history of premodern Japan for some time, though it has

finally come under much needed scrutiny in the past twenty or so years. Over

time it has been deployed to point to one or many of a number of developments that took place as Japan moved from the Heian into the subsequent Kamakura

鎌倉 era (1185-1333). In its most basic definition, it is the term used to label the appearance and rise to prominence of several new forms of institutional

Buddhism, most prominently Zen 禅 during that time. However, it is also used to

refer to the rise of a number of new doctrines, beliefs, practices, and types of

religious organizations (allegedly, at least) not previously seen. In this regard,

Historians and scholars of religion have given particular attention to new

movements advocating single "exclusive" practices, that is, practices that are

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held up as being both necessary and sufficient for happiness in this life and

salvation in the next. The most important of these were the Pure Land sects

(Jōdo-shū 浄土宗 and Jōdo-shinshū 浄土真宗) and the Lotus or Nichiren sect

(Nichiren-shū 日蓮宗) that over time gained large followings at all levels of society. For the Pure Land movements, the single practice was the recitation of the nenbutsu 念仏 (namu Amida Butsu 南無阿弥陀仏), expressing veneration of

the Buddha Amida 阿弥陀; for the Lotus sect, often referred to as the Nichiren

sect after its founder, it was a recitation honoring the title of the Lotus Sūtra

(namu myōhō renge-kyō 南無妙法蓮華経). Not surprisingly, these simple

practices proved to have broad appeal, leading some to regard the

"popularization" of Buddhism as one of the defining characteristics of Kamakura

Buddhism. In the words of James Foard,

The central religious change of the Kamakura period…resulted from a

new affirmation: that an individual of any social or ecclesiastical standing

could immediately reap the full benefits of Buddhist salvation, or such

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lesser benefits as health and prosperity, through some form of direct,

personal devotion to a particular Buddha, bodhisattva, sutra, or saint.13

The implication here is that before the Kamakura era, "individuals of any social or ecclesiastical standing" did not have access to "the full benefits of Buddhist salvation." In a note for this passage, however, Foard qualifies this, saying:

Since the rise of Kamakura political and social structures grew not from

an abrupt cataclysm, but from a gradual shift of power over a long period

of violence, historians of virtually all specialties must include as part of

Kamakura culture its roots which extend back through the eleventh

century.14

This has the effect of extending his idea of Kamakura Buddhism backward to

cover half of the Heian era, and though doing so raises questions about how appropriate the label "Kamakura Buddhism" really is, with respect to the actual history concerned, at least, Foard’s point is correct. The origins of Japanese Pure

Land Buddhism do in fact lie in the mid-Heian era; nenbutsu practice for lay

13 James Foard, "In Search of a Lost Reformation: A Reconsideration of Kamakura Buddhism," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 7:4 (December 1980) 267. 14 Foard, 267, n. 2.

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persons appeared in the late 900s and seems to have quickly gained popularity among the aristocracy, as reflected, for example in the interest taken in it by

Fujiwara no Michinaga 藤原道長.15 The Ōjōyōshū 往生要集, written by the Tendai

monk Genshin 源信 (942-1017) at the end of the tenth century, is generally

credited with calling the attention of the aristocratic class to the benefits of devotion to Amida and recitation of the nenbutsu. Hōnen-bō Genkū 法然房源空

(1133-1212), usually referred to in English as Hōnen), later took Genshin's

promotion of nenbutsu practice further, arguing that it was both necessary and

sufficient for salvation. In Hōnen's formulation, the promise of salvation was

universal, and there is some indirect evidence that the virtues of devotion to

Amida and nenbutsu practice began to be preached outside the aristocratic

class,16 meaning that in the latter Heian era, an individual of any social or

15 Cameron Hurst, "Michinaga's Maladies," Monumenta Nipponica 34:1 (1979) 107, among many others, have shown Michinaga's interest in Pure Land Buddhism. 16 The earliest example of this is that of the mendicant named Kōya 空也 (or Kūya), who is said to have proclaimed the virtues of the nenbutsu in the streets of the capital sometime in the tenth century. See Hayami Tasuku, "On Problems Surrounding Kōya's Appearance," Japanese Religions 21:1 (1976) 5-27. The existence of ōjōden, tales recounting the births of saints into the Pure Land, which seem to date from the latter Heian era, may have been one of the tools

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ecclesiastical standing could immediately reap the full benefits of Buddhist

salvation via Pure Land Buddhism, at least to the extent that they were aware of

Pure Land teaching.

But the central problem with the idea that "Kamakura Buddhism" marks

the advent of a more broadly based, vibrant, "popular," "new" Buddhism, in

contrast to Heian (and Nara) "old Buddhism," lies in what is implied about the

"old" Buddhism: that it failed to offer the full benefits of salvation to laypersons

(instead requiring professional monastic discipline for attainment), and that the

new Kamakura Buddhism superceded and pushed aside the corrupt and

degenerate "old" Buddhism.17 The latter of these two notions was a consequence

of approaches to the evolution of Buddhism in Japan, usually sectarian in origin, focusing on the development of one or another school of Japanese Buddhism

used by mendicant preachers to promote Pure Land belief. Ōjōden appear in the the Konjaku monogatarishu 今昔物語集 and other collections of hortatory tales. See, for example, Peter Wetzler, "Yoshishige no Yasutane: Lineage, Learning, Office, and Amida's Pure Land," Ph.D. Diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1977, for more on ōjōden. 17 For a more comprehensive discussion of trends in the study of Kamakura Buddhism, see Jacqueline Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999) 56-62.

