Warring States Survival Guide
Chapter 62 - 35: What does this have to do with the Buddha?

Chapter 62: Chapter 35: What does this have to do with the Buddha?

Since arriving in this world in distress, Nozawa had never seen handicraft production firsthand—especially not on such a large scale. Watching the bustling, chaotic activity of these handicraft producers, he finally realized where all those goods in Kuno Town actually came from.

He’d never thought about this before. From what he’d seen, commerce in Japan’s Middle Ages was quite prosperous. Woodenware, lacquerware, candles, oil, paper, ink, inkstones, wine, soy sauce, ironware, copperware, tinware... the shelves were full. Whatever you needed for daily life, as long as you had money, you could pretty much get your hands on anything.

But as a modern person, having a wide variety and abundance of goods just seemed normal to him—nothing to be surprised about—so he simply ignored it. He didn’t even spare it a thought, until now. After all, importing all those goods would be impossible; there had to be local producers. But who was actually making all this?

Now he had the answer: it was the Japanese monks who made them.

Or rather, Japanese monks organized their manufacture.

Who would have thought? It turns out Japanese monks actually held the highest productive forces of the entire Japanese Middle Ages!

For Nozawa, large-scale handicraft production in ancient times was far more interesting than any Dobao Pagoda. He slipped down the hillside and began wandering through these workshops.

Some were making wooden buckets, basins, and boxes; others were boiling lacquer to craft lacquerware; some were extracting wax from lacquer seeds to make candles; some were boiling rice straw and bamboo to make paper...

There were so many different types that he couldn’t possibly take them all in at once.

He also recalled what Yayoi had said earlier—their pathetic little village had to pay annual tribute, including things like timber, bamboo, bundles of rice straw, blocks of lacquer, lacquer seeds, and all sorts of other random stuff, and at the time he’d wondered what use the Hosokawa Family could have for any of it!

Well, looking around now, ninety-nine percent was being sold off to the Hosokawa Guanyin Temple!

So in Japan’s Middle Ages, is it the Samurai Group controlling the land and the monks controlling the technology, the two somehow working hand-in-hand?

But then, where did the monks’ technical know-how come from?

Nozawa pondered this as he took a closer look at the workshop with the lowest technical content—the barrel-making shop:

Carefully selected, flawless planks of wood were boiled over a fire to remove their oils, then sent to a kiln to be baked and shaped, removing their moisture;

Next to the kiln, someone watched the fire closely, occasionally directing two other people to stomp on a giant wooden machine that sprayed a fine mist of water onto the wood, making sure certain boards neither scorched nor cracked.

Then came the sanding stage, where a group of people polished the planks by hand until they were perfectly smooth. After that, the shaped and sanded boards would be put into a vat of solution for anti-rot treatment.

Only then would these boards be bound into barrels or basins, guaranteed not to rot or leak, good for ten or twenty years of use.

Honestly, this wasn’t exactly low-tech—even as a university student with a complete modern basic education, Nozawa couldn’t guarantee that, without considerable research, he’d be able to make a barrel that didn’t leak or rot.

In fact, even if he did research it for a while, he couldn’t say for sure that his barrel would be better than the ones made at Guanyin Temple.

Like that anti-rot solution vat, for example—he had no idea what was actually in it, or what the formula for the preservative liquid might have been.

Or that "sprayer"—built entirely from wood, capable of spraying mist and blowing air, and so cleverly designed that starting from scratch, all in wood, he probably couldn’t make anything as effective as what he saw before him.

This set of processes and techniques clearly didn’t emerge overnight. It must have taken a huge workforce, repeatedly experimenting over a long period to perfect every step, making them all mesh seamlessly and enabling them to churn out reliable barrels in bulk.

And that’s just the wooden barrels. For things like papermaking and wax production, all that uninterrupted manufacturing involved technologies that simply couldn’t have been mastered by a random ancient genius having a single bright idea—it’s just not possible to work out all those fiddly details in one go.

Nozawa’s suspicions only grew. He pointed at the busy workshop and asked Zhiru, "Who actually came up with all these production methods?"

Zhiru looked baffled. After all, he was just an eight- or nine-year-old little monk—how would he know any of this? But his status was high enough that, seeing Nozawa’s apparent fascination with this menial stuff, he glanced around, then immediately called over a portly, round-faced monk in his thirties, dressed in seven-layer monk robes, and said with great authority, "Fa Xing, this layman Nozawa has a question for you! You answer it thoroughly for him!"

Fa Xing was very deferential to his young uncle-master, and bowed to Nozawa with his hands pressed together: "Yes sir, what is it you wish to ask?"

Nozawa repeated his question. Fa Xing looked equally perplexed, "What do you mean, sir? What part are you unclear about?"

Nozawa rephrased, pointing at the candle-making workshop in the distance: "How did you learn how to make candles?"

Fa Xing looked enlightened, bowed again, and launched into a long explanation: "That’s a long story. Our founder, Master Kongyan, once traveled all the way to China in search of Buddhist Law, was struck by enlightenment, and instantly perceived the method. Upon returning to our sect, he passed on this teaching to the various monks as a means of protecting the Dharma."

"Enlightenment on the spot?" Nozawa was incredulous. "Since when can Buddhist Law produce manufacturing techniques?"

