The samurai and Zen
Military government replaces the court, and a spare form of Buddhism arrives with it.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 148 years
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
The Genpei War ends in 1185 with the establishment of a shogunate at Kamakura — real power passing to a warrior class while the emperor remains a legitimising figure, an arrangement lasting nearly seven hundred years. Zen, emphasising direct experience over doctrine and text, arrives from China in the same period and is taken up by the warrior class, shaping garden design, tea ceremony, calligraphy and archery.