Chapter 6. Imperial China and Early Japan. History 2

Transcription

1 History 2 Chapter 6 Imperial China and Early Japan When Xuanzang returned to China in 644, he had covered over 10,000 miles (16,000 km). The Gaochang kingdom had fallen to the armies of the Tang dynasty, and Emperor Taizong welcomed Xuanzang enthusiastically. He sought both Xuanzang s skills as a translator and the valuable information he brought about distant lands. Historians of India and Central Asia are particularly grateful for Xuanzang s detailed accounts of his trip, which supplement sparse indigenous sources. After he returned, Xuanzang translated over seventy Buddhist texts, many still read today because of their accuracy. The overland routes through Central Asia that Xuanzang took to India and the sea routes around Southeast Asia taken by others are known today as the Silk Routes. These routes were conduits not just for pilgrims like Xuanzang but also for merchants plying their goods, soldiers dispatched to fight in distant lands, and refugees fleeing dangerous areas for safety. Their tales of powerful rulers in India and China inspired chieftains in border areas to introduce new writing systems, law codes, ways of recruiting government officials, and taxation systems, often modifying them to suit their own societies. Some, like the Gaochang king and the rulers of Korea, Japan, and Tibet, patronized Buddhism and adopted Tang policies. Others, particularly in South and Southeast Asia, emulated South Asian monarchs and built temples to deities such as Shiva (SHIH-vah) and Vishnu (VISH-new), the most important deities in the emerging belief system of Hinduism (see Topic 2A). The individual decisions of these rulers resulted in the religious reorientation of the region. In 100 C.E., a disunited India was predominantly Buddhist, while the unified China of the Han dynasty embraced Legalist, Confucian, and Daoist beliefs. By 1000 C.E., the various kingdoms of India and Southeast Asia had become largely Hindu, while China, Japan, Korea, and Tibet had become Buddhist. This religious shift did not occur because a ruler of an intact empire, such as Constantine in the West, recognized a single religion. It was the result of many decisions taken by multiple rulers in different places over the course of centuries. 1

2 1. Buddhism and the Revival of Empire in China, With the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 C.E., China broke up into different regions, each governed by local military leaders. When the first Buddhist missionaries from the Kushan empire arrived in China during the first and second centuries C.E., they faced great difficulties in spreading their religion. Buddhist teachings urged potential converts to abandon family obligations and adopt a celibate lifestyle, yet Confucian China was one of the most family-oriented societies in the world. The chakravartin ideal of the universal Buddhist ruler, though, appealed to leaders of regions no longer united under the Han dynasty. During the Sui dynasty, which reunited China, and its long-lived successor, the Tang dynasty, Chinese emperors introduced important additions to the Qin/Han blueprint for empire, additions that remained integral to Chinese governance until the end of dynastic rule in the early 1900s. Buddhism in China, The first Chinese who worshiped the Buddha did so because they thought him capable of miracles; some sources report that his image shone brightly and could fly through the air. The earliest Chinese document to mention Buddhism, from 65 C.E., tells of a prince worshiping the Buddha alongside the Daoist deity Laozi indicating that the Chinese initially thought the Buddha was a Daoist deity. After the Han dynasty ended in 220 C.E., no other regional dynasty succeeded in uniting the empire until 589. Historians call this long period of disunity the Six Dynasties ( C.E.). During this time, Buddhist miracle workers began to win the first converts. Historians of Buddhism treat these miracle accounts in the same way as historians of Christianity do biblical accounts. Non-believers may be skeptical that the events occurred as described, but people at the time found (and modern devotees continue to find) these tales compelling, and they are crucial to our understanding of how these religions gained their first adherents. One of the most effective early missionaries was a Central Asian man named Fotudeng (d. 349), who claimed that the Buddha had given him the ability to bring rain, cure the sick, and foresee the future. In 310, Fotudeng managed to convert a local ruler named Shi Le ( ). Shi Le asked Fotudeng to perform a miracle to demonstrate the power of Buddhism. A later biography explains what happened: Thereupon he took his begging bowl, filled it with water, burned incense, and said a spell over it. In a moment there sprang up blue lotus flowers whose brightness 2

