Japanese History： The Kamakura Period (1192-1333), Pt. 2 (Hōjō Ascendant)

For the first time in their history, Japan's samurai warriors are the undisputed masters of the country. The imperial patriarch is in exile and the aristocracy is in the palm of their hand. But will these bow-slinging ruffians really be able to run a government on a national scale? Well, actually yeah, for a little while here they do a pretty damn good job. Join me today as we take our second dive into Japan's earliest era of samurai rule, the Kamakura period, and watch as the fledgling warrior government really begins to hit its stride. What was the moral code that governed these men? What do we know about their daily lives? And who is this guy who keeps saying the world's going to end if we don't all chant this one specific phrase? All that and more on this lucky 13th episode of Japanese History the Textbook, right here on the Buyuuden Japanese History channel. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Japanese History the Textbook, the series where we make our way chronologically through Japanese history using Japanese language educational sources as our guide. If you want to see the names of the textbooks that I'm using, as well as the supplemental information sources that I bring in to flesh out the framework the textbooks provide, you can find that down in the video description below. The only announcement that I have today is one I've been hinting at for a little while now, which is that I've set up an online t-shirt shop on Spring. If you're interested in getting your hands on some Japanese history themed merch and supporting the channel financially, definitely don't forget to check that out after you've finished watching the video. I've got some goofy designs and some serious ones, so hopefully there's a little something for everyone. Anyway, I know you didn't come here to hear about shirts, so with that said, let's go ahead and move right along into the main event. When we last left the warriors of the Kamakura Bakufu, they had just succeeded in defeating Japan's retired emperor himself in a struggle for their continued existence as an organization. This struggle, known as the Jōkyū War, is often overlooked in the shadow of the longer and more grandiose Genpei War which immediately preceded it, but in terms of its historical significance for Japan's warrior class, it was just as, if not even more so, important. As we discussed last episode, the Jōkyū War changed the course of history in a number of key ways, so let's briefly review those before we dive into the remainder of the 13th century. First, the cause of the Jōkyū War was a decree from the retired emperor calling for the elimination not of the Kamakura Bakufu itself, but specifically the Bakufu's de facto leader, Hojo Yoshitoki. The Hojo clan had gradually supplanted the Minamoto shoguns as the leaders of the Bakufu during the first two decades of the but unlike the Minamoto, their hegemony could hardly be justified by their noble blood or the heroic deeds of their ancestors. The Jōkyū War was a moment of reckoning for the Hojo, and the fact that they managed to unite the majority of the Gokenin, the vassals of the Kamakura Bakufu, to support them against the head of the imperial family itself was confirmation that the warriors of eastern Japan had truly and officially accepted them as leaders. The second major repercussion of the war was the effect which the direct defeat of the retired emperor would have on the future of the imperial court. Throughout the second half of the 1100s, Japan's royalty had certainly found themselves at the mercy of the country's great Bushi leaders more times than they would have liked, but there had always been a collective understanding that the emperors and retired emperors existed on a higher plane than everyone else did. The name of the game was to plan one's political chess moves in such a way that one always at least appeared to have the support and approval of the imperial sovereign. In the Jōkyū War, however, the Hojo had taken that political chessboard and flung it out the window, directly standing up to an imperial decree with military force and then being so bold as to issue punishment upon the retired emperor at the struggle's conclusion. Imperial authority had been dragged off its pedestal in a very public way, and for the remainder of the Kamakura period, the dynamic between the bakufu and the imperial court would come to almost resemble that of a parent and their small child, with the latter being strictly supervised and looking to the former for permission and guidance at every turn. Finally, the Jōkyū War had the very tangible effect of bringing a massive amount of new land into the jurisdiction of the Kamakura bakufu, it having been confiscated