there was no longer much autonomy left for internal networks of intellectual
argument and creativity. The content of Buddhism became largely identical
with lay concerns for the fortunes of daily life; Heian society was permeated
with taboos and pollutions manifesting this fusion of religion and society.
The creative eminence of Saicho and Kukai is a blip amid the surrounding
generations, where virtually nothing of intellectual note occurred among the
religious leaders. The only important creativity in these centuries was not in
philosophy or religion at all, but in the most secularized sector: the sophisti-
cated observations on marriage politics and shadow rule in Lady Murasaki’s
Tale of Genji and Sei Shonagon’s Pillowbook. In Figure 7.1 there are no other
names of any sort in that generation (1000–1035), when the court women’s
literary world reigned alone.
When philosophical creativity suddenly came alive, it did so simultaneously
in several branches each of Pure Land and Zen. This was not an emergence of
new religious doctrine. Zen and Amidaism had both existed for many centuries
in China. In Japan, Zen had been part of the Tendai synthesis since at least
the time of Saicho. The Amida salvation cult, with its characteristic ritual of
Nembutsu (chanting the savior’s name), was similarly long-standing. It too had
come in during the early days of Tendai; around the mid-900s Mount Hiei
leaders had traveled among the common people, popularizing communal reci-
tation, founding lay groups, singing and dancing to the accompaniment of
drumming on begging bowls. What was new about the Pure Land orders which
burst on the scene between the time of Honen (who founded the Pure Land
sect, Jodo, in 1175) and Nichiren (who founded the Lotus sect, Hokke, in
1253) was not so much doctrinal as organizational. These new orders, emerg-
ing within the older centers, broke with their lineages, often with unprece-
dented exclusiveness and militancy, and reshaped the social form of Japanese
Buddhism. The same is true of Zen, with a different social base and a different
method of reforming contemporary magical-ritual practice. The rapid upheaval
of Buddhist organization on so many fronts, after centuries of stagnation,
accompanied a deep shift in the surrounding political and economic structure.
The doctrinal ingredients had long been in existence; they were merely put in
a new and purified form, to create distinctive ideologies supporting the new
organizational paths which had now become available.
Population had grown and spread widely beyond the home provinces of
central Honshu; an economic base developed in considerable part through the
organizing activities of Buddhist evangelists, which could support Buddhist
temples beyond the court-centered monasteries near the old capital cities.
Politically, the great monasteries and their troops were tied to the factions of
regents and ex-emperors who struggled over control of Kyoto. Central control
disintegrated as local administrators built up their own forces, and fragments
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 329