. dharma prince shukaku 795
the period, such as the Heike monogatari, may have had a role in ear-
lier scholars’ apparent disinterest, which seems to have been based on
a series of assumptions influenced by modern presuppositions about
historical prominence and influence as well as institutional history.
However, a careful consideration of Shukaku’s activities, his political
ascendancy and that of his disciple Dōhō , his authorship and
editing of a vast corpus of sacred works, his creation of the royal
Go-ryū ritual lineage, and the influence of his corpus on esoteric Bud-
dhists throughout Japan, make it clear that Shukaku and his culture of
sacred works had a deep and lasting impact on Shingon lineages.
Indeed, not until the 1990s did Shukaku gain increased prominence
in academic circles. By the mid-1990s Abe Yasurō, Yamazaki Makoto,
and their research group, which had completed the first stages of
research at Ninnaji, began to publish monumental quantities of Shu-
kaku’s work and to analyze its contents in depth (Ninnaji konbyōshi
kozōshi Kenkyūkai, ed. 1995; Abe and Yamasaki 1998).
The focus on Shukaku was first related to greater recognition of
the preeminence of the dharma princes (hosshinnō) during the early
medieval era. As Abe Yasurō has noted, the position of dharma prince
was the highest rank within the exo-esoteric Buddhist establishment
(kenmitsu Bukkyō) that dominated the era. Sons of the cloistered sov-
ereign (in) were placed during childhood by their fathers into major
monasteries, where they took the precepts, entered the monastic com-
munity, inherited one of the halls (inge ) within the premises, and
took control of the abbacy of the entire complex.
Moreover, insofar as the cloistered sovereign Shirakawa (r. 1072–
1086) created the system at Ninnaji, site of the oldest royal cloister
(monzeki) O’muro at the end of the eleventh century, the dharma
princes there occupied a unique position within Japanese Buddhism.
In fact, the third of the dharma princes, Kakushō (1129–1169), son of
the cloistered sovereign Toba (r. 1107–1123), was granted the Sōgō
monastic administration by his father. The position of the dharma
prince of O’muro would later be referred to as the “universal dharma
administrator” (sōhōmu ), and thus constituted the highest sta-
tus within the Buddhist community at the time (Abe Yasurō 1998,
118–19).^2
(^2) Such status was specific to the court status system of the era, and did not neces-
sarily translate into direct domination of Japanese Buddhists more generally.