The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (29 page)

I
N
536,
NINE YEARS AFTER
B
UDDHISM
came to his country, King Pophung of Silla declared the beginning of a new era: Konwon, the “Initiated Beginning.” He had already made Buddhism the state religion, issued a code of law, and given Silla a bureaucracy. The new name marked the birth of Silla as a state just as important as its neighbors, Baekje and Goguryeo.
¹

Now the peninsula was laid out in a three-kingdom opposition of equals. In language, in race, in custom, in shared culture, and now in religion, the kingdoms were the same. Silla’s rise to maturity had brought it into line with its companions. All three were Buddhist countries with monarchs, bureaucracies, codes of law, aspirations to be all things Chinese, and ambitions to be the biggest fish in the pond.

Unfortunately there was little room to expand on the peninsula. The sea to the south and east, the Chinese to the west, and the sheer
cold
to the north meant that the three like kingdoms continually pushed back and forth against each other, with power shifting from one side of the peninsula to each other. The Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Franks all had enough space to spread out over a comfortable area without bumping constantly up against each other, but the kingdoms of the peninsula had to fight, and they did so, constantly, without any one kingdom either disappearing or dominating for very long.

Around 540, while Silla was flourishing, the neighboring state of Baekje was also in the midst of a renewal. Pophung of Silla had chosen the idea of time to unify his people, giving them a sense of their place on the vast calendar of Asian peoples; the king of Baekje, King Seong, chose place instead. He moved the capital away from its safe, confined, mountain-protected location at Ungjin and established it instead at Sabi, on the Kum river, in a broad central plain. The message of the move was simple: Baekje would no longer be a defensive, wall-building, cowering state protecting its own territory, but an expansive country with ambitions to dominate the peninsula.
²

30.1: The Far East in the Sixth Century

In an effort to establish himself as the premier power among the three kingdoms, King Seong of Baekje made an alliance with the Southern Liang of China. Going one better on Goguryeo, which had also allied with the south of China, he made diplomatic contact with the northern dynasties of the Eastern and Western Wei as well; Goguryeo, still the biggest and most powerful of the three kingdoms, was a bitter enemy of the northern Chinese kingdoms, which were near enough to reach threatening fingers into the upper reaches of the peninsula. With water between himself and the mainland, King Seong of Baekje was more willing to make goodwill gestures, particularly those that might put Goguryeo at a disadvantage.

In the 540s, Goguryeo began to suffer through assassination and civil war. It remained powerful, but unrest in the capital Pyongyang meant, inevitably, that less attention was devoted to protecting its borders. At the same time, King Pophung of Silla died and was succeeded by the young and ambitious King Chinhung, who inherited a well-organized and peaceful country ready to expand. The king of Baekje took advantage of both events; he convinced Chinhung of Silla to join with him in alliance and attack the giant Goguryeo.

In particular, Seong of Baekje had his eye on land in the Han river basin that had once belonged to Baekje but had been taken away in the conquests of Guanggaeto the Great a century before. As far as he was concerned, that land was captive: Goguryeo might claim it, but it was Baekje territory kept prisoner.

The distracted armies of Goguryeo were unable to defend the territory, and by 551 the combined armies of Silla and Baekje had driven them out. But Chinhung of Silla had been playing a double game. He now turned against his ally and took the land for himself.

Seong of Baekje hung grimly on to the lower Han for some time, but his troops were soon driven out. He had picked a fight with the giant and gotten nothing for it, and he was enraged. He went home and made a new plan: he sent presents, a statue of the Buddha made of gold and copper, and books of Buddhist scriptures eastward to the island of Japan, and asked its king for help.
*

F
OR AT LEAST TWO CENTURIES
, the kingdoms on the peninsula had known of the inhabitants of the eastern island. Known as the Wa, they appeared occasionally to trade, to buy, and every once in a while to join in a war.

We know very little about the earliest days of the Wa. There is no written history from the ancient cultures of Japan; its oldest historical account, the
Kojiki
, was not written until the seventh century
AD
. Archaeologists, working from objects rather than stories, speak of the first era of Japanese history as the “Jomon period”
Jomon
means “cord marked,” and during the Jomon period, the inhabitants of the Japanese islands marked their clay by pressing braided cords into it.
^†

Around 400
BC
, a new culture seems to have begun spreading down from the north of the islands, bringing with it new methods of farming, innovations in working bronze and copper, and other advances. These skills were probably brought to Japan by settlers from China, or from the Korean peninsula, or by a mingling of both; the combination of native culture with these new, immigrant skills marks the next historical period, the Yayoi, which ran (after a century or so of transition) from 300
BC
to around
AD
250.