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and aimed at showing the superiority of one lineage over another. Fortunately, this view has been definitively put to rest by the work of Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄, who showed that despite the rise of these new movements, “old” Buddhist

institutions, particularly those of Tendai, Shingon, and the Nara schools

continued to hold great influence well into the Kamakura era, especially in the

official realm but also, I believe, in the religious sphere as well.18

I believe the careless use of the term hijiri also has led scholars to misinterpret the religio-social dynamic of the later Heian era and the transformation that occurred from the Heian to the Kamakura as well.19 In what

might be called the "first wave" of opinion concerning Kamakura Buddhism,

18 Kuroda’s kenmitsu taisei 顕密体制 theory is laid out in such works as Jisha seiryoku: mō hitotsu not chūsei shakai 寺社勢力: もう一つの中世社会 [The Power of Temples and Shrines: Another Medieval Society] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980) and Nihon chūsei no shakai to shūkyō 日本中世の社会と宗教 [Society and Religion in Medieval Japan] (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1990). An overview of his ideas in English can be found in “The Development of the Kenmitsu System as Japan’s Medieval Orthodoxy,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 23:3-4 (1996) 233–69. The publication of Richard Payne, ed. Re-visioning Kamakura Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998) likewise offers essays showing the robustness of "old" Buddhism during the Kamakura era. The old "aristocratic" Buddhist institutions experienced revivals led by the likes of Eizon 叡尊 at Saidai-ji 西大寺, and Kakuban 覚鑁 and Kakukai 覚海 on Mt. Kōya, who offered simple teachings and, particularly in the case of Eizon, focused on social welfare. 19 See Appendix B for a more extended discussion of the history and historiography of hijiri.

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historians expressed the belief that hijiri and other extra-monastic religionists in the latter Heian and early Kamakura eras who had opted out of the Buddhist establishment moved throughout Japan’s hinterlands spawning a whole host of new religious movements characterized by simple teachings and the promise of salvation. These scholars emphasize the "anti-establishment character of the hijiri, and see them as one of the agents of the marginalization of the schools or

"aristocratic" Buddhism, failing to recognize that more often or not their actions showed they identified with and recognized the authority of the very institutions they were supposedly rendering irrelevant.

Nevertheless, the assumption that these institutions remained aloof from common people, doing little to offer them any kind of meaningful salvation or other religious benefits, has gone largely unchallenged. Tendai and Shingon in the Heian era are seen as the exclusive preserve of scholar monks cloistered on isolated mountaintops and engaged in the study of recondite texts and the practice of arcane rituals demanding extreme physical and mental discipline. In

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this view, the religious goals they pursued were simply beyond the reach of the

layperson; even the aristocrats who funded these monks and their monasteries did so more from a desire for the protection of the realm than out of any

expectation of personal benefit. Furthermore, standard histories give the

impression that Tendai and Shingon were the exclusive preserve of the

aristocracy. Commenting on Shingon, for example, one introductory text on

Japanese culture says:

Although Shingon…preached the universality of the buddha [sic]

potential, in practice it confronted its would-be followers with such

complex and time-consuming practices that only priests or leisured

aristocrats could hope to master them. And in any case Shingon gave

the general populace little chance even to attempt the practices by

keeping them secret from all but a favored few."20

Similar charges have been leveled at Tendai as well, but, it is the central contention of this dissertation that these institutions were not as completely beyond the pale of the religious lives of common people as their formal doctrines

20 H. Paul Varley, Japanese Culture, 4th ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'I press, 2000) 53.

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or official relationships and ritual activities would suggest. But whatever the

reason, we see in this case “aristocratic Buddhism” involved, even if somewhat

indirectly in meeting the real-world spiritual needs of the populace of the capital.

Departed spirits and the mischief they could cause was a concern not only for the

aristocracy, but was a problem long recognized throughout the society. And though McMullin’s goal in discussing the battle for control of the Gion shrine complex is to show how Enryaku-ji gained control of it, along the way he reveals the variety of ways in which Gion interacted with capital society at all levels. He notes, for example, the existence of the jinnin 神人 (or inujinnin 犬神人), a lay

confraternity of sorts charged with the basic maintenance of the complex, and the

fact that Gion possessed land in the southeast part of the capital that had

become part of an ichiba 市場, a center of manufacturing and commerce, from

which it doubtless derived revenue.21 Though it is possible that the relationship

was strictly economic, it seems unlikely that the tradespeople occupying Gion’s

land would not have availed themselves to the religious benefits it offered.

