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Enryaku-ji

On the heights of Mount Hiei, northeast of Kyoto, sits the ecclesiastical city of Enryaku-ji, headquarters of the Tendai sect and a center for religious meditation, political indoctrination, and warfare since the Heian period (784-1185). Most of the founders of the major Buddhist sects rising during the following several centuries studied there: Honen of the Jodo sect; Shinran of thejodo Shin sect; Eisai who introduced the Rinzai Zen sect to Japan; Dogen, who did the same for the Soto sect; Ippen of the Ji sect of Jodo; Kuya of his own Tendai sect; and Nichiren, who founded Nichiren Buddhism—all were trained there.

Enryaku-ji grew as enormous as it was important. Though less than a twentieth of its former size, the temple is still one of the largest in Japan. It now faces Lake Biwa and not Kyoto, the old capital, but is still so big that only a third is readily visitable—in winter the roads to the two other main sections are closed and no buses run.

Originally, however, it was but a collection of mountain huts. These followed only the irregularity of their terrain. In such sites as this the formal Chinese layout was impossible—so was any sustained balance or symmetry. Thus in their very appearance the temples of the new religion constituted a rebuke to the luxurious compounds down on the plain. This is something which the Tendai founder, Saicho (later known as Dengyo Daishi) reinforced in his deathbed message. He advised a "cheerful poverty" on his followers, and thus implied a criticism of those soft and luxurious Buddhists down below.

Saicho had early built his hut in the snows and forests of Mt. Hiei and in the silence and the cold observed his austerities. Said to have been but a youth of eighteen, he had climbed the mountain and sought the way, relying on what he had learned while in Nara.

One day he came across a fallen tree at the very summit of the mountain. From it he carved an image of the Yakushi Nyorai, that manifestation known as the Buddha of Healing (Bhaisajyaguru Tathagata). This figure—788 is the date given—he then set up in his hut. The house became home to the image and turned into a temple.

This was beginning of Enryaku-ji, and the little dwelling itself was eventually to be transformed into the mighty Komponchu-do where, it is said, dus same image still stands outlined in the shadows by the "inextinguishable Dharma Light" that Saicho himself lit and which, says the temple, has been burning for over twelve hundred years.

It was in 804, after this impressive beginning, that Saicho traveled to China, returned with the precepts of what became the Tendai sect in Japan, and consolidated his mountain temple.

Tendai was broadly Mahayana and its basic scripture was the so-called Lotus Sutra. This purportedly contains the Buddha's final sermon, in which he revealed the potential buddhability of everyone. At the same time, it bolstered this with ecclesiastical authority, and was itself much concerned with doctrine, attempting a grand synthesis of all religious knowledge.

By 823 the place was so powerful that the emperor Saga was prevailed upon to confer it with the name of Enryaku-ji—after the year of its founding—and to announce its official role of protecting the new capital and his imperial highness from the malevolent forces of evil inhabiting the northeast.

Beside protecting the city, the purpose was also to promote this new Buddhism which would combat the narrow Hinayana influence of the Nara temples. Saicho called his monastery Ichiji Shikan-in, a name which refers to the possibility of attaining Buddhahood inherent in everyone, one of the tenets of Tendai. This was in pronounced contradistinction to Nara Buddhism which insisted upon the concept of Sanji, interpreted as the inherent inequality of people and the consequent acceptance of a hierarchical society.

It was here, in the nearby Kaidan-in, a smallish red-lacquered building, that a year earlier in 822 Mahayana Buddhism (to which Tenryu belonged) officially declared its independence from the Hinayana Buddhism of Nara. The ecclesiastical threat had passed—the new Buddhism was benevolent.

Its duties also included prosylatization. Saicho, on his deathbed, ordered his disciples: "Do not make images nor copy sutras for me. Rather transmit what I have taught you. Spread my teachings so they will be useful to all."

Enryaku-ji had other roles to play as well—these largely political. As this liturgical capital grew ever larger it began to exercise an influence upon the imperial government and consequently upon the country at large. This was apparently one of Saicho's intentions.

In a manual for Tendai monks (the Tendai Hokkeshu Nembun Gakusei Shikt) he wrote that students should strive to become kokushi (national teachers) for "as students of the teachings of our Enryaku-ji Tendai lineage, even if we are beggars on the street, we can still become the emperor's teacher."As a kokushi, one was to travel throughout the provinces and instruct both officials and citizens. In this way religion, in particular the Tendai religion, could became the basis of the Japanese state. "Repay your indebtedness to the country by spreading the word" was the slogan oft repeated.

Enryaku-ji was quite strong enough to enforce these teachings. Eventually it extended twenty miles east and west, and twenty miles north and south, occupied the entire top of this large mountain and had a circumference of two hundred forty-four miles. In this enormous area there were more than three thousand buildings and it was said that the number of the priests and monks and servants was uncountable.

Its position was in several senses unassailable, a fact voiced by a later poet, Ji'en, who wrote:

Many are the mountains

But when we say 'mountain'

We mean Mount Hiei.

On different levels, there are seemingly endless staircases, and vast distances between the various parts of the compound. In addition the training was so rigorous that those who did not leave or die became exceptionally strong.

And it is always cold. Mount Hiei is over two thousand five hundred feet high, not really great as mountains go, but quite lofty enough to ensure snow through three seasons. There are also frequent winds. Those who lived and studied on Mount Hiei had to be strong soldiers for Buddha.

The main political tool of this enormous ecclesiastical citadel was an army of militant warrior-monks. Originally Buddhism had had no military arm. Nara Buddhism was a strictly aristocratic affair and the court limited those few members who did not belong to the aristocracy. With the move to Kyoto, however, such rules were relaxed and the large outlying temples began hiring an increasing number of-peasants who were to serve as private armies—initially for protection, later for aggression and gain.

