BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 259old age Ikkyii wrote explicitly erotic poetry to compare his mistress, Lady
Mori-a blind street singer, some forty years his junior-to the Buddha. Later
generations of Zen practitioners revered him, but he left no Dharma heir.
During the fifteenth century, the sophisticated Muromachi aesthetic had
been reduced to a thin veneer over a society that was essentially falling apart.
Bloody power struggles rent the shogunate; famines and epidemics led to peas-
ant uprisings. The ruinous Onin War (1467-78) effectively brought an end to
central control, and provincial warlords began asserting their independence.
Merchants and artisans in the cities and towns formed guilds that centered on
Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in order to defend their interests. Ren-
nyo (1415-99), the Eighth Patriarch of the Jodo-shin-shii sect, organized his
followers into a feudal state that was protected by peasant armies; the other
Pure Land sects and the Nichiren sect soon followed suit, staging peasant re-
volts to assert their interests.
In the sixteenth century, a string of warlords tried to reunify the country,
only to find their path blocked by the armed Buddhist groups. Oda Nobunaga
(1534-82) was especially ruthless in his suppression ofBuddhist institutions.
He burned the monastery at Mount Hiei to the ground, putting its monks to
the sword. He also attacked the Shingon stronghold on Mount Koya and sup-
pressed the Nichiren and Pure Land armies. In one province alone (Echizen)
he slaughtered thirty to forty thousand followers of the Jodo-shin-shii Ikko
(Single-Minded) sect. Rinzai Zen, like Soto, was able to escape his ire largely
because it remained unarmed and also because it had begun to decentralize,
spreading out to the country after many of its main monasteries in Kyoto had
been destroyed during the Onin War. Nobunaga's successor, Toyotomi
Hideyoshi (1536-98), was somewhat less savage in his policies, disarming
rather than killing the peasantry, although he too attacked rebellious monastic
communities, such as the Shingon center in Negoro, and conducted sword
hunts in monasteries throughout the land. National unification finally came
under Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), who moved the capital to Edo, mod-
ern-day Tokyo, and opened a new era in Japanese history.
10.7 Confucianism in Control (1603-1868)
The Tokugawa shogunate was more than just another feudal regime. It was a
military dictatorship with an all-embracing ideology aimed at the total re-
structuring and control of Japanese society. The ideology was founded on
Confucian ideals. The role of the government was to be based not on tran-
scendent principles, but on the order of heaven, which was immanent in the
natural norms implicit in human, social, and political order. Society was to be
divided into rigidly defined classes, and the duty of each citizen was to fulfill
the obligations of his/her class. Religions were allowed to function to the