Religion in medieval Japaninstruction in the teachings of other schools, which marked them off from the more common
historical practice of study of multiple schools (shoshū kengaku) mentioned earlier. Their self-
sufficiency was also often accompanied by self- governance in the form of leagues (ikki), which
seems to have contributed further to their sectarian tendencies. These groups, which thus identi-
fied themselves organizationally and doctrinally as distinct “schools” (shū), are thus seen as having
constituted the seminal beginning of what would later be the modern sects of Japanese
Buddhism.^71
As noted above, Kami- Buddha combinatory discourse was common in the traditional Ken-
mitsu Buddhist complexes and, apparently, throughout medieval Japanese religion. Here, recent
research has taken note of a trend to interpret kami and kami- related ritual outside the Buddhist
cosmological paradigms. In certain “Shintō” lineages and in Tendai honji- suijaku theory of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, kami came to be prioritized over Buddhist divinities. Yoshida
Kanetomo (1435–1511), who developed the first sustained argument that promoted non-
Buddhist kami as the highest sources of sacrality, seems to have drawn upon this template in order
to create his cosmology for the Yoshida lineage of Shintō.^72
In this way, some Shintō lineages became distinct and identifiable over the course of the late
medieval era, features that would still remain rare until the great institutional changes of the
Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, which assigned novel distinctions between Shintō and Bud-
dhism culminating in their separation as religions in the modern era. Meanwhile, scholars have
increasingly undertaken study of the broader development of the semi- marginal religious groups
noted above such as the holy ones and mountain ascetics. Ōta Naoyuki has offered an extensive
analysis of the development of the fundraising- monk (kanjin- sō) groups over the course of the
medieval and late medieval eras, drawing attention to research on the role of the meditation-
precepts monks (zenritsu- sō) noted earlier, who were seen by many in Japanese society as pure
practitioners and hence capable of undertaking practices such as fundraising and funerary prac-
tices; by the late medieval era, the fundraisers were no longer limited to such monks but took
varied forms and were typically not officially recognized as official clerics in temples although
they meanwhile often came to have greater influence in the temple- shrine complexes. Scholars
now understand that the “Kōya holy ones” (Kōya hijiri) included a distinct organization on
Mount Kōya but also varied groups and individuals who seem to have traveled throughout the
Kansai region; having originally been associated with fundraising and Kōya burial practices,
these figures were sometimes ambulatory entertainers or itinerant peddlers carrying wares yet
still retained the name of holy ones and hence retained religious associations for many who saw
them.^73
The challenge for scholars now is to understand how this changing institutional situation in
the temple- shrine complexes, the appearance of Shintō lineages, the increasing prominence of
the “new” schools of Japanese Buddhism, and the broad array of itinerant figures on the land-
scape, when considered together with the breakdown of central authority and the introduction
of utterly novel Christian ideas, influenced the appearance and consolidation of new religious
authority and practice in the Tokugawa period.
Notes
1 Jason Ānanda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan.
2 See, for example, his Nihon jōdokyō seiritsushi no kenkyū, especially in the preface, 5–8.
3 We will revisit Kuroda and Taira in the next section, though we should note here Taira’s critique of
Inoue in Nihon chūsei no shakai to bukkyō, 44–63. See also English- language studies: William M. Bodiford,
“The Medieval Period: Eleventh to Sixteenth Centuries,” and William E. Deal and Brian Ruppert, A
Cultural History of Japanese Buddhism.