Because official monks were
bureaucrats, they did not need to form orders that included secular
believers. In contrast, reclusive monks needed to establish orders that
included secular believers because they were not supported by the
government. Because they were no longer official monks, they were
freed from certain restrictions.
They could pray for the
salvation of women and lepers, conduct funerals, and collect contributions, all of which had previously been regarded as involving impurity.
In the Kamakura Era, several new forms of Buddhism emerged in Japan which broke with the existing schools.
Kuroda Toshio’s “exoteric-esoteric” model understood these new schools as rejecting the esoteric ritual system which bound the old schools together.
This paper sees the new schools’ rejection of the ritual system as a rejection of entanglement with the state and as a desire to return Buddhist monasticism to its ascetic ideals.
By focusing on their relationship with the laity, these “new schools” survived the later withdrawal of government support and are the schools we now think of as constituting “Japanese Buddhism”: Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren.