The Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 220, the all-seeing eye.

This week, I want to take some time to tell a story about one of, in my opinion at least,

the most interesting people in Japanese history.

It's a story with a powerful resonance, because it is, in the end, the story about one person's search for meaning in life.

It begins, as most stories do, with a birth in January of the year 1200, when a boy was born to one of the nobles of Kyoto.

Specifically, this child, an illegitimate one, by the way, was born according to the stories

to Minamoto no Michitomo, a poet and distant relative of the Shogun, Minamoto No Yori Ie.

Yore I, incidentally, was entering the second year of his reign, his father, the first

shogun of the Minamoto Shogunate, Minamoto No Yoritomo, having died more or less one year before

this child was born.

Very little is known about this child's young life. All we do know is that

eventually he was dumped off on an organization famous for taking in those who had nowhere else

to go, or who were looking to break from their past, the Buddhist clergy. In the same way that

European nobles would often get read of extra sons by sending them

off to go join the church, Japanese nobles would arrange for their kids to become monks.

This worked for the benefit of all involved. The religious establishment developed connections

to the wealthy and powerful, and got new members who had at least a decent education most of the time.

The nobles, meanwhile, could streamline their inheritance plans by assuring that the family estate

would be split fewer ways, and get rid of kids who they believed were ill-suited, for whatever

reason, to inherit. This particular kid was shipped off to Mount Hia, a massive temple complex

to the northeast of Kyoto. Built atop the slopes surrounding the lovely Lake Biwa, Mount

Hiae was the headquarters of one of Japan's most well-established Buddhist sects, Tendai Shu.

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