their accession, it is apparent that a great deal of wealth was being extracted
from the monastic economy by these officials. The shogun began to rake off
fees from certificates of appointment, and in the 1400s was inflating the
turnover to maximize income from the monastic sector.^13 The business atmos-
phere of these monasteries was so intense that the iconoclastic Zen master
Ikkyu described the monks as more like merchants than Buddhist priests.
The material success of Japanese Buddhism and its “corruption” were part
of the same process. Spiritual careers blended with careerism in the pursuit of
power and status, and of the material wealth which concentrated in the great
monasteries to a greater extent than in lay society. Even the monks who were
most inwardly oriented toward pure religious experience were caught up in an
organizational dynamic which required them to compete for widening rewards
in terms of inflationary criteria of advancement. Enlightenment was becoming
structured by an expanding marketplace.
Soto, whose niche was the small-scale rural monastery catering to the needs
of the common people, abjured koan and emphasized the purity of meditation,
although rigorous practice faded into ritual and scholasticism. Rinzai in con-
trast made koan the very center of practice. In its elite monasteries, where lay
aesthetes merged with religious virtuosi, koan practice in effect became a
literary practice, based on the texts of the koan collections which became
prominent in Japan in the mid-1200s and 1300s (Dumoulin, 1988: 248–251;
1990: 30–31, 47). The koan and their commentaries, written in elegant and
paradoxical form so as to constitute meta-koan in their own right, were very
close to poetry (if differing in the formal rules governing number of syllables
and the like). By the generation of Gido Shushin, a pupil of Muso Soseki and
adviser to the Ashikaga shoguns, the koan form was being assimilated to the
composition of secular poetry.
Conflict over the place of koan went along with the changing external
fortunes of Zen. During the Sengoku period (1467–1580), the “Country at
War” when central political authority had collapsed, the abbots of Buddhist
monasteries were literally independent feudal lords, and the armies and huge
financial resources of the greatest Pure Land orders held the military balance
of power. The worldly power of Buddhism tended to delegitimate it spiritually;
and the military lords who finally reimposed secular control by a quasi-cen-
tralized state, from Oda Nobunaga to the Tokugawas, took steps to crush the
monasteries’ power and confiscate their economic base. Zen, which as a
conservative elite had stayed remote from the Pure Land radicals, remained in
relatively good graces politically; but it too was subjected to increasing gov-
ernment regulation. It was reduced in effect to an administrative branch of the
342 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths