Prince Shōtoku

Prince Shōtoku is one of the best-known figures in early Japanese history. He was a member of the royal family of Yamato, the kingdom in central Japan whose rulers later took the title tennō (emperor). His personal name was Umayado, “stable door” — a later legend says he was born beside a stable. The name Shōtoku, “holy virtue”, was given to him after his death, and by the eighth century it had become the usual way to refer to him.

According to the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), a court history completed in 720, his aunt Suiko became ruler in 593 and made the prince her crown prince and gave him charge of government. He shared that power with Soga no Umako, the most powerful minister of the time and a relative of both Suiko and the prince. The Chronicles credit the prince with a series of reforms: new court ranks, a set of moral rules for officials, diplomatic missions to China and the building of Buddhist temples.

Because he stands at the start of so many things — Japanese Buddhism, written law, relations with a unified China — Shōtoku became a national symbol. His image appeared on Japanese banknotes for much of the twentieth century, and many schools and temples are named after him. At the same time, modern historians have looked closely at the evidence and asked how much of his reputation was built by later writers.

Around 600, Japan was not yet a single state with fixed borders and a bureaucracy. The Yamato king was the leader of an alliance of powerful clans (uji), each with its own lands, dependants and hereditary titles (kabane). Great mound tombs (kofun) built over the previous three centuries show how much wealth and labour these leaders could command.

The royal court was in the Asuka basin, south of modern Nara. Many skilled people there — scribes, builders, metalworkers, potters and monks — were immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the Korean peninsula and China. Writing itself, in Chinese characters, came through these contacts.

The biggest recent change was Buddhism. Around the middle of the sixth century the king of Baekje, a kingdom in south-western Korea, had sent Buddhist images and scriptures to Yamato. The court argued over whether to accept this foreign faith: the Soga clan supported it, while the Mononobe and Nakatomi clans opposed it. In 587 the Soga and their allies — the young Umayado among them, according to the Chronicles — defeated the Mononobe in battle. From then on, Buddhism enjoyed royal support, and the first great temple, Asuka-dera, was built by Soga no Umako.

The Nihon Shoki says that the prince studied Buddhism with Hyeja (Eji in Japanese), a monk from the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, and studied the Chinese classics with a scholar named Kakka (Kakuka). Hyeja arrived in 595 and lived for about twenty years in Japan, staying at Asuka-dera together with Hyechong (Eso), a monk from Baekje, before returning home in 615. The Korean government’s historical database presents these entries as a clear example of cultural diplomacy between Goguryeo and Yamato.

The prince is said to have lectured on Buddhist sutras to the empress, and three commentaries on sutras — the Sangyō Gisho, on the Lotus, Vimalakīrti and Śrīmālā sutras — are traditionally attributed to him. Whether he wrote them himself, compiled them with his teachers, or whether they were imported from China is one of the questions scholars still discuss.

Temples linked with him include Shitennō-ji, the “Temple of the Four Heavenly Kings” in Osaka, said to have been vowed during the battle of 587, and Hōryū-ji at Ikaruga, founded in 607 next to his own palace. Hōryū-ji burned in 670, according to the Chronicles, and was rebuilt a little later; its main hall and pagoda are among the oldest surviving wooden buildings on earth. Tree-ring dating shows that the timber of the pagoda’s central pillar was cut in 594.

In 603, according to the Chronicles, the court created a system of twelve cap ranks. Officials wore silk caps whose colours showed their rank; the ranks were named after six virtues — virtue, benevolence, propriety, sincerity, justice and knowledge — each divided into greater and lesser. Unlike the old hereditary kabane titles, a rank was given to an individual and could be raised. Ono no Imoko, the envoy to China, is the famous example: he rose to the highest rank after his missions. The ranks did not, however, apply to the very top: the Soga leaders stood outside the system. The model was continental — historians compare it with rank systems in Goguryeo, Baekje and China — and it was replaced by a new system in 647.

In 604, the Chronicles say, the prince himself wrote seventeen articles. They are called a “constitution” (kenpō), but they are not a legal code with penalties. They are moral instructions for officials. Article 1 makes harmony (wa) the highest value and asks people to discuss matters calmly. Article 2 tells everyone to revere the Three Treasures — the Buddha, the Dharma (teaching) and the Sangha (community of monks). Article 3 says that when an imperial command is received it must be obeyed, comparing the ruler to heaven and the subjects to earth.

Later articles ask judges to decide lawsuits without taking bribes, officials to come to court early and leave late, and provincial authorities not to levy their own taxes on the people, because the country has only one sovereign. Article 16 says that people should be called up for labour only in seasons when farming is not disturbed, and Article 17 advises that important matters should not be decided by one person alone but discussed with many.

