Holy vows and realpolitik: Preliminary notes on Kōyasan’s early medieval kishōmon

This article concerns the written vows made at the Shingon Buddhist temple Kōyasan 高野山 in the early medieval period (1185–1392). The temple complex at Kōyasan is situated in the mountainous interior of modern Wakayama prefecture, Japan, which in the pre-modern era corresponded to the province of Kii 紀伊. In the early medieval period, Kōyasan was developing a system of local rule centred on control of private estates ( shōen 荘園) in the area surrounding the temple. This was an era of decentralization, in which national authority and systems of rule were losing their potency in the face of rising localization and the increasingly central role of the warrior class. With warriors taking an ever greater share of estate revenue and assuming greater administrative control within shōen , estate proprietors such as Kōyasan were faced with diminishing income, leading to centrally-located temples and aristocratic families effectively losing all control over distant estates. Located in the mountains of Kii and overlooking the estates along the Ki river, Kōyasan by contrast was close to its land and was strongly involved in warrior society.  A major facet of this relationship with warrior estate managers was the kishōmon 起請文, or written vow, signed at the temple as both a performative act of submission to its spiritual authority and as a contract and code of conduct between proprietor and estate manager ( shōkan 荘官).


Introduction
M Y CURRENT research concerns the written vows made at the Shingon Buddhist temple Kōyasan 高野山 in the early medieval period (1185-1392).The temple complex at Kōyasan is situated in the mountainous interior of modern Wakayama prefecture, Japan, which in the pre-modern era corresponded to the province of Kii 紀伊.In the early medieval period, Kōyasan was developing a system of local rule centred on control of private estates (shōen 荘園) in the area surrounding the temple.This was an era of decentralization, in which national authority and systems of rule were losing their potency in the face of rising localization and the increasingly central role of the warrior class.With warriors taking an ever greater share of estate revenue and assuming greater administrative control within shōen, estate proprietors such as Kōyasan were faced with diminishing income, leading to centrally-located temples and aristocratic families effectively losing all control over distant estates.Located in the mountains of Kii and overlooking the estates along the Ki river, Kōyasan by contrast was close to its land and was strongly involved in warrior society.A major facet of this relationship with warrior estate managers was the kishōmon 起請文, or written vow, signed at the temple as both a performative act of submission to its spiritual authority and as a contract and code of conduct between proprietor and estate manager (shōkan 荘官).
As yet there has been very little research conducted on kishōmon in English-language academia, let alone on the religious-secular function of these vows in the context of the estate system and local power.The cosmological structure of Nanbokuchō period (1336-92) kishōmon is mentioned in passing in Sato Hiroo's "The Emergence of Shinkoku (Land DOI: 10.2218/ejecar.2013.1.738 of the Gods) Ideology in Japan" and Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli's Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm. 1 The political aspect of kishōmon is mentioned in Lorraine Harrington's"Social Control and the Significance of Akutō", which briefly deals with Kōyasan kishōmon and their use with criminals. 2However, these studies largely consider kishōmon in passing as support for broader arguments on religion or society; for detailed study of the written vow one must turn to Japanese-language scholarship, notably Hyakusho mōshijō to kishōmon no sekai by Irumada Nobuo, Satō's Kishōmon no seishinshi, and his recent contribution to the field, "Nihon chūsei zenki ni okeru kishōmon no kinō ronteki kenkyū". 3My research builds on previous scholarship by considering the kishōmon as a tool of social control and a reification of the social and political relationship between monks and warriors, estate managers and temple, within the Kōyasan Domain.
In particular, it seeks to establish the degree to which Kōyasan kishōmon were standardized in text and function in the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries, and to what extent this standardization departed from the general use of written oaths in early medieval Japan.

What were kishōmon?
