THE NATURE AND AIMS OF ALCHEMY

Many thousands of pages have been written by modern scholars on the subject of alchemy, but it cannot be said that all the obscurities that render the subject so difficult have yet been satisfactorily elucidated. These obscurities include the actual definition of the term “alchemy”, its origins in East and West, the authorship of many of the extant texts, the motives and beliefs of the alchemists, the methods they used and the identification of many of their materials. Only in the case of laboratory equipment and processes do we have any firm data, largely because most types of equipment used by the alchemists have survived into the present or recent past. Moreover, in several alchemical works, notably those of Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyaʾ al-Rāzī, many pieces of equipment are clearly described and illustrated and can be understood by comparing them with their modern counterparts. Even so, although the basic purposes of the equipment can usually be determined, uncertainty as to the course of a given process may remain if we do not know the precise composition of the materials being processed.

Much of the obscurity of the subject is due to its esoteric nature and the consequent use made by its practitioners of analogy, allusion and cryptic utterances. A second difficulty lies in the tendency of many writers to attribute their own work to earlier, sometimes mythological, personages.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Abū ʾ1-Rayḥān Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī al-Khwārazmī, the most distinguished encyclopaedist of the Muslim scientists, was born in Khwārazm, apparently on the 3 Dhū ʾ1-Ḥijjah, 362/4 September 973. There is no firm etymology for his name “al-Bīrūnī”, but according to Yāqūt it is a local dialect word applied to people who lived in a suburb.

The date of al-Bīrūnī's birth is not well established. The only evidence for it is a note appended to a manuscript giving the above-mentioned date, and a statement by al-Bīrūnī himself giving his age in lunar years, which seems to corroborate that date. The usual biographical sources do not devote much space to him, and none of them give any information on his early life. All we can assert about that period is that he had studied with someone close to the Khwarazm-Shah's court, who also probably introduced him to this court. Later on he served Qābūs b. Wushmagīr (reigned 366–71/977–81 and 388–403/988–1012–13), the master of Jurjān, and to him he dedicated his first major work, al-Athār al-bāqiyah (see below), in the year 1311 of Alexander (= AD 1000). After some considerable turmoil in the political life of Khwārazm, al-Bīrūnī was apparently taken prisoner by the central Asian monarch Maḥmūd of Ghaznah (reigned 388–421/998– 1030) about the year 407/1016, and it appears that al-Bīrūnī's knowledge of astrology saved him from certain death.

By the end of the Umayyad period, the government bureaucracy, organized as a group of dīwāns or government departments concerned with finance, official correspondence and the mustering and payment of the army, was already well formed. Under the ʿAbbasids, the existing dīwāns increased in size and complexity and were complemented by new ones with more specialized functions, such as confiscations (the dīwān al-muṣādarāt) and financial control and accounting (the dīwān al-zimām wa-ʾl-istīfāʾ). The role of the secretaries (kuttāb, sing, kātib), whose function had been of comparatively low standing under the Umayyads, now grew, possibly stimulated by the importance of the personal secretary to the last Umayyad caliph Marwān II (reigned 127–32/744–50), ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd b. Yaḥyā. This kātib class acquired a prestige in the ʿAbbasid state similar to that of its pre-Islamic predecessors in Persia and Iraq, the Sasanid dibhērān, whilst the coming to full form of the office of vizier or chief executive for the caliph, achieved under the originally eastern Iranian Barmakī family in the second half of the second/eighth century, allowed the secretaries to aspire to the highest position in the state beneath the ruler himself, and to give the central administration a distinct bias towards long-established Persian traditions of statecraft.

Despite this increased administrative proliferation and complexity, the positions of the exchequer, dealing with finance and taxation, and of the chancery, dealing with correspondence, remained pre-eminent.

Exegesis (tafsīr) forms one of the most extensive branches of Arabic prose literature. Developed over fourteen centuries, it provided the ideal vehicle for the expression of every shade of opinion adopted within Islam. Knowledge of the Qurʾān is indispensable for an understanding of Islam, but knowledge of the Qurʾān alone will not supply that understanding. Whereas the Qurʾān urged its first hearers to use their eyes and ears, but above all their minds in the pursuit of truth, the intellectual system that grew out of the Qurʾān was imbued with a spirit of conformity suspicious of every effort to act or think beyond the restraint of revelation. The definition of “revelation” gave Islam its distinct hue, while the identification as the source of knowledge of either Tradition, reason or intuition produced three broad exegetical approaches.