The text is a mixture of ideas. It uses Confucian language about ruler and subject, Buddhist ideas about human weakness and compassion, and phrases that echo Chinese classics and statecraft writings. It sketches a picture of a centralised state in which officials serve one sovereign rather than their own clans — a picture that would only become reality decades later.

In 589 the Sui dynasty reunited China after nearly three centuries of division. For every state in East Asia this was a shock: a single, powerful empire now stood on the continent. Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla all sent envoys, and so did Yamato.

The first Japanese embassy, in 600, is recorded only in the Chinese Book of Sui, not in the Nihon Shoki. The Book of Sui says that the Wa king, called Ame no Tarishihoko, sent envoys, and that Emperor Wen thought their description of how the king ruled made little sense. In 607 a second embassy, led by Ono no Imoko, brought a letter that began: “The Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises sends a letter to the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets.” Emperor Yang was displeased, because in the Chinese world order there could be only one Son of Heaven. Even so, he sent an envoy, Pei Shiqing, back to Japan with Imoko in 608.

When Imoko returned to China later in 608, he took students and monks with him, including Takamuko no Kuromaro (Genri), Minabuchi no Shōan and the monk Min (Sōmin). Some stayed in China for decades, lived through the fall of Sui and the rise of Tang, and came home with first-hand knowledge of Chinese government. Several of them became advisers in the Taika Reform after 645 — one of the clearest links between Shōtoku’s age and the later Japanese state.

The letter of 607 is also famous because it describes Japan as the land “where the sun rises”, an idea later expressed in the name Nihon (“origin of the sun”). Scholars debate whether the letter was meant as a claim to equality with China, as clumsy diplomacy, or as a Buddhist turn of phrase, but it shows the Yamato court trying to define its own place in a new international order.

Shōtoku’s life fits inside one of the great turning points of Eurasian history. On the Korean peninsula, Goguryeo fought off huge Sui invasions in 598, 612 and later; the disastrous campaign of 612, when a Sui army was destroyed at the Salsu river, helped to bring down the Sui dynasty itself. Goguryeo’s choice to send Hyeja to Yamato in 595 makes more sense in this light: a kingdom facing a giant empire had good reasons to make friends across the sea. Baekje and Silla, meanwhile, were fighting each other for the Han river valley, and each looked for allies in Japan and China.

In China, the Sui built the Grand Canal and reorganised government, including the first examinations for officials, before collapsing in 618. The Tang dynasty that followed would become the model that Japan copied most closely after Shōtoku’s death. In northern India, King Harsha ruled a large kingdom from 606, and the monastic university of Nalanda was at its height; Chinese pilgrims would soon travel there to collect scriptures.

Further west, the year 622 — when Shōtoku died — is also the year of the Hijra, when the Prophet Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to Medina, the event from which the Islamic calendar is counted. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius and the Sasanian king Khosrow II were locked in the last great war between Rome and Persia, which would leave both empires exhausted just before the Arab conquests. In England, the rich ship burial at Sutton Hoo was laid in the ground in roughly the same decades, and in Europe Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) sent missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons in 597.

Seen together, these events show a common pattern: rulers across Eurasia were using universal religions — Buddhism, Christianity and soon Islam — and written law to hold together larger states. Shōtoku’s combination of Buddhist piety and rules for officials is one East Asian version of that story.

In 601 the prince began building a palace at Ikaruga, some 20 km north-west of Asuka, and he seems to have moved there by 605. This put him close to the Yamato river route to Naniwa (Osaka) and the sea, and Hōryū-ji grew up beside the palace. In 620, the Chronicles say, he and Soga no Umako compiled histories of the rulers and the country (Tennōki and Kokki), which have not survived.

The prince died in early 622, according to the inscription on the back of the bronze Shaka Triad at Hōryū-ji, made the following year by the sculptor Tori. The Nihon Shoki places his death in 621. A large embroidered curtain, the Tenjukoku Shūchō, fragments of which survive at Chūgū-ji, was made by his widow to show the prince in the “Land of Heavenly Long Life” after death. Hyeja, back in Goguryeo, is said to have vowed to die on the same day the following year.

The prince never became ruler. After Suiko died in 628, the Soga dominated the succession. In 643 Soga no Iruka attacked the prince’s son, Prince Yamashiro no Ōe, at Ikaruga, and Yamashiro and his family took their own lives. Two years later Iruka himself was killed in the coup of 645 that opened the Taika Reform. The fate of the prince’s line helped later writers to portray Shōtoku as a virtuous figure destroyed by an arrogant clan.

