Although the military class had many illustrious precedents to draw upon—expecially from the latter part of the Heian period—its undeniable admiration for that culture still could not induce the leaders of the buke to accept the best which the Heian experience had to offer. Instead, their selections were highly restricted, and this narrowness eventually wreaked havoc upon the military class itself, dooming to failure the repeated attempts made by its leaders to freeze time and custom forever at the high point of feudalism. In fact, the leaders of the warrior class were actually forced to swiftly retrench their position in the national system, in order to ride the political waves generated by the restoration of power to the emperor.
When the bushi began to develop their professional traits and coalesce as a class during the eleventh century, they were confronted by the highly sophisticated culture of the Heian court and its aristocracy. Members of this culture had reached pinnacles of scholarship in their studies of classic literature, were exploring the complexities of religious ideas imported from India and laden with Chinese accretions, had developed a theocratic theory of state and nationhood, and were beginning to reach out into unexplored dimensions of pure speculation. By the time the warriors had turned their sights from the provinces to the capital and ultimate power, Heian culture had left far behind the ancient emphasis placed by the original clans in the age of kabane upon arts (waza) considered generally as esoteric manifestations of the divine, upon invocations (norito) insuring their correct manifestations, and upon liturgy (matsuri). Instead, the Heians had shifted to a thorough absorption of the complexities of Chinese culture and, with this, to a correlated emphasis upon quality, as well as an increase in the quantity of schools, libraries, and scholars. Steps had already been taken to institutionalize the function of scholars who had lectured or tutored in the mansions of aristocratic clan heads or at court, by forming a national school system tracing its legal roots to the eighth century, to the Taiho Code (A.D. 702). Centers of instruction had been established at the imperial court under a director of public education (fumiya-zukasa-no-kami), and in each provincial area (kokugaku). The imperial college (daigaku) and its college-house (daigakuryo) had mushroomed into a proper establishment in its own educational right, with a rector (daigaku-no-kami), vice-rector (suke), upper and lower heads (tai-jo and sho-jo), as well as upper and lower subofficials (tai-shakan and jo-shakan). Under these officials had operated many professors and assistants who provided introductory and advanced instruction in the following major subjects:
Chinese Classics (myokyo)
Law (myoho)
Calligraphy (sho, shodo)
Mathematics (san)
Composition and rhetoric (monjo, mongaku)
Chinese poetry (shigaku)
Japanese poetry (kagaku)
Planning and strategy (shusai)
Political theory (shinshi)
Divination (in-yo)
Calendar (koyomi)
Astrology (temmon)
Music (gagaku)
Medicine and pharmacy (tenyaku)
Each of these major subjects or academic disciplines had become highly complex and, at its superior levels, often downright esoteric, merging as it customarily did with metaphysics and the intuitive. As illustrated in Chart 9, the Chinese Classics alone, for example, consisted of thirteen texts, each accompanied by its own specific commentaries and appendices drawn from Chinese and Japanese sources. And mastery of them all was expected by the examiners who tested the preparation of their aristocratic students. Scholars had had to specialize in the study of those texts either one by one or, as a requirement for higher office, in major groups of texts, e.g., the collections known as the Small Classics (shokyo), the Great Classics (daikyo), or the Middle Classics (chukyo). Rare indeed, even then, was the man who could claim a thorough knowledge of them all.
The aim of education during the major part of the Heian era had thus obviously been less that of enlarging and deepening the realms of knowledge for the sake of understanding and appreciating the unfolding of life’s innumerable possibilities, than that of forming proper functionaries of a state which had already chosen one of those possibilities (an imitation of a Chinese model) and strove continually to maintain and perfect its essentially theocratic and aristocratic structure. Appearance (katachi) had traditionally been one of the most important aims of education, since it visually represented prestige and power. Intellect (zae) had had to be more specialized, since the functions the nobles were called upon to perform in the service of the system were many and administratively varied. In fact, the nobles had concentrated mainly upon the study of imperial liturgies and court ceremonials (yusoku kojitsu), the installation rituals (jimoku), law and theories of government, and so forth. Provincial aristocrats had been directed more toward studies in law, mathematics, divination, astrology, planning, and strategy.
As a collateral extension of the interesting fervor surrounding education during the Heian period (as reported by Tokiomi), private schools had also been established for the education of “the greatest number of people.” Schools such as the Nikyoin of Kibi-no-Makibi, the Untein of Iso-no-kami Yakatsugu, and the priest Kukai’s own institute, the Shugeishoin, had been established and operated outside the national system of education, valiantly attempting to do for the other classes of the nation that which the system had done for the nobles. Their existence was often threatened, and eventually they all had to close. However, the attempt had demonstrated the centrifugal and expansionistic effects of a broad approach to education and constituted a precedent for intermittent attempts to establish centers of popular learning whenever and wherever possible. Deep within this culture and at its outer limits, therefore, there seethed an irresistible impulse to expand and experiment which defied constrictions and was, perhaps, at the root of that period of trouble and glory which followed hard upon the heels of the Heian period.
The warriors of the eleventh century had been dazzled by the cultural splendor of the late Heian period, and, even when its luster had dimmed considerably with the passing of time, the buke evidenced the lingering effect of this initial fascination either by scorning the trappings of that culture a trifle too heatedly, or by endeavoring to recreate its aura (although obviously on a different basis and with a different content) whenever and wherever they could. At the beginning of their history as a separate class in search of its own character and destiny, those clans drawn into the spinning center of the nation during the late Heian period had endeavored to send their leaders’ children to aristocratic colleges and academies in order to prepare them for their new and expanded responsibilities. There, these “new” men, who—although of the buke’s upper ranks—had been bred in provincial towns to bear arms and to live simply, almost rustically, stood out in uncomfortably sharp contrast to the “effete” offspring of the nobility who despised and instinctively feared them. The nobles, in fact, were obscurely aware that, although these rustic members of the “family of archery and horsemanship” were indispensable instruments of power, they were also potentially dangerous contenders for that power. The resentment of the upper categories of warriors who were only reluctantly admitted to aristocratic centers of learning is abundantly recorded, and it found concrete expression in many of their policies during the succeeding centuries, when they repaid the kuge in full (as well as the clergy, who had held a large number of the highest teaching positions) for every slight inflicted by the aristocrats and priests—insults which the buke bore with the cold determination of military men whose time was manifestly to come.
Pragmatists by nature and function, the military leaders of the emerging buke had had to decide early whether they would be absorbed by the Heian culture or would instead select and adapt from it those features which best served their distinct purposes without allowing their own sharply differentiated individuality to be diluted. The example of many military clans, whose members had been lured into accepting the Heian culture unreservedly and had subsequently been swallowed up by