AUTHOR'S NOTE
Religion
Most Japanese were Buddhist, but Buddhism was not a single thing, any more than was (or is) Christianity. The oldest schools of Japanese Buddhism date back to the seventh century and were centred in Nara, the ancient capital. A newer set of schools was based in the capital or on the great mountain, Hiei, just north and east of the capital; or in Kamakura in the east, the one-time capital of the Minamoto shogunate. These schools all began as monastic centers, whose monks sought enlightenment as they prayed (and sometimes fought) for the safety of the empire.
The most recent developments in Buddhism were no more monastic than is evangelical Christianity. Two relatively new schools of Buddhism turned their backs on monasticism and meditation and spoke instead directly to the people, arguing that enlightenment and salvation were directly available to anyone, without the need for priestly intervention. (Sounds very Protestant, doesn’t it?) One of these new schools was urban in nature, the other rural.
The urban school, one of whose temples is Katsumi’s neighbour in the southern half of the capital, is known in the West as the Lotus sect. More formally it is the Nichiren school of Buddhism. Nichiren, or Hokke (”Lotus” in Japanese) was a populist form of Buddhism. Nichiren had taught that anyone could attain enlightenment by chanting the Lotus Sutra as a means of unleashing their individual Buddha essence. There were at least three separate branches of Nichiren in the Sengoku Jidai, with dozens of temples in the capital. The Hokke school was very popular with merchants and townspeople, though some warriors—the dangerous Miyoshi Motonaga, for example—were also members of Nichiren temples. Hokke people tended to be very intolerant of other forms of Buddhism, an intolerance that did not bode well for the future.
Their intolerance was very nearly matched by the rural school, known as the Ikkō (”single-minded”). Though this group is only mentioned in passing in this story (Katsumi’s reference to peasant invasions of the capital) they were extremely powerful in some provinces (they had overthrown the warrior rulers of Kaga province, for instance) and they maintained a huge, fortified temple complex at what is now the city of Osaka. Where the Hokke appealed to city-dwellers, the Ikkō school drew in farmers, especially the poor, and low-ranking samurai and other warriors living in the provinces.
Hiroki’s strong devotion to the kami or spirits is perhaps unusual but not uncommon at this time. Though Shinto as we know it today was not codified until the twentieth century, the practices that constituted the way of the gods were a significant part of daily life. (Most Shinto shrines in this period were in fact administered by Buddhist temples, something that probably doesn’t please Hiroki very much.)
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