TRADITIONAL EXEGESIS

The individual pursues the right path if he adheres to “the way of the Muslims”, the straight path which the Qurʾān commanded men to follow, “not separate paths lest they take you by various routes away from the path of God”. Muslims were forbidden to imitate those who “divided into sects, falling into disagreement”. The role of the Prophet was central to Muhammad's concept of Islamic unity: “He who obeys the Prophet obeys God”; “He who disobeys God and His Prophet, transgressing the bounds God has set, will be cast into Hell.”

“Copious without order, energetic without rules”: this is how the English language appeared to Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and so, too, must Arabic have seemed to its first lexicographers some thousand years earlier. It was at this time that Sībawayhi (d. c. 183/799)) created the grammar which would henceforth rule the energy of Arabic, while his master al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad (d. 175/791) brought order to its copiousness by laying the foundations of lexicography (ʿilm al-lughah, “the science of language”). Just a few years after the publication of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the Arab lexicographical tradition reached its peak in the gigantic Tāj al-ʿarūs min jawāhir al-qāmūs (begun in 1174/1760, finished 1188/1774) of al-Zabīdī (d. 1205/1791), which is a summation of the entire heritage, a triumph of cumulation incorporating every significant work directly or indirectly, from al-Khalīl onwards. There is hardly an item in the following sketch of the evolution of the classic dictionaries which has not found its way into the Tāj.

The formal lexicon is not the only product of the Arabs' interest in their language, however, and, before dealing with the standard dictionaries, some attention must be given to the other kinds of word-lists and alphabetically arranged reference works which emerged at the same time. These, though often subsumed in later dictionaries, are in no way their ancestors but had a separate existence and continued to appear side by side with them.

Although Faṭimid rule in Islamic history lasted only for about two and a half centuries (297/909 to 567/1171), it was of greater importance than any of the other provincial regimes which arose during the decline of the ʿAbbasid caliphate, for a number of reasons. It was the product of a movement, popularly known as Ismāʿīlī, the history of which goes back to the beginnings of the ʿAbbasid period, that is the time of the Shīʿī imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. It ushered in the first serious imperial challenge to the empire of the caliphate at Baghdad. Its intellectual legacy was as brilliant as those of the most productive periods of Islam. Lastly, its impact was felt till much later times, judging by the histories of the period that continued to be written, despite the withering away of Faṭimid religious influence in Egypt and Syria.

The Faṭimid daʿwah (mission), unlike any other mission, did not simply create a state, but continued to guide it throughout its existence and created an extensive literature. Never in Fatimid history was its mission geared to mass proselytization. Its teachings were addressed to a candidate (mustajīb) seeking admission to the community. It aimed at creating an elite class of dāʿīs (religious missionaries cum political agents) supported by a political base such as the Faṭimid caliphate. Once that base was gone, the community was destined to disappear, as the elite had been wiped out and there had in any case never been a mass following of the faith.

There are civilizations which have no history, or which, at any rate, are as little interested in commemorating the exploits of their ancestors as they are in bequeathing an account of their own to posterity. The reverse is true of those civilizations which, since antiquity, have succeeded one another on the shores of the Mediterranean and in western Asia, whether Semitic or otherwise. Writing, which made its appearance relatively early, obviously facilitated the recording of deeds or customs. Ruins of ancient monuments remind us of the passage of time and of successive peoples. The Qurʾān is full of allusions to this past and, within the framework of a divine plan, presents in its own way an historical view of the world. Arabic poetry, as has been observed elsewhere, preserves and glorifies the memory of the exploits of various small social groups. Arabs who had become Muslims could not but reveal some sense of history, even though at the outset they did not yet write works which could be called historical.

It is not claimed, of course, that a complete catalogue can be given of historiographical literature, of which, in any case, our knowledge is variable in relation to different periods and regions. At the start it is only necessary to emphasize that in the selection of works for mention – and a fortiori:, if such be the case, for publication, the criteria are not quite the same as for purely literary works.

Japanese society changed in many significant ways between the mid-twelfth century when the Taira were reveling in the final decades of their power and the close of the fifteenth century when the tenth Ashikaga shogun Yoshiki was ignominiously forced into a long exile. One of the most important changes was the rapid growth of commerce which affected in myriad ways both daily lives and the course of history.