Kishōmon originated in the late Heian period among high-ranking monks and the aristocracy, but became increasingly popular across Japan from the mid-twelfth century onwards. 4Vows were signed for a wide variety of purposes, but within the Kōyasan Domain, the kishōmon was soon adapted to specific purposes and took on a standardized form of both oath and the terms that were sworn. 5These standardized oaths coincide with the establishment of Kōyasan's early-medieval system of rule and the integration of the local elite into the hierarchy of the temple domain.Approximately one hundred pre-modern 1. Satō, Hiroo, "The emergence of Shinkoku (Land of the Gods) ideology in Japan," in Buddhism and nativism: framing identity discourse in Buddhist environments, ed.Henk W. A. Blezer and Mark Teeuwen, Challenging paradigms (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 32f; Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli, eds., Buddhas and kami in Japan: Honji suijaku as a combinatory paradigm (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), passim.
2. L. Harrington, "Social control and the significance of Akutō," in Court and Bakufu in Japan: essays in Kamakura history, ed.J. P. Mass (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 243f.
3. Irumada, Nobuo, Hyakushō mōshijō to kishōmon no sekai: Chūsei minshū no jiritsu to rentai (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1986); Satō, Hiroo, Kishōmon no seishinshi: Chūsei sekai no kami to hotoke (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2006); Satō, Hiroo, "Nihon chūsei zenki ni okeru kishōmon no kinō ronteki kenkyū," Shigaku Zasshi 120,  no.11 (2011).4. Irumada, Nobuo, Hyakushō mōshijō, 35.  5.The Kōyasan Domain (Kōyasan-jiryō, 高野山寺領, shikka no shōen, 膝下の荘園) was a large area of contiguous estates in north-eastern Kii province under the administration of the temple.In contrast to the nationally-scattered estates of other major temples, Kōyasan concentrated its estate holdings within a specific area, claimed as a divinely-commended "ancient domain" (kyūryū, 旧領) through association with the temple's protective gods, Niu 丹生 and Kōya 高野.Over the course of the Kamakura and Nanbokuchō periods (1185-1392), Kōyasan acquired all of the land within the boundaries of the "ancient domain" through donation, commendation, lawsuit, and armed invasion.kishōmon survive in the archives of Kōyasan, with some sixty of these dating from the early medieval period.Through them we are able to observe the means by which Kōyasan demanded the fealty of shōkan and warriors, and by examining the terms of the agreements that they swore to uphold we are offered a detailed insight into estate society.This provides a window into the relationship between monks, warriors, and cultivators within Kōyasan shōen.The vows sworn at Kōyasan were a formalization and regularization of the society of northern Kii.The temple, acting as the focal point, controller, and guarantor of these vows thus occupied a tremendously important position in this society.Not only were kishōmon signed at the temple itself, but their terms were decided in conference on the mountain and, judging by the uniformity of their language, were written out by Kōyasan's own scribes.The temple was thus providing the framework for the agreement of social roles in local estate society; in Foucauldian terms, Kōyasan was controlling the organization of discourse.Through control of the language, structure, and divine content of the vows, the temple was acting as the institutional apparatus through which local families articulated their social position and responsibilities. 6here can be no clearer expression of the integration of religious and temporal power in the medieval period in Japan than the kishōmon.The oath's validity and power came from the spiritual and political power of the issuing temple: drawing on the power of the nation's gods and Buddhas, deceased patriarchs and esoteric deities, kishōmon threatened oathbreakers with divine punishments in this life and the next.The subject matter of the vows themselves, in contrast to the religious nature of this frame text, was overwhelmingly practical and strongly linked to everyday society and local politics.The terrible power of the vow, drawing on powers considered immanent and fearful, and the institutional might of the temples at which they were signed lent kishōmon a practical authority as de facto legal documents. 7In a time when the reach and authority of central government was weakening, the vow represented an independent and decentralized means to create binding agreements and enforce judgement.The kishōmon was therefore a means for parties to sign an agreement guaranteed by the authority of the temple without involving the governments, and crucially was also a means for temples to enforce their spiritual and temporal power over signatories.In Kii Province, Kishōmon were used to chasten criminals and set the terms of their "parole", to articulate the rights and responsibilities of estate officials, and to enforce their submission to the overlordship of the temple proprietor.This written vow is thus closely connected to the evolution of administrative control and local power in the early medieval period.
In the context of medieval Japan, the weight of this religious force and the importance of the written document should not be underestimated.Medieval society depended on the authority of the written document to guarantee landholding, rights, responsibilities, and inheritance. 8Kishōmon added to this inherent authority the power of the gods and 6.M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 194, 196.  7. Satō, Hiroo, "Kishōmon no kinō," 27f.8. Hitomi Tonomura, "Forging the past: medieval counterfeit documents," Monumenta Nipponica 40, no.Buddhas, coupled with the fear of disease and damnation, to create a potent guarantee of the oath.The sacred importance of the kishōmon and its use as a tool to articulate power relationships echoes the importance of the sworn oath in European society of the same period.Marcel Bloch's statement on the practice of swearing fealty (foi), one of the central concepts of European feudality, might equally have been made about Japanese kishōmon:"in a disturbed society, where mistrust was the rule … the appeal to divine sanctions appeared to be one of the few restraints with any efficacy at all." 9 Within the framing language of religious might, kishōmon document a wide variety of matters both religious and secular: monks swearing abstinence from alcohol, warriors giving fealty to their overlords, and criminals promising to stick to the straight and narrow. 10The adaptability of the document, a simple two-part vow consisting of the articles to be sworn and the gods guaranteeing it, and its close association with temples-centres of not only religious but also economic power-naturally saw it develop a strong association with the shōen system in the medieval period.

Structure of a Vow
Kishōmon generally conformed to a basic binary structure composed of the vows or information to be sworn to (the maegaki 前書) and a religious declaration (shinmon 神文).This basic structure was followed by kishōmon across the country, but with important differences within both sections depending on the issuing temple and matters concerned.Both oath and religious declaration are therefore informative in reconstructing the role and nature of the kishōmon in early medieval Japanese society.The shinmon acts as a frame to the kishōmon, the guarantee of the articles sworn therein.This divine authority unified godly power with secular contract, listing the gods, Buddhas, departed souls and esoteric deities invoked as witnesses and guarantors of the vow, and the divine punishments that would befall oathbreakers.The shinmon is thus both the authority which guarantees the vow and a symbol of religious power.In the early medieval period, the written word held great power, with signed documents considered to be legitimising and sacrosanct in themselves. 11To this already puissant form were added the strongest forces known to Japan-the divine force of Buddhist and Shintō deities, representing the spiritual as well as political and military power of the great temples.Kami were regarded with active fear, and the invocation of divine punishment was not signed lightly. 12To sign a kishōmon was to do so in fear of the wrath of the immanent powers that surrounded you, from powerful and august deities such as Hachiman and Amaterasu herself to esoteric Buddhas and the souls of the founders of Buddhist sects.The deities invoked in kishōmon were themselves an important element in the politics of social control.Kōyasan's landed domain was grounded in the rhetoric of the "ancient domain" granted to Kūkai by the local deities Niutsuhime 丹生都姫 and Kōya 高野.Niu and Kōya were enshrined at Amano Shrine 天野社, a key estate holder within the Kōyasan community, and both deities feature prominently in the shinmon of Kōyasan kishōmon. 13eferred to either as"Niu and Kōya Myōjin" or"the protective gods of Amano", they appear in almost every surviving kishōmon.The Amano gods, Niutsuhime and Kariba, were not only the guardians of the local area and intimately connected to the founding of Kōyasan, but were identified with Dainichi Nyorai 大日如来 (Māhāvairocana), the central figure of Shingon cosmology. 14Through the doctrine of honji suijaku 本地垂迹, Niu was portrayed as the manifestation of Dainichi in the Womb Realm (taizōkai 胎蔵界) and Kariba was the corresponding manifestation in the parallel Diamond Realm (kongōkai 金 剛界). 15The invocation of the protective deities of Amano was therefore a symbol both of local and transcendental power, linking Kōyasan's local rule to universal Shingon cosmology.The invocation of local Kōyasan-aligned deities was thus a symbol of the temple's regional authority and right to land, reinforcing the relationship of ruler and ruled articulated in the vows themselves.