3 and color dazzled the eyes. A Buddhist symbol, the lotus is a beautiful flower that grows from a root coming out of a dirty lake bottom; similarly, Fotudeng explained, human beings could free their minds from the impediments of worldly living and attain enlightenment. As usual with miracle tales, we have no way of knowing what actually happened, but Fotudeng s miracle so impressed Shi Le that he granted the Buddhists tax-free land so they could build monasteries in north China. The son of a Xiongnu (SHEE-awng-new) chieftain, Shi Le could never become a good Confucian-style ruler because he spoke but could not read or write Chinese. Buddhism appealed to him precisely because it offered an alternative to Confucianism. He could aspire to be a chakravartin ruler. Fotudeng tried to persuade ordinary Chinese to join the new monasteries and nunneries, but most people were extremely reluctant to take vows of celibacy. If they did not have children, future generations would not be able to perform ancestor worship for them. A Buddhist book written in the early sixth century, The Lives of the Nuns, portrays the dilemma of would-be converts. When one young woman told her father that she did not want to marry, he replied, You ought to marry. How can you be like this? She explained, I want to free all living beings from suffering. How much more, then, do I want to free my two parents! But her father was not persuaded by her promise that she could free him from the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. When Fotudeng met the woman s father, he promised: If you consent to her plan [to become a nun], she indeed shall raise her family to glory and bring you blessings and honor. Deeply impressed, the father agreed to let her enter a nunnery. Many families made a compromise; they allowed one child to join the Buddhist order and transfer merit to the other children, who married and had children. Buddhists continued to win converts during the fifth and sixth centuries. They gained support because Buddhist teachings offered more hope about the afterlife than did Confucian and Daoist teachings. The original Indian belief in the transmigration of souls as expressed in the Upanishads (oo-pahn-ih-shahdz) presumed that someone s soul in this life stayed intact and could be reborn in a different body. But the Buddhists propounded the no-self doctrine, which taught that there is no such thing as a fixed self. Each person is a constantly shifting group of five aggregates form, feelings, perceptions, karmic constituents, and consciousness that change from one second to the next. 3

4 Accordingly, there is no self that can be reborn in the next life. This idea proved extremely difficult for people to grasp and was much debated as a result. Gradually, Chinese Buddhists abandoned the strict no-self doctrine and began to describe a series of hells, much like the indigenous Chinese concept of the underground prison, where people went when they died. By the year 600, Buddhism was firmly implanted in the Chinese countryside. A history of Buddhism written in that year explained that three types of monasteries existed. In the largest 47 monasteries, completely financed by the central government, educated monks conducted regular Buddhist rituals on behalf of the emperor and his immediate family. In the second tier were 839 monasteries that depended on powerful families for support. The final category included over 30,000 smaller shrines that dotted the Chinese countryside. Dependent on local people for contributions, the monks who worked in these shrines were often uneducated. The number of monks never exceeded more than 1 percent of China s total population, which was about 50 million in China Reunified, After more than three hundred years of disunity, the founder of the Sui dynasty reunified China in 589. Then, in less than thirty years, the Tang dynasty succeeded the Sui. The Sui and Tang emperors embraced the chakravartin ideal, for they hoped Buddhism would help to bind their many subjects together. The Tang emperors ruled more territory than any dynasty until the mid-eighteenth century, and Chinese openness to the influences of Central Asia made Tang art and music particularly beautiful. Consciously modeling himself on the great chakravartin ruler Ashoka, whose support for the Buddhist order was well known in China, the Sui founder gave money for the construction of monasteries all over China. He also built a new capital at Chang an, the former capital of the Han dynasty, with a gridded street plan. The city housed 120 new Buddhist monasteries. In 604, when the Sui founder died, his son succeeded him and led his armies on a disastrous campaign in Korea. He was soon overthrown by one of his generals, who went on to found the Tang dynasty. After only eight years of rule, in 626, the Tang founder s son, Emperor Taizong, overthrew his father in a bloody coup in which he killed one brother and ordered an officer to kill another. 4

