朱の世界 1The World of Vermilion, Part 1

The 1,400-kilometer pilgrimage known as the Shikoku Eighty-Eight Temple Circuit has drawn Buddhist devotees since ancient times and continues to captivate people to this day. The figure traditionally credited with founding this pilgrimage is Kukai (774–835), the monk who established the Shingon school of Buddhism in Japan. Yet the actual reasons and historical circumstances behind Kukai's creation of the pilgrimage have never been conclusively determined. In other words, while the pilgrimage is strongly associated with Kukai, the reality remains unclear.

Most people are naturally drawn to the visible fact that eighty-eight temples were established across the whole of Shikoku. But I want to shift the question. What if Kukai was not walking the length of Shikoku to build sacred sites of devotion? What if at the origin of the pilgrimage lies the possibility that Kukai was searching for something on someone else's behalf?

This line of inquiry has in fact been pursued by certain researchers before, though nothing definitive has emerged from their work either. The honest conclusion is that the true reason Kukai founded the pilgrimage remains unknown. The one thing we can say with certainty is that the young Kukai was an obscure, unnamed monk, and for that reason most of what he did during that period of his life is simply lost to us. And precisely because so little can be known, later generations were able to attach layer upon layer of legend to his name, constructing the image of Kukai that exists today. What this means is that the Kukai we think we understand may need to be examined far more carefully than we assume.

Today especially, Kukai is bound up with the grandeur of Koyasan and the striking imagery of becoming a Buddha in one's own body. The result is a heavily mythologized figure. But very little is actually known about his early life, and no one has satisfactorily explained the background to his sudden rise to historical prominence.

Given all of this, it might seem as though there is nothing meaningful we can say about Kukai. But there is one crucial fact we must not overlook. Kukai lived during a transitional era, the period of upheaval surrounding the move to Heian-kyo. In Japan's history, the relocation of the capital was never a simple matter of moving house. It almost always entailed a sweeping dismantlement and reformation of the existing power structure, because the purpose of relocating was, among other things, to strip the old ruling class of its entrenched privileges.

Kukai was born around 774. If we place his youth in the roughly twenty years leading up to the transfer of the capital to Heian-kyo, that period corresponds precisely to an era of relentless turmoil within the imperial court. Kukai was about seven years old when the fiftieth emperor, Kanmu (r. 781–806), ascended the throne. At that time the capital was still at Heijo-kyo, in what is now northern Nara Prefecture. But a tangle of succession disputes and fierce infighting within the imperial family drove Kanmu to seek an escape from the political machinations of the power brokers who had attached themselves to the Heijo-kyo system, in place since 710. He relocated the capital northward to Nagaoka-kyo, in what is now the city of Nagaokakyo in Kyoto Prefecture.

This happened in 784, which means Kanmu began pushing the plan forward almost immediately upon taking the throne. It should be noted, however, that it was exceedingly rare for a capital relocation to be carried out at the emperor's own initiative. Almost without exception, such moves were orchestrated according to the intentions of a new faction of power holders, and we should understand the move to Nagaoka-kyo in the same light. Yet from the moment the capital was transferred in 784, problems began multiplying. In particular, the severing of ties with the Fujiwara clan, the most powerful aristocratic house and the dominant force behind Heijo-kyo, and with the Buddhist institutions openly enmeshed in Fujiwara power structures such as Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji, created a politically disastrous situation for Kanmu's faction. Securing the budget to maintain control became extraordinarily difficult. Kanmu simply did not have the capacity to simultaneously establish a new political order and develop the urban infrastructure of a new capital. Nagaoka-kyo had favorable geographical conditions, but the fatal shortage of funds on Kanmu's side meant that the new capital never grew to surpass Heijo-kyo.

The critical point here is that when Kanmu's faction tried to sever its relationship with the Fujiwara clan and the Buddhist establishment on the Nara side, who had been sustaining the Heijo-kyo network through both overt and covert financial support, this rupture translated directly into fiscal crisis. After all, relocating an entire capital requires enormous sums of money. Then in September of 785, Fujiwara no Tanetsugu, Kanmu's right-hand man and the driving force behind the Nagaoka-kyo relocation, was assassinated in the middle of the night. This incident occurred within the context of shifting power and privilege caused by the break from Heijo-kyo. Put simply, it was a struggle over vested interests between the old guard and the new.

Fujiwara no Tanetsugu had risen through the ranks with remarkable speed and been entrusted with effective political authority over Nagaoka-kyo. Jealousy and resentment from the Heijo-kyo establishment were relentless. Moreover, eliminating the man who was effectively running Nagaoka-kyo opened a path for the old guard to reclaim power. When Kanmu received word of the assassination he was consumed with fury. Learning that the killing had been carried out with the approval of Crown Prince Sawara, who had been expected to succeed him as emperor, Kanmu had Sawara confined, stripped of his title as crown prince, and sentenced to exile. Sawara refused to accept this. He went on a hunger strike and died during transport to his place of banishment. It was a seismic event. And the deep resentment that Sawara directed toward Kanmu before his death would become the most feared vengeful spirit of the Heian era, casting a shadow over the centuries that followed and giving rise to one calamity after another.

