aristocracy. Rinzai’s organizational basis became the provision of aesthetic high
culture which linked all the rival elites into a unified status group. In 1246
under Enni, Zen acquired its first grand temple, the Tofuku-ji at Kyoto,
designed to compete with the splendor of the cathedrals of the traditional Nara
schools. Its sponsor was a retired official from the once-dominant Fujiwara
family. Around the same time the Kamakura shoguns built a similar string of
great Rinzai temples, beginning with the Kenchoji (1251) and the Engakuji
(1282), with their imposing architecture and spectacular hillside settings. Their
heads were the most prestigeful monks who could be found, including Lan-hsi
(an immigrant disciple from one of the main Chinese masters), and Koho
Kennichi, a son of the ex-emperor. From this lineage, in the early 1300s, came
Muso Soseki, himself an imperial relative, who gathered further connections
with the highly prestigious Chinese lines. Muso went on to found several more
great Zen monasteries at Kyoto, including one in a palace donated by the new
shogun.
Under the Ashikaga shoguns, the great temples of Kyoto and Kamakura
became recognized as the “Five Mountains” (in fact, five in each city), which
presided over a hierarchy of secondary and provincial temples. The Ashikagas
made Rinzai the de facto state religion. Zen temples were built in every
province throughout the country; their revenues were property of the Rinzai
hierarchy, under a civil official who supervised all Zen and Vinaya monasteries.
In actuality, this state minister was drawn from the Zen masters, and in 1379
the office was handed over to monastic administration. Materially, the Rinzai
elite were the apex of Japanese society. The Zen culture that emerged set the
high-status standards of aesthetized lifestyle which have prevailed in Japan ever
since. Muso Soseki designed temples and gardens as symbols of the cosmos,
including the first of the famous Kyoto rock and moss gardens. Flower gardens,
which had been conventional to that time, were displaced by a purified aes-
thetic permeated with the abstract consciousness honed by Zen meditation.
Tea, which began to be cultivated in Japan on temple grounds after seeds were
brought from China by Eisai, was expanded into a cult ceremonial, carried out
in special pavilions in idyllic garden settings. The Noh play was invented in
the context of the increasingly secularized mixture of Zen aesthetics and
aristocratic entertainment. Zen monks established the vogue of painting with
simplified and spontaneous ink strokes; the most famous lineage of painters—
Josetsu, Shubun, and Sesshu—were all priest-artists in the 1400s connected
with one of the Kyoto Five Mountains.^10
In the period from 1300 to 1600, the Rinzai monasteries, with their
libraries and art collections, were the material centers of cultural production
and display. In retrospect, we tend to take for granted that this is simply what
“Japanese culture” is. In fact, the cultural style emerged at this time as a sharp338 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths