Secrets of the Samurai. Oscar Ratti

      Each of these major subjects or academic disciplines had become highly complex and, at its superior levels, often downright esoteric, merging as it customarily did with metaphysics and the intuitive. As illustrated in Chart 9, the Chinese Classics alone, for example, consisted of thirteen texts, each accompanied by its own specific commentaries and appendices drawn from Chinese and Japanese sources. And mastery of them all was expected by the examiners who tested the preparation of their aristocratic students. Scholars had had to specialize in the study of those texts either one by one or, as a requirement for higher office, in major groups of texts, e.g., the collections known as the Small Classics (shokyo), the Great Classics (daikyo), or the Middle Classics (chukyo). Rare indeed, even then, was the man who could claim a thorough knowledge of them all.

      The aim of education during the major part of the Heian era had thus obviously been less that of enlarging and deepening the realms of knowledge for the sake of understanding and appreciating the unfolding of life’s innumerable possibilities, than that of forming proper functionaries of a state which had already chosen one of those possibilities (an imitation of a Chinese model) and strove continually to maintain and perfect its essentially theocratic and aristocratic structure. Appearance (katachi) had traditionally been one of the most important aims of education, since it visually represented prestige and power. Intellect (zae) had had to be more specialized, since the functions the nobles were called upon to perform in the service of the system were many and administratively varied. In fact, the nobles had concentrated mainly upon the study of imperial liturgies and court ceremonials (yusoku kojitsu), the installation rituals (jimoku), law and theories of government, and so forth. Provincial aristocrats had been directed more toward studies in law, mathematics, divination, astrology, planning, and strategy.

      As a collateral extension of the interesting fervor surrounding education during the Heian period (as reported by Tokiomi), private schools had also been established for the education of “the greatest number of people.” Schools such as the Nikyoin of Kibi-no-Makibi, the Untein of Iso-no-kami Yakatsugu, and the priest Kukai’s own institute, the Shugeishoin, had been established and operated outside the national system of education, valiantly attempting to do for the other classes of the nation that which the system had done for the nobles. Their existence was often threatened, and eventually they all had to close. However, the attempt had demonstrated the centrifugal and expansionistic effects of a broad approach to education and constituted a precedent for intermittent attempts to establish centers of popular learning whenever and wherever possible. Deep within this culture and at its outer limits, therefore, there seethed an irresistible impulse to expand and experiment which defied constrictions and was, perhaps, at the root of that period of trouble and glory which followed hard upon the heels of the Heian period.

      The warriors of the eleventh century had been dazzled by the cultural splendor of the late Heian period, and, even when its luster had dimmed considerably with the passing of time, the buke evidenced the lingering effect of this initial fascination either by scorning the trappings of that culture a trifle too heatedly, or by endeavoring to recreate its aura (although obviously on a different basis and with a different content) whenever and wherever they could. At the beginning of their history as a separate class in search of its own character and destiny, those clans drawn into the spinning center of the nation during the late Heian period had endeavored to send their leaders’ children to aristocratic colleges and academies in order to prepare them for their new and expanded responsibilities. There, these “new” men, who—although of the buke’s upper ranks—had been bred in provincial towns to bear arms and to live simply, almost rustically, stood out in uncomfortably sharp contrast to the “effete” offspring of the nobility who despised and instinctively feared them. The nobles, in fact, were obscurely aware that, although these rustic members of the “family of archery and horsemanship” were indispensable instruments of power, they were also potentially dangerous contenders for that power. The resentment of the upper categories of warriors who were only reluctantly admitted to aristocratic centers of learning is abundantly recorded, and it found concrete expression in many of their policies during the succeeding centuries, when they repaid the kuge in full (as well as the clergy, who had held a large number of the highest teaching positions) for every slight inflicted by the aristocrats and priests—insults which the buke bore with the cold determination of military men whose time was manifestly to come.

      Pragmatists by nature and function, the military leaders of the emerging buke had had to decide early whether they would be absorbed by the Heian culture or would instead select and adapt from it those features which best served their distinct purposes without allowing their own sharply differentiated individuality to be diluted. The example of many military clans, whose members had been lured into accepting the Heian culture unreservedly and had subsequently been swallowed up by