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Updated: June 19, 2025
It is thus seen that the great uji of Soga was closely related to all the Imperial personages who figured prominently on the stage at this period of Japanese history. The Emperor Yomei was the fourth son of the Emperor Kimmei and a nephew of the o-omi, Umako.
The prince, in his projected struggle against the uji system, needed the assistance of Buddhist disciples in general, and in his effort to reach the throne, needed the assistance of Umako in particular.
At his instance the crown was placed upon the head of his youngest nephew, Sushun. But Sushun entertained no friendship for Umako nor any feeling of gratitude for the latter's action in contriving his succession to the throne.
Necessarily these events sharply accentuated the enmity between the Soga and the Mononobe. Twenty-five years passed, however, without any attempt to restore the worship of the Buddha. Iname, the o-omi of the Soga, died; Okoshi, the o-muraji of the Mononobe, died, and they were succeeded in these high offices by their sons, Umako and Moriya, respectively.
Had Prince Shotoku protested, he would have been guilty of the futility described by a Chinese proverb as "spitting at the sky." Besides, Shotoku and Umako were allies otherwise. The Soga minister, in his struggle with the military party, had needed the assistance of Shotoku, and had secured it by community of allegiance to Buddhism.
The Emperor himself, as well as the o-omi, Umako, were attacked, and now the popular outcry took another tone: men ascribed the plague to the wrath of Buddha. Umako, in turn, pleaded with the Emperor, and was permitted to rebuild the temple and reinstate the nuns, on condition that no efforts were made to proselytize.
That this represented a part only of the o-muraji's property is held by historians, who point to the fact that the o-omi's wife, a younger sister of the o-muraji, incited her husband to destroy Moriya for the sake of getting possession of his wealth. The deaths of Prince Anahobe and Moriya left the Government completely in the hands of Soga no Umako. There was no o-muraji; the o-omi was supreme.
"I did not know there was an Emperor." Many others shared Koma's comparative ignorance when the Soga were in power. At the Emperor Yomei's death, only one person honoured his memory by entering the Buddhist priesthood. When Soga no Umako died, a thousand men received the tonsure.
Men began to adopt the stole; women to take the veil, and people to visit the hills in search of timbers suited for the frames of massive temples. Soga no Umako, the ostensible leader of this great movement, grew more and more arrogant and arbitrary.
Two years later, Shiragi also sent a Buddhist eidolon, and in 584 just sixty-two years after the coming of Shiba Tachito from Liang and thirty-two years after Soga no Iname's attempt to popularize the Indian faith two Japanese high officials returned from Korea, carrying with them a bronze image of Buddha and a stone image of Miroku.* These two images were handed over, at his request, to the o-omi, Umako, who had inherited his father's ideas about Buddhism.
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