5 In 645, when Xuanzang wrote asking permission to return, the emperor s brilliant military leadership had succeeded in extending Tang China s borders deep into Central Asia. Taizong was able to fulfill the chakravartin ideal by making generous donations of money and land to Buddhist monasteries and by supporting famous monks like Xuanzang. One of Taizong s greatest accomplishments was a comprehensive law code, the Tang Code, that was designed to help local magistrates govern and adjudicate disputes, a major part of their job. It taught them, for example, how to distinguish between manslaughter and murder and specified the punishments for each. Tang dynasty governance continued many Han dynasty innovations, particularly respect for Confucian ideals coupled with Legalist punishments and regulations. The Tang Code also laid out the equal-field system, which was the basis of the Tang dynasty tax system. Under the provisions of the equal-field system, the government conducted a census of all inhabitants and drew up registers listing each household and its members every three years. Dividing households into nine ranks on the basis of wealth, it allocated to each householder a certain amount of land. It also fixed the tax obligations of each individual. Historians disagree about whether the equal-field system took effect throughout all of the empire, but they concur that Tang dynasty officials had an unprecedented degree of control over their 60 million subjects. Emperor Taizong made Confucianism the basis of the educational system. The Tang set an important precedent by reserving the highest 5 percent of posts in the government for those who passed a written examination on the Confucian classics. Taizong thus combined the chakravartin ideal with Confucian policies to create a new model of rulership for East Asia. One Tang emperor extended the chakravartin ideal to specific government measures: Emperor Wu (r ), the only woman to rule China as emperor in her own right. Emperor Wu founded a new dynasty, the Zhou, that supplanted the Tang from 690 to 705. The chakravartin ideal appealed to Emperor Wu because an obscure Buddhist text, The Great Cloud Sutra, prophesied that a kingdom ruled by a woman would be transformed into a Buddhist paradise. (The word sutra means the words of the Buddha recorded in written form.) Emperor Wu ordered the construction of Buddhist monasteries in each part of China so that The Great Cloud Sutra could be 5

6 read aloud. She issued edicts forbidding the slaughter of animals or the eating of fish, both violations of Greater Vehicle teachings, and in 693 she officially proclaimed herself a chakravartin ruler. In 705 she was overthrown in a palace coup, and the Tang dynasty was restored. Documents and portrayals of the time do not indicate that Emperor Wu was particularly aware of being female. Like the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, Emperor Wu portrayed herself as a legitimate dynastic ruler. The Long Decline of the Tang Dynasty, Historians today divide the Tang dynasty into two halves: and In the first half, the Tang emperors ruled with great success. They enjoyed extensive military victories in Central Asia, unprecedented control over their subjects through the equal-field system, and great internal stability. The first signs of decline came in the early 700s, when tax officials reported insufficient revenues from the equal-field system. Then in 751 a Tang army deep in Central Asia met defeat by an army sent by the Abbasid caliph, ruler of much of the Islamic world. This defeat marked the end of Tang expansion into Central Asia. In the capital, however, all officials were transfixed by the conflict between the emperor and his leading general, who was rumored to be having an affair with the emperor s favorite consort, a court beauty named Precious Consort Yang. In 755 General An Lushan led a mutiny of the army against the emperor. The Tang dynasty suppressed the rebellion in 763, but it never regained full control of the provinces. The equal-field system collapsed, and the dynasty had to institute new taxes that produced much less revenue. In 841, a new emperor, Emperor Huichang, came to the throne. Thinking that he would increase revenues if he could collect taxes from the 300,000 tax-exempt monks and nuns, in 845 he ordered the closure of almost all Buddhist monasteries except for a few large monasteries in major cities. Although severe, Huichang s decrees had few lasting effects. The eighth and ninth centuries saw the discovery by faithful Buddhists of a new technology that altered the course of world history. In China, devout Buddhists paid monks to copy memorized texts to generate merit for themselves and their families. Sometime in the eighth century, believers realized that they could make multiple copies of a prayer or picture of a deity if they used woodblock printing. 6

