Buddhism reaches Japan from Baekje

The Nihon shoki, compiled in 720, records that in the tenth month of Kinmei’s thirteenth year King Seong (Seongmyeong) sent an envoy with a gilt-bronze image of Shakyamuni, banners and canopies and several volumes of sutras and treatises, together with a memorial praising the merit of spreading the Dharma. The emperor, struck by the Buddha’s solemn face, ‘such as we have never seen’, asked his ministers whether it should be worshipped. Soga no Iname answered that all the western countries honoured the Buddha and Yamato alone could not refuse; Mononobe no Okoshi and Nakatomi no Kamako warned that the native gods would be angered. The emperor gave the image to Iname to worship as a trial: Iname installed it in his house at Oharida and turned his house at Mukuhara into a temple. When an epidemic broke out, his opponents blamed the foreign god, and the image was thrown into a canal at Naniwa and the temple burned.

Two other early texts, the Jōgū Shōtoku hōō teisetsu and the Gangō-ji engi, date the arrival of Buddhism to the year tsuchinoe-uma, 538, in Kinmei’s reign, and this date is now more widely accepted. Both dates are problematic: the texts giving 538 were written after the Nihon shoki; the envoy it names is unknown to Korean and Chinese sources; the king’s memorial echoes the Sutra of Golden Light, translated into Chinese only in 703; and 552 may have been chosen as the first year of the ‘decline of the Dharma’ (mappō). Historians therefore speak of an official introduction around the middle of the 6th century, probably between 538 and 552; immigrants from the continent had worshipped the Buddha privately even earlier. Some Japanese scholars also doubt that the court dispute was about accepting or rejecting Buddhism as such, rather than about court ritual and the rivalry of the Soga and the Mononobe.

Baekje, which had received Buddhism in 384, used it as a diplomatic gift in its wars with Silla and Goguryeo. Under the patronage of the Soga the new religion remained a matter of court politics for half a century, until Soga no Umako defeated the Mononobe in 587 and built Asuka-dera. The year 538 is conventionally taken as the end of the Kofun period and the beginning of the Asuka period.