CHAPTER III.

Shinran, the Founder of Shinshu.

( section section 18, 19, 20.)

Shinran Shonin, to give him the name by which he was called during the greater part of his life, and by which he is still mostly known, [**] was born in the year 1173 A.D., in the third year of Shoan, on the first day of the fourth month, a date not to be confounded with the first of April of our reformed, Western, calendar. Through his father, Hino Arinori, a high official in the court of the Emperor Takakura (A.D. 1169-1180), one of the puppet-rulers whose fate lay in the hands of the all-powerful Taira family, he was connected with the Fujiwara family, being a descendant of the famous Fujiwara Kamatari (A.D. 614-669), better known as Nakatomi no Kamako, the faithful minister of the Emperors Kotoku, Saimei, and Tenchi, who had overthrown the ambitious family of the Soga, had placed his own equally ambitious but more fortunate family in their place at the right

hand of the reigning sovereigns, and had had a leading part in the so-called Taikwa reforms, (645-701). The founder of the Fujiwara family had brought himself to power by confronting and browbeating the Buddhism which centred in Nara, which was an exotic from India, and which had given many indications of a proneness to intriguing interference in the domestic policy of Japan. He had opposed to it the Confucian doctrines of China, which, under the splendid administrators of the early Tang period, had made the Celestial Empire a model for the world to copy; his successors, keeping their hold on the Imperial policy, had introduced new forms of Buddhism, administered from the new capital of Kyoto, which had been more ready to acknowledge state supremacy than had been the more "High Church" monks of Nara and the South, and which ended by being themselves enervated by the artistic, cultured, but withal, worldly, school which took its inspiration from the great Tendai monasteries of Hieizan and Miidera. By the twelfth century, the Fujiwaras, nay, even their Imperial puppet-masters themselves, were groaning under the tyranny of the Hieizan and Kyoto monks, but the spiritual tyrants seemed lastingly secure in what was at the time, practically, a religious monopoly over Japan.

Through his mother, Shinran was connected with the Minamoto family, the great opponents of the Taira, who were then supreme in the councils of the Empire. Her name was Kikkojo, she was the daughter of Minamoto Yoshichika, the second son of Yoshiie (1041-1108), better known as Hachiman