United States or Greenland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
So far as concerns the policy of such massacre, it may be remembered that, with less provocation, Nobunaga exterminated the Tendai Buddhists at Hiyei-san. We have every reason to pity the brave men who perished at Shimabara, and to sympathize with their revolt against the atrocious cruelty of their rulers.
Though he wrote in his Legacy, "Let my posterity ever be of the honoured sect of Jodo," he greatly reverenced the high-priest of the Tendai temple, Yeizan, who had been one of his instructors, and obtained for him the highest court-office possible for a Buddhist priest to obtain, as well as the headship of the Tendai sect.
The fame of the tea-house, its excellent fare, and special delicacy of its mountain trout, sugar-jelly and well-flavored rice-cakes, drew hundreds of visitors, especially poetry-parties, and lovers of grand scenery. Just across the river, which was visible from the verandah of the tea-house, stood the lofty firs that surrounded the temple of the Tendai Buddhists.
The principal of the sects now existing in Japan are the Tendai, Shingon Yoko and Ken, all of which, I may observe, are of Chinese origin. Besides these there are the Shin and the Nichiren evolved in Japan and dating from the thirteenth century.
In the first place, it illustrates a fact which may be read between the lines of all Japanese annals, namely, that the Japanese are never blind borrowers from foreign systems: their habit is "to adapt what they borrow so as to fit it to what they possess." In the second place, the Tendai system became the parent of nearly all the great sects subsequently born in Japan.
For this distress neither the Tendai doctrines nor the Shingon conceptions were sufficiently simple to supply a remedy. Something more tangible and less recondite was needed, and it came , in the sequel of twenty-five years' meditation and study, to Genku posthumously called Honen Shonin a priest of the Tendai sect. "Salvation is by faith, but it is a faith ritually expressed.
This system already existed in the case of Enryaku-ji on Hiei-zan in Kyoto, and it was Tengai's ambition that his sect, the Tendai, should possess in Yedo a temple qualified to compete with the great monastery of the Imperial capital. Finally, the Kwanei-ji was intended to guard the "Demon's Gate" of the Bakufu city as the Enryaku-ji guarded the Imperial capital.
The decline of the Muromachi Bakufu's authority encouraged the monks as well as the samurai to become a law to themselves. Incidental references have already been made to this subject, but the religious commotions of the Sengoku period invite special attention. Religious doctrine was not so much concerned in this feud as rivalry. Shinran had been educated in the Tendai tenets at Enryaku-ji.
Looking about him for the ways and means of effecting this centralization, he perceived that one of the very first obstacles to be removed was that created by the power of Buddhism militant, the feudal Buddhism developed under the Hojo regency, and especially represented by the great Shin and Tendai sects.
He is the true keeper of the Sutra." Zitsuzen Ashitsu of the Tendai sect. Everything is as we think it. The world is my idea.... Beyond our faith is naught. Hold the Buddhist to his creed and insist that such logic destroys itself, and he triumphs smilingly, 'Self-destructive! Of course it is. All logic is. That is the centre of my philosophy."