Prince Shōtoku

Prince Shōtoku was regent for his aunt the empress for thirty years, wrote or was credited with the Seventeen Article Constitution that told officials to value harmony and revere the Buddha, sent an embassy to the Sui emperor with a letter from the sovereign of the land of the rising sun to the sovereign of the land of the setting sun, which offended him, and became within a century the saint of Japanese Buddhism, on the banknotes for most of the twentieth century; how much of it he did is argued, and that he existed is not. He was born in 574, a son of the emperor Yōmei, at the moment the Soga clan, who had brought Buddhism from Korea in 552, were fighting the Mononobe, who wanted the old gods. The Soga won in 587 and in 593 put his aunt Suiko on the throne, the first reigning empress, with the prince as regent and the Soga chief as the power behind both. The court he ran took what China had. In 603 it set up twelve court ranks marked by the colour of the cap, on merit rather than clan. In 604 came the seventeen articles, which are not a constitution but a sermon to officials on obedience, decorum, and the three treasures. In 607 went the embassy to Sui Yangdi, who was displeased at the equality the letter claimed and sent an envoy back anyway, and the students who went with it came home twenty years later to make the Taika reforms. He founded temples, Shitennō-ji at what is now Osaka and Hōryū-ji near Nara, whose wooden hall is the oldest in the world, wrote commentaries on three sutras, and had the first chronicles compiled, which burned. He died in 622, before Suiko, and his line was wiped out by the Soga in 643, who were themselves destroyed in 645. The eighth-century chronicle made him a prodigy who spoke at birth and heard ten petitions at once, and the cult that followed made him the father of the nation's Buddhism and of its state; the historians of the last half-century have taken most of it away and left the temples.

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