. shingon buddhism in the early modern period 1011
Furthermore, a system of regional academies (dangisho ) was
established in the Kantō region to facilitate the training of provincial
clerics. By 1633, there were thirty-four Kogi Shingon academies in
Sagami, Musashi, Izu, and Kōzuke provinces. About half were located
in Sagami (Jiinhonmatsuchō kenkyūkai 1981, 37–58). A similar system
of forty-eight regional academies in the Shingi Shingon school existed
in eastern and northeastern Japan.^2
Based on head-branch temple registers from the late eighteenth cen-
tury, it appears that the Shingi Shingon school, with approximately fif-
teen thousand temples, was larger than the Kogi Shingon school, with
approximately ten thousand temples. While the former was primarily
concentrated in eastern and northeastern Japan, the latter was numeri-
cally strong in the west. However, Kogi Shingon temples outnumbered
Shingi Shingon temples in Sagami, Izu, Suruga, Tōtōmi, and Mino
provinces (Sakamoto Masahito 1979a, 26–31, 42–43). In comparison,
the Shingon Ritsu school was very small; Reiunji in Edo served
as its head temple and it had fewer than fifty branch temples, scat-
tered mostly in the Kantō region. Another small network consisting
of Sennyūji in Yamashiro as head temple and sixteen branch
temples in Yamashiro, Sagami, and Suruga provinces is recorded for
1633 (Jiinhonmatsuchō kenkyūkai 1981, 151–54, 1373–76).^3
Given that scholars of Japanese Buddhism often take sectarian
boundaries very much for granted, the fluidity between the Shingi
Shingon and Kogi Shingon schools is significant. In the early to mid-
seventeenth century, when the head-branch temple system had not
yet been fully established, the distinction between Shingi Shingon
and Kogi Shingon was seen as a doctrinal rather than a lineage-based
(^2) Depending on the Buddhist school, academies were known by various names.
For example, in the Jōdo and Nichiren schools, they were known as danrin (also
). Particularly in the Edo period, these referred to temple complexes that served
to train clerics in sectarian teachings. Most of the existing research on these educa-
tional facilities deals with the Jōdo, Nichiren, and Tendai schools. For an overview of
the development of Jōdo and Nichiren academies, see Sakurai 1977. For the develop-
ment of provincial Shingi Shingon academies, see Sakamoto 1972 and Kushida 1979,
669–704. For more on how this educational system was implemented, see Ambros
- For the functioning of a particular academy in its regional context, see Ambros
(^3) The Shingon Ritsu network may have been slightly larger than this. The Shin-
gon Ritsu school emerged out the Saidaiji community centered around Eison
(1201–1290) as a revival of the ancient Ritsu school, but Saidaiji is absent from the
head-branch temple registers of the Edo period. For more on Eison and the Saidaiji
community, see Groner 2001, Groner 2005, and Quinter 2007.