These warriors were called akuso (rowdy monks) and so they were. Whatever northeast evils the emperor Kammu had wished to avoid, they could not have been more troublesome than the monks themselves.

From 969 on the cenabitic army frequently threatened the court with violence, and in later years often carried out these threats. Imperial concern was voiced by the later emperor who is supposed to have said: "There are three things I cannot control—the Kamo River, gambling, and the monks on the mountain."

Since police were forbidden in the sacred precincts of Mount Hiei, Enryaku-ji itself became a refuge for those on the run from the capital. Professing religious enthusiasm they clambered up in such numbers that finally the head bishop Kakujin (1012-81) announced that the monastery would form its own army to rid "the temples and the estates of thieves and robbers." This army, however, was comprised of these very thieves and robbers. Enryaku-ji had, ironically, itself become the dreaded northeast threat.

The real enemies of this ecclesiastical military were not the court's aristocrats but other sects, their rivals for power. Originally the non-Nara sects, Tendai and Shingon, had been weak enough to coexist. But no longer. By the tenth century the conflict between the sanmon, or "mountain faction" based at Enryaku-ji, and the jimon, or "temple faction" based at Mii-dera, led to armed struggles which lasted from 933 to 1571.

The Tale of the Heike, that medieval war chronicle, has many passages concerning the militant monks, the power they enjoyed, and the damage they inflicted. They often intimidated the emperor and in 1177 burned the imperial palace causing a conflagration which destroyed much of the capital.

"Fanned by a strong southeast wind" says The Tale of the Heike "flames like huge cartwheels leaped three and five blocks and burned diagonally toward the northwest in an indescribably terrifying manner.... Family diaries, documents preserved for generations, and treasures of every description were reduced to ashes. The losses may be imagined. Hundreds of people perished in the flames, as well as countless oxen and horses. [But] that fire was no ordinary occurrence. Someone had a dream in which two or three thousand big monkeys, each carrying a lighted pine torch, came down from Mount Hiei to burn the city"

From the eleventh to the fifteen centuries the Enryaku-ji army was the most powerful in the country. During the thirteenth century alone it descended upon the capital more than twenty times; it controlled all the (religious and political affairs it could, and, like any political organization, was ruthless in suppressing its rivals.

All new religious sects had to contend with the Tendai monks of Enryakuji. Even though most of the leaders of these newer beliefs had been trained at the temple, no ties bound the graduates. The mountain monks continued to raid the new temples, burning their records and killing their priests. When Nichiren (1222-82) attempted a beginning in the capital, the holy Tendai army razed all twenty-one of his temples, and butchered all of his monks—in a single temple three thousand at once. Even today the Nichiren sect, strong in the rest of Japan, is not a major force in the old capital.

Enryaku-ji's reign as a center of military power continued into the sixteenth century. Then, in 1571, "hardened by age, blinded by success," as one chronicle describes it, Enryaku-ji sided against Oda Nobunaga, the general who succeeded in ending more than a century of civil war and eventually was to bring the entire country under his control.

Oda is supposed to have looked up at the militant monks and said: "If I do not take them away now, this great trouble will be everlasting. Moreover, these priests violate their vows: they eat fish and stinking vegetables, keep concubines, and never unroll the sacred books. How can they be vigilant against evil, or maintain the right? Surround their dens and burn them, and suffer none of them to live."

Though the priests were supported by a number of the powerful, including the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiaki, they could not prevent the army of Nobunaga from storming the mountain, burning the temples, and slaughtering some three thousand priests. On the twelfth day of the ninth month of the year Genki (September 30,1571), all the buildings, all the records, all the treasures of eight centuries were destroyed. Of the greatest temple complex in Asia not one building remained.

The heights of Mount Hiei, like much of the capital, remained deserted until after Oda was assassinated in 1582. His successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi then began a program of reconstruction. Since he himself had imperial ambitions, he rebuilt Kyoto on the model of the imperial capital it had once been. He even recalled the example of the emperor Kammu, who originally allowed no temples in the city itself, and placed the hostile Jodo and Nichiren temples where they could be watched—creating Teramachi in the east and Teranouchi in the northwest. He allowed the Tendai sect to reopen its notorious complex at Enryaku-ji but limited it to one hundred twenty-five temples. It never again wielded secular power.

In the Komponchu-do, rebuilt in 1642, the Yakushi Nyorai is said still to stand and so it may—it is impossible to tell in the darkness. Across bare, cold, red-lacquered floors now long rubbed pink, the barefoot visitor slides into the shadows of the great central hall and there, between the further pillars, opens a gulf.

Ten feet below, faintly illuminated by candles stands the personage. Seen as though across the moat of darkness, it is perhaps the statue carved by Shicho many centuries ago. Near it is that perpetual lamp said lit by the founding monk. Though it was in fact put out by Nobunaga when he began his depredations, this fact is ignored and it burns as though it has always. Yet it reveals nothing—the figure before it remains in the darkness.

The muffling scent of incense hangs in cold air and there remains something of the militant blackness of the huge, brooding, vanished complex. The heavy roofs weigh in the cold mountain air, the great cryptomeria stand black over the still temples, and still flags hang from the high eaves—yellow, green, red—speaking of old China and beyond, to ancient, cold Tibet.

In the dark of a winter afternoon the great icy Komponchu-do seems—as do all frozen things—to be waiting. The single lamp, cold as the gulf in which it burns suspended, is the only sign of life—the sign of a life to come.