In addition to the autochthonic Niu and Kōya, a number of shinmon also refer to Hachiman, the protective deity of many estates, especially those formerly under Iwashimizu control.All the vows concerning Ogawa-Shibame and Suda Minami Estates, both carved from Iwashimizu land, swear by Hachiman as well as the Amano gods, and several of the Arakawa vows invoke the local Mifune Hachiman. 16The inclusion of references to local Hachiman shrines reflected their continuing importance to Kii's estate society, an influence that was not always supportive of Kōyasan rule. 17That these powers and those of esoteric Buddhas and Indian deities were not seen as incompatible or fundamentally different reflects the invocation of the broadest range of power available to sanctify and guarantee the document.While there is therefore some variation in the wording of shinmon and the powers invoked, the same basic form permeates Kōyasan kishōmon, with many shinmon identical or near-identical across vows signed in different estates, reinforcing the concept of the document as driven by Kōyasan rather than created to serve the interests of individual estates.While the form of the vow differs from that used by other times, within the Kōyasan corpus it is frequent for the only variation between vows to be the name of the signatory.A standardized statement was used in one third of all the surviving Kōyasan kishōmon, with only trivial variations. 18For example, three vows which, despite being signed over a sixty year period, and in different estates, differed only in the names of the signatories and the phrasing of one word: 19 Shinmon, Kōno, Makuni, and Sarukawa Estates (Km, Vol. 1, Doc. 447, 1271).

Maegaki and the content of vows
The terms sworn in Kōyasan kishōmon (the maegaki) were often as standardized as the holy vow (shinmon).Taking the "Kōno no shō sōtsuibushi Kunitaka ukebumi" of 1291 as a representative example, it can be seen that of the vow's forty-one articles, every single one is found in at least four extant documents; the average (median and mode) is seven, and some of the articles are found in ten, twelve, or fourteen different vows signed between 1270 and 1330. 21The articles sworn in each vow address the contemporary concerns of estate society-regulating and protecting the ownership of land and resources, the degree of control exercized by the shōkan over the yeomanry and peasantry, the rights and prerogatives of monks, and the prevention and punishment of crime.The articles of the vows are therefore an expression of the social rules of the Kōyasan Domain, containing provisions to governing access to the water supply and natural resources, articulations of property and criminal law, and social and moral precepts focusing on respect for monks and Buddhist concepts such as the proscription of hunting and hawking.By signing the kishōmon and swearing to obey its precepts, the signatory-invariably a member of the local elite, a monk or warrior resident in a Kōyasan estate-was agreeing to a direct covenant with the temple and its system of private government.
The terms of the vows place significant emphasis on protecting the rights and privileges of the temple's monks, using kishōmon to enforce a behavioural hierarchy favouring the temple in local society.Good examples of this are the twelve separate kishōmon signed between 1288 and 1332 which contain the identical command, "I/we will not bathe before monks". 22Whilst it is not beyond the power of imagination to conceive of a local official whose public bath queue-skipping was so uncouth as to offend the resident monks 20.Bonten and Taishaku (Taishakuten) are the Indian deities Brahma and Indra (Śakra), and the four great heavenly kings are the Shitennō 四天王, world-protecting devas in Buddhist cosmology.Kōbō Daishi is the respectful posthumous name for Kūkai, the founder of Kōyasan and Shingon Buddhism in Japan.
21. of the estate, it is harder to countenance a total of twenty-four men whose ablutionary behaviour was so offensive.Rather, the prohibition of taking a bath before monks, along with similar articles demanding respect for monks and protection of their lands, demonstrate that the vows signed by local officials were semi-standardized rather than extracted for specific offences.This prohibition, standardized across a large number of Kōyasan kishōmon, is found nowhere else in the early medieval corpus. 23A further example is found in a similar article sworn in seven kishōmon which completely overlap with the bathing prohibition vows.The oath-takers swore that: Estate managers and their followers shall behave with courtesy towards temple monks, and the estimation of social position must not be abandoned.Furthermore their retainers, not to mention shrine attendants, temple attendants, and servants of the whole temple complex must be treated with the same respect and we (the signatories) must not oppose them.
