The sohei (monk-warriors) have come to represent the immense secular power that Buddhist temples possessed in Japan more than anything else. Although the term itself does not appear in Japanese sources until a.d 1715 (imported from Korea), more than a century after armed monks and their followers had ceased to play any significant role, it has been used to denote a wide range of religious military forces in the pre-1600 era. Today, accounts of monks who engaged in warfare are muffled by and intertwined with literary and artistic representations, making it difficult to discern their origins, role, and changing character in Japanese history.
Taken in its broadest meaning, the sohei may include not only armed monks but also various servants fighting in the name and under the protection of powerful Buddhist monasteries and affiliated shrines. As such, they appeared as early as the eighth century, when the imperial court sent out forces to combat “barbarians” in the eastern part of Japan. Young monks from central Japan reportedly aided the government troops, although it is unclear whether they actually carried any arms of their own. Chronicles and diaries subsequently indicate that there were sporadic incidents of violence involving monks and their followers in the ninth and early tenth centuries. It should be noted, however, that many of the instigators were not ordained monks but rather local strongmen, who used the cloak of monk robes to escape taxation and to appropriate land for themselves.
It is not until the late tenth century, amidst increasing competition for private estates and power in the capital region, that we find armed men regularly employed in the service of Buddhist temples. One of the earliest and most reliable documentary evidences dates to 970, when Head Abbot Ryo-gen of the monastic complex of Enryakuji, located on Mt. Hiei just northeast of Kyoto, issued a set of rules, including prohibitions of carrying arms within the temple compound, in order to restrict the activities of rowdy elements of the clergy. Ryogen’s edicts notwithstanding, armed clerics became increasingly involved in disputes with governors and warrior retainers of landholding nobles, and even in confrontations with other temples. But the resolution of conflicts by military means was not limited to religious institutions. The imperial family and nobles competing for positions at the imperial court, as well as Buddhist temples, relied more and more on warriors not only to protect and administer private estates but also in factional struggles in the capital. When the equilibrium between these factions broke down in the late twelfth century, armed forces from both the warrior class and influential religious institutions were involved in a five-year-long civil war, leading eventually to the establishment of Japan’s first warrior government (the Kamakura bakufu) in 1185.
The new government was meant to complement the existing imperial court in Kyoto, and its main goals therefore were to preserve order and contain intrusions by the warrior class. However, local warriors continued to make headway by appropriating land and titles from temples, shrines, and the gradually weakening class of nobles in Kyoto. Yet, the most powerful monasteries managed on the whole to retain their independence and assets, owing in part to their armed forces. Indeed, they were so successful that, beginning around the turn of the fourteenth century, war chronicles afford warriors serving religious institutions a reputation for courage and martial skills that rivaled those of well-known samurai heroes. The best known example is Benkei—a giant of a monk who lived in the tumultuous late twelfth century—who symbolizes such characterizations in terms of strength, martial skills, wit, and unselfish loyalty. He is said to have won 999 duels in order to collect swords in Buddha’s honor, before he was beaten by a young aristocratic warrior (Minamoto Yoshitsune), whom he later served loyally until their brave deaths in the face of a much superior force. Furthermore, according to the well-known war chronicle the Heike Monogatari, a furious and violent worker-monk named Jomyo Meishu balanced on a narrow bridge beam while successfully repelling hordes of warriors during the war of the 1180s. In an effort to convey the dual character of this monk, the tale describes how Jomyo calmly removed his armor following the battle and counted and treated his wounds before putting on his monk robe and retreating, piously chanting the name of Amida, the Buddhist savior.
Sponsored and appreciated mainly by members of the warrior class, these chronicles praise the heroics of such violent monks, while other works commissioned by capital nobles portray the religious forces of the major monasteries as a negative and disruptive influence on the imperial court. For example, fourteenth-century picture scrolls show groups of armed clerics participating in general monk assembly meetings in order to influence the temple community to stage protests in the capital, and various hagiographies glorifying the lives of founders of new, more populistsects do not waste any opportunities to criticize the established temples for their secular influence. Regardless of such interpretive discrepancies, the most serious flaw of these accounts is their tendency to neglect the diverse character of the fighting clerics, who are consistently portrayed as a unified group of rebellious, yet well-dressed and easily identifiable, monk-warriors from the lower ranks. In reality, armed religious forces came from various sectors of society, bound together by the protective umbrella of important Buddhist monasteries.
