Mongaku ［文覚］ (n.d.): A priest of the True Word (Shingon) school in Japan who lived from the twelfth through the thirteenth century. He is known as a restorer of Jingo-ji temple in Kyoto. Once a warrior and a guard of the imperial court in Kyoto, he renounced the secular world at age eighteen and devoted himself to austere Buddhist practice. In 1168 he began rebuilding the dilapidated Jingo-ji temple. In 1173, in an attempt to raise funds for this project, he persistently demanded that the Retired Emperor Goshirakawa provide financial assistance. This angered Goshirakawa, and Mongaku was exiled to Izu, where he met and won the patronage of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the eventual founder of the Kamakura shogunate. Mongaku urged Yoritomo to raise an army against the ruling Taira family. After Yoritomo defeated the Tairas and founded the Kamakura shogunate, Mongaku restored Jingo-ji, Tō-ji, and other temples with the support of Yoritomo. In 1199, however, upon Yoritomo’s death, he was implicated in a plot against the shogunate. He was exiled to the island of Sado and then to the island of Tsushima, but is said to have died in Chinzei (present-day Kyushu) en route to Tsushima at age eighty.