nificant distance from the old site at Kamakura, where the Five Mountains
temples of the Zen hierarchy had formerly held sway. The shogun’s admini-
stration (bakufu) remained feudal in form, but became in substance an abso-
lutist bureaucracy with a high degree of success in pacifying the aristocracy in
a web of legalistic and status formalities. Military forces remained under the
lords of the feudal domains; but loyalty was ensured by requiring the lords’
frequent attendance at the court at Edo, while fragmentation at the lower levels
was cut off by withdrawing all samurai from living on the land and concen-
trating them in the castle towns of the domains. Three great cities under the
bakufu’s direct control became the nodes of economic and cultural life: Edo,
which by 1700 had burgeoned into the world’s largest metropolis at 1 million
inhabitants; Kyoto, where most lords kept up an alternate establishment,
paying pseudo-court to the ceremonial regime, and where the schools prolif-
erated; and Osaka, the former monastery-citadel of the wealthiest Pure Land
movement, now the commercial hub of the Tokugawa economy.The Educational Marketplace and the
Intellectual Desertion of Buddhism
Buddhist intellectual and cultural domination was on its way out, but it shaped
events once more at the time of transition. By 1600, Zen had transformed
Japanese culture by establishing an educational system. The system was two-
tiered. Popular elementary education was provided around the countryside by
Soto temples, and the elite Rinzai monasteries offered advanced training (Du-
moulin, 1990: 261–262, 333–334). The latter diverged into various branches
or tendencies. In some places pure training in koan continued. At the leading
Kyoto temples, aesthetic cultivation over the centuries had blended with secular
training, nurturing painters, garden designers, tea masters, and even actors.
Pupils, masters, and other inhabitants of the monasteries might or might not
be in clerical orders. Another branch of Rinzai education was more strictly
textual and academic. It too had become essentially secular in content.
In the early Tokugawa, the Neo-Confucian contents of academic Zen were
mobilized as a vehicle for revolt. Although some ideological strands of this
movement give the appearance of a shift from one religion to another, from
Buddhism to Confucianism and then to Shinto, such a formulation would be
misleading. There was no shift in official religious ideology; on the contrary,
in 1614 (and more forcefully in 1638) Buddhism was made compulsory for all
households, a regulation not dropped until Meiji times. Confucian ceremonies
were introduced here and there but, outside of a few centers of Confucian mili-
tancy such as the Mito feudal domain, never became widespread. Neo-Confu-
cianism gradually became the favored educational doctrine of the bakufu, but
348 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths