Genjo Sanzo

[sunshinehistory]

Country/Village: Demons
Rank: Civilian
Age at Game Start: 25
Birthday: November 25th

Appearance

Sanzo is considered a ‘pretty boy’ because of his almost angelic dropping purple eyes and hair as gold as the sun. He is real touchy about being called feminine or mistaken for a girl, and unfortunately is mistaken for one quite often. At 5’9’, he is of average height and has a wiry athletic frame that is well hidden under his robes. Sanzo wears the traditional robes and crown of a Sanzo priest, and wears the Matten Sutra over his shoulders.

Abilities/Powers

There is no mention of the use of chakra in Saiyuki as it is portrayed in the Naruto universe. However, Sanzo is very skilled in martial arts, as it is a requirement for Buddhist monks in training, where martial arts are seen as a form of discipline in all faculties: mental, spiritual, and physical. He is never seen to use his skills to attack, only using it in defense, or to protect somebody else in the crossfires. He does, however, use it to evade attacks while he can, being quick enough to predict where a blow will be coming from in order to sidestep it and avoid confrontation. He will be able to use chakra with his taijutsu when he wants to. He has excellent chakra control, too, even if he probably does not use this skill.

Sanzo can literally use anything lying nearby as a weapon if you annoy him! That being said, his main weapon is the banishing gun given to him by the head priest of the temple he grew up in. The gun functions just as any other gun-- i.e. it is a high speed projectile weapon. Also called the exorcism gun, this banishing gun has special bullets that can cleanse evil forces, literally exorcising demonic or evil forces within an individual. These special bullets are each infused with a spiritual seal that gives it said banishing powers. Also called the exorcism gun, this banishing gun has special bullets that can cleanse evil forces, literally exorcising demonic or evil forces within an individual. To Sanzo, there is a clear distinction between merciless killing and exorcism, even though the end result of using the gun on an individual would guarantee its death. To him, it is a sort of ‘merciful’ killing. He would never use the gun on anyone unless he is completely out of options.

Sanzo also carries a harissen (paper fan) around with him, and even if it’s just made of paper, it can apparently deal a cr*p ton of hurt when he whacks you with it. It would be in everybody else’s best interests not to underestimate the power of a simple harissen--

In the sect of Buddhism that Saiyuki references to (most closely to Zen Buddhism) the title of Sanzo priest is one of the highest, meaning the one closest to the Buddha’s teaching and way of life. A Sanzo priest is given the task of protecting one of five sutras, each one said to possess great power against evil. Genjyo Sanzo is given the Matten sutra (the scripture of darkness) by his master/mentor/adoptive father Koumyou Sanzo as part of the Sanzo legacy. In essence, the sutra is a weapon against evil and has the ability to physically bind and incapacitate an individual once activated. Sanzo is able to put the sutra to use by chanting the Matten Sutra out loud or even uttering it mentally. The sutra is written on paper but never gets dirty or damaged because of its protective power.

Personality

Despite the exalted clerical position, Genjo Sanzo is by no means the purest of monks. Instead, he is worldly, ill-tempered, has an extremely short fuse, and breaks most of the Five Precepts of Buddhism, which happen to be the most basic principles that even laymen are expected to adhere to in order to walk the Noble Eightfold Path expounded by the Buddha. Sanzo drinks like a fish, swears like a sailor, kills, gambles, is a chain smoker, and seems to follow his own path. Despite his 'pretty boy' features, there is no hint of peaceful demeanor in the man, no monk-like appearance despite his robes. Brutal and worldly as opposed to gentle and unworldly, the man is a walking contradiction of what he is supposed to stand for.

Generally difficult to read and expressionless when calm, Sanzo’s emotions range from annoyed to raging. Instead of practicing patience like the saint he is supposed to emulate, even the littlest thing can set him off. Sanzo’s volatile temper is usually accompanied by his harissen or pistol, though the latter is most often only used as a threat, and shots fired would be fired into the air or deliberately made to miss.

It should be noted that, despite his unpredictable temper, Sanzo is hardly reckless. Extremely skilled in martial arts and a good marksman, Sanzo prefers to stay above the melee unless the circumstances call for his particular participation. However, he does tend to overdo it sometimes when he participates, though his will to keep on fighting to live manages to save himself from succumbing more often than not.

He is realistic and observant, highly opinionated and arrogant. However, he despises the pomp and grandeur that come with being a priest of high ranking. He cannot stand the hypocrisy of organized religion and the people who project a good and humble demeanor but act completely the opposite. As a child growing up under the care of his master and adoptive father Koumyou Sanzo at a Buddhist temple, Sanzo was witness to the hypocritical behavior of the monks within the compound, this behavior most often targeted at himself. Jealousy, gossip, insults—these were not what was expected of a monk. He saw no humility when monks would take quite the offense to another stepping over their rank.

