The Dog Shogun

15. The Two Wheels of a Cart

207 15 The Two Wheels of a Cart The Way of the Buddha and the Way of Confucius are based on compassion and require charity. They resemble the two wheels of a cart and both should be deeply revered. However, those who study the Way of the Buddha are affected by the teachings of the sutras. In their desire to master the Way of the Buddha, they part from their lords, send away their parents, leave their homes, and live in seclusion. Thus the Five Relationships tend to be violated .1 We ought to be very much afraid of this. Those who study the Way of Confucius are affected by the sayings of the classics. At ceremonies it is common to use the meat of animals as food. They do not think it detestable to take the life of living creatures. Thus everybody will adopt the customs of the barbarians and neglect benevolence. We ought to be very much afraid of this too. In the study of Confucianism and Buddhism, people must not lose sight of the notions on which these teachings are based.2 This passage from a letter of the ¤fth shogun to his grand chamberlain Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu in Genroku 5 (1692) shows a politically motivated, utilitarian attitude towards religion. It stands in stark contrast to the blind devotion to both Buddhism and Confucianism of which Tsunayoshi is generally accused, but in terms of Japanese political history this type of attitude was not new. Religion and Politics From earliest times the Shinto gods were invoked to sanction the authority of the emperor, and the introduction of Buddhism in Japan had much to do with a political power struggle between two contending court factions. In the Tokugawa period, Buddhist temples were used to maintain a national registry of the population, and Ieyasu’s dei¤cation as gongen at Nikkô—a reincarnation of the imperial ancestor Amaterasu—was unashamedly a political statement in religious garb.3 Yet one cannot simply condemn this as a cynical use of religion for political purposes. Although the popular use of words such as ideology and psychology is of a more recent date, the power of mental images and thought was understood 208 The Two Wheels of a Cart throughout human history. One might even argue that they were better understood in the premodern period, when nonvisible elements were accorded greater powers than our society, oriented towards scienti¤c veri¤cation, permits today. The political use of ideology—as well described by Herman Ooms— must be regarded as a legitimate concern of the Tokugawa bakufu. There was, moreover, a ¤rm belief at the time that the safety and wellbeing of the country depended on the protection of the gods and could be willed or refused by them. Historians cannot be content to discount this as superstition , for this conviction was considered realistic and rational at the time, much as armies and military equipment are considered effective tools for the protection of a country today. Future generations may well question the use of armies and military equipment for the protection of civilian populations, considering this as unrealistic as we today view the allocations of funds for religious projects to strengthen national security and well-being in the Tokugawa period.4 Both views are subject to the belief and value system of the times, and historians can no more interpret the latter as unintelligent and misguided “squandering” of government funds as consider such terminology appropriate in discussing the former. Both must be viewed as serious government concerns, equally beset by the problem of how much ¤nance is to be allocated to such protection and who is to foot the bill. Footing the Bill The governments of the ¤rst three Tokugawa shoguns saw a large investment in the religious sector that—though exact ¤gures are lacking—is likely to have peaked under the third shogun with the large expense of the Tôshôgû shrines. Different from the construction of Edo castle, where daimyo were required to supply manpower and labor, here expenses were paid overwhelmingly out of government funds.5 Under the fourth shogun, government expenditure was greatly reduced, and the daimyo were economically favored, as the reduction in attainder and the ¤nancial allocations after the Meireki ¤re have shown. Some three hundred temples and shrines were destroyed in the great ¤re, and some of these were moved by government order from their prime locations, but no systematic allocation of funds for rebuilding is found in the...