Prince Shotoku

Anyone asking who was Prince Shotoku runs immediately into a problem of names. The prince was known in his own lifetime as Umayado no Oji, the prince of the stable door, and also as Kamitsumiya, the prince of the upper palace. The honorific title Shotoku Taishi, meaning prince of sagely virtue, was applied only after his death, as his reputation grew into veneration ^[1].

He was born on February 7, 574 CE, into the innermost circle of the Yamato ruling house. Tradition places his birth at the site later occupied by Tachibana-dera, a temple in the Asuka region south of modern Nara ^[2]. His father was Prince Oe, who reigned briefly as Emperor Yomei from 585 to 587, and his mother was Princess Anahobe no Hashihito. Both parents descended from the powerful Soga clan, the family that dominated court politics in the late sixth century and championed the new religion of Buddhism against conservative rivals ^[1].

The Japan of his childhood was not yet a unified state. The Yamato court held loose authority over regional chieftains, writing had arrived only recently through Korean and Chinese contacts, and the court was split over whether to adopt Buddhism, which had been formally introduced from the Korean kingdom of Paekche around the middle of the century ^[3]. The chronicles describe the young prince as precociously intelligent, supposedly able to listen to ten petitioners at once, though such stories belong to the later cult rather than to verifiable history ^[4].

The struggle over Buddhism came to a head in 587, when the prince was a teenager. After the death of Emperor Yomei, the Soga leader Soga no Umako moved against the rival Mononobe clan, whose head Mononobe no Moriya opposed the foreign religion. The Nihon Shoki, the court chronicle completed in 720, places the young prince in the Soga army and records his vow to build a temple to the Four Heavenly Kings if the campaign succeeded ^[4]. The Soga victory at the Battle of Shigisan broke Mononobe power and secured Buddhism's place at court. The prince's promised temple, Shitenno-ji, was founded in 593 in what is now Osaka and still operates today ^[3].

Court politics then took a violent turn. Umako installed and later arranged the assassination of Emperor Sushun in 592, an almost unheard-of act against a reigning sovereign. In his place the court raised Suiko, a daughter of Emperor Kimmei and widow of Emperor Bidatsu, as the first woman clearly attested as a reigning empress in Japanese records ^[1].

In 593 Suiko named her nephew, then about nineteen, as crown prince and regent. For the next three decades the government operated through a working arrangement among three figures: the empress as sovereign, Umako as clan patriarch, and the prince as regent and chief architect of policy ^[2]. Historians disagree about how the credit should be divided, since the chronicles were compiled a century later under editors eager to glorify the prince, but the reforms of the Suiko era are conventionally associated with his name ^[5].

Any list of Prince Shotoku achievements begins with two documents from the early seventh century. In 603 the court introduced the twelve-rank cap system, which assigned officials ranks named for Confucian virtues and marked by caps of different colors. The significance was quiet but real: rank could now, at least in principle, reflect individual merit and service to the sovereign rather than hereditary clan title alone ^[3]. The model came from the bureaucratic states of China and the Korean peninsula, and it planted the seed of a civil service in Japan.

The following year, according to the Nihon Shoki, the prince issued the Seventeen Article Constitution. It was not a constitution in the modern sense but a set of moral injunctions for officials, opening with the famous instruction that harmony is to be valued and that opposition for its own sake should be avoided. The articles blend Confucian ethics of loyalty and decorum with Buddhist reverence for the Three Treasures, and they insist that the sovereign is the single source of legitimate authority in the land ^[4]. Some modern scholars doubt that the text dates to 604 in its received form, but its ideas match the direction of Suiko-era policy ^[5].

Diplomacy was the third pillar. In 607 the court sent the envoy Ono no Imoko to the Sui dynasty, reopening formal relations with China. The letter he carried, addressed from the sovereign of the land of the rising sun to the sovereign of the land of the setting sun, reportedly annoyed Emperor Yang, yet the missions continued and brought back students, monks, and technical knowledge that fed Japanese reform for decades ^[1]. Alongside diplomacy came building. The prince founded Horyu-ji near his palace at Ikaruga around 607. Rebuilt after a fire in 670, its western precinct contains what are generally regarded as the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world, and the complex was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1993 ^[6].

