Prince Shōtoku's Death and Resurrection

He speaks at birth.

The legend — and the Nihon Shoki carefully marks parts of it as legend while presenting other parts as chronicle — says that the infant born to Emperor Yōmei in 574 CE spoke immediately. Not the ordinary sounds of infants, but words. He stood in the stable — this detail is almost certainly later theological overlay — and announced his nature.

His childhood name is Umayado no Ōji — the Prince of the Stable Door.

His adult name is Shōtoku Taishi — the Prince of Holy Virtue — given posthumously by the civilization he created.

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He is regent from 593 CE, governing Japan on behalf of his aunt the Empress Suiko. He is seventeen. The political situation requires navigation between three things simultaneously: the Soga clan’s power, the traditional aristocracy’s resistance, and the new Buddhist religion that arrived from Paekche in 552 CE (or 538 CE — the dates are disputed) and that the Soga are using as their institutional base.

Shōtoku chooses Buddhism.

He writes the Seventeen-Article Constitution — Japan’s first — which is structured on Buddhist principles, Confucian governance, and the implicit claim that the emperor rules by a divine mandate transmitted through the dharma. He builds Hōryū-ji, which survives as the oldest wooden building in the world. He builds Shitenno-ji. He writes commentaries on three major sutras, including the Lotus Sutra and the Vimalakirti Sutra.

He governs for thirty years in which Japan is intellectually reorganized around the dharma.

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The legends that accumulate around him are the Buddhist tradition’s way of making sense of someone who accomplished too much too quickly. He is identified as the reincarnation of Nanyue Huisi, a Chinese Buddhist master of the previous generation who is said to have written a poem at his death predicting he would be reborn in Japan to spread the teaching. The poem, in its Japanese transmission, names the Yamato court as his destination.

Shōtoku is said to have remembered this. He is said to have written, before his death at forty-nine, poems in which he describes the dharmic view of a body dying on the roadside and the indestructibility of the Buddha-nature within it.

He dies in 622 CE. His wife dies on the same day. His mother died the previous day. The Nihon Shoki records these deaths together, the three departures linked, as if the world that contained him ended with him.

Hōryū-ji stands in Nara today, its wooden beams from the seventh century still supporting the roof. The Golden Hall contains the oldest dated bronze sculpture in Japan.

He is venerated at temples across Japan as Shōtoku Taishi.

He is on the ten-thousand yen note, or was until recently — the regent who built the civilization in the face of his contemporaries who were not sure it should be built, looking out from the currency of the country he organized.