sects do not waste any opportunities to criticize the established temples for
their secular influence. Regardless of such interpretive discrepancies, the
most serious flaw of these accounts is their tendency to neglect the diverse
character of the fighting clerics, who are consistently portrayed as a unified
group of rebellious, yet well-dressed and easily identifiable, monk-warriors
from the lower ranks. In reality, armed religious forces came from various
sectors of society, bound together by the protective umbrella of important
Buddhist monasteries.
At the very top, there were sons of high- and mid-ranking aristocrats
who organized and headed the temple’s armed followers in their capacity
as aristocratic clerics. Although some of them were skilled warriors, they
were above all educated nobles in monk robes, whose skills, training, and
status made them indispensable in the management of private estates and
the internal affairs of their temple. On occasion, these monk-leaders even
took control of an entire monastery, as was the case with Shinjitsu
(1086–?), who earned a reputation as “the number one evil military monk
in Japan” for his attempts to increase his temple’s influence in Nara and for
his involvement in capital affairs in the mid-twelfth century. By the four-
teenth century, imperial princes sought to become head abbots and take
control of the forces and landed assets of wealthy monasteries in order to
further the imperial cause against the increasingly influential warrior aris-
tocracy. The role of these noble monk-commanders must therefore not be
overlooked, for it was their ambitions and factional affiliations that made
armed forces a permanent and important presence at the highest-ranking
temples in the capital region of premodern Japan.
The bulk of the forces fighting in the name of Buddha came from var-
ious segments of the common population. Some of them were lower-rank-
ing monks, as indicated by the contemporary terms used to refer to them—
akusô(evil monks), daishu (literally, “clergy”—usually taken to represent
the larger entity of people associated with a temple), and shuto(clergy)—
which were used in opposition to the more educated and properly ordained
ranking monks (often referred to as sangô;the monastic deans), but there
were also acolytes and other followers under the protection of affiliated
Shintô shrines. For example, we find two types of armed servants within
the monastic complex of Kôfukuji in Nara. In the northern part of Ya-
mato—the temple’s home province—the armed followers belonged to the
community of worker-monks, who were working as local estate adminis-
trators. In the south, the armed followers were local strongmen, referred to
as “shrine servants” (jinnin), who closely resembled the local warrior in ap-
pearance, as they did not wear monk robes.
The armed forces of religious institutions thus had much in common
with the emerging warrior class—indeed, many fighting monks are hard to
Warrior Monks, Japanese/Sôhei 661