Episode 436 - Fist of the Buddhas, Part 1
Added 2022-05-06 16:29:29 +0000 UTCSo, I'll just start by saying that this was one of the most challenging episodes I've done in a long time. Deciding how to organize the material--and how deep to get into some pretty esoteric conflicts between different temples and subsects and the like--took up a LOT of the energy that went into this script.
But I do think it's an important one, and I'm glad I persevered with it. As I alluded to in the opening part of the show, the image of the 'sohei' is extremely pervasive in media about medieval Japan, but much of that image is based on imagination rather than actual historical fact. Indeed, in trying to research the reality I ran into a lot of roadblocks, because the image is so popular that it retroactively affected a lot of scholarship on medieval Japan. This was particularly true of the first wave of domestic Japanese historians writing on medieval history, who tended to be very influenced by early Meiji anti-Buddhist attitudes (Buddhism being both a 'foreign' religion as contrasted with 'native' Shinto and heavily associated with the old Tokugawa state). It's only been in the last few decades that there's been a serious attempt to revise some of those early conclusions about warrior-monks.
Also, this episode gave me an impetus to both pick up the new Royall Tyler translation of Tale of Heike (particularly for next week's episode) and to check out Tyler's translations of some of the other warrior chronicles of this time. If you've never read Heike, I highly recommend the Tyler translation; it's less literal than the more common McCullough translation but far easier to read if you're a non-expert in the field.
