JIEN (1155–1225), a Japanese Buddhist leader and renowned poet, was a highly influential figure at a critical time in the political, social, and religious life of Japan. Appointed abbot of the Tendai sect four times, he enjoyed close family ties with emperors and regents, composed poems that made him a leading poet of the day, and wrote Japan's first known interpretive history, the Gukanshō.

At the age of eleven, Jien was entrusted to the Enrya-kuji, a Buddhist temple, for training under a monk who was the seventh son of Retired Emperor Toba. Early poems by Jien, as well as entries in the diary of his distinguished brother Kanezane (1149–1207), indicate that he was a lonely child who was soon attracted to Buddhist teachings on transience and impermanence. A biography (the Jichin kashōden) states that when he was about twenty-five and was fasting at a temple on the Katsura River...