This chapter describes and analyzes how market activities began and grew, leading to specialization among merchants, artisans, those engaged in transportation, and others and, as a result, raising the efficiency of both production and distribution. This chapter will pay special attention to the emergence and growth of several important economic institutions such as markets and guilds; the rise of Kyoto as the center of medieval commerce; the appearance of cities, port towns, and other urban centers and the increase in both their number and size; and other consequences of market activity and monetization that caused political and economic conflict between recipients and payers of dues and between lenders and borrowers.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ISSUES

Historians transform lived life into narrated life, and in this sense they are not unlike novelists. Intent notwithstanding, neither history nor novel copies human experience but, rather, selects, focuses, and retells and thereby inevitably reshapes. Even subtraction adds something new. And so though we go to both historians and novelists for “truth,” both are inherently disposed to falsification.

By selecting and subtracting, the interpretations of Japanese cultural history to date, particularly those of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras (roughly the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries) have focused on the “high” culture of the period; on the activities of the political, religious, and intellectual leaders of the time; and on the achievements of their close associates, eminent artists, architects, writers, and performers. Even those historians who are interested in the culture of ordinary people tend to view them in comparison with the upper classes, and their accounts are thereby riveted to the same high-low polarity as are those of the historians with whom they are ideologically at odds. Ironically, therefore, an elite veneer stretches over the history of the middle ages, obscuring the texture and contours of the daily life of the great majority of medieval men and women, while leaving in darkness those creators of Japanese culture who have failed to qualify under these preferred definitions of history.

It is not that such lives are beyond historical retrieval. On the contrary, throughout the middle ages the daily life of ordinary citizens was often a subject of note, even in the diaries and historical records of the elite; it is therefore much more easily resurrected than might be imagined.

The medieval centuries can fairly be described as the great age of Japanese Buddhism. Hōnen, Eisai, Shinran, Dōgen, Nichiren, Ippen, Rennyo, and thousands of lesser-known but equally dedicated religious leaders took Buddhism out of its traditional place in monastic cloisters under elite patronage, found new possibilities for personal salvation, and carried their message to common people throughout Japan. During these centuries, the foundations were laid for those new schools of Buddhism – Pure Land, True Pure Land, Nichiren, and Zen – that still claim the spiritual allegiance of the majority of Japanese. In response to these surges of reform, innovation, and popularization, some of the older schools of Buddhism produced reformers who called for a return to stricter monastic discipline and tried to make their teachings more accessible to ordinary men and women.

The social ramifications of this religious upsurge were enormous. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of monasteries, nunneries, hermitages, and “training places” (dōjō) for lay devotees were established. Monasteries, monks, and wandering preachers looked for, and found, new patrons; received donations and grants of land; served as bearers of culture and learning as well as advocates of Buddhist spirituality; acted as political advisers; and engaged in commerce and diplomacy. Some of the older monastic centers remained powerful political and military forces in society. And some of the newer groups, especially the Nichiren and True Pure Land followers, displayed a militant edge.

INTRODUCTION

The 1260s marked the beginning of a decisively new period for the Kamakura bakufu as it faced a set of increasingly complex problems caused by changing conditions both at home and abroad. The political structure of the bakufu was about to undergo a major change the death of Hōjō Tokiyori in 1263, which in effect ended the “Golden Period” characterized by the regency (shikken) system. At the same time, changes in the social, economic, and technological spheres were beginning to shake the shoōn system, which had been flourishing since the eleventh century. As examples of these changes, improved agricultural technology increased arable acreage, and the technique of double cropping – planting wheat after harvesting the rice – also enhanced productivity. The greater surplus in turn led to the diversification of agriculture, and as witnessed by the opening of periodic markets, commerce and trade likewise became more important. Simultaneously, peasants with free time or surplus means produced various handicrafts to be sold at market. A cash economy made advances as a large quantity of coins was imported from China, giving rise to financial middlemen and the practice of paying shōen taxes in cash.

These changes could not have taken place without influencing the overall social fabric. In various regions, cultivators rose up against the local jitō or shōen proprietors. In the meantime, the jitō and proprietors themselves began to compete, the worst of such confrontations occurring in the home provinces and the west, often involving military forces.

