If your only exposure to Buddhism is how it’s practiced in America, you’d have good reason to think the prophecy has already been fulfilled. Each morning, millions of Americans meditate, and Buddhist scriptures are available in every bookstore. But monks are few, and it’s rare that they follow the full rigor of monastic discipline. Many meditators do not claim to follow the True Dharma, and it’s not uncommon that they haven’t heard of it at all. The mindfulness movement has become an incredible source of profit and fame.

Buddhism had to gradually adapt and be adapted to become a part of the modern Western religious landscape. It’s a process that began as soon as Europeans systematically studied it in the nineteenth century. Meditation practices were stripped of their traditional context and given new purpose while still retaining the allure of their oriental origins. Books portraying Buddhism as the religion of modernity excited people’s interest, and accessible retreat-based meditation programs were meant to keep it. This transformation, a collaboration between Western countercultural figures and Eastern religious reformers, tells a story of how a modern religion is shaped and the contours of its future.

Religious Modernities

Over the millennia, Buddhism had largely divided itself into three overarching sects: the Theravada concentrated in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, the Mahayana in East Asia, and the Vajrayana in Tibet and Mongolia. The practices are filled with rituals, folk customs, superstition, literal beliefs in rebirth, karma, and gods, divisions between priests and laity, chanted texts in dead languages, and except for certain monks, no meditation. 

When modern Europeans first encountered Buddhism, it resembled nothing so much as popular myths about the “superstitious” dark ages. In the eighteenth century, French-Walloon engraver Bernard Picart referred to the Dalai Lama as the “Supreme Pontiff of all Tartarian idolaters” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau classified the religions of Japan and Tibet with Roman Catholicism as the “the religion of the priest…so clearly bad that it is a waste of time to prove it as such.” To these observers, Christendom had left behind folk piety and the rule of monks, but Buddhism was still trapped in this more primitive mode. The encounter and the biases behind it would shape not just the colonizers, but the colonized Buddhist world as well. 

In much of the Buddhist world, the sudden changes brought by colonialism caused a sudden crisis for the clergy. In Burma and Sri Lanka, royal sponsorship of Theravada Buddhism was replaced with a supposedly neutral British colonial government and Christian missionaries. Removed from their traditional role, Buddhist institutions had to reground their religious authority. In both countries, a new generation of monks became the leaders of this renewal. 

The Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw became something close to a celebrity through his writing and speaking. He sought to stall Buddhism’s decline by inspiring the lay people to moral practice and better knowledge of the dharma, even teaching them the recently revived technique of Vipassana breath meditation. In Sri Lanka, the monk Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera became a notable debater, eschewing Pali for Sinhalese. In an event that would become consequential for Buddhism as a whole, he faced a Protestant reverend and a local catechist in a public contest that became known as the Panadura debate. Its topics spanned from the nature of God to the immortality of the soul. Drawing on traditional Buddhist traditions of rhetoric and using plain language in his responses, Gunananda Thera won the day, to the acclaim of the largely Buddhist audience.

Japan, meanwhile, had remained independent but turned much more harshly against its Buddhist traditions. The new Imperial government of the Meiji restoration encouraged mob violence against monasteries and gradually forced monks to marry and eat meat. While many Japanese monks accepted their demoted role, certain Zen intellectuals like Soyen Shaku began to engage with Western ideas and attempted to make a modern Buddhism that would be compatible with the country’s project of renewal. 

In Thailand, likewise never colonized, King Mongkut sought to modernize his country defensively. He took a reformist approach to Buddhism rather than an adversarial one, both reaffirming monastic orthodoxy and rejecting certain “superstitious” beliefs, such as the three-world cosmology and the beloved Jataka stories. 

Confronted by imperialism and cultural modernity alike, Buddhism had begun to adapt itself. These projects were already changing the religious landscapes of their own countries. But soon, they received unexpected help from the Westerners themselves.

At the same time Buddhist traditions were evolving, traditional Christianity faced increasing competition for satisfying the spiritual desires of the changing West. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation had moved both branches of Western Christianity from medieval, localized saint cults and pilgrimages to a more centralized, systematic, and confessional religion. The 1700s, in turn, had seen the rise of liberal, freethinking societies—including classic secret societies like the Freemasons—informed by the Enlightenment. 

But in the 1800s, a more eclectic and occult form of spirituality had begun to ascend across Europe and America. Interest in alternative spiritualities rose, with thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and orientalist scholars like Eugène Burnouf popularizing Eastern religions. Initially, Europeans had been repulsed by Buddhism; now they were curious about its potential for spiritual renewal.

