Chapter 2. Tokugawa Household Registration: The Terauke System¶

The new schools rose in a form seen in none of the other copies of Buddhist history: religious organizations themselves became Warring States daimyō. Rennyo rebuilt Shin through lay associations and vernacular pastoral letters, and the Honganji house grew rapidly. The Kaga Ikkō uprising expelled the provincial military lord; for nearly a century thereafter, contemporaries called it a country held by the common people. Ishiyama Honganji occupied a strategic site in Osaka and fought Oda Nobunaga for ten full years.¹ For a time, the Hokke uprising controlled the townspeople's self-government in Kyoto's lower city. Place this scene in the volume's sequence. Indian Buddhism never had troops; Chinese Buddhism occasionally had monk-soldiers but never a state; Tibetan Buddhism borrowed others' troops to found its own state (Essay 12). Japanese Buddhism was its own army and proclaimed itself a state. Religious organizations built on exclusive practice showed another face amid upheaval. The very structure of loyalty—one house, one lord—could turn disciples of Buddha recollection into an army. The men who ended it knew exactly what they were after: Nobunaga burned Mount Hiei and attacked Ishiyama; Hideyoshi conducted the sword hunt. The objects of confiscation shifted from scriptures and images to weapons and territorial sovereignty. Japan's Huichang did not burn scriptures or force monks back to lay life. It did one thing: disarm them.² The state here wanted something different from Wuzong. Wuzong wanted Buddhism's assets; Nobunaga and Hideyoshi wanted its sovereignty. You could keep your assets, but not an inch of sovereignty.

The Tokugawa put the disarmed organizations to another use. The prohibition of Catholicism was settled shogunal policy, tightened to its extreme after the Shimabara rebellion. Monasteries were its instrument. Under religious inspection and the terauke system, every household had to belong to a parish temple, which issued a temple certificate proving that its members were not Christians (Kirishitan). Registers inspecting religious affiliation and the population were drawn up annually. Travel, relocation, marriage, and service employment all required a temple certificate.³ Buddhism thus became the household-registration agency of the shogunate-domain system. Essay 12, Chapter 3 said that Tibetan Buddhism took over the state itself. Japanese Buddhism instead became one part of the shogunate's household registration. The direction of registration also deserves comparison. In China, the state registered monks: ordination certificates controlled who could enter monastic life. In Japan, monks registered the population: temple certificates controlled who was not Kirishitan. The same pair of superior and subordinate, but the pen had changed direction.

Along with the registration function, temples received parishioner households assigned by law. Parishioner households owed duties to their family temple. They had to engage it for funerals and ritual services; memorial offerings ran from the seventh day after death to the observance called sanjūsankaiki, the thirty-third memorial; Dharma names required payments graded by rank. To change temples, a family first had to alter its household registration. Ending an affiliation was nearly impossible. The head-and-branch system further organized the schools into pyramids. The shogunate needed only to control each school's head temple for a single code of temple regulations to reach the entire country.⁴ Buddhism's hold on the rites of death described in Essay 11, Chapter 3 thus reached its logical endpoint in Japan. China's hold on scripture and repentance services was won in competition; Japan's funeral monopoly was granted by the shogunate. Chinese bereaved families could engage another temple; Japanese parishioners were bound to one temple in life and death. Here lie the institutional roots of the later derisive label “funerary Buddhism.”⁵

In the Chinese half, the upper emblem represents the state and the lower one the monk. In the Japanese half, the temple registers the households below it; the English image omits the Chinese image’s four branching connectors. The first obligation covers funerals and ritual services performed by one’s affiliated temple. The fourth obligation concerns ending affiliation with one’s temple, which the chapter describes as requiring a change in household registration, not simply leaving a building. “Posthumous names” here are Dharma names, with contributions differentiated by rank. The memorial sequence runs from the seventh-day rite to the rite called the thirty-third anniversary memorial; “thirty-third” does not mean the thirty-third day.

The pyramid brings two arrangements into one schematic picture. The head–branch organization of temples and the temple–parishioner system are distinct institutions, as the chapter’s note explains. That note also preserves a distinction between the ordinance’s wording, which permits a donor to choose a temple, and the practical difficulty of changing affiliation under temple registration. The chapter has not resolved that discrepancy through a specialized study; the image does not erase it.

Marked explicitly, as required, the following is this volume's conjecture and this chapter's conclusion: being brought under state administration changed Buddhism more thoroughly than suppression. Under suppression there remain martyrs and underground faith. Administration removes competition altogether: believers are assigned by law, income guaranteed by obligation, and the monastic community no longer needs to persuade anyone to believe anything. Its capacity for propagation gradually declined over two hundred and fifty years. No one's moral decline need be blamed: the incentive structure operating as usual is sufficient explanation. Essay 11, Chapter 1 said that after Huichang the state learned that administering Buddhism paid better than demolishing it. The Tokugawa carried this to its limit, administering Buddhism so fully that there was no longer any need to demolish it. The straightforward half of the explanation must also be recorded: Edo was no age of Buddhist decline. Precisely because outward propagation was unnecessary, intelligence turned inward. Schools' seminaries and study halls flourished; sectarian textual scholarship reached unprecedented precision. Hakuin recast kōan Zen among ordinary people, Tetsugen raised funds to print the entire canon, and Bankei taught unborn Zen to peddlers and laborers. Beyond this flourishing of learning and institutions, however, there was a portent. An Osaka townsman read the whole canon outside the Kaitokudō's lecture halls and wrote Words after Emerging from Meditation. His theory of successive additions declared that Mahāyāna was not spoken by the Buddha. The first person to examine the canon philologically stood outside every school's study hall, because everyone within those halls belonged to a school. The influence of this book of 1745 would become fully visible only in Essay 14.⁶

To close: Edo's two hundred and fifty years offered a peace none of the three older copies had enjoyed. No fear of suppression, no labor of propagation, no anxiety over food and clothing. Ceylon was in colonial hands, China within dynastic cycles, Tibet amid the risks of its own rule. Japanese Buddhism rested securely within the shogunate's order. The cost was still invisible: when all of a religion's believers are assigned by law, its relation to them no longer needs to be faith; administration is enough. For two hundred and fifty years, no one learned how to survive under free competition. The next chapter describes competition's overnight return.

References¶