from the war's losers. A large portion of this land was located in central and western Japan, meaning that the Kamakura bakufu, which had up until this point mostly been an organization in charge of the eastern Kanto region, had suddenly extended its presence throughout the majority of the country. So that's where the Kamakura bakufu was in 1221. At this point in history, the bakufu was still being led by its first generation members, people who had lived through the Genpei War and personally known Minamoto no Yoritomo, but a changing of the guard was just around the corner. In 1224, the bakufu's leader Hojo Yoshitoki passed away, and he was followed the next year by his half-sister, the so-called nun shogun Hojo Masako, and the reliable old administrator Ōe Hiromoto. With this, it was time for the next generation to step up to the plate, and Yoshitoki was succeeded by his son Yasutoki, who returned from assignment in Kyoto to become the bakufu's new leader in Kamakura, a position you will recall was known as shikken or shogunal regent. If the Roman Empire had its five good emperors, well, Hojo Yasutoki would be the Kamakura bakufu's analog to one of those men, as many of his policy decisions paint a picture of someone who really above all else just wanted to govern well. Yasutoki envisioned a bakufu run by a consensus of its members, and he set about realizing this by establishing two new bakufu offices, the Hyōjōshū and the Renshō. The Hyōjōshū was a council of powerful samurai who worked together with the shikken to decide matters of policy and help arbitrate legal cases, somewhat reminiscent of the old council of 13, albeit securely subservient to the shikken, and the Renshō was the shikken's trusted advisor and command, kind of like the bakufu's vice president if you will. The word Renshō literally means joint signature in Japanese, and is derived from the fact that the Renshō would sign official bakufu documents together with the shikken. Hojo Yasutoki's most significant act as shikken, however, was not the establishment of these two new offices, but rather his creation in 1232 of the first warrior law code in Japan's history, the goseibai shikimoku. At this point in history, the imperial court's old ritsuryō law code was still the official law of the land, but those who were well versed in it were becoming so few and far between that it had basically ceased to exist in all but name. Among the bushi warrior stratum of society, written laws had come to be replaced by something called dōri, literally reason or sense, which was in practice the shared social conception of what constituted proper behavior and morals. Obviously, however, this was a bit loose as far as codes of conduct go, not to mention inconsistent from region to region, and so Yasutoki realized that it was necessary for the bakufu to provide an official legal standard for its vassals. The code which he thus created, the goseibai shikimoku, was made up of 51 articles covering everything from administrative and civil affairs to lawsuits and punishment, and it was based on precedents set during the time of Yoritomo, as well as the aforementioned common sense social ideals of dōri. Most importantly, the code was distributed widely amongst the vassals of the Kamakura bakufu, and a great effort seems to have been made to make it easily accessible and comprehensible to the often undereducated members of warrior society. A letter from Yasutoki himself even seems to indicate that there may have been versions of it written in contemporary Japanese kana rather than in Chinese kanji, although the lack of surviving examples of such raises some doubt in regard to this. Either way, the goseibai shikimoku was initially only applicable to the gokenin, but interestingly it was taken up quite enthusiastically by non-warrior elements of society such as shōen estate proprietors who latched onto it as a means of fighting back against samurai misbehavior. When disputes arose, they could go to the bakufu and point out the exact article of the code which the offending samurai was breaking, and this convenience led to the goseibai shikimoku eventually permeating Japanese society on a national level. Ironically, its establishment was also a final nail in the coffin for the power of the Kamakura shōgun, with its existence as a legal guide for the bakufu's subjects effectively replacing the need for the shōgun himself to ever offer his own personal opinion on legal issues. When Hojo Yasutoki passed away in 1242, he was succeeded as shikken by his grandson Hojo Tsunetoki, but Tsunetoki, being a sickly man, would only occupy the position for about four years. His brief era was, however, marked by the removal from office of the reigning shōgun, Fujiwara no Yoritsune, whom we met as a child in our last episode, but