The Tendai sect became dominant during the ninth and tenth centuries, when its center on Mt. Thei (on the outskirts of Kyoto) swelled to over three thousand buildings. Although Saicho himself appears to have been benign in nature, practicing the principles of morality he taught, in later years the Mt. Thei Tendai complex became the base for an army of irascible monks who frequently descended upon Kyoto to harass courtiers and citizens alike. In the late sixteenth century, the entire complex was burned to the ground and thousands of monks slaughtered by a fierce shogun who was determined to stop the intervention of Tendai monks in public affairs. Tendai survives today as a religion primarily of the upper classes, with a membership of something over a million, but even by the end of the Heian era it had become mainly ceremonial. The other Buddhist sect to gain prominence during the Heian era was Shingon, founded by a younger contemporary of Saicho named Kukai (774- 835). He also went to China, where he studied teachings of the Che-yen school, a type of Buddhism known as "esoteric" because of its kinship to the mystical Tantrism of Tibet. The elaborate rituals of the Japanese Shingon temples were an immediate success with the ceremonially minded Heian aristocracy. Shingon was superb theater, with chants, incantations, sacred hand signs (_mudra_), and meditation on the sacred _mandala_--geometrical diagrams purportedly containing the key to the cosmological meaning of reality. The headquarters for the Shingon school was established on Mt. Koya, near Kyoto but sufficiently removed that the monks were not tempted to dabble in state affairs. Nevertheless, in later years it too became a stronghold for mercenary warrior-monks, with the result that it also was chastened by an outraged shogun. Today there are Shingon monasteries in remote mountain areas, standing regal and awesome in their forested isolation, and the sect still claims over nine million practitioners, scattered among a host of offshoots. The popular, participatory Buddhism which followed the aristocratic sects was home-grown and owed little to Chinese prototypes. Much of it centered around one particular figure in the Buddhist pantheon, the benign, sexless Amida, a Buddhist saint who presided over a Western Paradise or Pure Land of milk and honey accessible to all who called on his name. Amida has been part of the confusing assemblage of deities worshiped in Japan for several centuries, but the simplicity of his requirements for salvation made him increasingly popular with the Heian aristocrats, who had begun to tire of the elaborate rigmarole surrounding magical-mystery Buddhism. And as times became more and more unstable during the latter part of the Heian era, people searched for a messianic figure to whom they could turn for comfort. So it was that a once minor figure in the Buddhist Therarchy became the focus of a new, widespread, and entirely Japanese cult.