religious or otherwise. In what follows I shall be concerned to show why
surrounding conditions did not stir up another wave of intellectual creativity
at that time; or, more precisely, why creative energy built up in gentry aesthetics
but not in abstract philosophy.Japan as Transformer of Chinese Buddhism
The Japanese state arose around 600 c.e. as an imitation of T’ang dynasty
centralized administration.^2 But no status group of Confucian literati appeared.
Government became controlled by a web of marriage politics manipulated by
regents who married their daughters to emperors, who were themselves stifled
by ceremony and encouraged to abdicate in favor of child figureheads. Shadow
rule dispersed authority as sexual politics multiplied claimants to the throne.
Further layers of shadow rule emerged; ex-emperors, sometimes retired to
Buddhist monasteries, exercised “cloistered rule” of behind-the-scenes manipu-
lation. Court factions allied with provincial warrior clans whose fighting
brought the Heian rule to an end after 1165. In the following period of feudal
usurpation, families of regents as well as ex-shoguns and ex-emperors manipu-
lated layers of front-stage officeholders from behind the ceremonial screen.
The Buddhist monasteries became military powers, whose lower-ranking
temple workers became shock troops, intervening in succession and property
disputes, at first between rival monasteries, then from 1100 on in the political
disputes of the capital. The centralized tax system was undermined, beginning
as early as the 800s, as private estates were withdrawn from state land-
ownership. At first favored monasteries, along with self-interested court fami-
lies, acquired the privilege of private property and fiscal immunity; when these
advantages eventually were acquired by the provincial aristocracy, centralized
government collapsed into feudalism.
One consequence of shadow rule was to preserve Shinto, despite its archaic
character as a plurality of animistic cults lacking central organizational struc-
ture. Originally the most important of the Shinto deities symbolized the leading
clans; clan chiefs had been simultaneously (even primarily) priests in charge of
the ritual. After the emergence of Chinese-style central government and of the
wealthy and literate Buddhist monasteries, one might have expected Shinto to
fade to the level of local folk religion; Shinto managed to preserve itself on the
national scene down to the 1300s only by being taken under the organizational
and ideological auspices of Buddhism. Shinto remained politically alive because
shadow rule focused attention on the imperial line almost exclusively in its
ceremonial and symbolic character. Without the substance of power, the em-
perors were defined by their religious ancestry; the old clan chief–priest role
was brought again to the fore. Given the parcelization of power, the imperial
326 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths