visibly dying tradition. Genealogical documents of lines of succession were pre-
served in monasteries as precious treasures.
- Eisai was already middle-aged. He had been to China 20 years earlier, at which
time he had merely returned with Tendai texts; on his later trip he studied Zen
and Vinaya as well. Upon his second return to Japan, Eisai founded the first Zen
monasteries, but he continued to be very compromising toward the established
schools. His monasteries at first remained a branch of the Enryaku-ji on Mount
Hiei; they continued to practice ceremonial, sutra reading, and Shingon, even
developing a version called tantric-magical Zen. Such eclecticism was nothing new.
Eisai also brought back with him Neo-Confucianism from a very minor pupil of
Chu Hsi. His visit coincided with a compromising mood in Chinese Zen, the height
of its contact with the Neo-Confucian networks (as we see in Figure 6.4).
- In all, 46 Rinzai lineages were founded in Japan, along with several other Zen
sects; the official Zen history included the lives of 1,600 important monks (Du-
moulin, 1990: 8, 36). These numbers far exceed the upper limits of the attention
space; by the law of small numbers only a few lineages could become eminent. It
was by building on a successful vector of attention that a small set of Rinzai and
Soto lineages produced virtually all the famous masters, whose names appear as
major and secondary figures in Figure 7.2 (as well as most of the names in the key
to that figure which meet the criterion of sufficient historical attention to be listed
as “minor”).
- The tea master Murata Juko, in the late 1400s, created the famous Zen stone
garden of the Daitokuji in Kyoto. This monastery became a center for the tea
ceremony and for the most worldly aspect of Zen. Other outstanding Kyoto temple
rock gardens were built around 1500 by Soami, a samurai and government official
who simultaneously excelled as poet, tea master, and ink painter (Kidder, 1985:
222–236; Kitagawa, 1990: 126; Dumoulin, 1990: 20, 151–153, 248; Varley, 1977).
- “This is the great watershed, a point of demarcation in Japanese cultural history
remarkably similar to that in the West between the arts of the Renaissance and
those of Medieval Christianity from which they emerged” (Rosenfield, 1977: 207).
- The inflation of religious currency was also promoted in the interests of raising
money from the laity. One of the targets of Ikkyu’s scorn was the Zen abbot Doso,
who raised money among the wealthy merchants “by granting certificates of
enlightenment to lay people who attended mass meditation sessions at which koan
were ‘solved’ by esoteric transmission rather than through rigorous self-directed
meditative enquiry” (Collcutt, 1990: 614).
- Collcutt (1990: 604–609, 613). The situation was similar to that which arose in
T’ang and Sung China, when certificates of monastic ordination (as ordinary
monks, not as abbots) were sold in official revenue-raising campaigns; in the later
period these certificates came to circulate for private resale. In the Chinese case,
these certificates became used as a paper currency, and were items of investment
on a speculative market (Ch’en, 1964: 241–244). The Sung dynasty economy was
probably the world’s first breakthrough into full-scale market capitalism, outgrow-
ing the sector of monastic entrepreneurship which had pioneered rationalized
structures of market production and reinvestment. In subsequent dynasties the
Notes to Pages 333–342^ •^975