Almost everything about Shōtoku comes from the Nihon Shoki, compiled nearly a century after his death by a court that had its own reasons to celebrate a wise Buddhist prince and a strong ruling house. The Chronicles mix record with legend — the prince speaking at birth, hearing ten petitioners at once, meeting a starving beggar who turned out to be a sage. Other early sources exist: inscriptions on Buddhist images at Hōryū-ji, the Tenjukoku embroidery, the Jōgū Shōtoku Hōō Teisetsu (a biography whose earliest parts may be old but whose surviving text is later), and the Chinese Book of Sui. Each has problems of date and authenticity.

Doubts are old. In the early twentieth century the historian Tsuda Sōkichi argued that the Seventeen-Article Constitution and the sutra commentaries were probably not the prince’s own work. Readers of the constitution have pointed to words and ideas — for example references to provincial officials (kuni no mikotomochi) and a strongly centralised state — that seem better suited to the late seventh century than to 604.

In 1999 Ōyama Seiichi went further, arguing that “Shōtoku Taishi” as a saintly founder was largely created during the compilation of the Nihon Shoki, even though a real Prince Umayado existed. This “fabrication theory” provoked a wide debate. Critics defended the early date of some inscriptions and the plausibility of the reforms. According to the scholar Ishii Kōsei, writing in 2021, articles actively supporting Ōyama’s thesis had largely stopped appearing in academic journals for over a decade. Most specialists now accept that Umayado was a real and important royal politician, while treating the specific achievements credited to him with caution.

A further issue is the Book of Sui itself. It calls the Wa ruler of 600 a king with a male-sounding name and mentions a wife, although the Japanese sovereign at the time was the female Suiko. Some historians think the Chinese account mistook the prince, or Soga no Umako, for the king; others think it reflects how Yamato presented its monarchy abroad. The mismatch reminds us that Chinese and Japanese sources were each written for their own audiences.

In modern Japan, Shōtoku has been read in very different ways. Before 1945 he could be presented as a model imperial servant and the founder of a Japanese spirit of harmony; after the war, Article 1 on harmony was often cited as an early expression of consensus and peaceful government. Popular Buddhism made him a saint: from the Heian and Kamakura periods, a “cult of the Prince” (Taishi shinkō) treated him as an incarnation of the bodhisattva Kannon, and founders such as Shinran revered him.

Japanese historians have argued, as seen above, about whether the reforms were his, Soga no Umako’s, or later projections. This debate reached schools in 2017, when the Ministry of Education’s draft curriculum proposed writing “Umayado-ō (Prince Shōtoku)” to reflect scholarship. After public comments objecting that the familiar name should be kept, the ministry went back to “Prince Shōtoku” within a month. The episode showed how a question of evidence can also be a question of national identity.

Korean scholarship and popular history tend to emphasise the peninsular side of the story: his Buddhist teacher Hyeja came from Goguryeo; Baekje monks, craftsmen and scholars built the temples of Asuka; and a famous portrait of the prince once kept at Hōryū-ji has traditionally been attributed to Prince Aja of Baekje, although that attribution is not proven. From this angle Shōtoku’s Japan appears as part of a shared Korean–Japanese Buddhist world rather than as an isolated beginning.

Chinese sources frame the embassies within the tributary order: the Book of Sui records Wa as a distant country that sent envoys and offered gifts, and records Emperor Yang’s irritation at the “Son of Heaven” letter. Modern Chinese historians generally treat the missions as part of the spread of Sui–Tang civilisation across East Asia. None of these perspectives is simply wrong; each highlights a different part of the evidence, and reading them together gives the fullest picture.

Whatever his personal role, the reign of Suiko marks the moment when Yamato began deliberately to borrow Chinese-style institutions — ranks, written instructions for officials, a court calendar, histories and state-sponsored Buddhism — often through Korean intermediaries. The next steps were the Taika Reform after 645, which announced public ownership of land and people, and the Taihō Code of 701, which created a full ritsuryō state on the Tang model.

Hōryū-ji is his most tangible legacy. Rebuilt after the fire of 670, it preserves the architecture and sculpture of the Asuka and early Nara periods: the Shaka Triad of 623 in a style related to Northern Wei and Korean Buddhist sculpture, the Tamamushi Shrine, and the Yumedono (Hall of Dreams), an octagonal hall built in 739 on the site of the prince’s Ikaruga palace. In 1993 the Buddhist monuments of the Hōryū-ji area became Japan’s first UNESCO World Heritage site.

Shōtoku’s story is therefore two stories at once. One is about a real prince at the court of Asuka, living in a world transformed by Sui China, Korean Buddhism and clan rivalry. The other is about how later generations — eighth-century historians, medieval devotees, modern nationalists, post-war educators and today’s researchers — kept reshaping his memory to answer their own questions.