CHAPTER XVIII

THE CROWN PRINCE SHoTOKU TAISHI

THE Emperor Kimmei, who had received from Korea the gifts of Buddhist images and sacred vessels which had caused so much disturbance among his subjects, died in A.D. 570. His reign had not been a very happy or glorious one. In addition to the domestic confusions arising from the introduction of the new religion, there had been disappointments in the foreign policy of the country. His ally, King Seimei of Kudara, had been defeated by the troops of Shiragi and taken prisoner (about 557), a Japanese army in Korea had been defeated by the Shiragi armies in 562, and the province of Mimana had been entirely lost to Japan. When Kimmei lay a-dying in 570, he charged his successor, Bidatsu, not to rest until Mimana had been recovered.

It was not Bidatsu's good fortune to recover the lost province, and when he died, in A.D. 585, he laid on his successor, Yomei, the same solemn injunction that his predecessor had laid upon him. But the year following his accession, the wife of his brother Yomei bore a son who was destined to restore the fallen prestige of the country. The child thus born was at the first called Umayado, "the Stable Prince," a name which has been explained by the story (surely a fiction) that his mother, while going the rounds of her house and grounds, was suddenly seized by labour pains, and gave birth to her son in the stable.

[paragraph continues] He had another name, Toyoto-mimi, which may convey some reference to his personal appearance; but at any rate personal defects had no effect on his intellectual powers, and he was early distinguished both for wisdom and for virtue.

His early youth was a troublous one. Bidatsu continued to receive presents (and appeals for help) from the King of Kudara, hard pressed by Shiragi and scarcely able to hold his own. Without becoming a convert, the Emperor did all in his power to help the new religion, and, to give but one instance, instituted the practice of releasing animals on the eighth, fourteenth, fifteenth, twenty-third, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth of every month--an institution not unlike the primitive uposatha, or the Christian and Jewish sabbath. No civic disturbances marked his reign; but once, when a pestilence broke out shortly after the erection of a pagoda, built to contain a Buddhist relic that had, it was claimed, been found in some rice, there must have been many doubtful heads shaken over the untoward event. But the Buddhists were not to be moved. They met the pestilence with the weapon of prayer, and when the Emperor himself miraculously recovered from an attack of the plague, they felt that they had triumphed.