At the very top, there were sons of high- and mid-ranking aristocrats who organized and headed the temple’s armed followers in their capacity as aristocratic clerics. Although some of them were skilled warriors, they were above all educated nobles in monk robes, whose skills, training, and status made them indispensable in the management of private estates and the internal affairs of their temple. On occasion, these monk-leaders even took control of an entire monastery, as was the case with Shinjitsu (1086-?), who earned a reputation as “the number one evil military monk in Japan” for his attempts to increase his temple’s influence in Nara and for his involvement in capital affairs in the mid-twelfth century. By the fourteenth century, imperial princes sought to become head abbots and take control of the forces and landed assets of wealthy monasteries in order to further the imperial cause against the increasingly influential warrior aristocracy. The role of these noble monk-commanders must therefore not be overlooked, for it was their ambitions and factional affiliations that made armed forces a permanent and important presence at the highest-ranking temples in the capital region of premodern Japan.
The bulk of the forces fighting in the name of Buddha came from various segments of the common population. Some of them were lower-ranking monks, as indicated by the contemporary terms used to refer to them— akuso (evil monks), daishu (literally, “clergy”—usually taken to represent the larger entity of people associated with a temple), and shuto (clergy)— which were used in opposition to the more educated and properly ordained ranking monks (often referred to as sango; the monastic deans), but there were also acolytes and other followers under the protection of affiliated Shinto shrines. For example, we find two types of armed servants within the monastic complex of Kofukuji in Nara. In the northern part of Ya-mato—the temple’s home province—the armed followers belonged to the community of worker-monks, who were working as local estate administrators. In the south, the armed followers were local strongmen, referred to as “shrine servants” (jinnin), who closely resembled the local warrior in appearance, as they did not wear monk robes.
The armed forces of religious institutions thus had much in common with the emerging warrior class—indeed, many fighting monks are hard to distinguish from the samurai—although the latter have enjoyed a much more favorable reputation than their religious counterparts. They were both a product of the larger trend of privatization of rulership and land that took place from the tenth and eleventh centuries on, satisfying the need for protection of private possessions for their patrons, who included imperial descendants and other nobles as well as the ranking temples. In fact, the akuso (evil monks) and the samurai have quite appropriately been described as a pair of twins that emerged from the sociopolitical developments of the Heian (792-1185) period. Oddly enough, whereas the samurai often are depicted as valiant and glorious heroes, the military men in monk outfits are still seen as villains.
Further evidence of the similarity between the samurai and the sohei can be found in their general usage of weapons. Both carried swords for close encounters and were skilled with the bow and arrow as well. In addition, even though militarily inclined clerics might wear religious robes, it was not uncommon to find armor under the monk garments. Helmets also were used, as was the bandanna (hachimaki). However, contrary to their samurai counterparts, the belligerent monks remained primarily foot soldiers, becoming experts with the naginata (a kind of halberd, with a curved blade at the end of a long pole). Although the naginata earned a reputation in one-on-one combats, it was especially effective in combating mounted warriors, indicating that it was originally a preference of lower-ranking soldiers. Eventually, the naginata came to stand as one of the foremost symbolic weapons of armed monks, and a handful of temple-based martial art schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to specialize in its usage. Another attire unique to the sohei was a hood that many wore to conceal their identity, allowing lower-ranking monks to overcome hierarchical differences among the clergy. As a result, the religious forces came to be regarded as more unified than they actually were, especially since the hoods were frequently used to signify armed monks in chronicles and picture scrolls from the early fourteenth century.
The dual character of the religious forces disintegrated during the high point of the second warrior government, the Ashikaga bakufu, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, but the most influential temples continued to thrive and hold their own against the warrior class. Behind this survival, we find new nonaristocratic military leaders heading their own forces within the monasteries, reflecting the final elimination, in favor of military authority, of the ancient style of rulership based solely on social status. The new composition of the monastic communities thus mirrored developments in society in general, as warfare and violence reached new heights during the chaos of the Sengoku period (1467-1573). While temples that did not adjust to these circumstances were quickly absorbed by regional warlords, those with sufficient forces, joined by religious strongholds in the countryside, participated actively in the wars to defend their assets. In addition, local warriors and peasants gathered under the banner of new populist sects, though rarely in monk robes, to fight in the name of the Buddhist savior to oppose oppressive rule by warrior leaders during this turmoil.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Japan was gradually pacified by a few powerful warlords who, interestingly, targeted the most powerful and independent monasteries first in their efforts to subdue the opponents to a centralized state. The attacks on and destruction of the last monastic strongholds of Enryakuji in 1571 and Negoroji in 1585 effectively signified the end of the religious forces, as Japan was subsequently restructured into a peaceful and pacified society with the establishment of the third warrior government, the Tokugawa bakufu. The sohei were thus extinguished, although some temples continued to display the martial skills of the naginata for some time. More important, they remained a part of the cultural production of subsequent centuries, often blamed for the decline of the imperial government prior to 1600 by later scholars. Today, armed monks, without exception in their mythical form, still appear in popular culture both in Japan and the United States, be it in historical dramas or animated comic topics.
