“Buddhism in Japan seems no different from Christianity in Europe . . . or Islam in Minor Asia, neither do Japanese monastic warriors appear any different from European crusaders or Spanish Moors.”

This is the import of his argument — that the military monks were soldiers, just as were the samurai, but that their true role has been obscured and in some part constructed.

There are reasons for this. Among these is the modern notion that religion and politics should be separate, though this was by no means the case in earlier ages. At the same time there is the notion that Buddhism was going through a degenerate age during which it failed to rein in the bellicose.

Among the results is that those who armed themselves and fought in the name of temples must be relegated to historical obscurity. Sources have been lost or are rarely consulted, and scholars and historians have made a number of sweeping generalizations, concerning just who these “holy” samurai were. As though to conceal a lack of knowledge, a neologism was fabricated in the 14th century and the temple roughneck was subsumed into the image of the sohei, the holy warrior.

“In short,” says the author, “the view of monastic warriors as something fundamentally different from other warriors is based more on the constructs of the observer than on the societal circumstances in which those figures actually lived.”

Source: Buddha’s fighting soldiers | The Japan Times Online