Around 601 the prince moved his household from the Asuka heartland to Ikaruga, roughly a day's journey to the northwest, where he built the Ikaruga palace beside the future site of Horyu-ji. The move gave him a base at some distance from the Soga stronghold, and archaeologists have excavated remains of the palace compound adjacent to the temple's eastern precinct ^[6].

He married several times, as was normal for a prince of his standing. His consorts included Uji no Kaitako, a daughter of Empress Suiko, and Tojiko no Iratsume, a daughter of Soga no Umako, marriages that bound him to both centers of power. The wife most closely associated with his final years was Kashiwade no Hokikimi no Iratsume, who according to temple tradition fell ill alongside him and died the day before he did ^[2].

The prince's personal devotion to Buddhism went beyond patronage. Later tradition credits him with lecturing on scripture before the empress and with writing commentaries on three sutras: the Lotus Sutra, the Vimalakirti Sutra, and the Srimala Sutra. A manuscript of the Lotus Sutra commentary preserved in the imperial collection has long been attributed to his own hand, although modern textual scholars debate both the attribution and the date of composition ^[5]. Whatever their authorship, the commentaries show how quickly sophisticated Buddhist learning took root at the Yamato court ^[4].

The last decade of the prince's life is thinly documented. He appears to have withdrawn somewhat from daily administration at Asuka, spending more time at Ikaruga with his family and his texts. In 620, the chronicles report, he and Soga no Umako compiled histories of the emperors and the provinces, the first recorded attempt at official history writing in Japan. Those books were destroyed by fire during the coup of 645, so nothing of them survives ^[4].

He died on April 8, 622 CE, at the Ikaruga palace, aged forty-eight, without ever occupying the throne himself. Empress Suiko outlived him by six years, and Soga no Umako by four. The prince was buried in a tomb at Shinaga, in the hills of what is now Taishi town in Osaka Prefecture, where his mother and his consort are traditionally said to rest with him ^[2].

His line did not long survive him. His son Yamashiro no Oe was passed over for the succession, and in 643 forces acting for the Soga leader Soga no Iruka attacked the Ikaruga palace. Yamashiro no Oe and his entire family took their own lives, extinguishing the prince's descendants in a single stroke. Two years later the Soga themselves were destroyed in the coup that opened the Taika reform era, which carried forward much of the centralizing program associated with the prince ^[3].

Few figures in Japanese history have been remembered as intensely. Within a century of his death the prince had become the object of a devotional cult, Taishi shinko, which honored him as the father of Japanese Buddhism and, in some tellings, as an incarnation of a bodhisattva. Temples he founded or was linked to, above all Horyu-ji and Shitenno-ji, became pilgrimage centers, and painted and sculpted images of the prince at various ages multiplied through the medieval period ^[7]. The Kamakura-era monk Shinran, founder of the True Pure Land school, revered him as the guiding saint of Japanese Buddhism ^[4].

Modern Japan kept the habit. The prince's portrait appeared on Japanese banknotes repeatedly during the twentieth century, including the 10,000 yen note issued from 1958, making his face one of the most familiar in the country ^[1]. Schoolbooks presented him as the model statesman who imported civilization while keeping Japan's independence, an image that served changing political needs from the Meiji era onward.

Scholarship has grown more skeptical. Since the late twentieth century, historians such as Michael Como have examined how the legend was constructed by court chroniclers and temple lineages with interests of their own, and a minority of Japanese scholars have argued that the historical Umayado bears little resemblance to the Shotoku of tradition ^[7]. The mainstream position accepts a real and influential prince while treating the miracle stories and some attributions with caution ^[5]. That tension is itself part of his importance: basic Prince Shotoku facts, from the Seventeen Articles to the sutra commentaries, sit exactly on the line where Japanese history emerges from legend. Any Prince Shotoku biography is therefore also a study of how a nation remembers its beginnings.