Still, whether or not they can easily be applied to the
contemporary scene, the two categories can be useful
in revealing tensions, present throughout the history of
Japanese Buddhism, between tradition and innovation,
orthodoxy and heterodoxy, elite establishment and
popular practice.
Early modern developments
Many of the distinctive characteristics of the contem-
porary Japanese Buddhist institution have their ori-
gins in government policies of the Meiji period
(1868–1912) and the long Edo (or Tokugawa) period
(1600–1868) that preceded it. In the years immedi-
ately following the revolution that overthrew the
Tokugawa administration, the new Meiji government
sought to establish an officially sanctioned Shintoin
support of imperial rule. It thus drew a sharp, and
historically dubious, distinction between a native
Shintoand the imported Buddhism, and sought in-
stitutionally to separate the two—a policy that had
the practical effect of a brief but severe persecution of
many Buddhist establishments. In the end, the gov-
ernment adopted a policy that at once separated
church and state and reasserted state authority over
the church: On the one hand, it revoked the old Toku-
gawa laws governing the clergy, decriminalizing vio-
lations of the Buddhist precepts and allowing the
clerical marriage that has now become common; on
the other hand, it carried forward the Tokugawa prac-
tice of legal recognition and regulation of Buddhist
organizations, setting the precedent for the pattern of
religious corporations that we see today.
The contemporary pattern of separate denomina-
tions with branch temples serving a local congregation
of member households can be understood as a rem-
nant of the Tokugawa government’s administration of
Buddhism through what are known as the honmatsu
and teraukesystems. The former term refers to the or-
ganization of the Buddhist institutions into a fixed set
of sanctioned denominations, each governed from a
headquarters responsible to the secular authorities.
The latter term refers to the practice of requiring lay
households to register their members at a recognized
local temple. These two systems, developed during the
seventeenth century in order to regulate both the Bud-
dhist institutions and the religious options of the pop-
ulace, had the effect of establishing Buddhism as a
branch of government administration and the local
temples as the registrars of the citizenry.
Such an arrangement assured Buddhism through-
out the Edo period of both government support and
popular patronage; and indeed, though the period is
sometimes regarded as one of Buddhist decline, in
many ways the religion flourished. Not only did many
of the sanctioned denominations thrive as institutions,
but the period also witnessed a marked growth in the
popularity of Buddhist funeral rites and pilgrimage to
Buddhist sacred sites that cut across sectarian divides.
It also saw the persistence of unauthorized Buddhist
communities and the rise of new religious fraternities
outside the sanctioned ecclesiastical establishment.
And it fostered within that establishment the devel-
opment of Buddhist centers of sectarian learning
(shugaku) that generated scholarship on the history,
texts, and doctrines of the various denominations.
The Buddhist sectarian scholarship that developed
during the Edo period and continued into the twenti-
eth century did much to frame the modern under-
standing of the religion. In general, it may be said that
such scholarship sought to create a systematic account
of the history and teachings of each school: to estab-
lish the orthodox tenets (kyogi) of the school, to define
the corpus of its scriptural canon, and to provide a his-
tory of its origins and transmission. In more modern
times, when attempts were made to tell the story of
Japanese Buddhism as a whole, these separate sectar-
ian accounts were often simply brought together in a
collection of loosely related narratives. Indeed, to this
day, the story of Buddhism in Japan is often told pri-
marily through an accounting of the basic doctrines
and founding figures recognized by the major denom-
inations (or their groupings into related traditions).
Because of the emphasis on the founders, the history
of the religion is typically punctuated by the dates of
the origins of the schools, which fall into three distinct
phases, located in the periods of Nara (710–784), Heian
(794–1185), and Kamakura (1185–1333).
The first of these phases covers those schools (tra-
ditionally numbered as six) founded in the years
between the introduction of Buddhism from the main-
land (usually dated 552) and the end of the Nara. The
second is associated with the two schools of Tendai and
Shingon, introduced near the start of the Heian pe-
riod. To the last are assigned the traditions of Zen, Pure
Land, and Nichiren, all of which look back to found-
ing figures in the Kamakura period. To the extent that
these three periods are plotted in a larger historical nar-
rative, it is often one of recurrent spiritual renewal and
decline. Thus, the founding of the Heian schools of
Tendai and Shingon are seen as a reaction by the
founders (SAICHOand KUKAI, respectively) against the
stale scholarship and corrupt politics of the Nara Bud-JAPAN