21 McMullin, 1987, 173-5. the exact nature and function of the jinnin deserves further study.

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Moreover, McMullin shows ways in which representatives of Enryaku-ji seem to

have used Gion as a kind of portal into capital society. The aforementioned

Genshin, for example, who despite his advocacy of devotion to Amida never left

the Tendai establishment, formed devotional groups that included laypersons,

and more significantly, incorporated into these groups' activities Kōmyō Shingon

光明真言 practices in which magical incantations called dhāraṇī are chanted to

ward off evil spirits.22 Genshin also succeeded in having an image of Amida

placed at Hōkan-ji, a temple near Gion extensively involved in the conduct of

goryō dispelling activities. He probably intended for people plagued by these

malevolent spirits to look to Amida for relief, in hopes Amida would take the

spirits off to his Pure Land. Finally, McMullin notes that Genshin also founded at least one Jizō-kō 地蔵講, another type of lay group seeking protection from

disease through the intervention of the bodhisattva Jizō. Jizō is often portrayed

22 McMullin, 1987, 178-9.

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with the face of a child, suggesting a linkage with the Hachikō 八子, a group of

eight child divinities (kami) associated with Gion.23

McMullin's study of Enryaku-ji's takeover of the Gion complex suggests some of the ways in which an aristocratic Buddhist institution, in this case Tendai,

became involved in the business of extending religious benefits to residents of

the capital irrespective of their social standing, something the Kamakura

Buddhism paradigm doesn't allow for. The same can be said of the Mt. Kōya

complex, as this dissertation has attempted to demonstrate. Following the lead of

Eamon Duffy, I have attempted in this work to avoid the use of the term "popular religion."24 Duffy believes that it is "a term laden with all kinds of assumptions

about the nature of non-popular religion and the gap between the two" – precisely

the kind of assumptions implicit in Foard's definition of "Kamakura Buddhism" and assertions about the inaccessibility of Shingon and Tendai to common people made by standard survey histories. One goal of this project is to

23 McMullin, 1987, 180. 24 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) 3.

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challenge these kinds of assumptions by demonstrating that even the kinds of

Heian Buddhism traditionally viewed as exclusively "aristocratic" did in fact offer avenues of participation, such as almsgiving and devotion to a salvific figure such as Kōbō Daishi, open to anyone regardless of social class.25 Commoner modes of participation were more limited than those of the aristocracy, but at the same time, the Shingon clergy in the eleventh century capital, for example, were themselves prepared to embrace and promote devotion to Kōbō Daishi as were the monks on Mt. Kōya. There is no indication that they were promoting this devotion out of mere expediency, that devotion to Kōbō Daishi was ever viewed as inferior to "proper" Shingon practice. Rather, all indications are that by the end of the eleventh century, Kōbō Daishi shinkō had simply become another element of orthodox Shingon practice (if there can be said to be such a thing as

"orthodox" Shingon practice). To McMullin's list of historical and historiographical issues in the study of Heian religion, then, I would addthe issue of "elite" versus

25 It goes without saying that the question of what constitutes participation in a religion is open to debate. As is clear from the foregoing, I think, my approach is to take a broad view as to what constitutes participation.

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"popular" religiosity. Scholars need to begin to recognize this as a false dichotomy and move toward a more sophisticated understanding, backed by additional research, of how the so-called Heian "elite" religious institutions in fact offered mechanisms for meeting the religious needs of people regardless of their social station.

Future directions

As noted in the introduction, the institutional history of Mt. Kōya from roughly 1200 to 1400 has been dealt with by Mikael Adolphson as part of a project aimed at understanding how it and other powerful monasteries advanced their political and economic fortunes during that time. However, we still await studies examining the continuing role played by the Mt. Kōya complex in fostering individual or popular religious expression subsequent to the Heian era.

For example, soon after the year 1100, the eminent Shingon cleric Kakuban 覚鑁 arrived on Mt. Kōya and sought to bring about a revival in the study and practice of the thought of Kūkai. In the process, he wrote several treatises modeled on

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Kūkai's work in which he sought to show how all forms of religion in Japan at the

time were in fact incomplete expressions of the ultimate truth of Shingon

esotericism.26 By Kakuban's time, devotion to Amida was beginning to attract the

interest of the aristocracy, leading Kakuban to deal with it explicitly in a treatise called Amida hishaku 阿弥陀秘釈, or "Esoteric Explanation of Amida."27 However,

after Kakuban's time it seems that his followers took Pure Land thought and

turned them inside-out. In later formulations, devotion to Amida, rather than being

one of a variety of inferior forms of esotericism, became the preferred form of

esoteric practice for adherents of what came to be known as Shingi (New

Doctrine) Shingon 新義真言 The history of the development of Shingi Shingon

remains mostly unexamined in Western scholarship and is deserving of greater

attention, because it shows another way in which Shingon Buddhism relevant

and influential long after the Heian era.

26 Save for Henny van der Veere, A Study into the Thought of Kōgyō Daishi Kakuban (Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2000), there is little information available in English on this important figure. 27 van der Veere, 107f, discusses Kakuban's attitude toward Pure Land thought and gives a translation of the Amida hishaku.

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Finally, despite the very famous work of Gorai Shgeru in Japanese, there

is little Western scholarship available concerning the Kōya hijiri and their

activities from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. Further studies of them

would help in clarifying what exactly a hijiri was in general, and it would also add to a more complete picture of the spread of the cult of Kōbō Daishi, another

subject that for the most part has been unjustly neglected by Western scholars of

premodern Japanese religion and history. Further investigation of the Kōya hijiri would, I believe, show that the enduring prominence of the Mt. Kōya complex throughout Japan's premodern history (and to the present day, for that matter) is more a consequence of its centrality in the cult of Kōbō Daishi than its identity as a center of Shingon esotericism.