7 At first Buddhists printed multiple copies of single sheets; later they used glue to connect the pages into a long book. The world s earliest surviving printed book, from 868, is a Buddhist text, The Diamond Sutra. After 755, no Tang emperor managed to solve the problem of dwindling revenues. In 907, when a rebel deposed the last Tang emperor, who had been held prisoner since 885, China broke apart into different regional dynasties and was not reunited until 960. The Tang dynasty governed by combining support for Buddhist clergy and monasteries with strong armies, clear laws, and civil service examinations. In so doing, it established a high standard of rulership for all subsequent Chinese dynasties and all rulers of neighboring kingdoms. The Song Dynasty in China The Tang dynasty ( ), permanently weakened by the An Lushan rebellion of 755, came to an end in 907. China then broke apart until 960, when the founder of the Song dynasty ( ) reunited the empire. The dramatic rise and fall of Chinese dynasties sometimes left the political structure basically unchanged, and this happened during the transition from the Tang dynasty to the Song. The new Song emperor presided over the central government. Almost all government officials were recruited by means of the civil service examinations, making the Song the world s first genuine bureaucracy. Despite the loss of north China to the Jin, Song officials successfully managed the transfer of the central government to a new capital in the south, where they presided over two centuries of unprecedented economic growth. The Growth of Civil Service Examinations The Song dynasty was the only government in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century world to recruit its bureaucrats via merit, as measured by a grueling series of examinations. At the time of the dynasty s founding in 960, civil service examinations had been in use for over a thousand years. But it was only in the Song era that the proportion of the bureaucracy who had passed the civil service examinations exceeded 90 percent. The tests were not always fair, but they were more equitable than the system of appointments by heredity or social position used elsewhere in the world. As a result, the Song era saw a decisive shift from government by aristocracy to government by merit-based bureaucracy. 7

8 During the Song dynasty, exam candidates took two rounds of exams: the first in their home prefecture and the second in the capital. The emperor himself conducted the final stage, the palace examinations, in which those placing highest in the written exams were examined orally. Those placing highest were given prestigious entry-level jobs, because even they had to work their way up the bureaucracy. The government examiners devised different types of exams over the centuries. Successful candidates had to demonstrate mastery of a classic text, compose poetry, or write essays about problems the central government might face, such as inflation or defeating border peoples. Those who wrote the questions were seeking to test a broad range of learning with the expectation that they could select the most educated and so, they believed, the most virtuous, men to become officials. The examinations were not open to everyone. Local officials permitted only young men from well-established families to register for the first round of exams. Unlike farmers sons, who were lucky to attend village school for a year or two, the sons of privileged families had the time and money to study for the exams, often at home with a tutor. Preparation required long years of study. In the eleventh century, successful exam candidates tended to come from a small group of one hundred families living in the capital, Kaifeng. This was the elite into which Li Qingzhao and Zhao Mingcheng were born, and both her father and her father-in-law had received the highest possible degree of advanced scholar. As the population grew and printed books became more widely available, examinations became more competitive. By 1270, in some prefectures in southeast China (particularly in modern Fujian), as many as seven hundred men competed for a single place in the first round of the examinations. The high number of candidates must have increased the literacy rate: some historians believe that one in ten men, but many fewer women, could read. The examinations were outwardly fair, but in fact, the sons and relatives of high officials were eligible to take a less competitive series of examinations, an advantage called the shadow privilege. Since Zhao Mingcheng s father was grand councilor, the highest official in the bureaucracy, his shadow privilege extended to his sons, grandsons, sons-in-law, brothers, cousins, and nephews. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as more men became eligible for the shadow privilege, fewer candidates took the open examinations. 8

