Thus began the next phase of early Japanese Zen, fueled by the invasion of Chinese Ch'an monks. This movement occupied the remainder of the thirteenth century and was spurred along by unsettled conditions in China—namely the imminent fall of the Southern Sung Dynasty to the Mongols and a concurrent power struggle within Ch'an itself, which induced monks from the less powerful establishments to seek greener pastures.3 In 1263 a senior Ch'an cleric named Wu-an (1197-1276) arrived in Kamakura and was also made an abbot by Tokiyori.4 The first monk, Lan-ch'i, thereupon moved to Kyoto and began proselytizing in the old capital. Wu-an subsequently certified Tokiyori with a seal of enlightenment, making the military strongman of Japan an acknowledged Ch'an master. Tokiyori's interest in Zen did not go unnoticed by the warriors around him, and his advocacy, combined with the influx of Chinese monks appearing to teach, initiated the Zen bandwagon in Kamakura.
Tokiyori died in 1263, and his young son Tokimune (1251—84), who came to power five years later, initially showed no interest in Zen practice. But he was still in his teens in 1268 when there appeared in Japan envoys from Kublai Khan demanding tribute. The Mongols were at that moment completing their sack of China, and Japan seemed the next step. Undeterred, the Japanese answered all Mongol demands with haughty insults, with the not-unexpected result that in 1274 Kublai launched an invasion fleet. Although his ships foundered in a fortuitous streak of bad weather, the Japanese knew that there would be more. It was then that Tokimune began strengthening his discipline through Zen meditation and toughening his instincts with koans. He studied under a newly arrived Chinese master whose limited Japanese necessitated their communicating through a translator. (When the enlightened Chinese found cause to strike his all-powerful student, he prudently pummeled the interpreter instead.)5 The samurai also began to take an interest in Zen, which naturally appealed to the warrior mentality because of its emphasis on discipline, on experience over education, and on a rough-and-tumble practice including debates with a master and blows for the loser—all congenial to men of simple, unschooled tastes. For their own part, the perceptive Chinese missionaries, hampered by the language barrier, rendered Zen as simplistic as possible to help the faith compete with the Salvationist sects among the often illiterate warriors.
In 1281 the Mongols launched another invasion force, this time 100,000 men strong, but they were held off several weeks by the steel-nerved samurai until a typhoon (later named the Kamikaze or "Divine Wind") providentially sank the fleet. The extent to which Zen training aided this victory can be debated, but the courage of Tokimune and his soldiers undoubtedly benefited from its rigorous discipline. The Japanese ruler himself gave Zen heavy credit and immediately began building a commemorative Zen monastery in Kamakura.
By the time of Tokimuni's premature death in 1284, Rinzai Zen had been effectively established as the faith of the Kamakura rulers. His successor continued the development of Zen establishments, supported by new Chinese masters who also began teaching Chinese culture (calligraphy, literature, ink painting, philosophy) to the Kamakura warriors along with their Zen. Since the faith was definitely beginning to boom, the government prudently published a list of restrictions for Zen monasteries, including an abolition of arms (a traditional problem with the other sects) and a limit on the number of pretty boys (novices) that could be quartered in a compound to tempt the monks. The maximum number of monks in each monastery also was prescribed, and severe rules were established governing discipline. Out of this era in the late thirteenth century evolved an organization of Zen temples in Kyoto and Kamakura based on the Sung Chinese model of five main monasteries (called the "five mountains" or gozan) and a network of ten officially recognized subsidiary temples. Furthermore, Chinese culture became so fashionable in Kamakura that collections of Sung art began appearing among the illiterate provincial warriors—an early harbinger of the Japanese evolution of Zen from asceticism to aesthetics.6
The creation of the gozan system at the end of the thirteenth century gave Zen a formal role in the religious structure of Japan. Zen was now fashionable and had powerful friends, a perfect
combination to foster growth and influence. On the sometimes pointed urging of the government, temples from other sects were converted to Zen establishments by local authorities throughout Japan.7 The court and aristocracy in Kyoto also began taking an interest in pure, Sung-style Rinzai. Temples were built in Kyoto (or converted from other sects), and even the cloistered emperors began to meditate (perhaps searching less for enlightenment than for the rumored occult powers). When the Kamakura regime collapsed in the mid-fourteenth century and warriors of the newly ascendent Ashikaga clan returned the seat of government to Kyoto, the old capital was already well acquainted with Zen's political importance. However, although Rinzai Zen had made much visible headway in Japan—the ruling classes increasingly meditated on koans, and Chinese monks operated new Sung-style monasteries—the depth of understanding seems disappointingly superficial overall. The gozan system soon turned so political, as monasteries competed for official favor, that before long establishment Zen was almost devoid of spiritual content. In many ways, Japanese Zen became decadent almost from the start. The immense prestige of imported Chinese art and ideas, together with the powerful role of the Zen clerics as virtually the only group sufficiently educated to oversee relations with the continent, meant that early on, Zen's cultural role became as telling as its spiritual place.
Perhaps the condition of Zen is best illustrated by noting that the most famous priest of the era, Muso Soseki (1275-1351), was actually a powerful political figure. This Zen prelate, who never visited China, came to prominence when he served first an ill-fated emperor—subsequently deposed—and later the Ashikaga warrior who deposed him. Muso was instrumental in the Japanese government's establishment of regular trade with the mainland. He was also responsible for a revision of the gozan administrative system, establishing (in 1338) official Zen temples in all sixty-six provinces of Japan and spreading the power base of the faith. Although Muso is today honored as an important Japanese master, he actually preferred a "syncretic" Zen intermingled with esoteric rites and apparently understood very little of real Zen. A prototype for many Zen leaders to come, he was a scholar, aesthetician, and architect of some of the great cultural monuments in Kyoto, personally designing several of the capital's finest temples and landscape gardens.
Thus by the mid-fourteenth century Zen had become hardly more than an umbrella for the import of Chinese technology, art,
and philosophy.8 The monks were, by Muso's own admission, more often than not "shaven-headed laymen" who came to Zen to learn painting and to write a stilted form of Chinese verse as part of a gozan literary movement. The overall situation has been well summarized by Philip Yampolsky: "The monks in temples were all poets and literary figures.. . . [T]he use of koans, particularly those derived from the [Blue Cliff Record], became a literary and educational device rather than a method for the practice of Zen."9 He further notes that ". . . with the gozan system frozen in a bureaucratic mold, priests with administrative talents gained in ascendency. In the headquarters temples men interested in literary pursuits withdrew completely from temple affairs and devoted themselves exclusively to literature. To be sure, priests gave lectures and continued to write commentaries. But the gozan priests seemed to concern themselves more and more with trivialities. By the mid-fifteenth century Zen teaching had virtually disappeared in the temples, and the priests devoted themselves mainly to ceremonial and administrative duties."10 Authentic Zen practice had become almost completely emasculated, overshadowed by the rise of a Zen-inspired cultural movement far outstripping Chinese prototypes.
The political convolutions of fourteenth-century Japan, as well as the organizational shenanigans of the official Rinzai Zen sect, need not detain us further.11 We need only note that the gozan system, which so effectively gave Zen an official presence throughout Japan, also meant that the institution present was Zen in name only. Significantly, however, a few major monasteries elected not to participate in the official system. One of the most important was the Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, which managed, by not becoming part of the establishment, to maintain some authenticity in its practice. And out of the Daitoku-ji tradition there came from time to time a few Zen monks who still understood what Zen was supposed to be about, who understood it was more than painting, gardens, poetry, and power. Perhaps the most celebrated of these iconoclastic throwbacks to authentic Zen was the legendary Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481).