Cypress Beams, Kufic Script, and Cut Stone: Rebuilding the Master Narrative of European History

In the year 769 a crisis appeared likely to engulf the Japanese imperial court at Nara. The empress Shotoku, aged fifty-two and childless, indeed never married, gave many signs that she intended to appoint a Buddhist priest named Dokyo as successor. A noted faith healer, Dokyo was credited with curing the empress a serious illness, for which she rewarded him with a succession of high offices the imperial bureaucracy. That he was looked upon with favor by the empress was thus no secret, but there may have been more to their relationship than a magical cure and political rewards. One source from a few decades later says flatly that the two of them “shared the same pillow.” Dokyo had, in any case, arrived almost to the pinnacle of Japanese power, and yet there stood between him and very top the inescapable fact that he was a commoner.