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APPENDICES

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APPENDIX A

Mt. Kōya as a Sacred Mountain An Anthropology and Folklore Studies-Based Approach

A site selected for the establishment of a religious edifice is never chosen at random; selection usually is based upon the site's traditional sacred character or supernatural associations. This seems to have been true of Kūkai's choice of

Mt. Kōya, though his reasons for choosing it of all the mountains in Japan (many of which lie much closer to the capital), may never be entirely clear. The genesis of Mt. Kōya as a sacred space is of course lost in the mists of prehistory and mythology. However, the place of mountains in Japanese folklore in general, and the customs and traditions associated with Mt. Kōya in particular, suggest something of the religious character it had before the arrival of Kūkai. The remoteness and relative inaccessibility of mountains has naturally led to them being seen as sacred, other-worldly precincts in which supernatural forces or powers can be found.

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A sense of how mountains are cast as sacred spaces in Japan is offered

in Emiko Namihira's anthropological study of beliefs and practices in three

Japanese villages, all of which are situated near mountains. In Katsumoto-ura 勝

本裏, a fishing village in Nagasaki prefecture, Namihira finds that

…all the Shinto shrines in Katsumoto-ura stand on the seashore. The

Buddhist temple and all the graveyards stand halfway up the hill. I

interpret this arrangement as follows: to the inhabitants of the fishing

village Shinto shrines, the sea and sea-water are sacred and pure

matters, and fishing is a prestigious and sacred labor while death,

graveyards and their contents are polluted and dangerous things and

must be kept separate from the sea.1

What is of particular note in Namihira's description is the location of the graveyards, halfway up the hill and at some remove from the sea, and equally

important, at some distance from the village itself. Namihira explains this in terms of purity and pollution, and while this may in fact play a role in the geography of this village, there is more to the story. In a later discussion of beliefs concerning

1 Emiko Namihira,"Hare, Ke, and Kegare: The Structure of Japanese Folk Belief, Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1977, 99.

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the postmortem destinations of the deceased in the village of Maetsue-mura 前津

江村 in Ōita Prefecture, she explains that "ancestral spirits go to the mountain after they are given the final memorial by their living descendants and become the mountain deity (yama-no-kami)…."2 This description gives the impression that the departed spirit joins the aggregate of an undifferentiated mountain kami, but coexisting with this belief is the idea that mountains are netherworlds where departed spirits reside, as shown by Namihira's subsequent discussion of possession by misaki 御先, or spirits who have not received offerings from descendants and are therefore left to wander in the mountains. She notes, for example, that the villagers hang the feet of a wild boar at their front doors in order to ward off misaki. The efficacy of this practice apparently derives from the fact that the wild boar, like the misaki, is a follower of the mountain deity.

It must be noted, however, that sacred mountains do not function only as other-worldly realms inhabited by the spirits of the departed. For example,

Namihira notes that the mountains in the vicinity of Umani-buraku 馬荷部落

2 Namihira, 206.

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attract pilgrims who are practitioners of what she calls "mountain cults" (sangaku

shūkyō. 山岳宗教), not because of their otherworldly character but because of the supernatural power they are said to possess owing to their steepness.3 It is this type of mountain in particular that attracts practitioners of shugendō 修験道.4

As Namihira's work shows, sacred mountains in Japan generally are perceived as other-worldly precincts imbued with mystical supernatural powers and occupied by natural and ancestral deities (kami). The presence of ancestors

in particular is marked by the gravesites that are often found on mountains, as in

the case of the graveyard halfway up the mountain overlooking the village of

Katsumoto-ura.

Mt. Kōya as a sacred mountain

In its general outline, the preceding composite description of a Japanese sacred mountain fits Mt. Kōya quite closely. The huge graveyard occupying the

3 Namihira, 165. Supernatural power is attributed to mountains for other reasons as well, such as distinctive shape (as in the case of Mt. Fuji) or a history marked by miraculous events. 4 Shugendō refers to a set of religious practices typically carried out on mountains in the wilds and incorporating elements of Buddhism and Daoism as well as indigenous beliefs and practices.

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Oku-no-In district of the mountain is a clear testament to the mountain's having

long been inhabited by the spirits of the deceased, as are the interment rituals held there, which probably predate Kūkai's arrival and continue to be practiced today.5 Mt. Kōya is one of a number of mountains in Japan where rituals of bone interment (nōkotsu 納骨) are practiced. The ritual on Mt. Kōya, practiced yet

today by residents of certain villages at its foot, is called kotsunobori 骨のぼり,

and it involves carrying a small piece of bond from the cremated remains of the

deceased to the top of the mountain the day after the funeral. On their way to the

mountain, the mourners bearing the bone place a bentō 弁当 lunch packet and a

pair of straw sandals at the boundary marking the other-worldly mountain

precinct as a way to support or assist the journey of the deceased to the other

world. In the course of their journey, the mourners also make offerings of nigiri

5 The following is drawn from Hinonishi Shinjō, "Kami no yama kara hotoke no yama e: Kōyasan o shuten toshite 神の山から仏の山へー高野山を主点として [From Kami Mountain to Buddha Mountain, with a Focus on Mt. Kōya]," In Setsuwa denshō gakkai 説話・伝承学会 ed. Setsuwa ikai toshite no yama 説話ー異界としての山 [Mountains as Stories and Other Worlds] (Tokyo: Kanrin shoten, 1997), 91-94. It is based upon Prof. Hinonishi's observations of the religious practices of people residing in the vicinity of Mt. Kōya.

