Cypress Beams, Kufic Script, and Cut Stone: Rebuilding the Master Narrative of European History

Abstract

In the year 769 a crisis appeared likely to engulf the Japanese imperial court at Nara. The empress Shotoku, aged fifty-two and childless, indeed never married, gave many signs that she intended to appoint a Buddhist priest named Dokyo as her successor. A noted faith healer, Dokyo was credited with curing the empress of a serious illness, for which she rewarded him with a succession of high offices in the imperial bureaucracy. That he was looked upon with favor by the empress was thus no secret, but there may have been more to their relationship than a magical cure and political rewards. One source from a few decades later says flatly that the two of them shared the same pillow. Dokyo had, in any case, arrived almost to the pinnacle of Japanese power, and yet there stood between him and the very top the inescapable fact that he was a commoner.1 Apart from any personal feelings for Dokyo, Shotoku had a long history of favoring the progress of Buddhism in her country. In this she was following the inclinations and policies of her father, Emperor Shomu, who, for example, decreed that every province must build and maintain an official Buddhist temple, where ceremonies would be carried out on a regular basis and where statues and sutras would be kept and accorded due honor. It was Shomu, moreover, who launched the project for erecting a massive gilded bronze statue of Buddha; its construction consumed over three hundred tons of copper and sixteen tons of gold. The temple enclosing it is the world's largest wooden structure. Before the statue was com pleted, though, Shomu abdicated in favor of his daughter in order to pursue his desire to become a Buddhist priest. She took the name Koken at the start of what turned out to be for her the first of two reigns, and she issued an edict declaring the name of the new era to be Heavenly Peace and Victorious Buddhism. Within a few years the great statue was completed, and she had it dedicated in what is