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This chapter traces the origin and early development of the Misai-e Assembly in ancient Japan. Before the Heian period, emperors had begun to adopt the image of Buddhist kingship as depicted in the Golden Light Sutra as they attempted to delineate an emperor-centric ideology in accordance with the Ritsuryo system. Initially sponsoring recitations and lectures on the sutra to justify imperial rule in the face of natural calamities and strife at home and abroad, eventually the emperors established these performances as an annual state-sponsored ritual called the Misai-e Assembly. The assembly’s ceremonial procedure was intended to express the centrality of the emperor by combining the two protocols of power—one defined in the Buddhist Golden Light Sutra, and the other in the bureaucratic structure of the Ritsuryo state. This combinative logic presented the emperor as both the wheel-turning king and the head of Japan’s ancient state.

In the early Heian period, the state organized a series of state-sponsored debate rituals such as the Misa-e Assembly into a single route of promotion, termed here the “clerical training program.” On the one hand, the program provided the Heian state a means to extend its control over the monastic population at large, as monks of different schools vigorously competed to participate in these rituals and gain promotion. On the other hand, monks actively intervened in the making of the state’s policy toward Buddhism and appropriated the state-sponsored debate rituals to satisfy their own desire for power and knowledge. In so doing, they resisted the state’s system of domination not by directly challenging it, but by tailoring it to their own purposes. Thus, the relationship between Buddhism and the state was far more complex than the idea of “state Buddhism” suggests.

The clerical training program was turned into fiercely competitive struggles for power and influence through the rivalry between the Hosso and Tendai schools and the two Tendai factions. Hosso monks were able to dominate the Sogo by monopolizing state-sponsored debate rituals, while in response the Tendai school strove to incorporate debate into its curriculum in order to reformulate the power relations in clerical society. With the emperor’s backing, the Tendai school’s eventual victory was achieved not by doing away with debate altogether, but by eliminating from the Lotus Assembly the Buddhist logic in which Hosso monks specialized. The emperor in turn had his own motivations in supporting the Tendai monks, namely, to enhance his own control of clerical promotion. Thus the state’s control of Buddhist monks was never as complete nor as consistent as the model of “state Buddhism” would suggest.

The emperor-centric ideology, together with the Misai-e Assembly, was transformed around the tenth century by the development of the new status system of shoden. The shoden system radically reformulated the authority relations in the court from those governed by the Ritsuryo bureaucracy to those governed by one’s right of access to the Seiryoden Hall, the emperor’s residential quarter. The system was legitimized not by the traditional authority of the emperor associated with the office of emperor, but by the authority derived from the emperor’s person. In response, existing court rituals, such as the Misai-e Assembly, were modified, while new ones, such as the Golden Light Lecture, were developed. This marked a turning point in the history of the Heian era, when the structure of power began shifting from the emperor-centered state based on the ritsuryo codes to shared rulership based on power blocs.

During the late Heian period (late eleventh and twelfth centuries), the retired emperor held the New Year’s Assembly (Shusho-e) concurrently with the emperor’s Misai-e Assembly. This was but one of many instances in this period where the rituals of the emperor and the retired emperor generated a conflict in scheduling, with the usual result that the former lost participants to the latter. In addition, the Fujiwara regent was also holding a New Year’s Assembly at the same time and failing to gather enough participants. While the Fujiwara regent’s infelicitous performance was closely connected with his vulnerable social and political standing, the schedule conflicts between the Buddhist rituals sponsored by the emperor and the retired emperor do not simply reflect the rivalry between two competing powers. Rather, they expose the seemingly paradoxical nature of shared rulership between the emperor and the retired emperor, which was simultaneously competitive and conciliatory.

The retired emperor often held Buddhist rituals in imitation of the emperor’s Misai-e Assembly by requesting the emperor’s permission to adopt procedures that were otherwise limited to the assembly. These rites, termed here “Jun Misai-e,” served as an effective means of appropriating the emperor’s authority based on the Ritsuryo state. Previous scholarship has tended to consider the development of Jun Misai-e rites a sign of the decline of the emperor and his Misai-e Assembly as caused by the ascendance of the retired emperor and his Buddhist rituals. However, the emperor in fact enhanced the cachet of the Misai-e Assembly as the unparalleled symbol of the ancient Ritsuryo state not by limiting it to himself, but by allowing it to be appropriated by other elites. This made it possible for the emperor to remain the exemplary center of Heian court society even under shared rule based on multiple power blocs.