Prince Shōtoku (574-622)

B.V.E. Hyde looks at the statesman who fathered Japanese philosophy.

- B.V.E. Hyde

According to legend, the great sage Prince Shōtoku was able to speak as soon as he was born and was so wise when he grew up that he could attend to the suits of ten men at once and decide them all without error. He knew beforehand what was going to happen. He was the reincarnation of Queen Srimala and of the Indian monk Bodhidharma, and the manifestation of the Bodhisattva Guze Kannon. When the prince met a starving man on the side of the road, he provided him with food and water and also gave him his coat. The following day, he sent a messenger to check on the man, but he was already dead, so Shōtoku ordered that he be properly buried. Suspecting that he was in fact, a holy man, he sent someone to check on the tomb, who found that the corpse was gone and only the prince's coat remained. This the prince continued to wear, proving that both the starving man and the prince were holy men.

Such are the things that are said about Shōtoku. The hagiography about him is so thickly layered that it's difficult to reach historical reality. There was even a cult of the prince (taishi shinkō) that formed around the Middle Ages. Of course, he was a man like any other; but maybe a little wiser than the rest. In fact he was a statesman and something of a political philosopher, who would be immortalized as the father of the Japanese state, the father of Japanese Buddhism, and the father of Japanese philosophy.

Civil War in Sixth Century Japan