Tokugawa Japan: Section 3--Buddhism

 

The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868)

Guiding Questions:

What challenges did the 3 Unifiers of Japan and the Tokugawa Shogunate face? 

How did they centralize power?

 

Section 3: Buddhism

In Japan today, 46% of the population identifies as Buddhists, while a slightly larger number follow the native religion of Shinto. In practice, most Japanese believers combine and/or switch between both faiths, depending on the occasion, the religious culture of a particular place, or just their personal preference. For the purposes of this reading, we are going to focus on Buddhist monks, since they played a key role in the stories of the 3 Unifiers–Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.

A key belief of Buddhism is that life is suffering. You suffer when bad things happen to you, obviously, but you also suffer as a result of good things, because you realize on some level that happiness is fleeting and that all the people you love (including yourself) will one day grow old, suffer painful illnesses, and die. Suffering also comes from your own greedy desire for more good things to happen in your life (love, friendship, wealth, etc.) because people are never truly satisfied and always want more. Since Buddhists believe in reincarnation–a cycle of birth, suffering, death and rebirth repeated over and over again–their primary goal is to escape this cycle by becoming enlightened. Following the Buddha’s teachings, believers can ensure that their death results not in reincarnation, and thus more suffering, but in a blissful existence in Nirvana, a Buddhist version of heaven. 

The original Buddha died in 483 BCE in India, about a thousand years before the Sengoku period. During that time, the religion evolved to include a new core idea–that history also has a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. New incarnations of the Buddha occasionally appear in the world, reminding humanity of the religion’s core principles. This starts an age of stability and happiness. During this time, it’s easier for people to become enlightened and reach Nirvana. The flip side, however, is the last part of the cycle, the age of chaos. Governments fall into civil war, society breaks down, and people lose their way. It is almost impossible, according to traditional Japanese Buddhist beliefs, to achieve enlightenment during this last stage, which could last decades or even centuries. 

In the 1200s, a new interpretation spread from China to Japan called Pure Land Buddhism. Followers of this sect believed that people can achieve enlightenment even in an age of chaos, as long as they followed the sect’s teachings. This gave hope to many Japanese Buddhists during the horrifically violent and chaotic Sengoku period (1467 to 1615). In addition, Pure Land Buddhists started to preach and write in Japanese, not the classical Chinese of the educated elite, and thus reached a broader audience. The sect gained a huge army of followers among the common people, formed into armed bands called Ikko Ikki, which in turn were led by highly skilled warrior monks. 

Armed, trained and extremely motivated by their faith, the Ikko Ikki posed a serious military threat to Oda Nobunaga’s plans to unify Japan under his rule. But it was their spiritual threat that concerned him the most, since all he could offer his followers was security, while the Pure Land Buddhists offered both security and Nirvana. Oda routinely spared his enemies after defeating them, but he made an exception for the Ikko Ikki, all of whom were killed. In one such campaign in 1575, Oda declared a “mountain hunt” in Etchu, a term usually reserved for hunting wild boars. In this case, the prey were Ikko Ikki members whose noses were cut off to present to Oda as proof of their deaths. A witness states that an additional 200 men, women and children “were taken alive and beheaded in the rice fields to the west of the camp.” Oda also burned several monasteries and when he later died due to betrayal, many Buddhists pointed to karma as an explanation for how his life ended.

Like the Catholic Church in medieval Europe, Buddhist monasteries acquired enormous property and wealth. Also similar to Europe, monasteries didn’t have to pay taxes; instead they collected taxes in the form of labor and other services from the surrounding population. Some of the more powerful monasteries took charge of justice and administration in the surrounding region, and even had the right to bar entry to samurais and grant refuge to people fleeing conflict. Their leaders thus tended to be very popular among the common people. A Portuguese Jesuit (a militant Catholic order) missionary, whose hostility to Buddhism should be taken into account when interpreting his quote below, visited the prominent Honganji monastery in 1561 and wrote that when believers interacted with the head monk:

…even a glimpse of him moves them to tears as they beg him to absolve them from their sins. They give [him] so much money in alms that he controls a large part of the country’s wealth. Every year a great festival is held in his honor, and so many people wait at the gate of the temple to enter that many die in the stampede which results when they open the gate. Such people, however, are considered very lucky to have died in this way, and some at their own request are dropped into the crowd around the gates and are thus killed.

All three of Japan’s Unifiers warred against Buddhist sects. Hideyoshi broke the power of the Buddhist monasteries by taking a lot of their land under direct shogunal control, not allowing them to repair their castles or to have any more private armies/warrior monks that they had needed during the Sengoku. Hideyoshi confiscated their weapons, seized most of their property, and on some occasions forced monasteries to relocate to areas far from their original power bases. At the same time, he personally awarded loyal monks new land and privileges, integrating them back into the traditional power structure.

Tokugawa Ieyasu at first spared Ikko Ikki in the Mikawa region, and even allowed them to keep some of their economic privileges, provided they agreed to leave the Pure Land sect and put down their arms. When they refused, however, he killed them all and destroyed their temples. A samurai ally of Ieyasu later wrote that since in the original deal, he had promised the monasteries that he would “let them be as they were originally”, what he really had meant was that, “originally they were [empty] fields, so let them be fields, as they were originally.”