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SIX Sōhei, Benkei, and Monastic Warriors— Historical Perspectives The sōhei, monastic warriors, and Benkei images can be described as three strands that, even though they came out of the same historical context, should be treated and understood separately. First and oldest are the monastic warriors, who emerged and developed as part of the social, political, and military milieu of the late Heian and Kamakura ages, not because of the deterioration of conditions within religious complexes, but as part and parcel of the increased tendency to settle disputes with the help of warriors. This “militarization” may be attributed to two separate trends that ultimately merged in the late Heian age: First, the dominance of local warrior -managers in the mid-Heian had become so overwhelming that Kyoto eliteshadnochoicebuttoabandonmanyoftheimperialstate’sbureaucratic principles in favor of forging more direct ties to local strongmen. Second, the involvement of warriors in religious disputes followed developments at the imperial court, mirroring factional competition among the leading power blocks. Nobles and warrior-aristocrats played a role in leading monastic forces, and as these leaders became bridging figures between capital factions and the provincial warrior class, temple warriors were drawn onto the national stage. But religious violence was not a new phenomenon in eleventh-century Japan, since individual clerics had resorted to arms from the very introduction of Buddhism. Monks and monasteries were never disassociated from the imperial court or from politics in general, either in Japan or in the continental contexts from which Buddhism was introduced. Isolated instances of cleric violence in the pre-insei period thus reflected conditions in society generally, as did the militarization of the monasteries from the tenth century onward. More importantly, monastic violence was often considered 158 the teeth and claws of the buddha justified, since in Buddhist discourse, as represented by sutras, sculptures, and ideological rhetoric, service to the state was equal to protecting the faith itself. The tensions between Buddhist religious precepts and the right to defend the faith resulted in an ambiguity that could be used to suit the needs of the elites. Accordingly, while Japan’s rulers frequently condemned clerics for carrying arms in the late Heian and Kamakura eras, these same rulers on numerous occasions asked for and received military support from the temples. This ambivalence about monastic forces is certainly not unique to Japan or to the Heian and Kamakura ages. The Ashikaga shogunate encouraged Jōdo Shinshū believers to rebel in 1506, less than two decades after it had ordered the sect’s head to stop such activities,1 and European kings and counts alternated between condemning and courting the Church and its armies. In their quest to discredit religious institutions for their secular power, many scholars in both the West and Japan seem to have neglected evidence that secular leaders enlisted the military support of temples almost as often as they opposed it. Monastic forces were complex in their composition. Most fighters came from lower- to mid-level classes, with some serving as menial workers or administrators within the temple communities and some attached to shrines in various capacities. Still others were warrior-administrators of estates and branches away from the temple compounds. Monastic forces were, in short, constituted by a wide spectrum of armed men, from fulltime mounted warriors to workers who armed themselves only as the situation called for it. For these clerics, the label “monk” carries little religious meaning. They were no more monks than their brothers and cousins serving in the capital were nobles. Moreover, the warfare techniques and strategies of monastic warriors, from the weapons they used to the barricades they built, were characteristic of the warrior class in general. For every instance of violence involving religious institutions there are equivalents and parallels in the world of nobles and their warrior affiliates, and the increase of monastic violence from the tenth century was not unique to temples, but rather reflected more general trends in Heian Japan. Social and political conditions generally encouraged the capital elites to co-opt and incorporate monastic forces into their own organizations. This became fully possible only with the injection of noble warrior-commanders into the monastic mix, where they served as important links between secular forces and the temples. It is in this context that commanders such as Shinjitsu and Chinkei were recruited and courted by nobles and aristocrats during the turbulent years of the late twelfth century, and it was only at that stage that monastic warriors became a force to be...

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