9 As competition increased, so did the pressure to cheat. Some candidates paid others to take the exams in their place, copied others answers, or bribed graders. Crafty students also bought commercial aids, like miniature books with tiny characters the size of a fly that they could smuggle into the examination halls. 2. State, Society, and Religion in Korea and Japan, to 1000 In Korea and Japan, rulers introduced Buddhism to their subjects because they hoped to match the accomplishments, particularly the military success, of the Tang dynasty. By the year 1000, both Korea and Japan had joined a larger East Asian cultural sphere in which people read and wrote Chinese characters, studied Confucian teachings in school, emulated the political institutions of the Tang, and even ate with chopsticks. Buddhism and Regional Kingdoms in Korea, to 1000 The northern part of the Korean peninsula, which came under Han rule in 108 B.C.E., remained under Chinese dominance until 313 C.E., when the king of the northern Koguryo (KOH-guh-ree-oh) region overthrew the last Chinese ruler. Because the Chinese presence had been limited to military garrisons, there was little lasting influence. During this time, Korea was divided into different small chiefdoms on the verge of becoming states. The three most important ones were Koguryo (traditionally 37 B.C.E. 668 C.E.), Paekche (traditionally 18 B.C.E. 660 C.E.), and Silla (traditionally 57 B.C.E. 935 C.E.). Historians call these dates traditional because they are based on much later legends, not contemporary evidence. Constantly vying with each other for territory and influence, the three kingdoms adopted Buddhism at different times but for the same reason: their rulers hoped to strengthen their dynasties. Before the adoption of Buddhism, the residents of the Korean peninsula prayed to local deities or nature spirits for good health and good harvests. The vast majority lived in small agricultural villages and grew rice. The ruling families of the Koguryo and Paekche (PECK-jeh) kingdoms adopted Buddhism in the 370s and 380s and welcomed Buddhist missionaries from China. Like Chinese rulers, the Koguryo and Paekche kings combined patronage for Buddhism with support for Confucian education. They established Confucian academies where students could study 9

10 Chinese characters, Confucian classics, the histories, and different philosophical works in Chinese. The circumstances accompanying the adoption of Buddhism by the Silla (SHE-luh) royal house illustrate how divided many Koreans were about the new religion. King Pophung (r ), whose name means King who promoted the Dharma, wanted to patronize Buddhism but feared the opposition of powerful families who had passed laws against it. Sometime between 527 and 529, he persuaded one of his courtiers to build a shrine to the Buddha. However, since such activity was banned, the king had no choice but to order the courtier s beheading. The king and his subject prayed for a miracle. An early history of Korea describes the moment of execution: Down came the sword on the monk s neck, and up flew his head spouting blood as white as milk. The miracle, we are told, silenced the opposition, and Silla became Buddhist. By the middle of the sixth century, all three Korean kingdoms had adopted pro- Buddhist policies, and all sent government officials and monks to different regional kingdoms within China. When the delegations returned, they taught their countrymen what they had learned. With the support of the royal family, Buddhist monasteries were built in major cities and in the countryside, but ordinary people continued to worship the same local deities they had in pre-buddhist times. From 598 into the 640s, the Sui and Tang dynasties led several attacks on the Korean peninsula, all unsuccessful. As a result, in the middle of the seventh century, the same three kingdoms Paekche, Koguryo, and Silla still ruled a divided Korea. In 660, the Silla kingdom allied with the Tang dynasty in hopes of defeating the Paekche and Koguryo kingdoms. The combined Silla-Tang forces defeated first the Paekche and then, in 668, the Koguryo dynasty. By 675, the Silla forces had pushed Tang armies back to the northern edges of the Korean peninsula, and the Silla king ruled a united Korea largely on his own. Silla s rule ushered in a period of stability that lasted for two and a half centuries. Silla kings offered different types of support to Buddhism. Several rulers followed the example of Ashoka and the Sui founder in building pagodas throughout their kingdom. One Chinese Buddhist text that entered Korea offered Buddhist devotees merit if they commissioned sets of tiny identical pagodas that contained small woodblock-printed texts, usually Buddhist charms. The text said that ninety-nine 10