The moment lined up with a convergence between science and the new occultist philosophies. Various groups tried to apply the scientific worldview to the supernatural. One such group, the Spiritualists, applied empirical methods to interactions with ghosts and spirits, and devotees sought hidden powers that could connect them with the dead. Later in the century, the Theosophists led by Helena Blavatsky believed that Aryan masters hidden in Tibet held the ancient wisdom of humanity, and that this true religion was imperfectly realized in the religions of the East. Theosophists from Europe and America would later become instrumental in popularizing Buddhism and other Asian religious traditions among Western disciples and enthusiasts.

Blavatsky and another Theosophist, Henry Steel Olcott, heard about the famous debate victory of Gunananda Thera in Sri Lanka through written accounts, and became convinced that Buddhism had some of the answers they were looking for. Olcott traveled to Sri Lanka in 1880 and quickly joined the monks in the process of reformulating Buddhist doctrine to accord with the needs of modern man. The monks were more than happy to receive this help, and Olcott is today honored in Sri Lanka as one of the great heroes of Buddhism’s national revival.

Olcott, the son of a Protestant minister, reformulated Sri Lankan Buddhism to fit with the Theosophist project. Between the abstracted version of the religion he found in the ancient texts and the actual, living Buddhist culture of the laity, he favored the more philosophical version which he could tune to his own goals. His writing stripped out doctrines he found to be incompatible with Western science; he stated flatly that “the worship of gods, demons, trees, etc., was condemned by the Buddha. External worship is a fetter that one has to break if he is to advance higher.” This rejection stood in clear contrast to the reality of Buddhism as it was practiced in Sri Lanka, as well as most historical accounts of early Buddhism. Olcott began a long Western tradition of updating Buddhist doctrine to accord with current scientific consensus and of reinterpreting rebirth and karma to accord with the theosophical idea of spiritual evolution—itself inspired by Darwin’s theory.

Reflecting on Olcott’s influence, the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere has called the resulting religious settlement “Protestant Buddhism.” From the perspective of both Western sympathizers and Asian modernizers, the reformed religion was closer to the true doctrines of its founder—Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha Shakyamuni, and to his words as recorded in the Pali Canon. 

The gradual purging of superstitious elements and of distinctions between clergy and laypeople, as well as a turn toward personal practice, reflect a Buddhism changed to meet the expectations of Westerners. These reforms were not evenly distributed—monastic distinctions and discipline were actually reinforced in the Theravada world, and popular practices were rarely overturned for most laypeople in the Buddhist world itself—but the version of Buddhism presented to the West was one crafted for this very purpose.

In 1893, the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago gathered two Buddhists, the Sri Lankan monk Anagarika Dharmapala and the Japanese monk Soyen Shaku, along with several Theosophists and other religious representatives. This event represented the entry of Buddhism onto the stage of world religions. Both Shaku and Dharmapala were modernist missionary intellectuals who sought to present a scientific Buddhism to the West. Their allies at the gathering included Western writers like Olcott and Paul Carus, a scholar who was instrumental in bringing Buddhist ideas to the West in a systematic way. 

Created explicitly for spiritual seekers, these modernized accounts of Buddhism tended to emphasize the antiquity and unity of Buddhist beliefs, and almost never discussed the recent transformations that had taken place or the many differences between different sects. This was a Buddhism that largely existed only in writing, totally distinct from the millions of lay practitioners in Asia. But as a living discourse, it was ready to bloom into a practiced religion.

California Dharma

The spiritual and occultist movements of the nineteenth century were the purview of socially influential but numerically small circles. This remained more or less the case in the early twentieth century as well. Then came the Baby Boomers. 

In the 1950s, beginning with the Beat Generation, a new subculture began to imagine new life paths, values, and experiences against what they saw as the conformism of their parents’ generation. Foreignness, particularly Asian and “oriental” foreignness, became a distinct mark of authenticity. 

It was not long before these spiritual seekers discovered books on Buddhism, and found in them a religion attuned to the needs of the time. Early Beats like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg all had notable encounters with Buddhism through reading. Usually, it never went beyond that. But many wanted to go beyond words and into experiences and practices. Before long, they would discover meditation.

Like psychedelics, music, and sex, it was an intensely physical and mental experience for the individual. Although altered states were more difficult to achieve through meditation than through pharmaceutical means, it offered something more natural and grounded in the authority of sacred wisdom. For some, it even offered a purpose for life: the ultimate goal of enlightenment. 

Most Buddhist sects traditionally identify enlightenment with freedom from rebirth with many profound signs and miracles, some with becoming a Boddhisattva and eventually a Buddha possessed of godlike powers. It is a process that takes countless lifetimes. But Buddhist modernizers had gradually begun describing it as something more akin to inner peace. This new enlightenment was presented as both the ultimate goal of practice and as what the original Buddhas had meant all along.

One popular 1934 book by the monk D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, states that ”satori [enlightenment] may be defined as intuitive looking-into, in contradistinction to intellectual and logical understanding…satori means the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistic mind.”