INTRODUCTION

Buddhism has had a long and illustrious history in Japan, but it was in the Kamakura period that Buddhism in Japan came into full flower. The forms of Buddhism that emerged at that time – Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren – were largely responsible for the dissemination of Buddhist beliefs and practices throughout Japanese society. The success of this movement lay in tailoring the ideas and goals of Buddhism to the concerns of the populace at large. Hence, Kamakura Buddhism, as the entire religious movement is called, has left an indelible mark on Japanese history and has made Buddhism a lasting and pervasive component of Japanese culture.

Buddhism originated in India and spread to China about four centuries after the time of the historical Buddha Sākyamuni (ca. fifth to fourth century, b.c.). It was transmitted to Japan from China via the Korean peninsula around the middle of the sixth century. The cultural gulf that existed at that time between Japan on the one hand and China and Korea on the other was considerable. Japan's ruling class accepted Buddhism as the embodiment of an advanced and superior civilization, and in order to gain control over the concepts and technology that Buddhism brought to Japan, the elite provided a succession of large temples where Buddhism could put down roots. A community of priests supported by the state and the aristocracy belonged to each of these temples.

Japan absorbed Buddhism as a comprehensive and advanced cultural medium from the outside but did not, at first, give substantial weight to its religious concerns per se.

The subject of this volume is medieval Japan, spanning the three and a half centuries between the final decades of the twelfth century when the Kamakura bakufu was founded and the mid-sixteenth century during which civil wars raged following the effective demise of the Muromachi bakufu. The historical events and developments of these colorful centuries depict medieval Japan's polity, economy, society, and culture, as well as its relations with its Asian neighbors. The major events and the most significant developments are not difficult to summarize.

This was the period of warriors. Throughout these centuries, the power of the warrior class continued to rise, and one political result of this development was the formation of two warrior governments, or bakufu. The first, the Kamakura bakufu, founded in the 1180s, was not able to govern the nation single-handedly. In several important respects, it had to share power with the civil authority of the tennō – usually translated as the emperor – and the court. But under the second warrior government – the Ashikaga bakufu that came into being in 1336 and was firmly established by the end of the fourteenth century – the warrior class was able to erode the power of the civil authority. During the first half of the fifteenth century, when the bakufu's power was at its zenith, the warrior class governed the nation in substantive ways. Although the civil authority did not lose all its power and continued to help legitimize the bakufu, it was manipulated and used to serve the bakufu's own political needs almost at will.

The establishment of Japan's first warrior government, the Kamakura bakufu, represented both a culmination and a beginning. Since the tenth century, an increasingly professionalized class of mounted fighting men had served in local areas as estate administrators and policemen and as officials attached to the organs of provincial governance. By the twelfth century, warriors had come to exercise a dominant share of the total volume of local government, but even after two hundred years they remained politically immature. The most exalted warriors were still only middle-level figures in hierarchies dominated by courtiers and religious institutions in and near the capital. The bakufu's founding in the 1180s thus represented an initial breakthrough to power on the part of elite fighting men, but the fledgling regime was scarcely in a position to assume unitary control over the entire country. What evolved was a system of government approximating a dyarchy. During the Kamakura period, Japan had two capitals and two interconnected loci of authority. The potential of warrior power was clear enough to those who cared to envision it, but the legacy of the past prevented more than a slow progress into the future.

Until quite recently, studies of Kamakura Japan have tended to overstate the warriors' achievement, by equating the creation of a new form of government with the simultaneous destruction of the old. As is now clear, not only was the Heian system of imperial-aristocratic rule still vigorous during the twelfth century, but also it remained the essential framework within which the bakufu, during its lifetime, was obliged to operate.

INTRODUCTION

The Muromachi bakufu, the second of the three military governments that held power in Japan from 1185 to 1867, was founded between 1336 and 1338 by Ashikaga Takauji (1305–58). The name Muromachi was taken from the district in Kyoto where the Ashikaga residence and administrative headquarters were located after 1378. The end of the regime is dated either 1573, when the last Ashikaga shogun was ousted from Kyoto, or 1597, when the ex-shogun died in exile.

