* Image is for illustrative purposes only.Prince Shotoku
聖徳太子
Regent / Imperial Family
Description
The Life of Prince Umayado
Prince Shōtoku was born on the first day of the first month of the third year of Emperor Bidatsu (7 February 574). His given name was Umayado, and he is called Prince Umayado (Umayado no Ōji or Umayado-ō). His father was Emperor Yōmei (Prince Tachibana no Toyohi) and his mother was Princess Anahobe no Hashihito, a daughter of Emperor Kinmei, so he was closely bound by blood to the Soga clan. He died on the twenty-second day of the second month of the thirtieth year of Empress Suiko (8 April 622), aged forty-nine. The name "Shōtoku Taishi" is an honorific conferred by later ages, not a designation used in his own time.
The Teibi Conflict and His Vow to the Buddhist Law
In 587 (Yōmei 2), when the pro-Buddhist Soga no Umako and the anti-Buddhist Mononobe no Moriya came to open war in the Teibi conflict, Prince Umayado stood with Umako and joined the punitive force. According to the Nihon Shoki, when the fighting turned against them, the prince carved images of the Four Heavenly Kings and vowed that, should he prevail, he would build a pagoda and devote himself to spreading the Buddhist teaching. This vow is given as the origin of the later foundation of Shitennō-ji.
Government under Empress Suiko
In 593, when his aunt acceded to the throne as Empress Suiko, Prince Umayado became crown prince and assisted the sovereign together with Soga no Umako. In 603 he established the Twelve Level Cap and Rank System, opening a path by which rank could be granted according to individual merit and ability rather than the standing of one's clan. In 604 he promulgated the Seventeen Article Constitution, which set out norms for the clan elite as officials — to prize harmony, and to comply reverently when an imperial command is received. In 607 he sent Ono no Imoko as envoy to the Sui court, seeking relations with the Chinese dynasty on terms of parity. It should be noted that the prevailing scholarly assessment holds the politics of the Suiko court to have been fundamentally Soga politics, with both the empress and the prince acting in close accord with the Soga.
The Promotion of Buddhism and the Founding of Temples
In 593, Shitennō-ji was founded at Naniwa in Settsu Province. It housed the four institutions of the Kyōden-in, Seyaku-in, Ryōbyō-in, and Hiden-in, so that it was at once a hall of the Buddhist Law and a facility for medicine and relief. In 607, taking up his father Emperor Yōmei's original vow, Hōryū-ji is said to have been founded at Ikaruga. The core of the prince's achievement lies in his introduction of Buddhism as an ordering principle of the state.
Two Straight Swords Transmitted as His Own
Shitennō-ji preserves two straight swords transmitted as blades worn by Prince Shōtoku. The Heishi Shōrin Ken is an iron sword bearing the four characters "heishi shōrin" in gold inlay on the blade, "heishi" being one of the sixty sexagenary terms. The Shichiseiken is a hira-zukuri straight sword with a blade length of 62.1 cm, named for the inlaid depiction of the seven stars of the Big Dipper. Besides the seven stars, it bears cloud motifs, a three-star design, a dragon head, and a white tiger — a decorative program drawn from Chinese celestial thought and understood to embody prayers for the peace of the realm and the salvation of all beings. Both are National Treasures; the Shichiseiken was so designated on 29 March 1952. The Shichiseiken had been a rusted blade without mountings since at least the Kamakura period, but after the Second World War it was polished by Ono Mitsutaka, a Living National Treasure, and it is now on deposit at the Tokyo National Museum. That these blades were worn by the prince is a matter of transmitted tradition and is not archaeologically established; nonetheless they remain first-rank surviving examples of the uncurved straight sword that characterized the Asuka period.
Devotion to the Prince and the Debate over His Historicity
The prince's deeds are recorded in the Kojiki (712) and in the Suiko chapters of the Nihon Shoki (720), and were further elaborated in legendary form by the Jōgū Shōtoku Hōō Teisetsu and the Heian-period Shōtoku Taishi Denryaku. From the medieval period onward, devotion to the prince spread widely, centered on Shitennō-ji and Hōryū-ji. In scholarship, Ōyama Seiichi provoked major controversy in 1999 by arguing that most of the prince's recorded deeds were fabricated in the course of compiling the Nihon Shoki. According to Ishii Kōsei, however, no paper actively endorsing Ōyama's thesis has appeared in the academic literature for more than a decade as of 2021. Present research takes the existence of the historical Prince Umayado as its premise and concentrates on how far the embellishments of later ages can be stripped away.