by this point was in his late twenties and beginning to become a beacon for anti-Hojo dissidents. Yoritsune was replaced by his six-year-old son Yoritsugu, who would become the second and final Fujiwara shōgun. In 1246, Tsunetoki resigned the position of shikken to his younger brother Hojo Tokiyori, whose reign ended up being so much longer and more eventful that most high school textbooks jumped directly from Yasutoki to him. Tokiyori's most significant administrative achievement was his establishment of an office called the Hikitsuke-shū, which joined the Samurai-dokoro, Man-dokoro, and Mon-chū-jō that we learned about last episode as one of the bakufu's key pillars of operation. The Hikitsuke-shū was another judicial institution along the lines of the Mon-chū-jō, and it actually took over many of the duties of that agency. The actual specifics of how these two agencies divided up judicial affairs are rather complex and actually changed multiple times throughout the remainder of the Kamakura period, so I will spare you my clumsy attempt at a detailed explanation. The important thing to remember is that the Kamakura bakufu was swamped enough with handling the legal disputes of its subjects that it needed to add another judicial organ just to function properly, a fact which speaks a lot to the strong character of the bakufu as a legal arbiter for the people of the era. I think when a lot of people hear the word Kamakura bakufu or Kamakura shogunate, they immediately think warrior government and conjure up images of imposing armored figures galloping around eastern Japan, but the fact of the matter is, these guys were spending more time in the courtroom than they were on the battlefield. The tenure of Hōjō Tokiyori is particularly characterized by the concentration of political power into the hands of the main line of the Hōjō family, a household known as the Tokusōke or the With several generations having passed since the time of Hōjō Tokimasa, his descendants had branched off into a number of different family lines, but it was in this era that it really began to become clear that the line which had led down to Tokiyori was the quote-unquote royal line within the context of the extended family. This was particularly emphasized by Tokiyori's crackdown on a branch of the family called the which had been wrapped up in the aforementioned shogun Fujiwara no Yoritsune's fall from power. This would be shortly followed up by the destruction of the Miura clan, who had also come to be strong supporters of the Fujiwara shoguns against the Tokusō house of the Hōjō. The Miura were destroyed by Tokiyori's loyal followers, the Adachi clan, in a battle known as the Hōji Kassen or the Battle of the Hōji Era, which was the first military clash to take place within Kamakura since the Wada Yoshimori incident in 1213. A few years after this, in 1252, an anti-bakufu plot involving ex-shogun Yoritsune was allegedly uncovered, and his son, the sitting shogun, was removed from office and sent back to Kyoto as a result, officially ending the era of the Fujiwara shoguns. In their place, Tokiyori welcomed the eldest son of the retired emperor Gosaga, the 9-year-old imperial prince Munetaka, as the sixth shogun of the Kamakura bakufu, and for the remainder of the Kamakura period, young imperial princes would occupy the post. These boys and young men, who make up the third category of Kamakura shoguns after the Minamoto shoguns and the Fujiwara shoguns, are referred to as miya shogun or kōzoku shogun in Japanese, so for our purposes, let's go ahead and call them the imperial shoguns. Despite their important-sounding name, the four members of this final group never possessed even a modicum of real power. Now that we have talked a bit about the history of the middle Kamakura period, let's take some time to explore the characteristics of the era outside of the general narrative of political history. First, let's take a look at the lifestyle of the men who actually made up the main body of the Kamakura bakufu's constituents, the bushi, aka Japan's warrior stratum of society. As we discussed back in our third video on the Heian period, the bushi seemed to have grown out of the wealthy segment of provincial society, which was involved in the development and cultivation of new land back in the 10th and 11th centuries. By the Kamakura period, most bushi resided on land which their ancestors had been cultivating for generations, and their primary concern was the maintenance and, if possible, expansion of this land. Those of you who study Japanese are probably aware of the phrase issho kenme, which is typically used as an adverb to mean with all one's might or with no effort spared, and this phrase is actually derived from the lifestyle of the medieval bushi. The issho part was