W.E. Deal
first was a royal route that involved the patronage of Buddhism by the ruling class. The other was
a route of individual travelers, such as merchants, missionaries, and immigrants.^55 These indi-
viduals practiced Buddhist rituals and therefore transmitted Buddhism in an informal and unof-
ficial manner.^56 Missing, too, from the official account, is the geographic context in which
Buddhism was transmitted. Barnes refers to the Yellow Sea interaction sphere, while Piggott uses
the term China Sea interaction sphere.^57 Both are references to the idea that there was a multi-
directional flow of intellectual and material culture between the Chinese mainland, the Korean
peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago, especially occurring between the third and eighth
centuries.
There are many other issues regarding the transmission and early practice of Buddhism to
Japan that warrant additional research and clarification. Three prominent issues are 1) the role of
women in early Japanese Buddhism, 2) the relationship between Buddhism and indigenous reli-
gious practices, and 3) the role of Prince Shōtoku in the dissemination of Buddhism in Japan.
Accounts of early Japanese Buddhist practices and their patronage by powerful aristocratic
families—most notably the Soga—include the fact that the first Asuka period monastics were
three young women related to the Soga and other families.^58 Ōsumi Kazuo discusses the question
of why the first Japanese Buddhist renunciants were women if Japanese Buddhism viewed women
negatively, as had been the case in other Buddhist cultural contexts. According to Ōsumi, the
answer is found in relation to prior Japanese religious practices and ideas: “In indigenous, pre-
Buddhist religious practices, those who served the native deities, the mediums who conveyed the
words of the gods to the Japanese people and acted as intermediaries to convey their wishes to the
gods, were mostly women.” Thus, he concludes that women were the obvious choice as the first
Buddhist practitioners in Japan.^59
The second issue concerns the status of the religious tradition referred to as Shintō. The court
debate over whether to accept a foreign god, the Buddha, or to reject foreign gods in favor of
indigenous gods has often been couched in terms of a struggle between Buddhism and Shintō. To
do so, however, is to read later religious developments into the past. Several scholars, such as
Kuroda Toshio and Yoshida Kazuhiko, have persuasively argued that Shintō did not become an
organized religious tradition until centuries after the events described in the Nihon shoki.^60 On
this basis, it makes more sense to interpret the early Japanese encounter with Buddhism as con-
ceptualized in terms of deities (kami) that were either native (kuni tsu kami) or foreign (adashikuni
no kami), rather than as a dispute between two religious traditions, Shintō and Buddhism. At stake
here was not a particular religion, but rather control over rituals and cultic centers that were
implicated in legitimating and maintaining political power.
The third issue concerns the historicity of Prince Shōtoku (Shōtoku Taishi). Shōtoku was
Queen Suiko’s nephew and chief minister, and was, according to the Nihon shoki and other texts,
a devout and erudite Buddhist who understood the profundity and truth of Buddhist doctrine
long before others in Japan. Shōtoku has been treated historically as both the father of the Jap-
anese nation and the founder of Japanese Buddhism. A cult of Shōtoku Taishi appeared fairly
soon after his reported death in 622 and treated him as having Buddha- or bodhisattva- like salvific
powers. Recent scholarship not only disputes this image of Shōtoku, but questions whether he
was even an historical person. Some scholars argue that Shōtoku, whether real or not, was prim-
arily a constructed image used to legitimate the political ambitions of the aristocratic families that
commissioned the compilation of texts like the Nihon shoki in order to explicitly connect the
Yamato ruling elite to Buddhist rituals and beliefs.^61
By the end of the Asuka period, Buddhist ritual practices and beliefs were under the firm
control of the ruling elites, who were using Buddhism as the ideological centerpiece of a state
under centralized rule, a task that was effectively completed by the subsequent Nara period. In