Just as Japan was to so spectacularly learn later from Europe and America, it now begin to practice that combination of appropriation and internalization common to all countries but perhaps perfected in this one. Pursuing its new aims, Japan sent four missions to Sui China (859-618) from 600 to 614, and from 630 to 838 many more to the Tang—that great Chinese dynasty (618-907) the influence of which was to have such a decisive effect on Japan.
These missions brought back not only Buddhist but also Confucian ideas. In 604 when the regent, Prince Shotoku, formulated his famous constitution—five years earlier than the like-minded Mohammed who, on the other side of the world, was also to proclaim a new state: Islam—he not only called for reverence for Buddhism but also insisted upon Confucian principles: ministers should obey imperial commands, harmony should be prized, and so on.
By 645 when the Taika (Great Change) Reforms were instituted, it was the Tang pattern which was utilized and the Japanese state was recast in the Chinese model. Just as the country was to later revolutionize itself in its nineteenth-century efforts to "catch up with the West," so it now remade its institutions as it caught up with the Tang. The ideal was a centralized and bureaucratic state. There was, even a redistribution of land—something which would not again occur until 1945. In theory everyone got the same amount. Actually, some got more than others and within a century Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and aristocratic families had all accumulated private estates.
The Tang pattern was secured when the Taiho (Great Treasure) Code was promulgated in 702. It gave Japan a symmetrical and elaborate bureaucratic structure—one which, in one form or another, still works today. With this as a base, bit by bit anything deemed useful was imported from the Tang and its Korean conduit into Japan: the language, the architecture, new ways of drawing, sculpting, and under it all, an accepted and basic Buddhist system of beliefs.
This was mainly of the Mahayana persuasion, though an animosity toward the Hinayana belief was not at first apparent. Rather some sort of powerful amalgam was sought, found, and referred to as the "highest absolute." United, this expansive version of Buddhist doctrine saw to it that temples and priests proliferated, and that the influence of the Buddhist church grew.
The city of Kyoto was the capital of Japan and home of the imperial court from 794 to 1868. It was consequently not only the cradle of this newly Sinoized civilization but also the keeper of its culture.
The city remains a treasure house—literally: it possesses a total of 202 National Treasures (20 percent of the country's total) and 1,596 Important Cultural Assets (15 percent of that total). It also contains many of the finest examples of Buddhist architecture in the country, well over 1500 temples.
Odd, this last, because the city was originally built to get away from Buddhist influence.
The reason for the intended avoidance was that ever since this religion had been introduced into the country its influence had been growing—some thought unduly. This was because Buddhism, like most religions, offered an array of class opportunities which proved amenable to the already Sinoized imperial court.
Just as the Chinese propensity for hierarchical order had provided a model to the Japanese government—a system of court ranks suitable to an aristocratic society was already built into it—so, too, the Buddhist religion proved itself friendly to a similar stratification and could further be used to support the newly consolidated power, centered as it was upon an imperial house and a regent family.
What became known as Nara Buddhism consisted of six schools: Sanron, Hosso, Kegon, Jojitsu, Kusha, and Ritsu. The first three belonged to the Mahayana tradition, the last three to the Hinayana and they thus offered the priests a survey of contemporary Buddhist thought. (Three of them still exist: Hosso at Kofuku-ji and Yakushi-ji, Kegon at Todai-ji, and Ritsu at Toshodai-ji.) Besides learned study the priests' only other duty was to perform rituals for the government—these were to assure the security of the state and to offer aristocratic patrons efficacious prayers
It was the court which was Buddhist. The imperial family and the influential noble houses were the true believers and held the monopoly on the new religion—it was not until much later (around 1200) that Buddhism became in any sense a popular religion.
This is different from the pattern observed in other major religions: Christianity began among what we would now call the underprivileged and then spread upward; the Muslim religion too was initially a popular belief. But in Japan most new institutions follow a different pattern: they are initially appropriated by whatever passes for aristocracy and are only then passed on to the lower echelons.
One of the attributes of Japanese Buddhism (in contrast with Buddhism elsewhere) is this tie with the state. The government patronized and thus controlled Buddhist organizations, while they—in return as it were—gave it spiritual and moral support, even though this often meant a compromise of churchly principles.
The ruling house took early to Buddhism. Just a generation after the death of Prince Shotoku, who had introduced the religion, the emperor Kotoku became so Buddhist that he ordered the destruction of the groves belonging to the Ikukunitama Shrine and is remembered in the Nihongi as having honored Buddhism and despised Shinto.
The later emperor Shomu was already early endorsing the fashionable new belief. He had by 742 piously announced a system of national temples, the Kokubun-ji, which linked the propagation of faith with the consolidation of state power. This he established in 752 with ceremonies at Todai-ji in Nara—then capital of the country.
The event was the inauguration of the Great Buddha, a bronze statue fifty-three feet in height—the cosmic Buddha Vairocana (Daibutsu or "Great Buddha" in Japanese)—an undertaking so extreme that it used up all the copper in the country and required eight attempts before it was successfully cast.
Housed in the new main hall of Todai-ji, the largest wooden building in the world, the statue was the figurehead of state religious ambitions. There was nothing this big in all of Tang China and so it called for inauguration ceremonies much more lavish than usual. Priests and royal envoys from as far away as Persia attended—ten thousand in all—and a high-ranking cleric all the way from India was there to paint in the pupils of the statue's eyes and give it symbolic life. The spectacle—for it was the grandest occasion in Japan so far—was memorable.
Memorable too was the new power that this gave the church. The court thought that it would be strengthened by an affiliation with the Buddhist church. It had perhaps not occurred to it that the church would be the more strengthened by this affiliation with the civil government.
The imperial house itself was thus eventually challenged by the growing power of the church. An example was the Buddhist priest Dokyo, who boldly attempted to influence the throne. The empress Koken, daughter of the emperor Shomu, was in retirement when she came under this priestly influence. Whether due to Buddhist invigoration or not, she emerged from retirement, became the empress Shotoku, and then elevated Dokyo to a much higher position, that of dajodaijin-zenji, priest-premier.
The power of Buddhism was much deplored, earlier instances of imperial ladies falling under the spell of priests were cited, and a popular poem of the period commemorated these scandalous events with its verses about hammers of power lying beneath priestly robes.
Escaping these dangerous Buddhist influences was among several reasons, then, that the emperor Kammu in 784, only three years on the throne, had the old capital moved from Nara to Nagaoka. He then, ten years later, had it installed in its present location (then Heian-kyo, now Kyoto). He thus remedied his problem in what we now recognize as a Japanese manner—rather than remove the monks he removed the city.
He had his geomancers seek out a proper site: mountains to the north, plains to the south, a river running