With the assassination of Fujiwara no Tanetsugu and the specter of Sawara's vengeful ghost shaking Kanmu's regime to its foundations, Nagaoka-kyo was struck by a catastrophic flood in 792 that left the capital unable to function. In that era there was a powerful belief that such disasters were the direct consequence of the actions of those in power. The blame fell squarely on Kanmu's treatment of Prince Sawara. Yet there was no going back to Heijo-kyo. Nor did Kanmu's faction have the funds to abandon Nagaoka-kyo and relocate yet again. For a regime already suffocating under fiscal strain, the imperative to move far from Heijo-kyo's sphere of influence and rebuild every system from scratch was not merely a political goal. It was a matter of survival. The key was securing the budget.

This was a budget that Kanmu's side could not possibly raise on its own. They needed a new source of funding independent of the Nara establishment. And at this moment, the faction that stepped forward to offer its support was a single clan that held de facto control over what is now the city of Kyoto. That clan was the Hata.

The Hata were a group of relatively recent immigrants who had arrived in Japan around the fifth and sixth centuries, bringing with them continental technologies such as sericulture, weaving, water management, civil engineering, and sake brewing. Their precise origins remain uncertain, though I believe they were formed from the convergence of multiple lineages. After landing on the Kyushu side of Japan, the Hata leveraged their revolutionary technologies to open up new land one territory after another, achieving a form of early industrialization and amassing enormous wealth.

Steadily advancing eastward, the main branch of the Hata eventually settled near Arashiyama in the western part of what is now Kyoto. A secondary branch reached the area of the famous Fushimi Inari Taisha in the southern part of the city. I will write about this in detail another time, but the reason the Hata as a rising power expanded across the western and southern sides of present-day Kyoto was that established local powers already occupied the eastern side. The Hata would later drive them out by military force and bring the entire area under their control. Having accumulated vast wealth, the Hata had already been building relationships with the imperial family and ancient clans through financial support and the provision of supplies even while the court was still based in Nara. They had achieved a considerable degree of influence. Yet as a clan of recent immigrants they remained outsiders, and while the court was situated in the Yamato region of southern Nara Prefecture, the distance and the entrenched presence of the older clans prevented them from acquiring truly dominant power.

So the Hata waited. And the opportunity they had been waiting for finally arrived under the reign of Emperor Kanmu. For the Hata this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to seize real political authority. To the despairing Kanmu and the officials around him at Nagaoka-kyo, the Hata made their pitch. They urged the emperor to relocate the new capital to the territory they controlled within Kyoto, and they worked both openly and behind the scenes to make it happen. What the Hata offered was vast tracts of land and the funding to build the new capital. For Kanmu, who had exhausted every other option, this was an irresistible proposition. The fact that Kyoto also offered sufficient distance from Heijo-kyo made the decision even easier. The result was the founding of Heian-kyo in 794. Behind the relocation of the capital to Heian-kyo stood the Hata clan. This is no fictional lineage. In Japanese they are written as 【秦氏】 (Hata-shi), where 【秦】 (Hata) is the surname and 【氏】 (Shi) means clan. To this day, place names such as 【太秦】 (Uzumasa) survive in the western part of Kyoto, along with sacred sites and ancient burial mounds. The Hata were also involved in the founding of Matsuo Taisha and Fushimi Inari Taisha. In fact, descendants of the Hata served as head priests of Matsuo Taisha for generations until the Meiji government prohibited the hereditary succession of shrine offices. Though the Hata have since been excluded from shrine administration, the surname 【秦】 still endures.

This is the broad historical backdrop. What I ask you to understand is that Kukai spent his formative years in the very midst of this upheaval. At that point he was still regarded as an anonymous monk, a young man barely twenty years old. And yet from this obscure starting point Kukai achieved a spectacular ascent. Within ten years, by 804, he had been selected as a member of the state-sponsored mission to Tang China. At the time he was still not a monk of high official standing. He was merely a practitioner in training.

The life of Kukai is wrapped in one mystery after another. But as I have shown in this article, the relocation to Heian-kyo was driven not by the old ruling class but by the Hata, a clan of recent immigrants with the ability to industrialize a diverse range of technologies. They supplied funding both openly and in the shadows while maneuvering to make their dominance absolute. In my view, the faction that first recognized Kukai's potential was not Emperor Kanmu but the Hata, who were leveraging their financial power to position themselves for their next move toward hegemony.

There is one more point worth noting. In 789, at the age of fifteen, Kukai studied Confucianism and other subjects under a maternal uncle before enrolling at the imperial university in Heijo-kyo. This uncle is said by some accounts to have been a tutor to one of Emperor Kanmu's princes, a man deeply versed in Chinese Confucian thought and history. The young Kukai studied Chinese learning under this uncle and then entered the university at Heijo-kyo, only to grow restless and throw himself into independent study almost immediately. With all of this as background, the following questions emerge.

How exactly was Kukai able to ride the turbulent current of the Heian-kyo relocation to achieve such a dramatic rise?

What does it mean that Kukai's ascent was perfectly synchronized with the reign of Emperor Kanmu?

In the next article, I will explore the hidden history of the young Kukai recruited to sustain the new Heian-kyo system at the intersection of ambitions between the Hata (Heian-kyo's industrialists) and Emperor Kanmu (the new leader of the imperial court).