originally issho, meaning one place or specifically one piece of territory, and the full meaning of the phrase, with no effort spared, reflects the attitude of the medieval bushi toward that piece of territory which was their ancestral land. In the Kamakura period, the bushi managed their territory either as a jitō, appointed by the Kamakura bakufu, or, in the case of non-gokenin, as the manager of a shōen estate which was directly subordinate to that estate's owner. The bushi typically resided within a residence called a yakata, which they often built on a plateau or at a particularly important traffic hub, and then surrounded with dry moats and earthen fortifications. The crop fields immediately around the yakata were viewed as the personal farmland of that bushi's family, and were cultivated by their servants and followers and were generally exempt from taxation. Farther outfields were cultivated by the general peasantry and were taxed as normal, but the resident bushi overlord was still responsible for managing the entire region. The fine line between manager and ruler was one which the bushi often aggressively crossed, and part of the reason that the Kamakura bakufu was constantly swamped with legal cases was that local bushi were regularly butting heads with the temples, shrines, and aristocrats whose land they were supposed to be managing. Two popular solutions to these disputes were something called jitō-uke, in which the jitō agreed to pay a fixed yearly fee to their territory's official owner in exchange for keeping everything else that came out of that territory, and something called shitaji-chūbun, in which the ownership of the territory in question was literally just split in half between its original owner and the resident bushi land manager. Regardless of what solution was taken, however, the Kamakura period saw a general trend of old guard territory owners gradually having their land rights stripped away by the emerging warrior class. Early Kamakura period bushi practiced a style of land inheritance in which territory was divided up amongst one's offspring, allowing them to move out on their own and start new family lines in nearby areas. This meant that most bushi families typically had a structure like the one we saw with the Hojo, where an exalted mainline existed in conjunction with a number of sidelines that were subservient to the orders of the sitting patriarch of the mainline. It is worth noting that in this era, women still had a relatively high social status and were very much capable of inheriting land from their fathers, and there are even recorded instances of women being appointed jitō land managers by the bakufu. In addition to their duties as agricultural managers, the Kamakura bushi also, unsurprisingly, placed a great deal of emphasis on the habitual practice of the arts of war, as they had for a couple centuries now been conceiving of themselves as a distinct warrior social class. This appeared in their daily lives through the practice of what were essentially military sports that focused mostly on the training of archery and horseback riding skills. These included things such as organized hunts, a mounted target practice sport called yabusame, and a sport called inuōmono, in which a dog was released in a fenced-off area and a mounted bushi attempted to shoot it with a blunted arrow. Because the arrow was blunted, no lethal damage would be inflicted upon the dog, but still, I'm sure a lot of dog lovers heard that and just got a lot less interested in samurai culture. The rank-and-file bushi of this era were not particularly well-educated, hence the need for the establishment of the aforementioned Gosei by Shikimoku law code, but as discussed earlier, they did have their own generally shared moral worldview characterized by adherence to loyalty within a lord-vassal relationship and the honoring of one's parents and family. Other elements such as bravery, good etiquette, honesty, frugality, and modesty were also highly prized ideals, and together these would eventually form the backbone of what we know today as bushido, although the actual compilation and establishment of bushido as an ethical code is something that was mostly undertaken by 19th century Japanese thinkers looking back at the past through rosy-tinted nostalgia goggles. Speaking of moral worldviews, easily one of the biggest changes that Japan witnessed during the Kamakura period was the evolution of its religious world, specifically in regard to Buddhism. At the dawn of the period, the most powerful Buddhist sects were the Tendai sect and the Shingon sect, whose Japanese iterations were founded respectively by our old friends Saicho and Kukai, whom we met way back in episode 8 of this series. Both sects had enjoyed several centuries as the favored