Zen, especially Soto Zen, emphasizes meditation practice to an unusual degree among extant Buddhist sects. As an exclusively monastic practice, it was not obvious that it would be part of a lay Japanese Buddhist revival, and Rinzai Zen monks like Shaku and Suzuki even left meditation out of their accounts of the tradition. Others such as the Soto and Rinzai-trained Hakuun Yasutani saw a future for meditation. He changed the monastic curriculum to cater explicitly to lay people with jobs and family responsibility, and even formed his own lineage independent from the more traditional Soto and Rinzai practices. It failed to catch on with Japanese practitioners. But by geographic coincidence, he and other Buddhist priests among the Japanese diaspora in California were living among a ripe new audience. 

In 1959, a 55-year-old Soto monk named Shunryu Suzuki arrived in San Francisco to take over the waning immigrant temple of Sokoji. San Francisco was buzzing with interest in Zen thanks to the activities of Buddhist popularizers like Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki. Many had read the latter’s Introduction, and were eager to get closer to the real thing. Westerners interested in Zen heard about the new “Zen master,” and went to Sokoji to investigate if they could learn from him. Suzuki, not used to such attention, invited them to sit in meditation with him during his morning sessions at 5:45 am sharp. These sessions quickly became popular; the meditators found something totally new and experiential they had not gotten from other Zen teachers. In 1962 Suzuki founded the San Francisco Zen Center. The center grew extremely quickly, establishing branch temples and becoming the largest Soto Zen organization in the West. 

By coming to San Francisco, Suzuki had quickly gone from being a minor priest to his sect’s most popular figure outside of Japan. While relatively tolerant, he did find the fusion of hippie culture with Zen monasticism challenging—particularly, he had to draw a strong line between meditative experience and psychedelic trips. In 1969, Sokoji’s board of directors asked Suzuki to resign, as by this point he was focused entirely on his Western students. But the San Francisco Zen Center continued to expand, and Suzuki’s students have now spread throughout American Zen.

Various forms of this story repeated across America: Rinzai temples established by Joshu Sasaki in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and Eido Tai Shimano in New York expanded meditation outreach. Taizan Maezumi, Philip Kapleau, and Robert Aitken, all students of Yasutani, established their own Zen meditation centers during this time. The vast majority of notable Zen teachers in America come from these 1960s lineages.

While meditation had proven itself highly attractive, it had not yet reached the form of optimal growth. Teachers were still monks who shaved their heads, lived at temples, and performed rituals. It was expected that students who wanted to reach enlightenment would eventually become monks, and take part in some of these practices. The institutional structure, regular meetings, community, practice schedules, and retreats are very likely part of the reason that Zen had so much more staying power than other ‘60s movements, but the rituals still put many people off. Like the Puritans against Luther, there was room for further purification, and it came from an entirely different tradition of Buddhism.

Meditation Without Religion

In the Theravada World, the original Buddhist modernists had revived meditation in Burma and Thailand. Like the Zen monks, Theravadins began teaching the practice to the laity and had found growth uneven. However, they would go on to find that the adaptation of lay-Vipassana meditation, presented with the scientific secular frame of “original Buddhism,” would become immensely popular among foreign students. 

In 1975, a group of Americans trained in the Thai and Burmese modernist tradition founded the Insight Meditation Society, presenting Burmese Vipassana with certain Thai elements as a united Theravada method that leads directly to enlightenment.

Like Zen, modern Vipassana focuses attention just on the breath and is therefore quite simple to teach. Both traditions also use a similar retreat format adapted for laypeople. Where Theravada modernization differs from that of Zen is in the re-entrenchment of monastic codes: monks are exclusively male and have numerous restrictions on their behavior in daily life.

When the Insight founders decided to teach meditation, they put on none of the trappings of temples or rituals, and did not expect anyone to become a monk. This would prove to be immensely appealing to those with a casual interest in such practices, but with no desire for the commitment of a shaved head. The core Theravada texts centered by reformers focus on the historical Buddha and the attainment of nirvana, which allowed Theravada teachers to present their meditation practice as an original, pure, non-monastic, secular Buddhism, and a direct path to enlightenment.

It set the stage for a new and very much irreligious phase in Western Buddhism: the mindfulness revolution.

By the 1980s, detraditionalized, non-sectarian meditation was available to anyone who wanted to seek “enlightenment,” a secular romantic take on the meaning of life. Zen, Vipassana, and even Tibetan Buddhism all existed as live options, but promised mostly the same benefits. Mass adoption would only come once meditation was advertised as a tool for mental and physical health. Jon Kabat-Zinn studied both Zen and Insight Meditation and founded a stress-reduction clinic where he began teaching what he called “mindfulness.”

Mindfulness used the same breath methods as Vipassana, but added a further element to the frame—it marketed itself as a peer-reviewed mental health practice. Other Western Buddhists largely accepted this new presentation of meditation, although they continued to insist that the fruits of practice were more than just health. 