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rice balls to the hungry ghosts (known as gaki 餓鬼). Along the route to the

mountain are also found sites called ochatō お茶湯 where water can be sprinkled

on the bone in cases where it has not already been purified. The piece of bone is

then carried to the top of the mountain and interred by simply placing it under a

rock, typically somewhere in the Oku-no-In precinct. Finally, the end of the forty-

nine day mourning period is marked by the offering of another bentō at the

boundary of the sacred precinct. Subsequent death anniversaries are observed as per Japanese custom, and by the 50th anniversary of the death of the ancestor,

he or she is understood to have become an undifferentiated protective deity of

the family.

In addition to the specific interment and memorial rituals, every year on

the occasion of the Bon festival (Bon matsuri 盆祭り), the deceased ancestors

who occupy Mt. Kōya are welcomed back to the village by their families. At the

beginning of the Bon festival, families from Shimoyugawa 下湯川, Kiyomizu-chō

清水町, Arita-gun 有田郡, for example, travel to the Kongō zammai-in 金剛三昧院,

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one of the many cloisters in the Mt. Kōya complex, and have their ancestor's

kaimyō 戒名, or posthumous name, written on a wooden memorial tablet (ihai 位

牌), which is then brought back to the village for the duration of the festival. This ritual, called hotoke mukae 仏迎え (literally, "welcoming back Buddha"), ends

with the ancestor being returned to Mt. Kōya by floating the memorial tablet down the river marking the boundary between the village and the mountain. A similar ritual is found in the Minede 峯出 neighborhood of Hanazono village 花園村, Ito- gun 伊都郡, though in this case, the ancestors return the way they came, being treated to a bentō meal at a teahouse along the way back to the mountain.

Prof. Hinonishi Shinjō, who has done extensive research on the folk rituals connected with Mt. Kōya, believes that the ancestral rites associated with Mt.

Kōya significantly predate the arrival of Kūkai. However, the first recorded

instance of an interment on Mt. Kōya is that of a lock of hair from the tonsure of

retired emperor Horikawa 堀川 in 1108. It seems that Horikawa was an adherent

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of Maitreya (J. Miroku 弥勒) belief and possessed a desire to return to earth with

Maitreya when he descended to earth to renew the Dharma.6 Accounts of early interments on Mt. Kōya are otherwise generally scarce because relatively few came from outside the vicinity of the mountain, and local people were likely both ill-equipped and disinclined to keep such records. It was not until the Kamakura era that Mt. Kōya became a nationally prominent site for interment of remains.

Though this history is beyond the scope of this study, it should be noted that the eventual nationwide appeal of interment in Mt. Kōya's Oku-no-In was doubtless in no small measure due to the attraction of being interred in the proximity of the mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi, as a result of the cult that began to grow around the image of Kōbō Daishi in the early 1000s, and was later promoted by the Kōya hijiri.7

6 Hinonishi, 1997, 94, referring to the Chūyūki 中右記 account of this event. For a further explanation of the association of Maitreya belief with Mt. Kōya, see p. 86f and 97f below. 7 This phenomenon seems to be akin to burial ad sanctos in medieval Europe, vividly described in Philippe Ariés, The Hour of our Death, (New York: Knopf, 1981), 32-40.

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Sacred mountains in Japan are viewed as otherworldly realms where one is likely to encounter the supernatural. The supernatural powers with which

sacred mountains are imbued historically has drawn various kinds of practitioners

(notably those of shugendō) seeking to confront or draw upon that power, but

with some exceptions, sacred mountains are not typically regarded as harboring

malevolence or danger. One might expect that their association with the dead would inspire fear and dread, but this does not seem to be the case for the most

part. Because sacred mountains are regarded as appropriate destinations for the

departed, the spirits residing there are not expected to cause the kinds of

mischief attributed to the goryō, spirits who for some reason have not

successfully made the journey into the afterlife. In the particular case of Mt. Kōya,

it is likely that Kūkai was attracted there by its reputation as a site of the

supernatural, though there is no way to know for sure. Whatever the reason, its

character as a Japanese sacred mountain was not extinguished by the founding

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of a Buddhist temple complex there; rather, its essential sacred character continued to manifest itself throughout its subsequent history.

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APPENDIX B

History and Historiography of Hijiri 聖 in the Heian Era

Historians in both Japan and the West have for some time attached a great deal of significance to the person and work of the hijiri in the Heian

Kamakura eras. According to authors such as Inoue Mitsusada 井上光貞1 in

Japanese, and Janet Goodwin2 in English, these itinerant preachers or holy men,

played a significant role in the development of commoner Buddhist movements

emblematic of the Kamakura era. In this view, as hijiri opted out of the formal

Buddhist establishment and propagated simple teachings accessible to people in

all stations of life, they transmitted Buddhism to areas of Japanese society where

it had not been found before.

1 Inoue Mitsusada 井上光貞, Nihon Jōdokyō seiritsu shi no kenkyū 日本浄土教成立史の研究 [A Study of the History of the Establishment of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1985) 233f. 2 Janet Goodwin, Alms and Vagabonds: Buddhist Temples and Popular Patronage in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994) 13-14.

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However, as Christoph Kleine3 has argued his article "Hermits and

Ascetics in Ancient Japan: The Concept of Hijiri Reconsidered," the term hijiri is generally applied too broadly by modern scholars, often used indiscriminately to refer to a wide variety of ascetics, hermits, itinerants, incantators, and extra- institutional monks who do not actually qualify as hijiri. Kleine bases his

contention on a detailed analysis of the term hijiri as it appears in setsuwa 説話 literature as compared with how it has been used by modern scholars. He points out that, contrary to the impression given present-day writing on the subject, the term hijiri appears quite rarely in setsuwa literature. In fact, Kleine's assertion can

be extended to other documents of the time as well. The index of Heian Ibun

contains only two entries for the word hijiri: of these, one is impossible to connect

to a document in the collection, and the other points to a document describing a

kanjin campaign undertaken by the monk Zenban4 – and the word hijiri appears

nowhere in the document.

