state church, used for enrolling the populace under approved religious prac-
tices. The fluidity of monastic careers which had once allowed creative cross-
overs among lineage masters was gone; movement within career hierarchies
was restricted to bureaucratized channels. The choking off of Buddhism was
one reason why the most ambitious intellectuals had shifted by the second
generation of the Tokugawa regime into the Confucian schools and become
expressly anti-Buddhist.
For those whose remained within Buddhism, eminence went to dissident
masters such as Bankei Yotaku who repudiated the koan because of their
artificiality. Written in Chinese, with their subtleties packed into the nuances
of a classical language, the koan cut off Zen students from the masses. Bankei
became a Rinzai evangelist, preaching to mass audiences and proselytizing the
common people to realize the unborn Buddha mind (Dumoulin, 1990: 321–
323). Recapitulating the Soto style, Bankei downplayed the distinctiveness of
enlightenment.^14
Tokugawa Zen underwent a crisis of bureaucratization, arising through the
sheer size of the Buddhist establishment, and enforced by the government. The
Tokugawas thoroughly recentralized the Buddhist orders after their period of
feudal proliferation; every temple was made a branch subordinate to its head-
quarters, and that in turn to government oversight. In 1614 Buddhism was
made the official state religion; every household was required to register as
members of one of the recognized Buddhist sects.^15 Along with responsibility
for vast numbers of purely nominal adherents, this presented Buddhism with
the problem of control by an efficient and increasingly unsympathetic secular
administration. In 1627 controversy arose over a new regulation that abbots
of the elite Rinzai temples should have mastered the entire corpus of 1,700
koan. The leading Zen master of that generation, Takuan Soho, protested that
such mastery was impossible and would vitiate the spirit of Zen enlightenment.
On the other side, Takuan’s condemnation was called for by Suden, govern-
mental supervisor of all Zen establishments (who was the original drafter of
the 1614 religious regulations), and by Hayashi Razan, a former Zen monk
who had gone over to neo-Confucianism and was in the process of establishing
an official Confucian college under the shogun (Dumoulin, 1990: 275; Sansom,
1961: 70–74). The regulation was upheld; Takuan was sent into exile.
High religious status—and along with it an honorable career position
ending as abbot in one’s own right—involved the increasingly competitive
seeking of certificates of formal legitimation. It was this credential inflation
and the accompanying jostling for organizational position which motivated
many of the bureaucratic reforms and restrictions of the Tokugawa period.
The requirement of learning 1,700 koan for the highest abbotships was part
of this atmosphere. So too were reform efforts within Soto in the late 1600s,
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 343