The Administration of Local Temples during the Middle and Late Tokugawa Period : The Case of the Kanto Area Shingi-Shingon Sect

Abstract

In recent years the opinion has been raised that scholars scholars should focus more upon the religious aspects of the Tokugawa period. However, we should be paying attention not only to ceremonies, festivals and such religious practices as donation, but also to the structure of the relationship between the clergy and the people. In this article the author introduces one way to discuss Buddhist priests and temples separately, in contrast to the fact that temples have come to be inherited through blood ties since Meiji era. There-fore, he takes notice not of "fields", but rather temples which existed within relationships between Buddhist priests and villages, patron organizations, households, or individuals. His aim is to lend a more vivid image of the relationship between Buddhist priests and local groups or individuals by analyzing the administration of local temples and how their chief priests were replaced. For this purpose he presents the case of the Shingi-Shingon 新義 真言 sect's temples in the Kanto 関東 area (mainly present Saitama 埼玉 prefecture). He restrictes the time of the study to the middle and late Tokugawa period, when the temple patron system and the inter-temple hierarchies under the Tokugawa regime were firmly in effect. His conclusions are as follows. 1) The structure in which at the temples organized into the temple hierarchy was clear: the clergy of Buddhism sects were interrelated with the patron organization or villages mainly through the temples. 2) In that structure the maintenance and administration of a temple's real estate and movable property was an important matter for the chief priest of the temple, the patron organization and the village. The state of such matters affected the relationship between priests (or their clergies) and patron organizations or villages. 3) As long as we study various Buddhist sects besides the Shin 真 sects, it was not only the temple-patron relationship that supported the chief priests of temples (and their membership in the clergy) economically, and but also probably maintained the upper class temples in the temple hierarchies.