Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 437, Fist of the Buddhas, part two.

Last week, we talked about the historical reality of warrior monks in Japanese history,

and the fact that the historical record does not really back up the common image of the

Solhe, the warrior monk image most people are familiar with. Monastic armies fought,

yes, but for much the same reason that early samurai families did, for territory, power, and influence.

And the armies involved were largely non-munks and looked in many ways virtually indistinguishable

from other armed groups, samurai, bandits, and the like,

in terms of how they fought. And that raises the question, where does the image of the Solhei,

the warrior monk, so familiar to anyone who knows about pre-modern Japan, come from? And that's a

particularly interesting question to ask when you realize that the very word used

to describe this stock warrior monk image, Solhei, which literally means monk soldier,

didn't even appear in print sources in Japan until 1715, by which point monasteries even having

armies was a thing of the remote and distant past.

To understand how this happened, we first have to talk a bit about how monasteries came to

lose their armed forces in the first place, so let's pop on back to the 1100s.

By that time, as we saw last week, armed monastic forces were something of a fixture of the political

landscape, the example of Shinjitsu and his army based in Nara's Kofukuji, illustrating

that well. But of course, they were not the only emergent force in Japanese politics

at that time. Shinjitsu himself was defeated by the combined forces of the Minamoto and Taira samurai families

during his attempt to forcibly intervene in the succession dispute around Emperor Gosherakawa after all.

And ultimately, as those familiar with pre-modern Japanese history know well,

it was the samurai who came to dominate politics.

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