thumb|A blind man greets a formally dressed school inspector The was a Japanese guild for blind men, established in the 14th century in Kyoto. Founded by , the guild trained blind men as biwa hōshi or known as, "blind lute-playing narrative singers." Members were provided other professional roles, such as itinerant musicians, masseurs, and acupuncturists. The guild was organized hierarchically, enjoying official patronage from the Muromachi and Edo shogunates, and remained an important social and economic role for blind men in Japan until the abolishment during the Meiji restoration, in1871.
thumb|A blind man greets a formally dressed school inspector The was a Japanese guild for blind men, established in the 14th century in Kyoto. Founded by , the guild trained blind men as biwa hōshi or known as, "blind lute-playing narrative singers." Members were provided other professional roles, such as itinerant musicians, masseurs, and acupuncturists. The guild was organized hierarchically, enjoying official patronage from the Muromachi and Edo shogunates, and remained an important social and economic role for blind men in Japan until the abolishment during the Meiji restoration, in1871.
== Origins and Early History == Originally, blind men had made a living as Moso, or blind priests, who would recite Buddhist scriptures in small local guilds under the local Buddhist temple authority. During the medieval period, some Buddhists associated a persons blindness with karmic punishment. However, this negative connotation was slowly lost during the Tokugawa period. Overtime, these small local guilds turned into national guilds, moving from religious teachings to the performing arts.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).