Perhaps growing up with Koumyou Sanzo resulted in quite a bit of the man’s personal philosophy rubbing off on Sanzo. While Koumyou was not ill-tempered or prone to violence as Sanzo is, he too showed a disregard of basic Buddhist principles when he drank sake almost every night, smoked, and refused to give sermons when he felt like it. In essence, to Sanzo, there is no point in projecting humility and hiding behind a veil of piousness when one could be themselves and be honest about it. Sanzo himself is blunt and brutally honest, and doesn’t hide this fact. For example, when asked to deliver a sermon once, Sanzo refuses. When informed that Koumyou Sanzo, who had visited said temple earlier on, also refused to do so, Sanzo responds – with a very visible tinge of disgust – that he wouldn’t be surprised because the inhabitant monks of the temple were nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. Well informed and learned in the scriptures of Buddhism, Sanzo is by no means lacking in wisdom, which he doesn’t fail to impart in the crudest and bluntest manner possible. He is above sugar coating anything and calls things as they are.

Growing up as an orphan who was found floating in a river as an infant, Koumyou Sanzo became Sanzo’s closest role model he had as a parental figure. He was the only Sanzo priest that he recognized at the time, and over the years, began to take care of the older man as well, especially with advising him not to drink too much or smoke out in the open. This relationship with Koumyou was probably the deepest emotional connection Sanzo has ever had in his life. However, the tragic and violent way in which Koumyou was taken away from him would come to haunt him for the rest of his life, as well as have a deep impact on his personality.

Of all the teachings of Buddhism (that he is quick to disregard) Sanzo cares mostly about the one teaching that was his mentor’s mantra: Hold nothing (Muichimotsu). In Buddhism, moichimotsu relates detachment more to the transient nature of life and the events within it than to any disdain for love, friendship, and companionship. Since the death of his mentor, Sanzo takes to using moichimotsu as a means of shielding himself from the hurt that comes with caring for someone, establishing a deep emotional connection with them, and having to ultimately be ripped away from it. It can be argued that it is pride that prevents him from acknowledging this fact, but it may also very well be a deep-set fear of wanting to acknowledge this as it leaves him quite open for new emotional wounds to be dealing with. In other words, Sanzo struggles with intimacy, and in letting people into his life. As a result, he does not open up to anyone and claims not to give two shits about anybody else, living for himself and walking his own path, siding only with himself.

Another main event in his life that has since deeply affected him on a very personal level would be the first time he ever killed a man. Having sworn to find the Seiten sutra that was stolen from his master during the murder, Sanzo leaves the temple he was brought up in to travel the world with this mission in mind. Along the way, he had to deal with quite a lot of hardship, including unwanted advances from men who considered him pretty enough and ‘girly’ enough to be fair game for sexual intentions. It was during one of these instances that Sanzo shot and killed the man reaching for his leg, and the moment in which this happened had since tormented him for the rest of his life. Somehow, it was never the advances that wore him down, but the guilt of having taken a life. After the first, the second and third came easier, and there were many others, though Sanzo found himself pointing the barrel of than gun to his own head soon after. The guilt, though he has hardened considerably by now, is something that never really wears away, even if there was a certain sense of justification that he killed in order to survive at the time.

History

Genjo Sanzo was born to Rin Tokou, a politician, and to Kouran, the daughter of a shop peddler. His father went missing shortly after he was conceived, and his mother ran off into the wilderness to bear their child alone. She would die shortly afterwards, but not before setting her infant son in a basket and setting him afloat on the river.

He is discovered by Koumyou Sanzo, a Sanzo priest residing in one of the Buddhist temples in Kanazawa, in the Land of the Demons, at the time, and is taken in and cared for. Koumyou takes up the role of parent, guardian, mentor, and master to the young boy. Koumyou named the orphaned boy Kouryuu – meaning flow of the river. Kouryuu was raised by Koumyou as his own child, and over time, the boy grew to love and respect the man. Koumyou would be the first person Kouryuu would have ever let into his life, and the first person he would share a deep emotional connection to.

He is taught martial arts as a form of physical, mental, and spiritual discipline under the tutelage of Koumyou Sanzo. He is well aware of how to use chakra in martial arts, yet does not do so, even though the country itself is famous for their spiritual jutsu, especially in sealing demons. As a Buddhist priest, he has been taught to recognize martial arts only as a form of discipline and, under dire circumstances, as a form of defense. He therefore sees no reason to hone these battle skills during his stay at the temple, where life is almost always calm and complacent.

