Chapter 35: What does this have to do with the Buddha?
Since his transmigration and subsequent misfortune, Yuan Ye was seeing handicraft production for the first time, and it was even on a considerable scale. Looking at the bustling and chaotic handicraft producers, he finally realized where all the various goods in the market town came from.
He hadn’t even considered this question before. From what he had seen, commerce in the Japanese Medieval Period was quite prosperous. Woodware, lacquerware, wax, oil, paper, ink, inkstones, sake, soy sauce, ironware, bronze ware, tin ware… and so on, a dazzling array. Anything needed for daily life, as long as you had money, you could basically get your hands on it.
But as a modern person, a wide variety of goods in ample supply was normal, nothing to be surprised about. He had simply ignored it, never even thinking about it, until now – it was impossible for so many goods to be solely imported. There must be local producers. Who produced them?
Now he had the answer: Japanese monks produced them.
Or rather, Japanese monks organized their production.
He never expected it, never expected that Japanese monks would control the highest productive forces of the Japanese Medieval Period!
For Yuan Ye, ancient large-scale handicraft production was far more interesting than any Multi-Treasure Pagoda. He slid down the hillside and began to wander among these handicraft workshops.
There were those who made wooden buckets, wooden basins, and wooden crates; those who boiled lacquer to make lacquerware; those who made wax and candles from lacquer seeds; those who boiled straw and bamboo to make paper…
There were many types, too many to see at once.
And he also remembered what Yayoi had said before. Their small, broken village had to pay annual tribute in lumber, bamboo, straw bundles, lacquer blocks, lacquer seeds, and other miscellaneous items. At the time, he had wondered why the Aragiko Maeda Family wanted these things!
Now, looking at it, 99.9% of them were sold to Aragiko Kannon Temple!
So, looking at it this way, in the Japanese Medieval Period, did the samurai groups control the land, and the monks control the technology, with the two complementing each other?
But where did the monks’ technology come from?
Yuan Ye pondered this and took a closer look at the “bucket-making workshop,” which had the lowest technical content:
Carefully selected wooden boards, without a single scar, were heated to degrease them, then sent to a kiln to be dried and shaped, removing moisture.
Someone monitored the heat next to the kiln, occasionally directing two other people to step on a large wooden machine that sprayed a mist of water onto the wood, ensuring that some boards wouldn’t scorch or crack.
Then came the polishing stage, where a group of people manually polished the wooden boards to a high sheen. After that, the already shaped and smooth wooden boards were immersed in a pool of medicinal liquid for anti-corrosion treatment.
Finally, these wooden boards were banded into buckets, basins, and other containers, ensuring they wouldn’t rot or leak and could last for ten to twenty years.
This actually wasn’t low in technical content. Even Yuan Ye, a university student with a complete modern basic education, couldn’t guarantee that his own produced wooden buckets wouldn’t leak or rot without careful study for a period.
Even after studying for a while, he wouldn’t dare guarantee that his produced wooden buckets would be better than those from Kannon Temple.
For example, the anti-corrosion liquid in that pool, he couldn’t figure out its ingredients or its formula for quite some time.
And then there was the “sprayer,” made entirely of wood, capable of spraying mist and blowing air, designed very ingeniously. If he had to design one from scratch, entirely out of wood, its effectiveness might not be as good as the one before him.
This entire process and craftsmanship were by no means the work of a moment. It must have required a large number of laborers to engage in long-term and extensive practice to achieve such a seamless, smooth, and efficient mass production of qualified wooden buckets.
And this was just for wooden buckets. For things like papermaking and wax production, to achieve continuous production, the involved craftsmanship and technology were far beyond what a single ancient genius could achieve with a flash of inspiration to perfectly handle so many miscellaneous details.
Yuan Ye’s doubts grew stronger. Pointing to the busy workshops, he asked Chijō, “Who designed these production processes?”
Chijō looked bewildered. He was just an eight or nine-year-old young monk, how would he know these things? However, his seniority was high. Seeing that Yuan Ye seemed very interested in these lowly tasks, he looked around and immediately called over a fat monk in his thirties, wearing a kasaya, with a large head and big ears. He said righteously, “Nephew-disciple Faxing, Benefactor Yuan Ye has something to ask you. You must explain it well to Benefactor Yuan Ye!”
Faxing was very obedient to this junior uncle-master and immediately clasped his hands in greeting to Yuan Ye, “Yes, what questions does the Benefactor have?”
Yuan Ye repeated his question. Faxing also looked confused, “What does the Benefactor mean? What part don’t you understand?”
Yuan Ye rephrased his question and pointed to the “wax-making workshop” in the distance, asking, “How did you learn to make wax?”
Faxing suddenly understood and clasped his hands in greeting again, “This is a long story. It was when our sect’s patriarch, Master Kongyan, traveled to China to seek Buddhist teachings that he had a flash of inspiration, a sudden enlightenment, and comprehended this method. Upon returning to our sect, he passed it on to the monks of all branches for the use of protecting the Dharma.”
“Sudden enlightenment?” Yuan Ye couldn’t believe it. “Can Buddhist teachings also lead to the enlightenment of production processes?”
“Namo Amitabha, Buddhist teachings are boundless, and wisdom is infinite.” Faxing clasped his hands and chanted the Buddhist name. Then, glancing sideways at Chijō, he figured Yuan Ye was a guest of the elder ancestor of this branch, so he explained a bit more, “Wisdom also has its causes and conditions. Master Kongyan meticulously studied Buddhist teachings and delved into the mortal world. It was within a workshop in China that he had this opportunity, which is truly the fruit bestowed by the Buddha.”