But this was the last piece of the puzzle. Meditation was now completely accessible to an unmodified Western secular worldview and could be both a means and an end to fulfillment. If you believe that meditation is ultimately about coming to understand your own mind, the nature of the universe, and becoming a fully realized human being, as the ancient sages did, then it is for you. If you believe that it is a method of decreasing stress to allow you to better your career and achieve self-actualization in a scientifically proven way, it is also for you. If you doubt either, the other is there, for both offer great benefit for minimal belief. And it requires no commitment other than that you just keep doing it.

Within a generation, the waning religiosity of America opened further space for mindfulness to become something everyone should do. Buddhism as secular mindfulness meditation is no longer a counter-cultural commitment, but one of many options for individuals to spend their time on alongside exercise, drugs, yoga, and diets. While Western Buddhist temples would rarely request fees for classes, it is now standard for smartphone apps and meditation centers to charge subscriptions.

American Buddhism is healthy, but has little growth. The three traditions exist in stable ecumenical friendliness and have settled on a consensus of Buddhist values largely identical to secular liberal moral principles and trends. As the history of Buddhist modernism has become better known, a new generation of intellectuals has taken on the task of sorting out what it really means for Buddhism to be secular or scientific, but there are no ready solutions. Some argue for a turn towards more traditional variations of Vajrayana, others argue that Buddhism should be further secularized. There has been increasing attention to forms of meditation beyond Zazen sitting meditation, and the risks of meditating too much. 

In Japan, Buddhism is often described as “Funeral Buddhism.” The temples and monks perform funeral rituals and do little else, because all other major rituals of life are handled by Shinto. In the Theravada world, the old monastic institutions remain strong, consistently supporting conservative social values, and laypeople continue to give alms and pray for spiritual protection and favorable rebirth. The Buddhist world has gotten larger, but it is still divided. The monks who feared Buddhism’s decline would likely give a mixed verdict. 

There is a continuing demand for individual pursuits of fulfillment justified by ancient wisdom. Buddhist meditation’s rise was not planned or intended, but was slowly paired down and transformed according to the desires of successive cultural avant-gardes, before finally breaking into mainstream culture. 

Just as the Baby Boomers were positioned to discover meditation and make it the center of their religious lives, so too may subsequent generations discover new practices based on new needs. Recent changes in the values of Buddhism’s educated Western base on issues like gender and sexuality have been reflected in American Buddhist communities, despite not being shared in the traditional Buddhist world itself. We can expect that future changes—say, a departure from ideological universalism or a more strident critique of the “mindfulness” industry—will be similarly reflected. Whether American Buddhism will ever give rise to politically radicalized factions like those in Myanmar or regain an appreciation for Buddhist folk culture will depend on the attitudes of this base.

But the cost of the mindfulness revolution has been Buddhism’s lost monopoly on many of its core concepts. Very few of those using Buddhist practices will ever become Buddhists in a religious sense. California Buddhism is one of the most successful cultural syntheses of the last century; but as far as conversion goes, it seems that it is Buddhism that has embraced California rather than the other way around.

Among the new alliances which this age produced were the Ikkō-ikki, a network of autonomous religious collectives that led major uprisings and controlled significant parts of Japanese society for nearly a century. Their final defeat at the hands of Japan’s warrior class set the stage both for a centralized Japanese state and the social hierarchy behind it. While the Japanese state has undergone many transformations since then, the country has never since been politically divided. Likewise, memories of the Ikkō-ikki echoed through the generations: Suspicion toward autonomous sects and ideologies remained entrenched in Japan’s political culture. From the Tokugawa suppression of Christianity to the Meiji promotion of the imperial cult of State Shinto, the Japanese state tightly controlled the ideologies and religious sects that existed among its people until after the Second World War.

The Ikkō-ikki could only exist in a landscape where centralized power was absent and in which existing hierarchies were in a state of confusion. When a renewed Japanese elite re-established both, loose networks like the Ikkō-ikki were unable to withstand their enemies’ coordinated exercise of power. However, they also demonstrate the role of ideology in coordinating power of any kind: built on religious conviction, these networks could mobilize local nobles alongside monks and peasants, uniting them in willingness to die for a transcendent cause. Reunifying Japan was not just a matter of military power; its early-modern founders had to displace these hostile modes of coordination and establish new ones as well. The resulting Japanese state was not only a political accomplishment, but an ideological and religious one as well.