The period in Japanese history defined by the existence of the Muromachi bakufu has been judged in two quite contradictory ways. Measured on the basis of effective centralized rule, it has been seen as a time of political weakness and social unrest. Yet in cultural terms it has been recognized as one of Japan's most creative periods of artistic achievement. There is, of course, no necessary contradiction between political instability and cultural brilliance. And modern historians have tended to play down the apparent paradox. They stress instead the significant social and institutional changes of the time: when military government (the bakufu system) came into its own, when the military aristocracy (the buke or samurai estate) became the real rulers of the country, and when profound changes were wrought in the distribution of rights over land and in the organization of the cultivating class. Recent assessments have suggested that even with respect to government effectiveness, the Ashikaga should not be dismissed too lightly. After all, the Muromachi bakufu lasted for more than two hundred years.

THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF MEDIEVAL PROVINCES

In the opening chapter Jeffrey P. Mass discusses the establishment of warrior government in medieval Japan under the Kamakura bakufu. In an agrarian society the shoguns, regents, and warriors throughout the country – like the emperor and nobles in Kyoto – depended primarily on land and its produce for their support. Thus, to understand early medieval society it is essential to understand the nature of the land system and the subtle but far-reaching changes that were taking place on the land.

The medieval land system is sometimes categorized as a system of private estates, shōen, and public domain, kokugaryō. The public domain had existed since the Nara period (710–94) when all lands throughout the provinces were subject to the fiscal and administrative authority of the imperial court. During the Heian period (794–1185) absentee proprietors, including nobles, temples, and shrines, and members of the imperial family acquired collections of private rights, shiki, in reclaimed or commended holdings scattered throughout the provinces. These holdings, known as shōen, were gradually sealed off from the taxing power and administrative supervision of state officials. Thus by the twelfth century most provinces in Japan had complex patterns of landholding in which public and private holdings were intermingled. This chapter will examine the shifting interaction of shōen and kokugaryō in the Kamakura period, the structure and management of shōen, the relations between shōen proprietors and their holdings, and the impact of the political emergence of warriors on the control of shōen.

THE KAMAKURA PERIOD AND THE END OF BUDDHIST LAW

This laconic statement came from the brush of the Buddhist priest Jien (1155–1225), the author of Gukanshō, an early-thirteenth-century history of Japan. Jien was a member of the ascendent northern branch of the Fujiwara and wrote Gukanshō in part to justify the historical success of his family as regent-rulers at the Heian court. But Jien is probably best remembered as the first historian in Japan to view the past in distinct terms of cause and effect and as a progression from one stage to another. Although earlier writers had not been totally oblivious to historical causality, none had sought to analyze Japanese history, as Jien did, within an overall, interpretive framework.

Jien's emphasis on the progress of history was not an aberrant view but, rather, emerged from a heightened awareness of the momentous historical changes that he himself witnessed. As observed in Gukanshō, Japan in the late 1100s was transformed from a comparatively peaceful and tranquil country under the rule of the imperial court to a tumultuous, strife-filled “age of warriors.” Yet the anguish that Jien and other members of the courtier elite experienced as a result of this transition was accepted fatalistically because of a belief in its inevitability: They were convinced that the period of mappō, or “the end of the Buddhist law,” had already begun a century before.

In this chapter I shall describe and analyze Japan's relations during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods with various countries of East Asia and their governments, including the Sung, Yüan, and Ming dynasties of China, the Koryŏ and Yi dynasties of Korea, and the Ryūkyū Islands. My descriptions and analyses focus primarily on Japan's international political relations, particularly Japan's relationship with its Asian neighbors, the effect of this relationship on Japan's internal political developments, and, conversely, the influence of Japan's internal politics on its international relations. Because my research interests lie mainly in the Kamakura period, I shall discuss developments of that period more extensively than those of the later Muromachi period.

JAPAN'S INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN EAST ASIA

Around the tenth century the motive force in East Asia shifted from the Han People of China to the northern nomadic tribes, often called the conquest dynasties. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, East Asian history centered on the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire. The Southern Sung (1127–1279) was reestablished after China's territory was reduced by the consecutive invasions of the Liao and Chin, which generated a financial crisis owing to the massive military expenses. The Southern Sung, whose resources and level of productivity were lower than those of northern China, inherited the developments that took place in various industries during and following the dominance of the Northern Sung (960–1127) and vigorously promoted foreign trade in hopes of resolving its financial crisis.