11 such miniatures were the spiritual equivalent of building ninety-nine thousand lifesize pagodas. The Koreans adopted the brand-new Chinese innovation of woodblock printing. The Silla rulers implemented some measures of Tang rule, but not the equal-field system or the Confucian examination system, which were not suited to the stratified Korean society of the seventh and eighth centuries. The bone-rank system classed all Korean families into seven different categories. The true-bone classification was reserved for the highest-born aristocratic families, those eligible to be king. Below them were six other ranks in descending order. No one in the true-bone classification could marry anyone outside that group, and the only way to lose truebone status was to be found guilty of a crime. The rigid stratification of the bonerank system precluded civil service examinations. The Silla kingdom entered a period of decline after 780. From that time on, different branches of the royal family fought each other for control of the throne, yet no one managed to rule for long. The Emergence of Japan Japan is an island chain of four large islands and many smaller ones. Like Korea, Japan had no indigenous writing system, so archaeologists must piece together the island s early history from archaeological materials and later sources like the Chronicle of Japan (Nihon shoki) (knee-hohn SHOW-kee), a year-by-year account written in 720. The royal Yamato (YAH-mah-toe) house, this book claims, was directly descended from the sun-goddess Amaterasu (AH-mah-TAY-rah-soo). The indigenous religion of Japan, called Shinto (SHIN-toe), included the worship of different spirits of trees, streams, and mountains, as well as rulers. People buried their chieftains with goods used in daily life and distinctive clay figurines, called haniwa (HAH-knee-wah), a modern term meaning clay rings. In the fifth and sixth centuries, many Koreans fled the political instability of the disunited peninsula to settle in the relative peace of Japan only 150 miles (240 km) away. These Korean refugees significantly influenced the inhabitants of the islands. The Yamato kings gave titles modeled on the Korean bone-rank system to powerful Japanese clans. They had the most sustained contact with the Paekche kingdom because the two states had been allied against the Silla kingdom. 11

12 Once the Paekche royal house adopted Buddhism, it began to pressure its clients, the Yamato clan, to follow suit. In 538, the Paekche ambassador brought a gift of Buddhist texts and images for the ruler of Japan, but the most powerful Japanese families hesitated to support the new religion. The conflict among supporters and opponents of Buddhism lasted for nearly fifty years, during which the Paekche rulers continued to send Buddhist writings, monks, and nuns. Two miracles played a key role in persuading the Japanese to adopt Buddhism. The first occurred in 584, when Soga no Umako, the leader of the powerful Soga family, which had provided the Yamato clan with many wives, saw a small fragment of bone believed to be from the original Buddha s body. Skeptical of the relic s authenticity, he tried to pulverize it, but his hammer broke, and when he threw the relic into water, it floated up or down on command. As a result, Soga no Umako became an enthusiastic supporter of Buddhism. Three years later, in 587, the thirteen-year-old Soga prince Shotoku ( ) went into battle against the powerful families opposed to Buddhism. Prince Shotoku vowed that, if the Soga clan won the battle, their government would support Buddhism. The pro-buddhist forces won. These miracle tales illustrate the early stages of state formation as the Soga family tried to unify the region through Buddhism. For the next forty years, the Japanese court depended on Korean monks to learn about Buddhism. Only in the 630s were there enough knowledgeable Japanese monks at court to conduct Buddhist rituals correctly without Korean guidance. Chinese forces never threatened Japan as they had Korea, and Japan embarked on an ambitious program to learn from China. Between 600 and 614, it sent four missions to China, and then a further fifteen during the Tang dynasty. A large mission could have as many as five hundred participants, including officials, Buddhist monks, students, and translators. Some Japanese stayed in China for as long as thirty years. In 645, the Fujiwara clan overthrew the Soga family, and the Yamato clan remained the titular rulers of Japan. The Fujiwara continued to introduce Chinese institutions, particularly those laid out in the Tang Code like the equal-field system. However, they modified the original Chinese rules so that members of powerful families received more land than they would have in China. The Fujiwara rulers sponsored Buddhist ceremonies on behalf of the state and the royal family at state-financed monasteries. The Fujiwara clan built their first Chinese-style capital at Fujiwara and the second at Nara in 710, which marked the 12