3 Christoph Kleine, “Hermits and Ascetics in Ancient Japan: The Concept of Hijiri Reconsidered,” Japanese Religions 22:2 (July 1997): 1-46. 4 HI 3, #1077. Zenban’s kanjin campaign is discussed below, p. 106.

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When the word hijiri does appear in setsuwa literature, it nearly always

refers to a hermit who has not only renounced the Buddhist establishment but has withdrawn to an isolated area that permits him to avoid all human contact

and cultivate supernatural powers.5 It is not surprising then that hijiri are rarely portrayed as itinerating (though they may have traveled to sites associated with supernatural powers), or as transmitting any kind of religious teaching. They are not shown engaging in alms-collecting (kanjin 勧進) campaigns, and are never

portrayed as being members of any kind of hijiri organization (though informal

groups of disciples may have coalesced around some hijiri). In short, hijiri

appearing in setsuwa literature who are explicitly referred to as such show none

of the traits that would be required of one engaged in the propagation of

Buddhism to a broad audience.

It might be argued that athough the term hijiri appears rarely in Heian era

sources, it is nevertheless still useful as an analytical term as applied by

contemporary scholars. Janet Goodwin, in her Alms and Vagabonds, seems to

5 Kleine, 15-20, 30-38.

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be opting for such a usage when she labels one or another monk as a kanjin hijiri

while admitting that the document from which she is drawing her information

does not refer to the monk in question as such.6 But scholars who use hijiri as an analytical term tend to run into two problems: they never unambiguously define the term, and to the extent that they do define it, it is often applied to monks who upon closer inspection clearly do not fit even the definition offered. For example,

Goodwin states that the label hijiri "was one of several terms applied informally to

anyone who rejected monasticism in favor of a vagabond or reclusive religious life," and that they were "mostly of low status: unordained, unattached, and

unschooled"7 A few pages later, she presents Zenbō and Zenban (who she treats

as one person though they are two different people) as examples of temple-

restoring hijiri, and describes their efforts to restore Mandara-ji 曼荼羅時, a

temple in Sanuki 讃岐 province. But Zenbō and Zenban don’t seem to fit

Goodwin’s own definition very well. Both of them initially discovered the

6 eg., Goodwin, 20. 7 Goodwin, 27, 31.

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dilapidated state of Mandara-ji while they were there for periods of religious

practice (shugyō 修行), leaving us to wonder why a religious figure who had

"rejected monasticism" would not only engage in religious practice at a

monastery, but even go so far as to work to restore it. It is possible to believe, as

Goodwin seems to, that it was the centers of established monastic Buddhism located in the capital that hijiri had in fact rejected, and that their aid of Mandara-ji

was justified because it was a provincial temple. However, it is unclear why

monks who had rejected the great monastic centers of Buddhism would send

reports on their restoration work to Tōji 東寺, the head temple of Shingon

Buddhism and one of the most powerful religious institutions at the time.

Furthermore, the fact that they were able to compose such reports at all suggests

that they were literate and anything but "unschooled."

In the end, pressing Zenbō and Zenban into the mold of the hijiri greatly complicates the job of understanding who they were and where they fit in society.

If we simply treat these two as itinerant monks (there is no record of their being

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based at a particular temple or monastery), possibly low in the Shingon hierarchy or not formally a part of it at all, but probably having received basic initiation rites and some formal monastic training, we probably have a more accurate picture of these monks and their context. Far from being antagonistic toward the "Buddhist establishment," in their case, the Shingon establishment, they probably identified with it and in the main saw themselves as part of it, or as working in service of it.

I believe that many of the monks who engaged in preaching, setsuwa storytelling, and kanjin campaigns were not in fact outsiders who had assumed a critical stance toward the Buddhist institutions. Rather, they were in fact a part of those very institutions, or at least identified with them to some extent.

Further research on these figures is called for, and should be aimed

at testing the following propositions: 1) many religionists related to Heian

Buddhist institutions in ways not explicitly accounted for in their formal

organizational structures, 2) the religious changes that did occur in the

tenth through the twelfth centuries were brought about mainly by monks

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and others who were not critical of established Buddhism but in fact

identified themselves with it, and 3) Buddhist institutions in the Heian era

were more accepting of extra-monastic or non-doctrinal forms of religious

expression than they are given credit for. That is, there is no reason to see

those who were teaching simple practices with broad appeal as being in

conflict with the formal Buddhist institutions.

With respect to the first two of these points, researchers examining these

contentions will have to move beyond setsuwa literature and make use of other historical sources that reveal the activities of these "para-monastic" monks and their place in society. The example of Zenbō and Zenban presented above

suggests some simple steps that can be taken in pursuing this line of inquiry. As

their case shows, careful reading of sources will sometimes reveal monks who

were of a particular Buddhist institution if not in it. Once this is made clear, we no

longer will need to wonder why monks regarded by scholars as independent

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would naturally engage in alms-collecting campaigns for the support of temples

belonging to the Buddhist establishment they had supposedly rejected.

