insufficient against professional warriors. The old lines of religious-political
power were disrupted; their provision of ritual as well as military resources to
the old factions of the center was now outmoded.
The warriors of the provinces marshaled under the great military clans now
far outweighed both the old court forces and the thinly armed and unruly mobs
of monastic armies. A new counterbalance was arising. The Pure Land organi-
zations were creating a new economic resource that could be mobilized into
truly significant military strength. Popular Buddhism, spreading throughout
the countryside, led to the development of trade links, amassing and reinvesting
capital. Missionaries and traveling evangelists, and the pilgrim routes left in
their wake, built up links of popular communication and material flow.
The crisis of religious-political legitimation comes across most clearly in
Nichiren. Why had the imperial forces lost in 1221 despite the incantations
and prayers of Tendai and Shingon? Nichiren saw the occasion as a crisis of
faith. What path for salvation could take the place of these disproven methods?
The old orders belonged to the corruption of the times. The ecclesiastical
lineage for transmission of office, the center of previous struggles over ordina-
tion halls and masters’ certificates, was radically abrogated by a purely char-
ismatic, spiritual succession. Reveling in newfound social resources, Nichiren
declared that the throne should be subservient to religion.
Nichiren’s was only the most militant of the movements oriented toward
proselytizing the new popular base at this time of breakdown of the old
religious-political alliances. Honen, too, had been stripped of his clerical status
in 1207, and his Pure Land sect banned from the capital, for declaring the
Nembutsu the favored path to rebirth in paradise. His pupil Shinran—like all
the other Pure Land reformers a former Mount Hiei monk—made the sharpest
organizational break of all. His True Pure Land sect (known as Ikko, single-
minded), founded in 1224, broke down the fundamental structure of Buddhist
monasticism. Monks could be married; religion became a practice of lay
congregations rather than world-rejecting virtuosi. In this respect Shinran is
the Martin Luther of Buddhism. In the breakdown of religious authority during
the overthrow of the Kyoto government, Honen was radical enough to be
pushed out of the monastic establishment. In his circle of declericalized follow-
ers Shinran took the further step of declaring that a non-institutionalized
religion, apart from the monasteries, the court, and their rituals, was the true
religious path. The magical Buddhism of ceremonies and chants, aimed at
cleansing pollutions and achieving worldly success, was replaced by an inner
sense of sinfulness, from which only faith could provide salvation. Shinran’s
version of popular Pure Land became a purely ethical form of Buddhism. In
subsequent generations, Shinran’s followers became a network linking the
countryside and the commercialized towns into a church so powerful that its
wealth and its armies made it the equal of any feudal domain.
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 331