A volume might be written and devoted to Japanese Buddhism as a political power; for, having quickly obtained intellectual possession of the court and emperor, it dictated the policies of the rulers. In A.D. 624, it was recognized as a state religion, and the hierarchy of priests was officially established. At this date there were 46 temples and monasteries, with 816 monks and 569 nuns. As early as the eighth century, beginning with Sh[=o]mu, who reigned A.D. 724-728, and who with his daughter, afterward the female Mikado, became a disciple of Shaka, the habit of the emperors becoming monks, shaving their heads and retiring from public life, came in vogue and lasted until near the nineteenth century. By this means the bonzes were soon enabled to call Buddhism "the people's religion," and to secure the resources of the national treasury as an aid to their temple and monastery building, and for the erection of those images and wayside shrines on which so many millions of dollars have been lavished. In addition to this subsidized propaganda, the Buddhist confessor was too often able, by means of the wife, concubine, or other female member of the household, imperial or noble, to dictate the imperial policy in accordance with monkish or priestly ideas. Ugeno D[=o]-ki[=o], a monk, is believed to have aspired to the throne. Being made premier by the Empress K[=o]-ken, whose passion for him is the scandal of history, he made no scruple of extending the power as well as the influence of the Buddhist hierarchy.

Buddhism had also a distinct influence on the military history of the country,[37] and this was greatest during the civil wars of the rival Mikados (1336-1392), when the whole country was a camp and two lines of nominees claimed to be descendants of the sun-goddess. Japan's only foreign wars have been in the neighboring peninsula of Korea, and thither the bonzes went with the armies in the expeditions of the early centuries, and in that great invasion of 1592-1597, which has left a scar even to this day on the Korean mind. At home, Buddhist priests only too gladly accompanied the imperial armies of conquest and occupation. During centuries of activity in the southwest and in the far east and extreme north, the military brought the outlying portions of the empire, throughout the whole archipelago, under the sway of the Yamato tribe and the Mikado's dominion. The shorn clerks not only lived in camp, ministered to the sick and shrived the dying soldier, but wrote texts for the banners, furnished the amulets and war cries, and were ever assistant and valuable in keeping up the temper and morals of the armies.[38] No sooner was the campaign over and peace had become the order of the day, than the enthusiastic missionaries began to preach and to teach in the pacified region. They set up the shrines, anon started the school and built the temple; usually, indeed, with the aid of the law and the government, acting as agents of a politico-ecclesiastical establishment, yet with energy and consecration.

In later feudal days, when the soldier classes obtained the upper hand, overawed the court and Mikado and gradually supplanted the civil authority, introducing feudalism and martial law, the bonzes often represented the popular and democratic side. Protesting against arbitrary government, they came into collision with the warrior rulers, so as to be exposed to imprisonment and the sword. Yet even as refugees and as men to whom the old seats of activity no longer offered success or comfort, they went off into the distant and outlying provinces, preaching the old tenets and the new fashions in theology. Thus again they won hosts of converts, built monasteries, opened fresh paths and were purveyors of civilization.

The feudal ages in Japan bred the same type of militant priest known in Europe--the military bishop and the soldier monk. So far from Japan's being the "Land of Great Peace," and Buddhism's being necessarily gentle and non-resistant, we find in the chequered history of the island empire many a bloody battle between the monks on horseback and in armor.[39] Rival sectarians kept the country disquieted for years. Between themselves and their favored laymen, and the enemy, consisting of the rival forces, lay and clerical, in like array, many a bloody battle was fought.

The writer lived for one year in Echizen, which, in the fifteenth century, was the battle-ground for over fifty years, of warring monks. The abbot of the Monastery of the Original Vow, of the Shin sect, in Ki[=o]to, had built before the main edifice a two-storied gate, which was expected to throw into the shade every other gateway in Japan, and especially to humble the pride of the monks of the Tendai sect, in Hiyeizan, The monks of the mountain, swarming down into the capital city, attacked the gate and monastery of the Shin sect and burned the former to ashes. The abbot thus driven off by fire, fled northward, and, joined by a powerful body of adherents, made himself possessor of the rich provinces of Kaga and Echizen, holding this region for half a century, until able to rebuild the mighty fortress-monasteries near Ki[=o]to and at Osaka.

These strongholds of the fighting Shin priests had become so powerful as arsenals and military headquarters, that in 1570, Nobunaga, skilful general as he was, and backed by sixty thousand men, was unsuccessful in his attempt to reduce them. For ten years, the war between Nobunaga and the Shin sectarians kept the country in disorder. It finally ended in the conflagration of the great religious fortress at Osaka, and the retreat of the monks to another part of the country. By their treachery and incendiarism, the shavelings prevented the soldiers from enjoying the prizes.

To detail the whole history of the fighting monks would be tedious. They have had a foothold for many centuries and even to the present time, in every province except that of Satsuma. There, because they treacherously aided the great Hideyoshi to subdue the province, the fiery clansmen, never during Tokugawa days, permitted a Buddhist priest to come.[40]

Literature, and Education.

