You like religious wars, right?
They’re fun.
When two religions meet, things can get ugly, and things getting ugly means more views YES.
But did Shinto and Buddhism war it out?
What the heck did people believe back then?
And what is blood pollution?
So the Japanese worshipped what we now call Shinto long before Buddhism arrived.
When Buddhism came in the Kofun Period, blood was spilled between the pro-Buddhists and
anti-Buddhists.
I made a video about that.
Now in the Heian Period, Buddhism was already rooted in the society, but the two religions
were like my clothing, they didn’t really match.
Shinto worshippers believed that these spirits or gods called kami inhabited the world and
they were everywhere.
There were kami of trees and mountains and rivers.
They didn’t exist in Buddhist teachings.
What were these Buddhist teachings?
I’m glad you asked, no one.
No history of Heian Period Japan is complete without talking about religion.
Two Buddhist sects became all the rage in Heian Japan: Tendai and Shingon.
Before the Heian, in the Nara Period, Buddhist schools taught that attaining enlightenment
was super duper hard, you undeserving worm, you couldn’t do it within your lifetime.
You basically had to wait for a lucky string of reincarnations.
When Emperor Kanmu moved the capital from Nara to Heian-kyo, partly to escape the powerful
Buddhist temples around the Nara capital, it opened the door for new schools.
Saicho (最澄) and Kukai (空海) were two monks who studied Buddhism in China, came
home, had a bad breakup, and each founded their own brand of Buddhism.
Saicho formed the Tendai school (天台宗), and Kukai founded the Shingon school (真言宗).
Both schools rejected the old sacred doctrine of...
Wow reaching salvation was a pain in the ass.
A pain in multiple asses because you had to reincarnate a bajillion times.
Our two new kids on the block were like,
“No, you too can reach salvation in a single lifetime!
Just come study at our schools.
I mean my school.
Not his, he dumb.”
You had to become a monk though.
That’s why a lot of men at the end of their careers retired from public life to become
monks, gotta get some of that procrastination worship in, Buddha won’t mind.
The two Buddhist schools argued on some Buddhist-y things.
They were rivals like Coke and Pepsi, Edison and Tesla, Sir Patrick Stewart and hair.
Saicho created the famous Tendai monastery Enryakuji (延暦寺) on Mount Hiei, overlooking
the capital of Heian-kyo.
Enryakuji was not only a badass temple that taught Buddhism to a bunch of famous figures
and trained warrior monks,
it also became a political and economic powerhouse for centuries...
until in the Sengoku Period, infamous asshole Oda Nobunaga burned it to the ground and slaughtered
everyone.
Tendai followers taught that the way to understand Buddha’s teachings was through studying
sacred texts, the main one being the Lotus Sutra.
In theory, anyone could attain salvation if they studied the texts hard enough.
Shingon monks were like, cool story bro.
They thought the Tendai-ers were absurd.
You couldn’t get anywhere studying old writings.
No, the way to enlightenment was by experiencing the truth of the universe via rituals like
mantras, mudras, and mandalas.
There was a trend in the Heian Period of quantity over quality.
So the more you recited mantras, the more likely it was for you to reach salvation.
Don’t understand why you’re doing it?
Who cares, just go through the motions.
It’s all good.
Even Tendai incorporated some of these rituals.
People accumulated a bunch of Buddhist art because it was supposed to increase your chances
of salvation.
One retired emperor had people make him one thousand pieces of art of the Buddha.
Unfortunately, no interviews of the dead have survived to the modern day, so we can say
nothing of the efficacy of the art-4-salvation method.
Shingon Buddhism did have public texts for outsiders to read, but these were just appetizers.
Remember, Shingon monks didn’t much care for texts.
You were supposed to experience the truth, not read about it.
To reach enlightenment, the texts were not enough.
You needed the secret teachings that were only passed down verbally, monk-to-monk.
So conveniently, you had to become a Shingon monk and prove that you deserved the secret
teachings of your master.
And since they didn’t write down these secret teachings, it’s hard for us today to know
what they were.
What we do know is, it probably didn’t involve anything fun.
Tendai was the more powerful of the two, it enjoyed the backing of the Fujiwara house
and the Imperial Family.
The Fujiwara was a clan that famously married their daughters into the Imperial Family,
allowing them control over the Heian court for 200 years.
But Shingon was popular among the other Heian elites.
It was easy to see why.
Shingon was all about grand ceremonies and rituals, and they also sprinkled in some secksual
ingredients from Indian Tantrism.
Remember, the Heian elite had a cult of beauty, so they loved the extravagant ceremonies.
The aristocracy went on pilgrimages to Buddhist temples all the time.
Was it because they were super devout?
Well, an educated man was expected to be familiar with Buddhist texts and religious teachings,
but nah, a pilgrimage was often like a vacation.