The Rise of the Ikkō-ikki

The Ikkō-ikki were born in the political and religious environment of Sengoku Japan (1467-1615). The preceding Heian period (794-1185) was a time of a strong centralized government led by the imperial court. Buddhism was introduced from China in waves. A series of orthodox Buddhist sects began to initiate Japanese elites into the many paths to enlightenment and won political favor by performing massive rituals for the health of the state. After a civil war ended the Heian period, the borders of power began a slow process of erosion. Maverick Buddhist priests began to spread new doctrines aimed at the common people and challenged the traditional position that many paths to enlightenment were possible. The warrior class seized increasing political power and expanded the role of the shoguns, marginalizing the court. The embattled state’s complicated system of tax exemptions—granted to temples, courtiers, warriors, and friendly clients—allowed for a concentration of local power in landed estates. Power was no longer defined by a hierarchical relationship to the imperial court; instead, local and competing clan loyalties became the defining social fabric. Bonds were increasingly defined by a rigid warrior ethic—though one which was often betrayed for the sake of small advantages. By the mid-15th century, the shogun had lost real central power and the country slipped into a continuous hundred-year civil war, the Sengoku.

In this tumultuous landscape, new forces filled the vacuums of coordination and power. With shoguns and warlords reliant on fragile bonds of loyalty with their warriors, the advantage fell to those who were able to raise up mass mobilizations instead. The best-placed of these authorities were the monks of Japan’s newest and rapidly-growing Buddhist sect.

True Pure Land Buddhism began as a minor Buddhist offshoot. It was founded in the early-13th century by a radical Japanese monk named Shinran who believed that the Earth had recently entered an age known as Mappō, a 10,000 year period so corrupt and evil that traditional modes of salvation were now impossible. He taught that priestly learning, esoteric practices, and ethical principles were no longer sufficient for enlightenment. Only faith in the celestial teacher known as the Amida Buddha, expressed through chanting, could open the path to spiritual liberation. Amida Buddha would save the faithful, bringing them after death to the paradisical Pure Land, a world he himself had created in which his followers could be assured of eventual Buddhahood.

Shinran’s followers were distinguished from early on by their disregard of traditional civility and the extremity of their belief. In times defined by increasing war and famine, the doctrine of Mappō appeared an obvious truth. Many who had been rejected by the clergy for their involvement in the evils of the world could now follow the Buddhist path. Warriors and those involved in animal-killing had been unable to practice due to the karma of their sins, but now joined the chanting. Merchants and artisans had been unable to practice due to the time-consuming and esoteric nature of orthodox Buddhist rituals, but now joined the chanting. Peasants, who previous priests had never cared to preach to, now joined the chanting. And these multitudes, coming from classes with competing loyalties that would never normally speak to each other, all chanted together.

People came to the True Pure Land temples for differing reasons. Some were attracted to their doctrine and belief, while others pursued the tax exemptions and independence from the government enjoyed by religious settlements. Empowered by their growing numbers, Buddhist priests founded branch temples in distant provinces, simultaneously growing the faith and increasing its economic base. Motives, both pure and impure, were indistinguishable in the dark age of Mappō. The intermingling of honest zealots with opportunistic salesmen was merely a feature of the times.

What mattered for the Ikkō-ikki was that Shinran’s doctrine could now bring together people who shared common local interests but were not linked by any sort of clan or feudal tie. In a West colored in the legacy of Protestantism, we risk focusing entirely on the sincerity of the believers in a movement. When opportunists or corruption exist within a movement, it is easy to dismiss the ideological element as a cynical vehicle that is in some sense inauthentic. But Japanese Buddhism may provide a more helpful example for understanding how ideologies operate. Sincerity and personal profit can be fully compatible. What mattered for the strength of the Ikkō-ikki was the ever-larger number of people who found themselves connected to each other by belief, religious practice, and social identity. The True Pure Land doctrine and the monks who preached it had created a powerful new coordination mechanism in a society riven with disunity and chaos.

True Pure Land temples were divided among a variety of sub-sects emphasizing different nuances in Shinran’s teaching. The balance of doctrinal power changed in the 15th century, when Patriarch Rennyo of the Honganji temple succeeded in centralizing his authority. Shinran’s descendants had become the priests of Honganji, which was built on the founder’s grave. They distinguished themselves from other True Pure Land groups with the idea that Shinran’s blood made them uniquely qualified to interpret his doctrine during the time of Mappō. From that point on, the title of Patriarch was passed on through heredity. Thanks to his incredible organizational skills, as well as his preaching and writing in a simple vernacular language, Rennyo was able to rapidly expand the sect’s numbers. He also organized the existing True Pure Land temples under a hierarchical branch system with Honganji at the top. The local priests were still centers of their community, but now they owed loyalty and rents to the Honganji patriarchs. The True Pure Land sect centered around Honganji became preeminent within True Pure Land Buddhism as a whole, a school which was itself still considered heterodox by more traditional rivals.

Common sectarians enthusiastically believed Honganji’s claims to the preeminence of its patriarch, imputing to him the power to ensure rebirth in the Pure Land and equating expulsion from the sect with damnation to the lowest of the Buddhist hell-realms. Rennyo himself discouraged this belief, which was technically heretical. He emphasized his own family’s relatively abstract belief that faith in Amida was not something that anyone had control of—rather, Amida alone granted salvation. He worked hard to spread Buddhist doctrine and ensure the survival of the sect in difficult times and seems to have been sincere in his pursuit of religious goals by secular means.

