800 brian o. ruppert
works of the Go-ryū collection, Raijo transmitted more than one hun-
dred and twenty fascicles to his disciple, the Ninnaji dharma prince
Yakujo (1255–1305), who copied them in 1285.
The site at which these initiations occurred was the Sasame-yuishin’in
Hall in Kamakura, the family temple of the Hōjō clan,
which offers further evidence of the great interest the shogun’s family
had in Go-ryū teachings and practices. Moreover, the fact that Raijo
was Yakujo’s teacher indicates that by the late Kamakura era non-
royal monks took increasingly active roles even within the high-status
lineage of the Go-ryū, an indication of the increasing fluidity of access
to esoteric ritual knowledge in both spatial and class terms. Soon after,
the abbot Kenna (1261–1338) of another Hōjō-sponsored tem-
ple, Shōmyōji (Kanazawa Bunko), received initiation from Yakujo’s
disciple into the same lineage, and many of the works are extant there
today (Fukushima 1998, 463–69).
At Ninnaji, the Mitsuyō shō collection was transmitted and expanded
throughout medieval and early modern times within the complex, and
disseminated partially to other major Shingon temple complexes such
as Daikakuji. Moreover, nearby Kōzanji , which held a mas-
sive collection of Huayan (Jpn. Kegon) and Shingon materials—thanks
to Myō’e (1173–1232) and his disciples—had close connections
with Ninnaji throughout most of the medieval period. Ninnaji monks
such as Chōi (ca. 1501–1579) withdrew to Kōzanji for a period
after the devastating Ōnin War (1467–1477), thus enabling the Go-ryū
and related collections to be maintained.
In the generations after their return, and at the dawn of the Toku-
gawa shogunate, the situation greatly improved at Ninnaji. There the
well-known monk Kenshō (1597–1678), who worked closely
with the dharma prince Kakujin (1588–1642) to reconstruct the
Ninnaji complex and transmit Ninnaji traditions, developed the final
standard catalogue of the Mitsuyō shō (Nagamura 1998). This was the
culmination of a process following the age-old activity of expanding
upon earlier versions of the Mitsuyō shō—a process in which the sacred
works (shōgyō) of the Go-ryū lineage were freely expanded upon in the
developing traditions of master and disciple that marked the medi-
eval era in esoteric Japanese Buddhism. Rather than a static “canon,”
scripture was worked out in the context of the developing monastic
environs where masters and disciples lived or visited; they often reas-
sembled or revived these works in differing ways and in various locales
in the Japanese isles. This situation would only become significantly
altered with the institutional changes introduced by the shogunate and
imperial governments of the Tokugawa and modern eras.