Isn’t this just plagiarism?
That old bald donkey Kongyan probably went undercover in a Song Dynasty wax-making workshop for a year or two! How could he have copied the entire process so perfectly after just one or two glances? How could he have obtained all sorts of formulas and mechanical design blueprints?
Even if you brought in a professional professor, they wouldn’t dare claim to be able to restore ancient production processes after just a couple of glances!
And you don’t even admit to copying?
What does this have to do with the Buddha?
Yuan Ye frowned deeply for a moment, then pointed to the papermaking workshop in the distance and asked, “What about the papermaking process?”
Although papermaking existed in the Han Dynasty, the craftsmanship and technology had been continuously refined. He had glanced at it earlier and found the technical content to be quite high, with a very smooth production process.
Faxing recalled for a moment. He was one of the workshop managers and was quite clear about the origin of the technology. “The method of papermaking seems to have been exchanged from Saint De Temple over a hundred years ago! An ancestor of Saint De Temple also traveled to China to seek Buddhist teachings and brought back many papermaking methods, exchanging a few with us.”
“Oh? Exchanged? What did you exchange it with?”
“With several lacquer formula recipes! It was roughly like that. It’s been too long, and the temple’s records don’t detail it precisely.”
“The lacquer formula recipes were also ‘enlightened’ in Chinese workshops, weren’t they?” Yuan Ye was almost speechless with these shameless Japanese monks.
“Amitabha, it is indeed that our sect’s patriarch happened upon it, and it is still bestowed by the Buddha.” Faxing somewhat admitted it, but refused to explicitly state that these processes and technologies were related to China and were copied, attributing everything to the Buddha. This was basically the same as modern Japan – modern Japan would admit to some extent that Japanese culture was deeply influenced by Chinese civilization, mainly because of the large number of Chinese characters in the Japanese language, which were obvious and couldn’t be denied. But behind closed doors, they never mentioned this aspect, always vaguely referring to it.
They would even claim that ancient China had long since perished, and modern China had no connection to ancient China. This way, they wouldn’t have to bear any “debt,” and their national pride could be preserved.
This shameless and brazen attitude made Yuan Ye quite displeased, but he had no recourse. He couldn’t just beat Faxing to a pulp right now and force him to admit that his ancestors stole technology!
That would be useless. This idea was clearly not unique to Faxing. He didn’t have the ability to beat up all the monks in the temple right now.
He was still very unhappy.
He kicked a nearby wooden bucket and sarcastically said to Faxing, “So this bucket was also ‘enlightened,’ right!”
“The bucket wasn’t!” Faxing was actually very clear. “Benefactor, you may not know, but the method for making buckets was taught from a book.”
“Taught from a book?”
On account of “Junior Uncle-Master Chijō,” Faxing hesitated for a moment, then went to fetch a book and handed it to Yuan Ye. When Yuan Ye took it and looked, it was 《Mushi Jūni Tō Shūi Roku》. He hadn’t even heard of this book in modern times. He flipped open the cover and looked at the author, Mushi Sanjin. He still hadn’t heard of him, likely a pseudonym or a Taoist name?
Was it too embarrassing for a scholar to write such technical books, so they didn’t dare use their real names?
Yuan Ye looked at the binding again. It was bound with thread, beautifully printed, with clear characters. He carefully flipped through the content, which was full of various production processes and diagrams of labor-saving machinery. Among them was the “wooden spray blower” he had just seen – in the book, it was called a “wood-pressing air sac.”
Yuan Ye was even more speechless. Were ancient Chinese scholars fools? They still printed these things? Wasn’t this shouting “come and get me for free”?
Yuan Ye was defeated. He looked around at the various workshops again, losing the desire to examine or ask further questions.
There was no need to ask; it was highly likely that production processes and technologies like woodblock printing, ink and inkstone formulas, etc., were all obtained this way.
For hundreds of years, Japanese monks had been going to China to seek Buddhist teachings, and it turned out they were busy with these matters!
Of course, there might have been some who genuinely went to study Buddhism, and there might have been a few highly virtuous monks. But Yuan Ye now believed that there were more “technical thieves” among them, using their monastic status to either seek technology, secretly learn craftsmanship, or simply trick Chinese monks with specialized skills into coming to Japan to teach, thereby mastering advanced production technology, opening large workshops, and making a fortune.
No wonder Japanese monks could engage in usury. They were indeed good at making money. Over these centuries, they could accumulate a large sum of money, have the capital to lend it out, and even have the strength to collect debts, beating to death anyone who dared not repay – among the busy people in the Kannon Temple workshops, besides the monks and artisans, there were ordinary believers doing odd jobs, hundreds of them of all ages, men and women. If these people were armed with sabers and spears, the Aragiko Maeda Family would have a headache.
Not to mention that Aragiko Kannon Temple surely kept a contingent of warrior monks specifically for combat, and their numbers should be considerable, though he hadn’t seen them yet.
By this point, Yuan Ye’s interest in sightseeing had completely waned. He rolled up the book in his hand and asked Chijō, “Can I borrow this book to read?”
Ancient Chinese people were truly too foolish, not even knowing they were being taken advantage of, leaving one utterly speechless!