In its literary and scholastic development, Japanese Buddhism on its popular educational side deserves great praise. Although the Buddhist canon[41] was never translated into the vernacular,[42] and while the library of native Buddhism, in the way of commentary or general literature, reflects no special credit upon the priests, yet the historian must award them high honor, because of the part taken by them as educators and schoolmasters.[43] Education in ancient and mediaeval times was, among the laymen, confined almost wholly to the imperial court, and was considered chiefly to be, either as an adjunct to polite accomplishments, or as valuable especially in preparing young men for political office.[44] From the first introduction of letters until well into the nineteenth century, there was no special provision for education made by the government, except that, in modern and recent times in the castle towns of the Daimi[=o]s, there were schools of Chinese learning for the Samurai. Private schools and school-masters[45] were also creditably numerous. In original literature, poetry, fiction and history, as well as in the humbler works of compilation, in the making of text-books and in descriptive lore, the pens of many priests have been busy.[46] The earliest biography written in Japan was of Sh[=o]toku, the great lay patron of Buddhism. In the ages of war the monastery was the ark of preservation amid a flood of desolation.

The temple schools were early established, and in the course of centuries became at times almost coextensive with the empire. Besides the training of the neophytes in the Chinese language and the vernacular, there were connected with thousands of temples, schools in which the children, not only of the well-to-do, but largely of the people, were taught the rudiments of education, chiefly reading and writing. Most of the libraries of the country were those in monasteries. Although it is not probable that K[=o]b[=o] invented the Kana or common script, yet it is reasonably certain that the bonzes[47] were the chief instrument in the diffusion and popularization of that simple system of writing, which made it possible to carry literature down into the homes of the merchant and peasant, and enabled even women and children to beguile the tedium of their lives. Thus the people expanded their thoughts through the medium of the written, and later of the printed, page.[48] Until modern centuries, when the school of painters, which culminated in Hok[)u]sai and his contemporaries, brought a love of art down to the lowest classes of the people, the only teacher of pictorial and sculptural art for the multitude, was Buddhism. So strong is this popular delight in things artistic that probably, to this passion as much as to the religious instinct, we owe many of the wayside shrines and images, the symbolical and beautifully prepared landscapes, and those stone stairways which slope upward toward the shrines on the hill-tops. In Japan, art is not a foreign language; it is vernacular.

Thus, while we gladly point out how Buddhism, along the paths of exploration, commerce, invention, sociology, military and political influence, education and literature, not only propagated religion, but civilized Japan,[49] it is but in the interest of fairness and truth that we point out that wherein the great system was deficient. If we make comparison with Christendom and the religion of Jesus, it is less with the purpose of the polemic who must perhaps necessarily disparage, and more with the idea of making contrast between what we have seen in Japan and what we have enjoyed as commonplace in the United States and Europe.

Things Which Buddhism Left Undone.

In the thirteen hundred years of the life of Buddhism in Japan, what are the fruits, and what are the failures? Despite its incessant and multifarious activities, one looks in vain for the hospital, the orphan asylum, the home for elderly men or women or aged couples, or the asylum for the insane, and much less, for that vast and complicated system of organized charities, which, even amid our material greed of gain, make cities like New York, or London, or Chicago, so beautiful from the point of view of humanity. Buddhism did indeed teach kindness to animals, making even the dog, though ownerless and outcast, in a sense sacred. Because of his faith in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the toiling laborer will keep his wheels or his feet from harming the cat or dog or chicken in the road, even though it be at risk and trouble and with added labor to himself. The pious will buy the live birds or eels from the old woman who sits on the bridge, in order to give them life and liberty again in air or water. The sacred rice is for sale at the temples, not only to feed but to fatten the holy pigeons.

Yet, while all this care is lavished on animals, the human being suffers.[50] Buddhism is kind to the brute, and cruel to man. Until the influx of western ideas in recent years, the hospital and the orphanage did not exist in Japan, despite the gentleness and tenderness of Shaka, who, with all his merits, deserted his wife and babe in order to enlighten mankind.[51] If Buddhism is not directly responsible for the existence of that class of Japanese pariahs called _hi-nin_, or not-human, the name and the idea are borrowed from the sutras; while the execration of all who prepare or sell the flesh of animals is persistently taught in the sacred books. These unfortunate bearers of the human image, during twelve hundred years and until the fiat of the present illustrious emperor made them citizens, were not reckoned in the census, nor was the land on which they dwelt measured. The imperial edict which finally elevated the Eta to citizenship, was suggested by one whose life, though known to men as that of a Confucian, was probably hid with Christ, Yokoi Heishiro.[52] The emperor Mutsuhito, 123d of the line of Japan, born on the day when Perry was on the Mississippi and ready to sail, placed over these outcast people in 1871, the protecting