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 Taishi, “holy-virtue prince”, was given to him after his death; in surviving literature it first appears in the preface to the Kaifūsō, dated 751.

According to the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), a court history completed in 720, his aunt Suiko became ruler at the end of 592 and in 593 made the prince her crown prince and gave him charge of government. Whether a Chinese-style office of single crown prince already existed at the time is doubted by historians, since the court still used an older system of senior princes (ōe). 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.

Later generations associated Shōtoku with the beginnings of Japanese Buddhism, written rules of government and relations with a unified China, and he became an enduring 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, traditionally 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 by the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties indicates that the cypress used for the pagoda’s central pillar was felled in 594, earlier than the rebuilding.

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 stresses that officials serve one sovereign, but historians differ over how clearly it anticipates the later centralised ritsuryō state; the historian Seki Akira, for example, saw no explicit ritsuryō-style programme in it.

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, whose name is written 阿每多利思比孤 (read Ame no Tarishihoko; the reading and identification are uncertain), 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.” The Book of Sui says that Emperor Yang was displeased and called the letter discourteous, though it does not say exactly which wording offended him; many historians point to the use of “Son of Heaven” for both rulers. 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 East Asian history. On the Korean peninsula, Goguryeo fought off huge Sui invasions in 598, 612 and later; in 612 a Sui army was destroyed at the Salsu river, and the failed wars helped to bring down the Sui dynasty itself. The National Institute of Korean History interprets Goguryeo’s sending of Hyeja to Yamato in 595 as part of its diplomacy amid tension with Sui. Silla had taken the Han river basin in the 550s, before Shōtoku was born, and its rivalry with Baekje continued around 600.

In China, the Sui connected and expanded older canals into a unified transport network, the Grand Canal, and contributed to the development of examination-based recruitment of officials, building on earlier practices, before collapsing in 618. The Tang dynasty that followed would become the model that Japan copied most closely after Shōtoku’s death.

The changes most directly connected to Shōtoku’s court took place across the sea. Yamato sought contact with the newly unified Sui empire while maintaining close ties with the kingdoms of the Korean peninsula. Monks, scholars and craftspeople brought Buddhist teachings, writing and building skills to Japan, and envoys carried information about continental government back to Yamato. These exchanges help explain why court ranks, Buddhist temples and written instructions for officials became important during Suiko’s reign.

In Yamato, Buddhist patronage and changes in court government developed alongside sustained exchange with the Korean kingdoms and continental East Asia.

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. According to its inscription as transmitted, his widow Tachibana no Ōiratsume petitioned Empress Suiko to have a large embroidered curtain, the Tenjukoku Shūchō, made to show the prince in the “Land of Heavenly Long Life” after death; court women did the embroidery, and fragments survive at Chūgū-ji. 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. The Edo-period scholar Kariya Ekisai already questioned the constitution, and in the 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. Others, such as the historian Seki Akira, judged these arguments weak and accepted the Nihon Shoki’s date.

In 1999 Ōyama Seiichi, in his book 〈Shōtoku Taishi〉 no tanjō (The Birth of “Shōtoku Taishi”), challenged the historical basis of the traditional image, arguing that the saintly founder was largely created around 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 texts; the Buddhist-studies scholar Ishii Kōsei, in a 2016 book, argued against it and defended a historical basis for the prince. The disagreement concerns the dating, interpretation and evidential value of the surviving sources, and each claim about the prince has to be assessed on its own.

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. The debate reached schools in 2017, when the draft junior-high curriculum used the form “Umayado-ō (Prince Shōtoku)”. The final guidelines kept “Prince Shōtoku” in both primary and junior-high schools, and the junior-high guidelines also asked teachers to explain that the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki use names such as Umayado no Miko and that “Shōtoku Taishi” was a later designation; the ministry cited continuity between school levels, ease of teaching and pupils’ understanding after many public comments objected to the change.

The peninsular side of the story is important. His Buddhist teacher Hyeja came from Goguryeo; monks and craftsmen from Baekje took part in building Asuka-dera; and a famous portrait of the prince once kept at Hōryū-ji has traditionally been attributed to Prince Aja of Baekje, but that attribution is unproven; Japanese cultural-heritage records date the original to the eighth century. Michael Como has also highlighted the role of immigrant lineages, including groups claiming Silla ancestry, in the later development of the cult of the prince.

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. That tributary language should be compared with the Japanese accounts, which describe the same contacts differently; each claim still has to be checked against the evidence.

Whatever his personal role, the reign of Suiko was an important stage in a longer process of adopting continental institutions and Buddhism, often through the Korean peninsula — ranks, written instructions for officials, a court calendar, histories and state-sponsored Buddhism. The reforms after 645 and further changes in the later seventh century developed the institutions of the ritsuryō state; the Taihō Code was completed and put into effect in 701.

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 were among the first sites in Japan to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

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.