religious denominations of the imperial court, to the point that they had become powerful political entities in their own right, whom the common people of Japan now viewed more as territorial overlords than as spiritual guides. This was unfortunate because at this time in Japanese history, the idea that the world had entered into a prophesied spiritual dark age called Mappo, see episode 10, had permeated society, and the unease which this brought about was only amplified by tumultuous events like the Genpei war and the various famines and natural disasters that had accompanied it. The people of Japan were in dire need of spiritual support, but the leaders of Japan's great temples seemed more interested in arming their followers and engaging in secular squabbles, or at best, engaging in complex and mysterious ceremonies to pray for the health and prosperity of the aristocratic elite. It should thus come as little surprise that the Kamakura period saw the birth of a wave of new Buddhist sects which aimed to break away from the worldly corruption of the pre-existing denominations and meet the needs of a changing society. These were the six schools of Kamakura Buddhism, or the Kamakura Rokushu, made up of the three Nenbutsu schools, the two Zen schools, and the Nichiren school, which is kind of its own beast. The meanings of those category names will become clear as we get into the explanations of the individual schools. Let's begin with the Nenbutsu schools. The first of these was founded by a monk named Honen, who was born into a powerful provincial warrior family in the province of Mimasaka during the tail end of the Heian period in 1133. When he was still a child, his father was mortally wounded during a territory dispute, and with his dying breath is alleged to have instructed Honen to forsake any thoughts of revenge and instead enter the priesthood. The young Honen obeyed his father's instructions, and at age 13 he ascended Mount Hiei and began learning the teachings of Tendai Buddhism, but he quickly found himself disillusioned with the corruption of the religious world. After three decades of struggling to find his path, a 43-year-old Honen at last found what he was looking for in something called the Nenbutsu, a simple Buddhist chant proclaiming one's faith in the Buddha Amitabha, Amida in Japanese. The idea that Honen hit upon was that if one simply chanted the Nenbutsu, specifically the words Namu Amidabutsu, one would be guaranteed entry into the Buddhist holy land in the next life, regardless of one's background or station in society. Honen then made his way down from Mount Hiei and began attempting to spread his new teaching to the masses, but while he doesn't seem to have had any intention to actually start a new school of Buddhism, he eventually began to be met with pushback from the leaders of the traditional Buddhist world. The imperial court finally ordered Honen sent into exile in Shikoku in 1207, and while he was forgiven just four years later, he would pass away just after returning to Kyoto, aged 78. Honen had many disciples by this point, and after his death, many of them broke off and started their own sects propagating his teachings, but all of these sects are collectively referred to as Jodoshu, known in English as Pure Land Buddhism. Well, perhaps all is a bit too strong of a word, because you see, the religious revolution that Honen had kicked off had gained too much momentum to be confined to a single new school of Buddhism, and the next major denomination to spring up in its wake was indeed started by one of his disciples. That disciple was a man named Shinran, who was born in Kyoto in 1173 to a lesser branch of the Fujiwara clan, and entered the priesthood at Mount Hiei at just nine years of age. Shinran apprenticed under Honen after the legendary Asuka period statesman Prince Shotoku allegedly appeared to him in a dream and instructed him to do so, and when Honen was sent into exile by the imperial court in 1207, Shinran met with the same fate. In Shinran's case, however, he was sent to the rugged northern backcountry of Echigo province, and it was there for the first time that he got to experience living amongst the common people of Japan's countryside, people whose life-taking customs of hunting and fishing made them the least worthy of salvation according to traditional Buddhist doctrine. Shinran seems to have found his calling in this new environment, as he remained in Echigo for two years even after being pardoned by the imperial court, and he then spent an additional 20 years preaching his ideas in the Kanto region before finally returning to Kyoto in his 60s. As a former disciple of Honen, Shinran too believed in the importance of the nenbutsu, but the crucial idea that he appended to his master's teachings