However, the disparity between Rennyo’s personal claims and those of his devoted following came to reflect a constant tension within the Ikkō-ikki: Leading religious figures might have had great authority, but they also had limited power. Rennyo could not always control them through doctrinal corrections or even expulsion. Their enthusiasm for the sect sometimes jeopardized his careful building of institutional power. Despite these tensions, the growing communities of believers, drawn from all classes of Japanese society, were now linked to each other across the country. They had a common faith and holy patriarch to defend.

When the more orthodox Buddhist temples of the Tendai school on Mount Hiei demanded rents and subservience from Honganji with threats of violence, groups of believers at other temples banded together in defense of their patriarch. In doing so, they drew on a well-established organizational custom in medieval Japan: the ikki.

The concept of ikki was already used throughout medieval Japan at the time of Honganji ascendancy. It defined a temporary social bond used by the lower classes to address collective problems. When confronted by an oppressive landlord or a troublesome group of bandits, groups of villagers, merchants, and warriors would gather together, write their grievances down, burn the resulting paper, ritually drink the ash mixed with water, and agree to act as a collective until the problem had been fixed. The ikki differed from other sorts of military units in that it was fundamentally collective, without an explicit chain of command or a single leader.

Undisciplined and temporary by nature, the ikki could never have the same power as a regular army. But their flexible and quick formation often allowed them to accomplish their goals and win military engagements. In the case of the True Pure Land devotees, the social grievance was now combined with religious faith, leading people to identify them as the Ikkō-shu—the Single-Minded School—and to name their collective the Ikkō-ikki.

The Ikkō-ikki first showed their strength in power struggles in Kaga (present-day Ishikawa), an area of particular strength for the Honganji sect. In 1473, the governor of Kaga supported a rival True Pure Land sect and put harsh taxation on villages associated with Honganji. Ikkō-ikki organized by local priests backed his rival, named Masachika, and brought him to power instead. When Masachika failed to reward them, they rebelled once again. This time, they were quickly defeated.

As the power of the Ikkō-ikki grew, so did their tension with the very religious authority they invoked. Honganji’s authorities viewed the situation with growing concern. Rennyo himself never endorsed any of these actions and even condemned the second Ikkō-ikki rebellion, which he saw as local opportunism that would hurt the movement. But the Ikkō-ikki had begun to develop a will of their own. After Masachika pursued a particularly brutal policy of taxation, they struck again and overthrew him in 1487. From that point on, the governors of Kaga ruled only with the Ikkō-ikki’s support. By the early 1500s, the Ikkō-ikki were the de facto government of the province. The patriarch at Honganji granted them his tacit support, but had effectively lost all direct control.

It is difficult to say exactly what Kaga under the ikki looked like, with relatively few contemporary sources surviving to the modern-day. It was known from outside as a sort of “Peasants’ Kingdom.” Unlike Japan’s other provinces, which were gradually falling under the control of regional warlords, Kaga had no single figure controlling it. Speculatively, we should not expect that social class was abolished or that there was any sort of utopian social project. Peasants made up a large proportion of Ikkō-ikki ranks, but warriors and merchants appear to have controlled their informal leadership.

Despite the lack of any central executive, the Ikkō-ikki seem to have collected rents from the various estates, set taxes, and more or less governed the province as a whole. Their informal and somewhat fluctuating hierarchies, combined with the coordinating power of the True Pure Land doctrine, created a regime stable enough to assume the functions of government. But while they had achieved a degree of internal stability, their structure made them especially vulnerable to external threats—and that same structure made those threats inevitable. Kaga horrified Japan’s rising warlords, who were actively pursuing the return to the direct, top-down rule which they believed necessary both for their clans and for the country as a whole. But they had seen the power of the True Pure Land faith. As a result, local lords increasingly saw any concentration of Honganji believers as a potential ally or enemy in their struggles. Given their religious and ideological strength, mere toleration was no longer possible.

Moreover, the reigns of religious power were changing hands. Rennyo retired in favor of his son Jitsunyo in 1489. The patriarchs were reluctant to use their authority, but their familial and political ties with the elites made this difficult. In 1506, the shogunal deputy Masamoto called on Jitsunyo to summon the Ikkō-ikki to assist him in a succession dispute. Jitsunyo at first refused, but ultimately submitted to the influential Masamoto. For the first time in the sect’s history, the Honganji patriarch directly sent the Ikkō-ikki into battle.

Despite this momentary alignment of the Honganji leadership with their mobilized faithful, the structure of the ikki made it impossible to permanently cement control. The Ikkō-ikki sometimes refused orders, especially when their local interests aligned more with the patriarch’s enemies than his allies. The continuing tension showed that the constant mingling of motives did not always favor the religious side. Collectives often know when they are being weaponized; it is their own interests that ensure whether or not they cooperate.