Temples were often located on mountains, in forests, on mountains, perfect Instagram spots.
Women especially couldn’t wait to get out of the house, though they couldn’t actually
show themselves in public.
They mostly stayed inside carriages on their trips.
Now, it wasn’t all fun and games, this Buddhism thing.
In the Heian era, religious treatment of women changed.
When Buddhism arose in India from a trust fund kid who checked his privilege, it was
egalitarian.
The body was an illusion, so the differences that you saw between men and women were illusory.
Your soul could reincarnate into a man or woman.
When Buddhism spread to China, they incorporated Taoist and Confucian thought, which were not
so egalitarian.
They introduced the idea of blood pollution.
It was simple, and as always it had to do with the vaa-gin-nah.
Women’s menstrual and birthing blood were icky wtf and so they prevented salvation.
Women had to reincarnate into men before they could attain enlightenment.
Women also polluted temple grounds with their cooties.
This Cootie Buddhism spread to Japan.
Before, women were allowed to be trained in temples as nuns, but in the Heian Period,
most temples put a stop to that.
It was only after the Heian Period that temples started accepting women again.
Let’s talk about warrior monks for a bit.
If you pictured these Buddhist temples as serene places where monks go about meditating
and studying and they just wanted to be left alone to focus on Buddha’s teachings, you’re
wrong and you need to be punished.
You must write “I love this channel” in the comments.
That’s the punishment.
Alright, one of the main roles of Buddhist temples was to protect the capital, not by
arms but by prayers.
Temples had strong connections with the Imperial Family and the Fujiwara, which made sense
because the temples protected them.
It was a time when the government was giving out tax-free land to people rather than paying
them directly.
Buddhist temples made like turkeys and gobbled up a bunch of land.
This brought wealth and power, especially for the Tendai and Shingon schools.
So you had these large temples expanding their territory, pressuring landowners to come under
temple control.
They acted no different from local warlords.
When non-violent pressure didn’t work, they would exert the other kind of pressure, the
pressure of an arrowhead against your chest.
Now there must have been people who said,
“Warrior monks?
What can they do, they’re just monks.
They sit all day.
They don’t even eat meat.
Where do you get your protein, monks?”
Those people are dead.
In fact, if you just had that thought watching this, you just died, they just killed you.
Powerful Buddhist temples trained warrior monks called Sohei (僧兵).
These were much like the monastic orders of Catholic warrior monks in Europe.
Enryakuji on Mount Hiei was a huge training ground for warrior monks.
Temples would send them to harass landowners.
You even had temples fighting and destroying other temples.
Buddhist monks were huge Buddha shaped thorns on the sides of the ruling elite.
If they had an issue with the government, they didn’t write complaint letters like
whiny little teat-sucking chihuahua puppies.
No, they took to the streets.
Monks protested all the time in the capital streets and surrounded the houses of government
officials.
Officials stayed indoors lest they get the word of Buddha delivered up their asses.
An emperor once said that there were three things in the world he could not control:
“the floods of Kamo River,
the hazards of gambling,
and the monks of Mount Hiei.”
Now all this talk of Buddhist power may give you the impression that the whole country
was Buddhist.
But no, not everyone got the memo.
In fact, most people missed that memo.
They must have been using Yahoo Mail.
Buddhism was what the aristocracy in the capital indulged in.
The common folk, the vast majority of the country, still practiced their native kami
worship.
So what were the Buddhist temples to do about these old beliefs?
You would think that they could have taken their warrior monks to the countryside and
converted the peasants to Buddhism at the point of a spear, but they didn’t.
The Japanese didn’t think that believing in one religion meant you closed yourself
off from another.
They kind of incorporated Shinto into Buddhism.
Shinto was a set of beliefs that was so vague that it was pretty easy to conjure up some
explanation.
In Star Trek, they explained that ships had gravity because of gravity plating under the
floors.
The Japanese handwaved into existence the idea that the various kami floating around
were just Buddhist deities in different forms.
Buddhas can take different forms, you see, to help steer people to the right path.
They built religious complexes that were both Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines.
The capital devised a system called nijuni-sha (二十二社), or Twenty-Two Shrines, where
they designated 22 shrines to be official shrines sponsored by the government.
These became huge gathering places for the public.
They were shrines slash temples slash places where people went to cheat on their spouses.
So they were a crucial part of Heian society.
So we’re really close to the next goal on Patreon, when we reach it I’ll do a contest
for patrons where you can get a copy of the excellent Premodern Japan by Mikiso Hane and
Louis Perez.
It’s a great overview of Japanese history before modern times.
And the new patrons for this week are Chris A., Grant Graves, Ben Sauer, Rae, and Drawing
and games.
Thank you warrior monks.
Alright much love, you, and spread the knowledge!