In fact, evidence is now emerging of "commoner Buddhism" as far back as

the Nara period. Jonathan Augustine has shown that the social welfare activities of Gyōki 行基 in the Nara era did not happen in a vacuum. He has demonstrated that there were a number of monks at this time who stepped outside the monastery walls and carried out projects designed to help common people.8

These monks too were part of the Nara Buddhist institutions. They did not undertake their aid activities from a stance critical toward these institutions; on the contrary, Augustine points to some of the Buddhist thought found in the Nara institutions upon which these activities might have been based.

Once we have moved these para-monastic monks back under the umbrellas of the institutions that benefited from their works, the meaning of the work they did changes significantly. Suddenly we no longer have a "new

8 Jonathan Augustine, “Monks and Charitable Projects: The Legacy of Gyōki Bosatsu,” Japanese Religions 25:1 (January, 2001): 1-25.

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Buddhism" propagated by critical outsiders in opposition to an "old Buddhism,"

but an "old Buddhism" that evolved incrementally and organically as a

consequence of the interactions of these monks with the general populace. It is

often difficult to discern the content of these interactions, though as many

scholars have suggested, they likely offered sermons or teachings which often

made use of setsuwa and engi 縁起 or documents related to temple-founding,

and emakimono 絵巻物, picure scrolls depicting Buddhist concepts or the lives of saints,9 possibly sometimes as part of the process of collecting alms. In this

approach, these media are more useful for gaining an understanding of for the

message their users intended to convey than they are for what they tell us about

the figures who appear in the stories.

This brings us to the third contention above, that Buddhist temples played

host to a variety of religious practices, only some of which conformed to the

9 Foard, 271, sees this as a defining characteristic of Kamakura Buddhism, and surely we must take him to mean this in the broad sense of “later Heian and Kamakura Buddhism,” because many emakimono and most commonly cited setsuwa collections can be reliably dated to the later Heian. See note 3 above.

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standard teachings of the institution to which they belonged. For example, some

of the messages contained in setsuwa tales fit quite poorly with the teachings

transmitted to monks within the cloister walls. They typically portray the

miraculous powers of spiritual adepts or show someone gaining paradise in the

afterlife as a consequence of a simple practice such as chanting the nenbutsu.

They usually do not merely celebrate the lives of clerics who have taken the initiations of established Buddhism, and they almost never contain arcane points of Buddhist teaching.

It may be the case that these stories were aimed at common people who had never any prior contact with Buddhism, but this seems unlikely given the preponderance of temples of ancient provenance throughout Japan. I think it is more likely the case that by the eleventh century at least, these pictures, stories, and sermons were aimed at enhancing the devotion of common people to the temples they already frequented, even if only in a limited way. This remains something of an open question, however, and we need further research aimed at

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highlighting the presence and activities of lay people at these provincial temples in the Heian era. The case of Hasedera 長谷寺 is suggestive in this regard. From early on in the Heian era, Hasedera was a magnet for people of all classes seeking religious palliation.10

In sum, what I am proposing is the elimination of the divisions that have walled off "established" or "aristocratic" Buddhism of the Heian era both from religionists who do not fit neatly into its structure and from common people, who as a matter of principle had no place in it. The first of these walls is embodied in the concept of the anti-establishment hijiri, and the second appears in distinctions made by scholars between the "big" and "little" traditions of Buddhism.11 Once we reject these divisions and recognize that the monks who reached out to people regardless of class were in fact a part of established Buddhism, working within it to reach out to a lay Buddhist clientele, the evolution of Buddhism in

10 Tsuji, 66-76. 11 See Foard, 267. Foard says that “peasants did not participate in Buddhist ceremonies to protect the state, as the Buddhist priest in the capital did not pacify the peasant’s ancestors with crude Buddhist charms,” but his use of term “Buddhist” in reference to both means he is making a doctrinal distinction within Buddhism and not between what is and is not “Buddhist.”

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Japan looks much different. In this view, Japan did not go from being a society containing a few "elite Buddhists" to a society of many "commoner Buddhists," as scholars writing on the subject have implied. Rather, it went from being a society in which a few kinds of Buddhism figured prominently, to one in which a wider variety of kinds of Buddhism predominated. This brings us to a point that is perhaps rather surprising, because the change that occurred from the tenth to the twelfth centuries in Japan becomes less a broad social transformation than a doctrinal or organizational transformation within a religion (assuming it is appropriate to speak of Japanese Buddhism as "a" religion). To be sure, it was a transformation with broad social consequences, but it was one that began within a religious tradition and moved outward, rather than the other way around, throughout the history of pre- and early modern Japan.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

223

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbreviations

DNBZ Dainihon Bukkyō zensho 大日本仏教全書 DNK Dainihon komonjo 大日本古文書 DNS Dainihon shiryō 大日本史料 GR Gunsho ruiju 群書類従 HI Heian ibun 平安遺文 JJDJ Jiin jinja daijiten 寺院神社大辞典 KDDZ Kōbō Daishi den zenshū 弘法大師伝全集 KDJ Kokushi daijiten 国史大辞典 KT Kokushi taikei 国史大系 KZF Kii zoku fudoki 紀伊続風土記 M Morohashi kanwa daijiten 諸橋漢和大辞典 MBDJ Mochizuki Bukkyō daijiten 望月仏教大辞典 NBJJ Nihon Bukkyō jinmei jiten 日本仏教人名辞典 NI Nara ibun 寧楽遺文 NKBT Nihon koten bungaku taikei 日本古典文学大系 NST Nihon shisō taikei 日本思想大系 SNKBT Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 新日本古典文学大系 SSZ Shingon-shū zensho 真言宗全書 T Taishō shinshū daizokyō 大正新修大蔵経 TKDJ Teihon Kōbō Daishi zenshū 定本弘法大師全集 ZGR Zoku gunsho ruiju 続群書類従 ZSSZ Zoku shingon-shū zensho 続真言宗全書 ZST Zōho shiryō taisei 増補史料大成 ZZGR Zoku zoku gunsho ruiju 続々群書類従

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Hattori Hideo 服部英雄. "Mirai nengō no sekai kara 未来年号の世界から [From the World of Future Eras]." Shigaku zasshi 92:8 (1983) 38-65.