The next patriarch, Shonyo, inherited the title at the age of 10 and proved to be the most willing claimant yet to use his religious power for secular ends. After a brief civil war between the patriarch and powerful local temples in 1532, which saw the Ikkō-ikki mobilized again, Honganji became the de facto governor of Kaga under the shogun. Shonyo then sent the Ikkō-ikki into battle in another shogunal power dispute in 1534. He also went the closest of any patriarch towards the line of religious heresy in his cause. In his teaching, Shonyo began to heavily imply that fighters for the cause would be assured of rebirth in the Pure Land, contradicting the central role of the Amida Buddha in this process.

In the aftermath of this conflict, overzealous adherents in Nara mounted a brutal sacking of the Kofukuji complex, the oldest center of Buddhist orthodoxy. Their motives were probably mixed, embodying both a response to the oppression of the True Pure Land sects by the traditional Buddhist authorities and, perhaps, a zeal to fight their shogunal ally’s enemies.

Whatever their cause, the results were dire for both Honganji as an institution and for the True Pure Land communities. Shonyo’s ally turned on the sect to firm up his relationships with the old elite, summoning a new ikki of Nichiren Buddhists to destroy the Honganji temple itself. Local and dedicated branches of fighters had proved a powerful tool, but their lack of discipline and communication now threatened the existence of the sect as a whole. After this, the patriarch moved his base of authority to the newer Ishiyama-Honganji in Osaka. There, the Honganji leadership experienced a few relatively peaceful decades while local Ikkō-ikki continued their own fights.

The Daimyo and the New Regime

Japan’s warlords had found a use for the ikki. But as the prospect of reunifying the country beckoned, they were increasingly unnerved by the ikki’s unpredictability. Moreover, they perceived accurately that the ability of the ikki to coordinate mass uprisings lay in their religious authority among huge numbers of the population. All three of Japan’s eventual three unifiers—Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu—were extremely suspicious of any sort of Buddhist power whatsoever in the new social order they hoped to create. As warriors, they believed that the basis for society should be the ties of loyalty between lord and vassal. These daimyo, or regional lords, controlled their domains absolutely and eliminated traditional tax exemptions and other local power bases. The nature of the daimyo’s authority could not permit rivals.

The greatest contrasts to this vision were the Honganji sect and the Ikkō-ikki: Undisciplined collective mobs scattered in pockets of every province, controlled by priests instead of warriors, undermined the very foundation of daimyo rule. Moreover, generations of control over the trading network of tax-exempt temple towns had given the Honganji patriarch incredible power over the country’s economy. From the perspective of the increasingly ambitious warlords, they threatened the unification of Japan itself.

The sect’s power was stably decentralized; despite its religious and economic power, Honganji did not actively seek control over the provinces. The ties that bound the ikki themselves together were weaker than the warrior bonds that bound the daimyo. Moreover, their participants were generally untrained and unpredictable. These weaker bonds were both a feature of their success and a flaw that warlords could exploit; they had allowed both the True Pure Land sect and the ikki to spread into every part of medieval Japan and amass enough collective power to be a serious threat to the daimyo, while simultaneously preventing them from consolidating and formalizing that power. The Honganji patriarchs might have envied a daimyo’s direct relationship with their vassals at times, but accepted their political weakness as a necessary part of that connection.

The patriarch could issue rules of conduct and direct orders but could only punish insubordinates or rebels with expulsion from the sect. Instead, he exercised a softer form of power. Since he did not require a lord-vassal relationship, he could exert influence over those who were supposed to be exclusively loyal to their immediate superiors. The religious nature of the movement divided the loyalties of the daimyo’s subjects and threatened any central control. When Tokugawa Ieyasu tried to collect rents from his own domains, his own lower warriors who followed the sect joined with the merchants and peasants in a rebellion against him. The unifiers fought all their opponents with brutality, but the threat of the alternate order embedded in the Ikkō-ikki made their absolute defeat and suppression necessary for their political project.

The Ikkō-ikki do not appear to have ever really contemplated replacing the shogun with their own theocratic order. The Pure Land was a reality far away from the corrupted world they saw around them and Hongangji’s only goal was to keep the paths to escape open. The long instability of medieval Japan and its endemic violence made for a harsh existence and threatened the Buddhist sect at times, but also created the only environment where both its authorities and its militant followers could remain largely independent of a jealous and powerful daimyo state. Any compromise with a power strong enough to unify Japan—and therefore, strong enough to destroy the sect—would involve an existential risk to the patriarch’s authority. The Ikkō-ikki and the daimyo both knew this. Although each tried to find paths to reconciliation, an ultimate conflict became inevitable.

