arts of peacetime were halted by the destructiveness of the Onin War (1467–77), which devastated Kyoto and has been called one of the most futile wars ever fought. It started as a battle of succession to Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, founder of the Silver Pavilion, but with the passage of time the original cause was forgotten as rival armies stampeded across Kyoto. Fire raged throughout the city, and the mighty Zen complexes suffered along with everything else. As a result, most of the structures visible today date from rebuilding in the sixteenth century or later.
The civil war heralded a breakdown of central power, as Japan entered a period of Warring States when regional warlords vied with each other for power. Without the backing of a powerful shogun, the Gozan system fell into disarray, though ironically Zen as a whole prospered in the misfortune. The independent temples of Daitoku-ji and Myoshin-ji were boosted by donations from regional warlords for the establishment of subtemples. At the same time provincial rulers set up branch temples in their capitals. The top generals of the age received on the spot guidance from powerful Zen priests, who acted as negotiators or gave training in martial arts. Takuan Soho, briefly abbot of Daitoku-ji, is a famous example, drawing on Zen techniques to give much valued advice about swordsmanship.
Detail of one of the huge columns that support the Sanmon gate at Nanzen-ji. Hewn out of a zelkova in 1628, the column shows evidence of the passage of centuries.
The poet Hanshan and his friend Shide were a pair of eccentrics who lived near China’s Mt Tiantai. Known in Japan as Kanzan and Jittoku, they became a popular subject in Zen painting. Kanzan lived in a cave and is depicted with a scroll to indicate his poetry, while Jittoku was a foundling who worked in the temple kitchen and passed food to his friend.
The Edo Period and Modernization
With a return to stability under the Tokugawa shoguns, the country entered more settled times in the Edo Era (1600–1868). To counter the threat of Christianity, every family in the country was obliged to register with a Buddhist temple, and the terakoya system was introduced to promote public education by temple priests. With its Chinese roots Zen was well suited to promote the prevailing Neo-Confucianism. The connection was reinforced in 1654 by the arrival of a Chinese immigrant known in Japan as Ingen Ryuki (1592–1673), who not only introduced Obaku Zen but prompted an invigorating influx of Ming arts and crafts.
For Rinzai, the major development of these years was the work of Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1768), seen in hindsight as almost single-handedly reviving the moribund sect. He lived in a modest temple near the foot of Mt Fuji, turning down offers from Kyoto temples and devoting himself to the training of monks. He made a point of preaching to commoners and his drawing skills won him wide attention, particularly the idiosyncratic portraits of Daruma which he freely gave away. Such was his influence that it is said all contemporary Rinzai priests can trace their lineage back to him.
Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new government was eager to establish a state religion as in the West. They chose the indigenous religion of Shinto and imposed its separation from Buddhism, to which it had been conjoined for over a thousand years. As a pillar of the discredited Tokugawa, Buddhism found itself in disfavor and its funding was cut. With the loss of their estates, temples became financially insolvent and had to sell off valuable assets, including parts of their precincts. As a result, some of Kyoto’s Zen temples are barely a third or a quarter of their former size. Tenryu-ji is just one-tenth.
Buddhism was too deeply rooted to be eradicated, however, and it soon made a comeback. Priests became dependent to a large extent on funeral rites for their income. For many Japanese, the only encounter with Buddhism is through the death of a family member, when the elaborate obsequies involved in securing a safe passage into the afterworld can cost millions of yen. However, this too has come under threat in recent years as Japan’s population shrinks, particularly in rural areas. It is said that in the next couple of decades as many as a third of Japan’s 77,000 Buddhist temples are expected to close down.
To some extent, Zen in Kyoto has been shielded against the downward trend because of the tourist trade, which has seen a dramatic rise in numbers. Kyoto, a city of a million and a half, now attracts over 50 million visitors a year. For a religious sect that values silent contemplation, the revenue from tourists is a mixed blessing, as indicated by this notice posted publicly at Shokoku-ji: “Please respect the temple precincts, garden and environment as a religious space and keep all noise to a minimum. You will acquire Buddha’s providence from the bottom of our heart.”
Zen Spreads to the West
During the course of the twentieth century, as knowledge of Zen spread to the West, Kyoto played a prominent part. D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) is a case in point. Born in Kanazawa, Suzuki studied Zen in Kamakura before working for eleven years in America. After returning to Japan and teaching English in Tokyo, he took up a professorship at Kyoto’s Otani University in 1921, where he continued teaching until the age of 89. He founded the influential Eastern Buddhist Society, and in 1927 published the first series of his ground-breaking Essays in BuddhismOther books followed, among them An Introduction to Zen Buddhism in 1934 and Zen and Japanese Culture in 1959. Over the years, Suzuki gave several lecture tours in the West, described as more like Buddhist sermons than academic talks. Although he has been hailed for his pioneering work, he has also proved a controversial figure who has come under criticism for espousing essentialism.
Among Western intellectuals to take an early interest in Zen were such notables as Satre, Heisenberg, Huxley, Jung and Heidegger. The Beat Generation of the 1950s looked East for inspiration, with Kerouac dubbing his book Dharma Bums (1958) and Gary Snyder coming to Kyoto to study Zen. (Other poets to have found inspiration in Kyoto include Kenneth Rexroth, Cid Corman and Edith Shiffert.) But perhaps the most influential figure of all was Ruth Fuller Sasaki (1892–1967), whose pioneering work played a vital role in opening up Zen to the West.
As Ruth Fuller, she had met Suzuki in 1930 while on a trip to Japan, and she returned to Kyoto the following year to do zazen meditation at a Nanzen-ji subtemple. As a wealthy widow following the death of her husband, she had continued her Zen practice in America, marrying the Japanese master Sokei Sasaki shortly before his death. In accordance with his wishes, she set up the First Zen Institute of America and traveled on its behalf to Kyoto in 1949. She was given use of a house in Daitoku-ji, and used her wealth to develop the site into the subtemple of Ryosen-an. Here she entertained such luminaries as Joseph Campbell, R. H. Blyth and her son-in-law Alan Watts. She was a formidable woman, at one time sitting zazen eighteen hours a day, and she dedicated herself to making Zen writings available to the English-speaking world. To that end, she created a research team, which included Gary Snyder, Burton Watson and Philip Yampolsky.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Zen experienced a cultish boom in the West fueled by books as disparate as The Way of Zen (1957) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). The spiritually displaced headed for ‘a golden triangle’ of Kathmandu, Kuta and Kyoto, and the streets of the city began to fill with seekers of satori (‘awakening’). Some returned home none the wiser, though others stayed on in the city to pursue their interest long term. Some even qualified as priests. Figures like ‘Shakuhachi Bob’ were prominent among the foreign community, and the appeal of studying Zen in the city was poetically caught by Pico Iyer in The Lady and the Monk (1991).
The diffusion to the West has been compared by commentators to the movement of Zen from China to Japan. Among the Kyoto priests facilitating the westward spread were Zenkei Shibayama at Nanzen-ji, a follower of D. T. Suzuki; the abbot of Tofuku-ji, Keido Fukushima, who was unusually open to teaching Western students; and Soko Morinaga, head of Hanazono University, who was the inspiration behind Daishu-in West in northern California and the Zen Centre in London. Through the work of such figures, Kyoto’s reputation
