REL 444/544 Notes

REL 444/544 Notes - Week 3

Buddhism of the Kamakura Period (1185-1333) - Setting the Stage

This weeks readings set the stage for the development of Buddhism during the Kamakura period.

A. The Tale of the Heike, translated by Helen McCullough. The selections from this work help us to understand the status, role, and power of certain kinds of female characters during that time, specifically courtesans and nuns.
    Religiously, the selection is about karma, taking the tonsure and becoming a nun, and the practice of Pure Land Buddhism, of chanting the Name of Amida Buddha and looking toward rebirth in the Pure Land.
    Politically, we have to remember this is fiction, and the Kiyomori depicted here is not the historical person. Nevertheless, the excerpts show his power, indicate how he began to overreach his ability in seeking the Imperial Throne, and how he might have isolated himself by virtue of his ambitions.

B. Robert Morrell, "Tendai's Jien as Buddhist Priest." Jien was the Chief Priest of the Tendai Sect, the most powerful sect entering the Kamakura Period. All of the founders of the "new" forms of Buddhism during the Kamakura Period studied on Mount Hiei, headquarters of the Tendai sect. These included Dogen, founder of Soto Zen; Eisai, founder of Rinzai Zen; Honen, founder of the Jodo sect of Pure Land Buddhism; and Shinran, founder of the Jodo Shinshu, known as Shin Buddhism in the West.
    Jien was a prominent leader of the Fujiwara Clan and was the brother of KUJO Kanzane, another prominent Fujiwara ("Kujo" is a branch of the Fujiwara) who was regent and Chief Minister to the Imperial Court.
    Jien saw himself as living in mappo, the final degenerate age of the Dharma; he felt it was unrealistic to revive the Golden Age of the Buddha or of the fortunes of the Fujiwara clan fully, but he did envision a kind of Silver Age (a term coined by scholar Charles Hambrick), in which the Fujiwara provided a regent to help rule Japan in the face of the rising threat of the warrior class, increasing war and famine, social decay, and corruption within the Buddhist orders.
    In the poems that are included in Robert Morrell's chapter on "Jien," one can see a mixture of themes: religious, political, historical reflection. Sometimes the focus is primarily on one or another theme, at other times, multiple themes are interwoven. Jien is an instructive figure who expresses the complex interweaving of these and other themes, the place of the Fujiwara within the larger social and religious world, and the sense of corruption expressed in terms of mappo, a prominent theme during the Kamakura Period.

C. Jeffrey Mass, "The Emergence of the Kamakura Bakufu [Military Government]." Mass's discussion of the emergence of the military government in Kamakura, (hence the term Kamakura Bakufu, which was not used at the time, but is in fact a much later scholarly label) shows how the increasingly powerful elite warrior class, disaffected with their lack of influence among the nobility, began to assert their power and eventually achieve a significant degree of control over Japan politically. Some of the new Buddhist movements (such as Eisai's Rinzai Zen) needed patrons and political support, which they could not gain from the Imperial Court, which was closely tied to the existing sects, such as Tendai and Shingon. Thus, in part, the emergence of new forms of Buddhism in the Kamakura Period can be tied to the rise of the warrior elite.

D. Kazuo Osumi, "Buddhism in the Kamakura Period." Osumi outlines the historical, social, political, and religious context within which "new" forms of Buddhism emerged in the Kamakura Period. These involve various factors including: i) perceived corruption of Buddhism and imperial society, 2) a move towards more lay-centered forms of Buddhism, 3) need for simpler, more accessible forms of practice, 4) diversity of new approaches within a common matrix, everything from the founding of new monasteries as found in Zen Buddhism; movements arising from outside the matrix of Tendai Buddhism on Mount Hiei, such as Nichiren's advocacy of chanting the title of the Lotus Sutra; lay-centered Pure Land Buddhism associated with peasants as can be seen in Shinran's Shin Buddhism.