At thirteen, on a particularly rainy day, Kouryuu is ordained a Sanzo priest by Koumyou and is given the Matten scripture to protect. He is also given his formal Buddhist name—Genjo. The title of Sanzo is given to those deemed closest to the gods. Sanzo priests also bear the characteristic chakra mark on their foreheads as physical proof of their closeness to the teachings and to the heavens. However, the very day that he is ordained, his master Koumyou Sanzo is murdered in a vicious attack by a group of armed men wanting to steal the Seiten and Matten scriptures. Koumyou gives up his own life to protect Sanzo, and dies in front of him, the Seiten scripture stolen from him. The guilt of being to one to have survived instead of his master will live with Sanzo for the rest of his life, and rainy days would always bring back the painful memories of losing the one person he’d cared about the most.

Kouryuu never really had such a good rapport with some of the younger monks at the temple. So much so that during the hearing after Koumyou Sanzo’s murder, he is accused by one of them of having murdered the man himself. He had always had a knack for attracting quite a bit of jealousy because of Koumyou’s attentions to him despite being a simple orphaned boy who hadn’t even been ordained, and this jealousy probably gave rise to inappropriate gossip that hint at Koumyou Sanzo possibly harboring pedophilic tendencies towards him. It is without a doubt that Sanzo is ‘pretty’, so leery or sexual jokes aimed at him were not uncommon at the temple. Jealousy, however, was probably not the only factor that led to the monks not trusting him. Sanzo’s eyes are reported to be dangerously beautiful—as enchanting as a deity’s, and as frightening as a demon’s. And these eyes could arrest the person they were looking into, hold them captive for a moment as if reading their soul. It was these eyes and the fearlessness within them that stopped a rampaging bear from attacking the temple one day—a feat that many other monks failed to accomplish at the time. That a mere child could walk up to a deranged bear and calm it down struck a sense of fear in the others who watched it happen. [Note: In order to understand the significance of this, one needs to look at the Buddhist parallel in the life of the Buddha. The Buddha was able to calm a highly intoxicated elephant (Nalagiri) sent by an enemy to destroy him by merely standing in the creature’s presence and speaking directly and fearlessly to it.]

Genjo Sanzo was able to prove his story by revealing the chakra mark on his forehead, and thereafter, the case put to rest, he is handed a banishing gun from the temple’s sacred weapons store and announces his mission to retrieve the Seiten sutra from the perpetrators and find out who killed Koumyou Sanzo and why.

He would be on his own for four years since then, and happens to run into many hardships along the way. His girlish looks attract negative attention, and in one instance, a group of men decide that he looked like a woman enough to rape. It was this day when he was running from said group of men and almost found himself caught that he fired his gun, killing the man instantly. The moment is something that sticks with him for the rest of his life, as would the guilt and the burden of having to bear that guilt. He is forced to kill many in time, in order to survive, and on occasion, the barrel of that gun did turn to his own head though he could never pull the trigger.

Four arduous years later, he would travel to The Temple of the Setting Sun in the Land of Lightning, where he intended to speak to the Three Aspects – deities – in order to learn about the whereabouts of the Seiten sutra. He was, however, instructed to remain at the temple because the Three Aspects deemed his eyes were ‘dead’ and that he wouldn’t even recognize the Seiten sutra if it were staring him in the face.

His conscience still raw from the nightmares of the past and constantly woken by the nightmares of the present, Sanzo takes to shutting himself in his room and praying. The monks, intrigued by such a ‘holy presence’ in their midst, are curious, and tended to sneak unwarranted peaks into his room in order to learn more about their honorable guest… who also happened to keep all to himself instead of mingling with the rest of them and spending his days imparting his wisdom and delivering sermons. They find that he doesn’t recite sutras when he prays, and one monk happens to get a glimpse of Sanzo’s naked body when he bathes, remarking that there is hardly a spot on the man’s form that does not bear bruises—bruises that attest the hardships he had had to endure over the years since leaving Kanazawa. On one such restless night, Sanzo takes to pacing about the halls of the temple, running into the archbishop Jikkoku as a result. The older monk happened to be smoking at the time—a pastime Sanzo did not approve of at the time. Jikkoku would hand Sanzo a pack of cigarettes upon their second meeting the next night, one that Sanzo would grudgingly accept.

It wouldn’t be long after that that Jikkoku would be attacked in a similar fashion as Koumyou Sanzo. The attackers had been looking for Genjo Sanzo, and when asked, the old man claims to be Genjyo Sanzo himself, putting himself in place of the real person. Angered, Sanzo kills again when the men are unable to give him information as to who they were working for and what they wanted with the scriptures.

Taking on a less passive role now, his nightmares disappear, and in its place, Sanzo hears a voice calling to him. Determined to find out who it belongs to and tell the person behind it to shut up, Sanzo sets off on a different journey, now fully clad in formal robes.