The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Monastic Warriors and Sōhei in Japanese History (review)

Writing at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between political and religious violence, Mikael Adolphson offers an exercise in historiography of great contemporary relevance. Adolphson’s subject, the military might that Japanese temples and shrines exerted from the Heian through the Muromachi periods, has long posed a problem for historians. Yet it is a problem, Adolphson argues, largely of the historians’ own making. The modern distinction between religion and politics—a distinction at once ahistorical and naïve—has served to obscure a subject central to the Japanese past. Adolphson’s project is thus two-fold: to retrieve this past from obscurity by situating religious forces in their social and political context, and to question the historiography responsible for such a legacy of misunderstanding. He succeeds admirably on both counts and in doing so provides his readers lessons about the present as well as the past.

Why, Adolphson asks, have historians of Japan failed to recognize, let alone analyze, the significance of such institutional actors? Whereas the military exploits of warriors and aristocrats remain the traditional subject of historiography on Japan, such actions carried out on behalf of temples and shrines are often ignored or, if acknowledged, dismissed as inappropriate behavior unworthy of analysis. And when monastic warriors are granted a place in the historian’s narrative, appearing in the common caricature of the belligerent sōhei, a complex social history is reduced to a synchronic fiction. Adolphson show how this bias of historians has itself a history, one composed from literary and artistic sources with their own polemics that modern scholarship has done more to perpetuate than to question. By taking this history seriously, Adolphson gives us something more than the most detailed study to date of monastic warriors and a close-grained analysis of their social and institutional status. He also gives us insight into the Japanese historiographical imagination.

Adolphson defines his own approach in the context of those taken by others and thus provides, in chapter 1, a comprehensive survey of the treatment of monastic warriors by a century of Japanese scholars, identifying their interests, arguments, and agendas, and also their blind spots. One common weakness of this early scholarship was to interpret monastic warfare as evidence of a degeneracy within Buddhist institutions. Although the chronology of decline and the use of historiography as ethical critique have deep roots in both the Buddhist and Confucian traditions, moral judgment is not the same thing as historical argument. To confuse the two, Adolphson suggests, is to mistake an ideological claim for a descriptive account. Adolphson analyzes how past studies of monastic forces have failed to agree on a criteria for militarization, have sought a single identity for diverse groups, and have taken visual representations and vocabularies from a later period as evidence of an earlier age. Against all of this accepted wisdom, he illuminates the specific contexts of monastic violence, clarifies the individuality and variety of the actors involved, reveals the connections between these individuals and other institutional and political forces, and subjects the documents, the language, and the imagery describing those who fought in the name of temples and shrines to a refreshingly rigorous and careful critique.

In chapter 2, Adolphson demystifies religious violence by showing how monastic warfare was an integral element in the increasing militarization of all institutions of Japanese society from the tenth century on. Through a chronological analysis of evidence from the sixth through the fourteenth centuries, he rejects the notion that the factionalization of temple and shrine communities and the recourse of such factions to armed conflict should be perceived as significantly different from the same processes that took place among imperial, aristocratic, and warrior groups. Not only were the issues that informed such conflicts—disputes over succession and land rights—similar to those in the court and the provinces, so too were the actors involved...