was the importance of belief. According to Shinran, the moment one believed in the power of Amitabha, one was guaranteed salvation in the next life. Moreover, he preached that all people were equal in the eyes of Amitabha, even the poor common people of the countryside who couldn't afford to build temples and make great financial donations to the clergy like the aristocracy could. When one considers these teachings alongside the fact that Shinran also openly engaged in very un-monk-like practices such as getting married and eating meat, one can really feel how strongly he identified with the less privileged rungs of Japanese society. Like Honen before him, Shinran also seems to have had no intention of founding his own school of Buddhism, but after he died in 1262 at the ripe old age of 90, his disciples carried on his legacy, and the sect of Japanese Buddhism known as Jodo Shinshu, True Pure Land Buddhism, was born. The final pioneer of nenbutsu Buddhism who emerged during the Kamakura period was a man by the name of Ippen, who, like Honen, was born to a provincial warrior family. Ippen was born somewhat after Honen and Shinran in 1239, and actually apprenticed under a second-generation disciple of the former. His biggest contribution to the theological discourse was his idea, apparently revealed to him in a dream, that the presence or absence of belief was irrelevant to the efficacy of the nenbutsu chant. Put simply, just saying the words was enough to secure salvation in the next life, even if you secretly felt a bit skeptical about the whole thing. Ippen wandered Japan for decades preaching his ideas and handing out small cards with religious inscriptions, and during the course of his travels, he discovered the method of proselytizing for which he would become most famous, the odori nenbutsu. Odori nenbutsu literally means dancing nenbutsu, and it is exactly what it sounds like. Participants dance to a percussive rhythm while chanting the nenbutsu. It began as a spontaneous occurrence, with Ippen and his followers so overjoyed by the promise of Amitabha's salvation that they naturally began to dance, but Ippen soon adopted it as his trademark and began carrying it out wherever he went. The dancing nenbutsu found great popularity among a wide range of people, from peasants to aristocrats, but it was not embraced by the Kamakura bakufu, who actually barred Ippen's entry to the city when he attempted to spread his teachings there. Ippen was famous for his extreme devotion to non-attachment, and when he sensed his death was at hand, he burned all of his scriptures and personal writings and instructed his disciples to discard his corpse for wild animals to consume. Much like Honen and Shinran, Ippen's teachings were cemented into an official school of Buddhism by his disciples, and that school is known to us today as Jishu, literally the Time School. What all of these nenbutsu-based sects of Buddhism had in common was their concept of relying completely on a higher power for the salvation of one's soul. One did not need to spend years learning Chinese and Sanskrit and delving deep into complicated religious texts, or living an austere ascetic lifestyle full of abstinence and self-mortification. One simply needed to chant the nenbutsu and let the celestial Buddha Amitabha handle the rest. This combination of approachability and psychological reassurance led to wild popularity for the nenbutsu sects, especially among the peasantry and the bushi warriors, and it was not long at all before they had taken root and become a fixture of Japanese society. The nenbutsu schools were not, however, the only new denominations which emerged to meet the needs of the era, with an equally influential but ideologically opposed movement being that of the Zen schools. Where the nenbutsu schools looked to an outside savior for salvation and reassurance, the Zen schools looked inward and sought enlightenment from within oneself. These concepts, by the way, are expressed in Japanese with the pair of antonyms tariki and jiriki, which literally translate to other power and self-power, respectively. Now, Zen as a concept had actually been known to Japan's clergy since as far back as the Nara period, but it was in the Kamakura period that it was officially reintroduced as the main focal point around which a religious practice could be based. The person typically regarded as the foremost pioneer of Japanese Zen Buddhism is a man named Eisai, the son of a family of Shinto priests who was born in 1141. Eisai, like many of the others we have discussed, began his religious education studying the teachings of the Tendai school at Mount Hiei, but it was through two extended stays in Song China that he became a disciple of Zen. Upon bringing what he had learned back to Japan, Eisai