transition within Buddhism. Previously, in the Kamakura period, Buddhism
had not produced significant works in painting, sculpture, or literature; these
arose with the organizational transition in the Muromachi (Yamamura, 1990:
582). The artistic productivity that appeared after 1400 shifted decisively in a
secular direction. Paintings broke free from traditional religious themes to take
up worldly subjects, as well as non-Buddhist “classical mythology” from Con-
fucianism and Taoism.^11
This secularization of the means of cultural production took place in the
transitional generations as priests became mixed with a new semi-laity. In the
process, religion lost its tension with lay practices; the essentials of religion
became redefined as aesthetic. In Kyoto during the 1300s, taking the tonsure
was a means of freeing oneself from court rankings; such tonseisha priests had
no formal ties with temples and continued a secular lifestyle (Varley, 1977:
186–189). These individuals promoted the secularizing aesthetics of the artistic
golden age of the 1400s; by decreasing the gap between laity and clergy, they
helped delegitimate Buddhism in much the same way that the Humanists of
the European Renaissance began a wave of neo-paganism culminating in the
cultural displacement of medieval Catholicism.
The breach in the clergy-lay border opened the gates for the extreme social
fluidity of the Muromachi period. Rinzai schools became open to lay pupils as
well as monks. This is the path toward the secular university, which we have
seen in India at great training centers such as Nalanda, and which we will
follow in the Christian universities of Europe. From the outset Rinzai sojourn-
ers in China had brought back Neo-Confucianism; it was propagated in Japan
not as a separate school but as part of the general literary education at the
Rinzai temples. In the late 1300s the Ashikaga shoguns supported an academy
with thousands of students, many of them laity, taught by a staff of Zen monks
(Kitagawa, 1990: 126). Central to the curriculum were the Chinese classics,
taught in much the same spirit as Latin and Greek within Christian Europe,
as purely cultural accomplishments apart from religious orthodoxy. In this
mode of secularism and scholarly eclecticism, the Neo-Confucian commentar-
ies were kept alive in Japan under Buddhist auspices.
Why then did this proto-“university” structure fail to produce the takeoff
into abstract philosophy that characteristically went along with it elsewhere?
No philosophical creativity came out of these studies; the classics were simply
memorized and used as materials for historical allusions (Dumoulin, 1990:
176). No competitive network emerged among rival centers in philosophy; a
single center dominated, without opposing schools of thought. And focus of
attention was not on an inward orientation to argument among intellectual
specialists but on the aesthetics shared with a leisured upper-class laity. Such
outward orientation of a religious elite toward social standing in a decentral-
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 339