By
AD
250, Japan, like its neighbors to the west, was mutating from a land filled with allied warrior clans into a nation with a monarchy. The warrior clans, known as
uji
, still existed; the geography of the country (four larger islands and a swarm of smaller ones, mountains chopping even the continuous surface of the larger islands into smaller self-contained areas) lent itself to multiple independent groups ruling themselves. However, by
AD
270, Japan had at least one monarch and one royal family. The Yamato dynasty ruled the flat fertile plain on the largest island: the Yamato plain, which gave easy passage to the Inland Sea.
³

The first period of Yamato control was marked by the coronation of the semi-mythical ruler Ojin in
AD
270. Ojin, the first Japanese monarch in the Kojiki who can be connected with a real historical personage, was seventy when he ascended the throne, and he reigned for an improbable forty years.
*

In fact, the real Ojin was probably not a king, but a warrior-chief who had managed to subdue his neighbors. For the next few centuries, his family would govern at Yamato; but they were not rulers of their entire domain, let alone the nearby islands. They would become known as
tenno
, “heavenly sovereigns.” They did not command world-conquering armies or control trade routes; they provided, instead, a nexus point where the divine could meet the earthly, where the presence of the sacred provided (in a way unclear to us from the contemporary sources) a stable center for the people of the islands.
^†

A mass of tribal chieftains and warleaders spun around the Yamato center. On the island to the south, known as Kyushu, lived clans known as
bambetsu,
“foreign clans”—networks of families whose ancestors had, within living memory, migrated from the Korean peninsula or from the Chinese mainland and settled in a new home. On the northern island, Hokkaido, lived peoples whom the Yamato called the Ezo—the barbarians. It didn’t take much of a royal line before a people drew a line between civilization (themselves) and barbarians (the others).
⁴

T
HE
552
ARRIVAL
of the gifts from the Baekje presented the Yamato ruler with a decision: to accept and ally, or to reject and isolate.

Japanese chronicles tell us that the heavenly sovereign, Kimmei, summoned the clan leaders loyal to him and asked them whether or not to accept the gifts. The heavenly sovereign may have been the nexus of divine power on earth, but the clan leaders exercised much of the real
political
power in the land of the Wa, and in this case they were divided. The Nakatomi clan, which controlled the worship of the traditional Japanese deities, was opposed, as were the members of the Mononobe clan, who objected not so much to the religion as to its foreignness. On the other hand, the leader of the Soga clan, the most powerful in Japan, argued that since every other kingdom now followed the Buddha, it was high time for Japan to follow suit. He had apparently been convinced by the message Seong sent: “From distant India to the three kingdoms of Korea,” Seong had written, craftily, “all receive these teachings and there is none who does not revere and honour them.” No one east of China wanted to live in a backwater, or to get a reputation as the last hick town out of the mainstream.
⁵

Kimmei decided to keep the statue, and in return dispatched an army to help Seong out. King Seong launched an attack against Kwansan Fortress, the keystone to the defense of the Silla frontier; despite the reinforcements, the battle was a disaster. Seong was killed, the Baekje army was driven back, and Chinhung of Silla, elated by his success, kept fighting his way south until he held not only the land around the Han river but also the land along the Naktong river, all the way to the southern coast of the peninsula.

In just a few years, Chinhung had turned his country into the largest and strongest on the peninsula. The map had shifted again. Silla, not Goguryeo, had risen to the top of the heap; and the new king of Baekje, Seong’s son Wideok, hastily made an alliance with his previous enemy, the king of Goguryeo, to protect himself against further aggression.
⁶

Meanwhile, east of the peninsula, the image of the Buddha was in peril.

The Yamato monarch Kimmei had allowed the Soga chief, Soga no Iname, to build a temple and begin following the ways of the Buddha, but the religion was definitely on probation; the Nakatomi chief had already warned that the old gods of Japan would punish this foreign trespass on their territory. Soga no Iname ignored the warning—until an epidemic broke out in the capital city and intensified. He finally heeded the Nakatomi advice, threw the statue into a canal, and burned down the temple.
⁷

But the teachings of the Buddha had already taken hold. It is difficult for us to know exactly what the traditional faith of Japan (later known as Shinto) looked like before the arrival of Buddhism; writing came to Japan along with Buddhism, so all of the descriptions we have were written well after Buddhism had worked its way into the Japanese landscape. But in its earliest forms, Shinto depended on rituals conducted at
kami
, sacred places where earthly existence and the sacred world were thought to intersect; clan leaders were charged with supervising the rituals and keeping the
kami
unpolluted.
⁸

Whatever else it encompassed, in the sixth century Shinto was firmly connected to particular places; it was, in the strictest sense, a
local
religion. The universalism of Buddhism meant that the two faiths did not collide. Buddhism, with its global truths, its focus on vast all-encompassing realities, offered answers to questions that Shinto did not ask. The gold and copper Buddha might lie in the mud of a canal bed, but after 552 the Buddha’s words spread unstoppably through the islands of Japan.

B
Y GETTING RID OF THE
B
UDDHA
, Soga no Iname had protected his clan’s power; now the dissident Nakatomi couldn’t use the new religion as justification to challenge the Soga hold over the emperor. The monarch Kimmei and his dynasty called themselves Great Kings, but their greatness was a tentative and wary affair; they channelled divinity, in their role as heavenly sovereign, but their earthly power was supported by growing reliance on Soga strength.
⁹

Of Kimmei’s three royal wives, two were of Soga family; Kimmei himself arranged the marriage of his son and heir Bidatsu to one of his own daughters, the prince’s half-sister by a Soga wife, tying the clan even more closely to the throne. When he died, the prince Bidatsu came peacefully to the crown; when Bidatsu died after a thirteen-year reign, he was followed by his half-brother Yomei (who reigned for two years) and then his half-brother Sushun (five years). All were children of Kimmei’s Soga wives; the Soga had a vested interest in keeping them in power.