THE KAMAKURA PERIOD AND THE END OF BUDDHIST LAW

This laconic statement came from the brush of the Buddhist priest Jien (1155–1225), the author of Gukanshō, an early-thirteenth-century history of Japan. Jien was a member of the ascendent northern branch of the Fujiwara and wrote Gukanshō in part to justify the historical success of his family as regent-rulers at the Heian court. But Jien is probably best remembered as the first historian in Japan to view the past in distinct terms of cause and effect and as a progression from one stage to another. Although earlier writers had not been totally oblivious to historical causality, none had sought to analyze Japanese history, as Jien did, within an overall, interpretive framework.

Jien's emphasis on the progress of history was not an aberrant view but, rather, emerged from a heightened awareness of the momentous historical changes that he himself witnessed. As observed in Gukanshō, Japan in the late 1100s was transformed from a comparatively peaceful and tranquil country under the rule of the imperial court to a tumultuous, strife-filled “age of warriors.” Yet the anguish that Jien and other members of the courtier elite experienced as a result of this transition was accepted fatalistically because of a belief in its inevitability: They were convinced that the period of mappō, or “the end of the Buddhist law,” had already begun a century before.