the dormitories (sobo); and the dining hall (jikido).
There were other buildings as well. These included the inner sanctuary (naijin) where the priests performed their rituals, the outer sanctuary (gaijin) where laymen worshipped, bathrooms, toilets, and the various gates. These last were grouped into the outer gates (daimon) which were named after the cardinal points. The south gate (nan-daimon) was the front or main gate. The inner or middle gate {chumon) opened into the main precincts which contained the pagoda and the main hall. Later developments included the massive sanmon (triple gate) of Zen found in temples such as Tofuku-ji, Nanzen-ji, and the Chion-in. Balanced, symmetrical, speaking of order in a Chinese accent, this early architecture also displayed direct authority. It was a spatial narrative form, an architectural text which from its inception indicated a secular society and the need for a man-made order.
In this the imported Buddhist temple was as different from the local Shinto shrine as were the two religions from each other.
Buddhism in all of its forms encourages thoughts of evanescence, transience, the passing of all things, the attractions of the next world. It is also universalist and moralistic. Shinto—the native animistic religion of Japan—is vital: concerned only with the here and now. It is both pluralistic and amoral. It is also phobic about pollution and decay, while Buddhism is morbid in its reflections upon the imminence of death.
It was through fears of death and hopes of the consequent life beyond that Buddhism achieved its popularity—unlike Shinto which could threaten or promise nothing of the sort. Buddhism consequently achieved a political power which Shinto could never match.
At the same time, however, different though the two religions appeared, they were—such being the way of the country—shortly brought into a kind of harmony with each other. Indeed, the ease with which these apparently inimical beliefs were accommodated makes one wonder about the real depth of either.
Sir George Sansom has voiced these doubts. "The Japanese as a people have displayed in matters of belief a tolerance amounting almost to indifference." But there was also undoubtedly another reason for this religious alloy, one which Karel van Wolferen has indicated in speaking of the melding of Shinto with Buddhism: "An amalgamation of the two religions was clearly an official policy designed to strengthen their joint endorsement of existing worldly rule."
Of the process itself, Shuichi Kato has written that "Buddhism in Japan absorbed native gods and was simultaneously transformed by contact with them... the Japanese gods themselves were transformed by Buddhism, since gods who once were objects of worship prior to the arrival of Buddhism' did not have their own myths, doctrines, shrines, or images."
Later, "under the influence of Buddhism, consistent myths and doctrines were created, the architecture of Shinto shrines was developed, and images of gods were produced." The popular Shinto deity Hachiman is called Hachiman Daibosatsu, and his original home is described as the Pure Land in the west where he is otherwise known as Amida. Amaterasu Omikami, the Sun Goddess, is also at holy Ise known as the Kanzeon Bosatsu, that is, as the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.
There was a name for this: honji suijaku, which means the manifestation of the Buddha incarnated in the form of the native gods. In taking over Shinto to this extent Buddhist authorities knew what they were doing since the native religion still defined the natives. It still continues to do so, for as Nicholas Palevsky has written: "Shinto is characterized not by scriptures and churches but by... a concern for purity and defilement... Shinto is not so much a matter of personal belief as it is of being Japanese."
Beneath the Chinese infatuation (as beneath later crushes on things European and American) this native inclination persists. It resisted the ethical high-mindedness which so reflected the philosophy of Confucious, it opposed the presumed universality of China with the concrete detail and the specific example; to the model conduct of the sages, it opposed the beauty and variety of the world it knew.
No matter how much the eighth-century aristocrat was convinced of China's greatness, he is unlikely to have consequently altered all of his feelings and changed all of his opinions. Just as the modern Japanese resists a complete Westernization (one does riot trod shod in the house, one does not lather in the bath), so his ancestor must have resisted a complete Sinozation.
There is an indication of this in a complaint seen in a 724 Nara report which said that the capital lacked majesty and virtue because there were so many native plank-roofed dwellings and thatched roofs. These are difficult to build and easy to destroy, yet their presence was persisting. The report advised that all high-ranking persons be required to erect tiled dwellings and to paint them red and white in the Chinese style.
Native Japanese needs and tastes continued, however, to assert themselves and often accounted for the combinations through which the foreign influence was changed into something which was both more practical and more in accord with being Japanese.
An architectural example is that important part of the temple known as the kondo, or Buddha hall. The Japanese originally saw it in the form of a scaled model brought by a Paekche mission in 588. The first such halls constructed in Japan were all careful copies. Eventually these were seen as impractical.
The completely symmetrical is something rarely seen in native Japanese art—it too often sacrifices human convenience for reasons both aesthetic and symbolic. The Chinese-style kondo symmetrically dispensed with practicality for symmetry and comfort for effect. Simple human convenience, always prized in Japan, was consequently sacrificed. So, the hall was soon after adapted to native purposes which attempted to retain something of Chinese dignity while accommodating Japanese pragmatic needs. Now the new Buddha hall could hold a lay congregation indoors where they could see and hear the service, and at the same time it had space in which to perform the tantric rites in secrecy.
In this manner an approximation of a national style was returned to religious architecture. It shared with Shinto a practicality, a directness, a humanity one might say, which the Chinese original had not originally evidenced. Now, composed of old and new, the native and the imported, the Buddha hall became Japanese.
Buddhism in Japan was influenced not only by Shinto but also by two systems of thought which, if not precisely religions, functioned remarkably like them. Temple organization and architecture in Japan were in part formed by both Confucianism and Taoism. The former allowed and excused power and the latter extended this power into the further realms of superstition.
They came together in (as seen in one example of their manifestations) geomancy (hoigaku), This originally came from China (fengshui) and entered Japan within a decade (554) of Buddhism. It is a complicated technique for the handling (and creating) of good fortune. Taoist in origin, it was taken over only in part in Japan where it became largely a preventative art, one governed by fear of misfortune.
Temporally, it concerns itself not so much with "good days" (for weddings, the beginning of businesses, etc.) as it is with "bad days" when any kind of action was impermissible. Court lady Sei Shonagon (968-1024) has left a despairing account of the exhausting detours necessary on inauspicious occasions and figuring largely in the list of things hateful in her pillow book, the Makura no Soshi, are the inconveniences of geomanistic superstition.
Spatially, in equally negative manner, hoigaku also concerned itself with things forbidden. Early Buddhist compounds were all built according to forbidding principles. Charts were drawn up with the cardinal points indicated. Here a gate could let in only melancholy; a well in this spot brings worries