Hinonishi Shinjō. "Kishin shōnin den oboegaki 祈親上人伝覚え書 [Recollections Concerning the Holy Man Kishin]." Parts 1-22. Kōyasan jihō. 1962-1963.

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______. "Kōyasan no geango to Karukaya dōshin 高野山の夏案居と刈萱道心 [The Geango of Mt. Kōya and the Worthies of Karukaya]." Bukkyō bungaku 18 (March, 1994) 1-20.

______. "Kami no yama kara hotoke no yama e: Kōyasan o shuten toshite 神の山から仏の山へー高野山を主点として [From Kami Mountain to Buddha Mountain, with a Focus on Mt. Kōya]." In Setsuwa denshō gakkai 説話・伝承学会 ed. Setsuwa ikai toshite no yama 説話ー異界としての山 [Mountains as Stories and Other Worlds], 91-128. Tokyo: Kanrin shoten, 1997.

______. "The Hōgō (Treasure Name) of Kōbō Daishi and the Development of Beliefs Associated with It." Japanese Religions 27:1 (January 2002) 5- 18

Inoue Mitsusada 井上光貞. Nihon Jōdokyō seiritsu shi no kenkyū 日本浄土教成立史の研究 [A Study of the History of the Establishment of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1985

Kikuchi Hiroki 菊地大樹. "Jikyōsha no genkei to chūseiteki tenkai 持経者の原形と中世的展開 [The Origins and Medieval Development of Jikyōsha]." Shigaku zasshi 8 (August, 1995) 1-35.

Koyama Yasunori 小山靖憲. Chūsei jiin to shōensei 中世寺院と荘園制 [Medieval Temples and Shrines and the Shōen System]. Tokyo: Hanawa shobo, 1998.

Kubota Osamu 久保田収. Shintōshi no kenkyū 神道史の研究 [Studies of Shintō History]. Ise: Kōgakukan daigaku shuppanbu, 1973.

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Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄. Jisha seiryoku: mō hitotsu not chūsei shakai 寺社勢力: もう一つの中世社会 [The Power of Temples and Shrines: Another Medieval Society]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980.

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Matsumoto Akira 松本昭. Kōbō Daishi nyūjō setsuwa no kenkyū 弘法大師入定説話の研究 [Studies of Tales of the Continual Meditation of Kōbō Daishi]. Tokyo: Rokkō shuppan, 1982.

Matsunaga Yūkei 松永有慶 Takagi Shingen 高木訷元, Wada Shūjō 和多秀乗, and Tamura Ryūshō 田村隆照. Kōyasan: sono rekishi to bunka 高野山ーその歴史と文化 [Mt. Kōya: Its History and Culture]. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1984.

Mezaki Tokue 目崎徳衛. Saigyō no shisōshi kenkyū 西行の思想史研究 [A Study of the History of the Thought of Saigyō]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1978.

Miyazaka Yūshō 宮坂優宥勝 and Satō Tamotsu 佐藤任. Kōyasan shi 高野山史 [History of Mt. Kōya]. Tokyo: Shinkōsha, 1984.

Miyata Noboru 宮田登. Miroku shinkō 弥勒信仰 [Maitreya Belief]. Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1984.

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Nagai Yoshinori 永井義憲. Nihon Bukkyō Bungaku 日本仏教文学 [Japanese Buddhist Literature] Vol. 3. Vol. 12 of Shintensha kenkyū sōsho 新典社. Tokyo: Shintensha, 1985.

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Tsuchiya Megumi 土谷恵. "Ono sōjō Ningai zō no saikentō 小野僧正仁海像の再検討 [A Reconsideration of the Rainmaking Monk Ningai]." in Aoki Kazuo sensei kanreki kinenkai, ed. 青木和夫先生還暦記念会編, Nihon chūsei no seiji to bunka 日本中世の政治と文化 [Politics and Culture in Medieval Japan]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1987.

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Wada Akio (Shūjō) 和多昭夫 (秀乗). "Kōyasan to Niu-sha ni tsuite 高野山と丹生社について [Concerning Mt. Kōya and the Niu Shrine]." Mikkyō bunka 73 (1965) 1-19.

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______. "Shōō yonnen Kongōbuji nenchū gyōji chō 正應四年金剛峯寺年中行事帳 [The Kongōbuji Annual Ceremony records in Shōō 4 (1291)]." Koyasan daigaku ronsō 14 (1979) 59-100.

______and Takagi Shingen 高木訷元, eds. Kōbō Daishi to Shingon-shū 弘法大師と真言宗 [Kōbō Daishi and the Shingon School]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1984.

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Theory and Method Medieval Europe

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.

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Southern, R. W. Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Pelican Books, 1970.

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