met with opposition from, you guessed it, the Buddhist old guard and the imperial court, and so he eventually made his way over to Kamakura in search of a more receptive audience. As I mentioned a moment ago, the core of the Zen teachings was the pursuit of enlightenment through one's own efforts, a sort of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps mentality. Specifically, Zen adherents engaged in the now world-famous practice of seated meditation known as Zazen, in which they attempted to discover the divine presence of the Buddha within themselves through prolonged and intense reflection on paradoxical problems. Put simply, Zen was difficult and required a lot of strict self-discipline, and unsurprisingly, this really appealed to the high-ranking samurai of the Kamakura Bakufu. As a result, some of Eisai's early adherents were the final Minamoto Shogun Sanetomo and his mother Hojo Masako, and it was through their support that he eventually got the imperial court to accept his new brand of Buddhism. The school Eisai founded, by the way, is known as the Rinzai school of Buddhism, and it would go on to become to the Kamakura Bakufu what the Tendai and Shingon schools were to the imperial court. I would also be remiss not to mention that Eisai is credited with bringing back the custom of tea drinking from China and popularizing it in Japan, which honestly makes him one of the most tangibly influential people in all of Japanese history. In addition to Eisai, the Kamakura period witnessed one other great pioneer of Japanese Zen Buddhism, the namesake of everyone's favorite YouTuber slash Japanese pitch accent coach, Dogen. Dogen, the monk, not the YouTuber, was actually the second generation disciple of Eisai, and he may have even met the man himself, although this is unclear as Dogen was only 15 at the time of Eisai's death. Either way, he decided to follow in the great monk's footsteps, and at age 24 he made his way over to Song China to further his understanding of the Zen teachings. A famous anecdote remains from when Dogen first reached the continent and was still lodging on the ship which had carried him there. One day, an old Chinese monk visited the ship to purchase shiitake mushrooms from its crew, and Dogen took the chance to strike up a conversation with him. Dogen found the old man's thoughts to be profoundly interesting, and so he begged him to stay a night on the ship so that they could continue to chat. The monk declined, however, explaining that he was in charge of cooking the meals at his temple and thus needed to head back to fix supper for the other monks. Dogen was profoundly puzzled by this. Why would such a wise and important-seeming monk reduce himself to working as a lowly cook? When he asked as much of the old monk, he was calmly presented with the following reply. You do not yet understand the true essence of spiritual training. You think that to endure great trials and ponder unsolvable mysteries is the path of the disciple, but the truth is that every aspect of our lives, even cooking a meal or cleaning a floor, is part of our training. These words shook Dogen to his core and it is said that in this moment he felt that he had had his eyes opened to the true way of the Buddha. Perhaps partially inspired by this incident, Dogen would ultimately propagate a version of Zen in which Zazen meditation was not the means to enlightenment but was literally a manifestation of enlightenment itself. For this reason, unlike the followers of Eisai, he and his followers did not aim to ponder anything during their meditation, instead simply sitting facing a wall and putting their full attention into the meditation itself. Dogen also differed from Eisai in that he was highly averse to the idea of forming any sort of bonds with the leaders of the secular world, even turning down an offer of patronage from the Zen-loving Kamakura bakufu. Because of this, while the Rinzai sect of Zen ended up taking root among the upper crust of warrior society, Dogen's sect, which was known as the Sōtō sect, found its greatest base of support among the lower-ranking warriors of the provincial back country. The final man we have to bring up in our discussion of Kamakura period Buddhism, and the man who I have intentionally saved for last, is of course the problem child himself, Nichiren. Born in Awa province in 1222, Nichiren began his path toward monkhood at the age of 12 and spent more than a decade as a young man traveling around and studying at Japan's various great temples in a quest for knowledge. It was while studying at Mount Hiei that Nichiren encountered what is known as the Lotus Sutra, or Hōkekyō in Japanese, the foundational sutra of the Tendai school and a scripture that is sometimes known as the king of all sutras for its importance