Other notable articles within kishōmon declared protection for monks' forestry and fields within estates and forbade managers from entering monks' land when pursuing criminals.These articles suggest the role of this form of kishōmon as an articulation of the relationship between the temple and the managers within its domain, the signing of which was an act of submission by local leaders acknowledging the temple's prerogatives in the estate.
established new direct working relationships with power-holders in the area, setting out the rights and responsibilities of the shōen elite as agents of Kōyasan.The kishōmon is a physical manifestation of the combination of spiritual and political power wielded by the temple complex, a demonstration of how religious authority was combined with military strength to achieve local control.In Kōyasan's kishōmon we may therefore see a record of the network of alliances and vendettas through which Kōyasan interacted with the provincial elite.Furthermore, the documents cluster around transformative periods in which the temple was attempting to assert greater control over the land and people of nearby estates, primarily the late Kamakura to Nanbokuchō Periods and again in the early fifteenth century.The changing frequency of vows corresponds closely to political events at the provincial and national level, with kishōmon providing a record of how the temple was affected by and responded to political opportunities to expand its domain in Kii.
The imposition of strikingly similar kishōmon on the officers of local estate administration are a documentary representation of the links between the temple and local communities.The narrative of the late Kamakura Period is one of the decreasing ability of proprietors to exert control over land and the gradual loss of revenue, corresponding to the growing independence of estates and the warriors who managed them.The network of Kōyasan kishōmon both bears out and questions this hypothesis in parts.The vows contain numerous articles reflecting warrior encroachment, from failure to forward revenue to theft of crops and incursions into forestry.However, Kōyasan kishōmon also indicate the centrality of the temple to the region as an economic and religious centre, a fount of authority which created the fundamental underpinning of local social structures.Shokan were compelled to travel to and from the temple to sign multiple vows-Monk Nōshin, kumon of Sarukawa, for example, signed no fewer than five vows over the years 1271-1302. 25he periodic renewal of vows reinforced the relationship between temple and local elite, with the performative act of signing kishōmon asserting both the temple's authority and the conferral of legitimacy on its administrators.We may see in this a parallel of the repetition of oaths of fealty in Europe, extracted for much the same reasons. 26Within the vows themselves, local managers swore that whenever they were summoned by the temple they were to attend immediately, or send their sons if they themselves were too ill to travel, on pain of being branded criminals if they failed to comply. 27Failure to co-operate with Kōyasan or to adhere to the terms of kishōmon had serious consequences, as demonstrated by expeditionary forces of armed monks sent against the estate managers (and 25.Km, Vol. 1, Doc. 447 (1271), Vol. 7, Doc.1589 (1275), Vol. 8, Doc.1778 (1291), Vol. 7, Doc.1594 (1291)  and Vol. 7, Doc.1599 (1302).
eJECAR 1 (2013) ISSN 2053-1079 DOI: 10.2218/ejecar.2013.1.738bandits) Minamoto no Tametoki and Genpachi Yoshikata in Arakawa estate. 28Tametoki and Yoshikata's vows were extracted by military force, and when those oaths were broken some years later, the temple responded by mustering a further army of monks and local warriors to destroy the bandit network in battle. 29References to the men disappear from the historical record after this.
Having established the importance of the kishōmon to Kōyasan's estate society, there is considerable scope for research within the corpus of vows from the temple.While there is not space here to go into greater detail, it has been possible to recreate the spatial dimension of kishōmon usage in medieval Kii province, plotting the prevalence of geographically-bound deities in vows across the area, revealing the influence of competing religious networks.This approach offers a fine-detail map of local belief at the estate level, reflecting the influence of shrines in shōen as well as the permeating influence of Kōyasan's Shingon Buddhist cosmology.It has also been possible to examine the temporal record of Kōyasan vows, demonstrating that the number of vows as a proportion of the temple's documentary output increased during periods in which Kōyasan was expanding its local control over warriors and peasants, and falling in eras in which that control was weaker.This quantitative approach allows us to examine the centrality of the holy vow to Kōyasan's secular administration in the early medieval period.In future, I intend to broaden this analysis of both the religious and administrative facets of kishōmon to provincial Japan more broadly, examining the extant vows of other major temples.