八世紀における寺院の所領とその認定

抄録

In ancient Japan temples were the owners of many estates. A lot of documents concerning these estates have been preserved and extensively studied, but the general system of temple landownership is still unknown. In this paper the author re-examines the documents from a new angle: how did the State confirm the temple ownership of estates? His conclusions are as follows. Temples were proprietors of two kinds of estates: jiden and konden. The former were their main estates donated by the Emperors. These imperial donations were confirmed by the central and local governments. The central governmental office and the local one issued documents authorizing the temple ownership whenever handen-shuju or ritsu-ryo land redistribution was put into practice. The central government issued a document called denki, the local one denjaku or occasionally, denzu. Konden, the other type of estate, was land either purchased or reclaimed-sometimes with the assistance of a local governor-by temples or land donated by aristocrats and others. The ownership of those manors was confirmed only by a document called kokuhan issued by the local government. The central government was concerned only with jiden, that is imperial donations, for the Emperors directly ruled the central government. The taxation of manors was closely related to their origin. Among the various taxes known in the eighth century, so, land tax in rice, was collected and stored up by local governors in reserve, but we may assume that it was assigned for central government use, because the central government kept the keys to the storehouses and spent rice stored in them in the ninth century in times of financial difficulty. Jiden was exempted from the so land tax. Konden, on the other hand, was not. We can explain this fact from differences in donators. The fact that the central government, whose ruler was the Emperor, had the right to spend the so land tax means it also had the right to impose or exempt the tax. This is why, jiden donated by the Emperors was exempted from so, but konden was not. We can therefore see a close relation among donators, authorization of ownership, and the land tax in temple estates.