in the Buddhist religious world. Nichiren came to believe that it was only through the power of the Lotus Sutra that the decaying secular world could be saved from the Mappō Dark Age, and he preached that one could attain Buddhahood in this very lifetime by chanting the words Namu Myōhō Rengekyō, a mantra which basically means, I have faith in the Lotus Sutra. As a neutral observer, Nichiren's method of chanting a single simple phrase might seem very evocative of the Nenbutsu schools, but this is definitely not something you would have wanted to say to Nichiren. The man had such a deep conviction in his beliefs that he began viciously attacking the other schools of Japanese Buddhism, claiming that by not prioritizing the Lotus Sutra and the Namu Myōhō Rengekyō mantra, these schools were actively inviting misfortune upon the country. Nichiren was particularly vitriolic toward the Nenbutsu schools, viewing them as nothing more than silly escapism, and his aggressive criticism of them nearly got him killed by the Jito of his home province. He then moved his base of operations to Kamakura, where he continued to build up his roster of enemies, but also slowly began drawing in converts with his passionate proselytizing. In 1260, Nichiren sent a written opinion piece to the now-retired Shikken Hojo Tokiyori, warning him that if he continued to allow misguided schools of Buddhism to thrive throughout the country, not only would Japan be beset by natural disaster and civil war, but it would also be subjected to a great invasion from abroad. Tokiyori, however, was not interested in Nichiren's prophecies of doom, and the next year the bakufu at last decided to sentence the troublemaking monk to exile in Izu province, although they would pardon him two years later. In 1268, however, a message would arrive on the bakufu's doorstep that would somewhat vindicate Nichiren, a message from a young empire to the west that had been vigorously expanding since the dawn of the 13th century. We have received the mandate of heaven and become masters of the universe, the message read. We wish to open relations with your country and become good friends. We see this world as a great family, but such a family cannot exist without mutual communication. We would hate to have to The Kamakura Bakufu had just received its first correspondence from one of the greatest conquering forces in human history, the Mongol Empire. And with that, my friends, we have reached the end of our second episode on the history of the Kamakura period. Just to provide a little epilogue for you here, I want to mention that despite the correspondence from the Mongols, Nichiren never ultimately managed to get on the good side of the Kamakura Bakufu, and after being exiled a second time, he finally learned his lesson and hightailed it out of Kamakura. He ended up establishing his new base of operations in Kai province, where his teachings became popular amongst provincial warriors and merchants and evolved into what we know today as the Nichiren sect of Buddhism, the only school of Japanese Buddhism to actually be named after its founder. One of the modern iterations of the Nichiren sect is the Souka Gakkai, an organization famous for being a bit like the Jehovah's Witnesses of the Buddhist world, and when I read about the life of Nichiren the man, I somehow don't find this historical outcome at all surprising. It should be noted that, in spite of the emergence of the six new schools of Kamakura Buddhism, the old juggernauts of Tendai and Shingon remained as powerful and relevant as ever, and they continued to be the favored denominations of the imperial court. The even older schools of Nara Buddhism were also still very much around, and many of their members even began to work at giving them a bit of a facelift to remain relevant in the new era. In particular, the Risshu practitioner Eizon and his disciple Ninsho are remembered fondly for their great efforts in improving the quality of life of Japan's poor and sick, with Ninsho even building a pair of hospital-like institutions for sufferers of leprosy and other serious ailments. Anyway, we are ostensibly in the outro here, so to avoid turning into the teacher who keeps on lecturing even after the bell, I think I probably ought to stop talking. Next time, we should have quite an exciting episode as we cover the final phase of the Kamakura period, beginning with the much-awaited Mongol invasions and ending with the dramatic collapse of the Kamakura Bakufu, for a double whammy of military drama. It should be a heck of a ride, so I very much hope you will join me for that. Stay tuned to the very end here for a Japanese mnemonic about the creation date of the Goseibai Shikimoku, and, as always, thanks for watching, have a great day, and BUN WO INORUZO!