Nobunaga, head of the powerful Oda clan, conquered the capital city of Kyoto in 1568. In the years that followed, he made clear his intention to destroy the Honganji sect. The Patriarch Kennyo took him at his word and summoned all Ikkō-ikki from across the country to defend the faith with their lives. Despite graver circumstances than those faced by his predecessor Shonyo, Kennyo did not go as far as implying that those who fought for the Amida Buddha would be guaranteed rebirth in the Pure Land. Nevertheless, he threatened expulsion from the sect for those who failed to respond to the call and he did not crack down on those who raised the Ikkō-ikki’s now-famous banner of war: “Advance and be reborn in Paradise, retreat and fall immediately into Hell.”

The Ikkō-ikki, held in contempt by warriors for their ragtag nature, were able to hold out for a full 10 years against Nobunaga, finally facing defeat in 1580. In the meantime, Nobunaga had sought to eliminate his other opponents, sacking the temples on Mount Hiei with relative ease in 1571 and subjugating the Shingon base of Koyasan in 1582. The Ikkō-ikki had made the religious power of Buddhism as a whole intolerable, not only that of the True Pure Land sect. After Ishiyama-Honganji fell, Kennyo was able to use his family ties with the imperial court to arrange a peace treaty and spare the sect from total destruction, even if he had to sacrifice its independence. Despite all the power that Honganji had gained in the prior century, it was ultimately careful politicking that ensured the doctrine’s survival.

Ultimately, it fell to Tokugawa Ieyasu to build the new shogunal regime. He revamped the state’s religious policy with a very deliberate eye towards preventing anything like the Ikkō-ikki from happening again. Christianity, once entertained as a potential centralizing ideology by Nobunaga, was now banned as a potential threat. The religious bonds of its communities and their loyalty to a far-off religious patriarch in Rome posed too great a threat to the new order. Small rebellions already hinted at a repetition of the Ikkō-ikki. If a European country had decided to invade, it might be that Christians throughout the country would side with the invaders over their rulers.

Buddhism, however, was not completely suppressed in the new order. As Tokugawa cemented his rule, he cleverly appropriated Buddhist temples as arms of the growing police state. They were divided into strict sectarian groups and monitored by the government. All Japanese subjects were required to register with a temple, providing a form of census that also served to root out Christians and other sects. Honganji itself was divided into two rival sects controlled by separate patriarchs, both of which survive to the modern day. These reforms also gave Buddhism a new social role: providing funeral rituals. Japan’s shoguns allowed Buddhist institutions no separate power base apart from the state. Neo-Confucianism imported from Ming China, which viewed Buddhist devotion with great skepticism, became the official government ideology. Weapons were confiscated from all classes except the warriors and formerly fluid class divisions were made strict and hereditary.

The social order instituted by Japan’s three unifiers, culminating in the Tokugawa shogunate and the Edo period that lasted until the late-19th century, has defined the country ever since. Rebellions and upheavals have threatened the Japanese state and changed society substantially, but independent religious and ideological organizations have never been allowed to reclaim substantial power.

The caste system of the Edo Period successfully kept people divided from each other and their feudal roles continued to be the preeminent social relationship. The Meiji restoration abolished the strict rules of this caste system as imperial authority once again usurped that of the shoguns, but maintained the same trend of centralization. As Japan entered the 20th century, the cult of the emperors became a defining feature of Japanese ideology. Centering that cult around the wider, carefully controlled system of State Shinto, the imperial government even carried out a fresh purge of the Buddhist temples to ensure their subservience. While Japanese citizens were technically allowed private familial and religious sentiments, loyalty to Japan and its emperor demanded political preeminence. Only the introduction of Western philosophies of human rights under American occupation would ultimately abolish the political sanctions against autonomous and insufficiently patriotic religious sects.

The Ikkō-ikki demonstrate the efficacy of religious and ideological authority to organize people on a large scale, particularly in the absence of centralized power. Their ideology did not make sense to the scholarly elites, but that did not matter for its appeal. Their mix of sincere religious belief with local and economic opportunism enhanced their strength rather than hindering it. Their leader commanded absolute respect and unified many distant coalitions, but could not control them. The relations which allowed the Ikkō-ikki to spread like wildfire ultimately contributed to their downfall.

We continue to see similar dynamics in religious, social, and ideological mass movements. The Taliban was able to continue an ongoing military campaign even in the face of American military might thanks to a weak central government, while ISIS spread under similar circumstances. But the real test of such movements is whether power and authority align. Those who can develop centralized institutions capable of directing a movement and translating immediate victories into institutional endurance are extremely difficult to overcome. Conversely, those who never do so—like the Honganji patriarchs—are often overcome by better-coordinated rivals in the long run. The power of the Ikkō-ikki was enough to grant them temporary hegemony over a region, but only the strong bonds of daimyo loyalty proved able to unify Japan.