13 beginning of the Nara period ( ). Both were modeled on the gridded street plan of Chang an. In 794, the start of the Heian (HEY-on) period ( ), the Fujiwara shifted their capital to Kyoto, where it remained for nearly one thousand years. Gradually the Fujiwara lessened their efforts to learn from the Chinese. The final official delegation went to China in 838. Because Japanese, like Korean, was in a different language family, Chinese characters did not capture the full meaning of Japanese. In the ninth century, the Japanese developed an alphabet, called kana (KAH-nah), that allowed them to write Japanese words as they were pronounced. A Japanese woman named Murasaki Shikibu (MOO-rah-sock-ee SHE-key-boo) used only kana to write one of the world s most important works of literature, The Tale of Genji, in Some have called it the world s first novel. The book relates the experiences of a young prince as he grows up in the court. Lady Murasaki spent her entire life at court, and her novel reflects the complex system of etiquette that had developed among the Japanese aristocracy. For example, lovers choose sheets of paper from multiple shades, each with its own significance, before writing notes to each other. While the highest members of Japan s aristocracy could read and write men using both Chinese characters and kana and women more often only kana the vast majority of their countrymen remained illiterate. The Decline of the Heian Court Gradually the Fujiwara nobles began to entrust responsibility for local government, policing, and tax collection to their warriors, known as samurai, literally one who serves. Though often of humble origins, a small number of warriors had achieved wealth and power by the late 1000s. By the middle 1100s the nobility had lost control, and civil war between rival warrior clans engulfed the capital. Military clans acquired increasing importance during the period , and warfare between rival families culminated in the establishment of the Kamakura Shogunate (kah-mah-koo-rah) in eastern Honshu, far from the old religious and political center at Kyoto. The standing of the Fujiwara family fell as nobles and the emperor hurried to accommodate the new warlords. The Tale of the Heike, an anonymously composed thirteenth-century epic account of the clan war, reflects a Buddhist appreciation of the impermanence of worldly things, a view that became common among the new warrior class. This class eventually absorbed some of the 13

14 Fujiwara aristocratic values, but the monopoly of power by a nonmilitary civil elite had come to an end. By 1000, Japan had become part of the East Asian cultural realm. Although its rulers were predominantly Buddhist, they supported Confucian education and used the Tang Code as a model of governance. The Fujiwara family modified some Chinese institutions, like the equal-field system, to better suit Japanese society. From Aristocratic to Feudal Japan Although the Japanese emperors had earlier looked to China as a model, in 900 certain warrior clans gradually gained power and forced the emperor to retire to Kyoto, abandon Chinese-style government, and remain as a figurehead. In 1185, the Minamoto (ME-nah-MOE-toe) clan defeated its rivals and established a new capital at Kamakura, a city just outside modern Tokyo. During the Kamakura period ( ), political power rested in the hands of the shogun, or general, who claimed to govern on behalf of the emperor and appointed members of powerful clans to office. The shogun distributed land and privileges to his followers. In return they paid him tribute and supplied him with soldiers. This stable, but decentralized, system depended on balancing the power of regional warlords. Lords in the north and east of Japan s main island were remote from those in the south and west. Between 1333 and 1338 the emperor Go-Daigo broke the centuries-old tradition of imperial seclusion and aloofness from government and tried to reclaim power from the shoguns. This ignited a civil war that destroyed the Kamakura system. In 1338 the Ashikaga Shogunate (ah-shee-kah-gah) took control at the imperial center of Kyoto. Provincial warlords enjoyed renewed independence. Around their imposing castles, they sponsored the development of market towns, religious institutions, and schools. The application of technologies imported in earlier periods, including water wheels, improved plows, and Champa rice, increased agricultural productivity. Growing wealth and relative peace stimulated artistic creativity, mostly reflecting Zen Buddhist beliefs held by the warrior elite. In the simple elegance of architecture and gardens, in the ritual of the tea ceremony, and in the eerie, stylized performances of the Noh theater and the contemplative landscapes of artists, the aesthetic code of Zen became established in the Ashikaga era. 14

15 Despite the technological advancement, artistic productivity, and rapid urbanization of this period, competition among warlords and their followers led to regional wars. By the later 1400s these conflicts resulted in the near destruction of the warlords. The great Onin War in 1477 left Kyoto devastated and the Ashikaga Shogunate a central government in name only. Ambitious but low-ranking warriors, some with links to trade with the continent, began to scramble for control of the provinces. Japan entered its most feudal, de-centralized period that would last until a new group of powerful warlords emerged to unify the country at the end of the 16th century. 15