Since police were forbidden in the sacred precincts of Mount Hiei, Enryaku-ji itself became a refuge for those on the run from the capital. Professing religious enthusiasm they clambered up in such numbers that finally the head bishop Kakujin (1012-81) announced that the monastery would form its own army to rid "the temples and the estates of thieves and robbers." This army, however, was comprised of these very thieves and robbers. Enryaku-ji had, ironically, itself become the dreaded northeast threat.
The real enemies of this ecclesiastical military were not the court's aristocrats but other sects, their rivals for power. Originally the non-Nara sects, Tendai and Shingon, had been weak enough to coexist. But no longer. By the tenth century the conflict between the sanmon, or "mountain faction" based at Enryaku-ji, and the jimon, or "temple faction" based at Mii-dera, led to armed struggles which lasted from 933 to 1571.
The Tale of the Heike, that medieval war chronicle, has many passages concerning the militant monks, the power they enjoyed, and the damage they inflicted. They often intimidated the emperor and in 1177 burned the imperial palace causing a conflagration which destroyed much of the capital.
"Fanned by a strong southeast wind" says The Tale of the Heike "flames like huge cartwheels leaped three and five blocks and burned diagonally toward the northwest in an indescribably terrifying manner.... Family diaries, documents preserved for generations, and treasures of every description were reduced to ashes. The losses may be imagined. Hundreds of people perished in the flames, as well as countless oxen and horses. [But] that fire was no ordinary occurrence. Someone had a dream in which two or three thousand big monkeys, each carrying a lighted pine torch, came down from Mount Hiei to burn the city"
From the eleventh to the fifteen centuries the Enryaku-ji army was the most powerful in the country. During the thirteenth century alone it descended upon the capital more than twenty times; it controlled all the (religious and political affairs it could, and, like any political organization, was ruthless in suppressing its rivals.
All new religious sects had to contend with the Tendai monks of Enryakuji. Even though most of the leaders of these newer beliefs had been trained at the temple, no ties bound the graduates. The mountain monks continued to raid the new temples, burning their records and killing their priests. When Nichiren (1222-82) attempted a beginning in the capital, the holy Tendai army razed all twenty-one of his temples, and butchered all of his monks—in a single temple three thousand at once. Even today the Nichiren sect, strong in the rest of Japan, is not a major force in the old capital.
Enryaku-ji's reign as a center of military power continued into the sixteenth century. Then, in 1571, "hardened by age, blinded by success," as one chronicle describes it, Enryaku-ji sided against Oda Nobunaga, the general who succeeded in ending more than a century of civil war and eventually was to bring the entire country under his control.
Oda is supposed to have looked up at the militant monks and said: "If I do not take them away now, this great trouble will be everlasting. Moreover, these priests violate their vows: they eat fish and stinking vegetables, keep concubines, and never unroll the sacred books. How can they be vigilant against evil, or maintain the right? Surround their dens and burn them, and suffer none of them to live."
Though the priests were supported by a number of the powerful, including the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiaki, they could not prevent the army of Nobunaga from storming the mountain, burning the temples, and slaughtering some three thousand priests. On the twelfth day of the ninth month of the year Genki (September 30,1571), all the buildings, all the records, all the treasures of eight centuries were destroyed. Of the greatest temple complex in Asia not one building remained.
The heights of Mount Hiei, like much of the capital, remained deserted until after Oda was assassinated in 1582. His successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi then began a program of reconstruction. Since he himself had imperial ambitions, he rebuilt Kyoto on the model of the imperial capital it had once been. He even recalled the example of the emperor Kammu, who originally allowed no temples in the city itself, and placed the hostile Jodo and Nichiren temples where they could be watched—creating Teramachi in the east and Teranouchi in the northwest. He allowed the Tendai sect to reopen its notorious complex at Enryaku-ji but limited it to one hundred twenty-five temples. It never again wielded secular power.
In the Komponchu-do, rebuilt in 1642, the Yakushi Nyorai is said still to stand and so it may—it is impossible to tell in the darkness. Across bare, cold, red-lacquered floors now long rubbed pink, the barefoot visitor slides into the shadows of the great central hall and there, between the further pillars, opens a gulf.
Ten feet below, faintly illuminated by candles stands the personage. Seen as though across the moat of darkness, it is perhaps the statue carved by Shicho many centuries ago. Near it is that perpetual lamp said lit by the founding monk. Though it was in fact put out by Nobunaga when he began his depredations, this fact is ignored and it burns as though it has always. Yet it reveals nothing—the figure before it remains in the darkness.
The muffling scent of incense hangs in cold air and there remains something of the militant blackness of the huge, brooding, vanished complex. The heavy roofs weigh in the cold mountain air, the great cryptomeria stand black over the still temples, and still flags hang from the high eaves—yellow, green, red—speaking of old China and beyond, to ancient, cold Tibet.
In the dark of a winter afternoon the great icy Komponchu-do seems—as do all frozen things—to be waiting. The single lamp, cold as the gulf in which it burns suspended, is the only sign of life—the sign of a life to come.
| Ishiyama-dera |
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The old Japanese guidebooks to the temples of Kyoto make much of the masculine nature of Enryaku-ji. There were many reasons for doing so but among them may have been a desire to celebrate the perceived femininity of Ishiyama-dera.
This temple is not on the stern heights but rather on a gentle eminence along the Seta River above Lake Biwa. Open, easy of access and pleasant of aspect, Ishiyama-dera also has a long history of women visitors.
The author of the Kagero Nikki, known to history only as "the mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna," took refuge here during troubled times. The Lady Murasaki is said to have penned part of The Tale of Genji while staying here.
The date of this occurrence is known (the night of the full moon, August, 1004), the room is identified (right off the hondo), and in a way she is still there. In her many-layered robes (the outer one purple—murasaki), brush in hand, a blank page on the desk, sits a mannequin with long hair and whitened face purporting to be the famous author.
She has just paused in her inspiration and is looking at us—peering into the future. She seems to be pondering a narrative problem—it appears to be a grave moment. Indeed, it may be because, according to the Noh drama Genji Kuyo, the Lady Murasaki was actually an incarnation of the local deity, the Ishiyama Kannon. She had written her novel solely, you see, in order to teach the Buddhist truth that the world is but a dream.
Later, many other women also came. The hero of Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Man was here enjoying the view over Lake Biwa, and overheard a most attractive lady explaining to a companion that this was the very spot where The Tale of Genji was composed. Intrigued, he drew closer and, in so doing, caught the lady's sleeve on his sword guard. Or she caught his. In either event they became lovers.