"Namo Amitabha, Buddhist Law is boundless, wisdom infinite." Fa Xing put his hands together, chanted the Buddha’s name, then glanced sidelong at Zhiru. Figuring Nozawa was a guest of their branch ancestor, he added another sentence: "Wisdom has its causes and effects. Master Kongyan studied Buddhist Law intensively and immersed himself in the dust of the mundane world. It was only in a Chinese workshop that he had the chance encounter, a fruit truly bestowed by the Buddha."

So basically, copying?

That old bald Kongyan was probably undercover in one of the Great Song’s candle-making workshops for a year or two, right? Who could possibly copy a process that perfectly just by glancing at it once or twice? Who could possibly get all the formulas and machine diagrams like that?

Even if you brought in a professional professor, they wouldn’t dare say they could reconstruct some ancient production process by just taking a quick look at it!

And yet you still won’t admit you copied it?

What the hell does this have to do with the Buddha?

Nozawa’s brow furrowed, and from a distance he pointed to the papermaking workshop: "What about paper-making?"

Papermaking may have existed since the Han Dynasty, but the process had continually improved. He’d caught a glimpse of their operation just now, and found their technique quite sophisticated, the production flow perfectly smooth.

Fa Xing paused to recall—he was, after all, one of the workshop managers and knew the history of the techniques—"The method for making paper was apparently acquired over a hundred years ago from Shengde Temple! An ancestor there had also traveled to China to seek the Dharma and brought back many papermaking methods, a few of which were traded to us."

"Oh? Traded? What did you give in exchange?"

"A few lacquer formulas! Something like that; it’s been so long. The temple records don’t give details."

"And you ’enlightened’ those lacquer formulas in a Chinese workshop too, didn’t you?" By now, Nozawa was nearly speechless at these shameless Japanese monks.

"Amitabha! It was indeed serendipitously gained by our own founder—a result, too, of the Buddha’s favor." Fa Xing sort of admitted it, but absolutely refused to acknowledge any connection between these skills and China, much less admit to copying them. Everything got dumped on the Buddha—basically the same routine as modern Japan. Modern Japan will at least openly admit Japanese culture is strongly influenced by Huaxia civilization—mainly because there are so many Han characters in the language that you can’t possibly deny it—but behind closed doors, they’ll never bring it up, always keeping things vague.

Some even claim ancient China died long ago, and the modern country has no connection to the past—this way, they never have to "pay a debt," and their national pride stays intact.

This shameless, barefaced attitude made Nozawa deeply uncomfortable, but it’s not like he could do anything about it now. He couldn’t exactly pin Fa Xing to the floor right this moment, beat him bloody, and force him to admit his ancestors were technology thieves!

Which would be useless anyway. Clearly Fa Xing wasn’t the only one who thought like that, and Nozawa was in no position to beat up every single monk in the temple.

Still, it didn’t stop him from feeling extremely irritated.

He kicked a nearby wooden barrel and sneered at Fa Xing, "So I’m guessing this barrel was ’enlightened’ too?"

"Not the barrel!" Fa Xing was actually well-informed, "You see, sir, the barrel-making method is found in a book."

"A book?"

Giving Zhiru’s status due respect, Fa Xing hesitated a moment, then went off to fetch a book, handing it to Nozawa. Nozawa glanced at the cover: "Wood and Stone Twelve Grades Collection." He’d never even heard of this title back in the modern world, so he checked the author—Wood and Stone Hermit. Still hadn’t heard of him, probably a pen name or a Daoist title?

Maybe writing these technical manuals was so humiliating for scholars that they didn’t dare use their real names?

Nozawa inspected the book: string-bound, beautifully printed, clear characters. When he skimmed the contents, it was all various production processes and mechanical diagrams to save labor—including that "wooden mist blower" he’d just seen—the book called it a "wooden air bellows."

Nozawa was gobsmacked. Were Chinese scholars in ancient times all idiots? Why would you ever print these things? These aren’t things you publish! It’s like hanging a sign saying, ’Come and steal for free!’

Nozawa gave up. Looking around at all the workshops, he lost interest in examining anything further.

No need to ask—stuff like woodblock printing, ink and paint formulas, and so on, the vast majority of production techniques must have come this way.

For centuries, Japanese monks went off to China to "study the Dharma," but in reality, it turns out they were busy with this!

Of course, some of them probably really did go to learn Buddhism—there might even have been a few genuinely virtuous High Monks—but Nozawa believed there were far more "technology thieves" mixed in, using the monk’s identity to seek out technology, study the crafts in secret, or even trick talented Chinese monks into coming back to Japan to "teach the Dharma," and then seizing their advanced production techniques to build workshops and make money hand over fist.

No wonder Japanese monks could be loan sharks—they really did know how to make money. Over hundreds of years they’d managed to accumulate enough capital to make loans, and even had the muscle to demand repayment—any who dared default would get beaten to death if necessary. In this Guanyin Temple workshop alone, besides monks and craftsmen, there were hundreds of lay followers, young and old, men and women, working menial jobs. If these people ever armed themselves, even the Hosokawa Family would get a headache.

Not to mention that the Hosokawa Guanyin Temple definitely kept a force of professional Monk Soldiers—their numbers likely weren’t small, though he hadn’t seen them yet.

By this point, Nozawa’s interest in sightseeing had completely died. He rolled up the book in his hand and asked Zhiru, "Can I borrow this and take a look?"

Honestly, the Chinese of old were just idiots—letting themselves be exploited and not even realizing it. What else could he even say?