Page:A history of Japanese mathematics (IA historyofjapanes00smitiala).pdf/27

Rh says, “were brought up with utter disregard of economy. It was considered bad taste to speak of it, and ignorance of the value of different coins was a token of good breeding. Knowledge of numbers was indispensable in the mastering of forces as well as in the distribution of benefices and fiefs, but the counting of money was left to meaner hands.” Only in the Buddhist temples in Japan, as in the Christian church schools in Europe, was the lamp of learning kept burning. In each case, however, mathematics was not a subject that appealed to the religious body. A crude theology, a purposeless logic, a feeble literature,—these had some standing; but mathematicians save for calendar purposes was ever an outcast in the temple and the church, save as it occasionally found some eccentric individual to befriend it. In the period of the Ashikaga shoguns it is asserted that there hardly could be found in all Japan a man who was versed in the art of division. To divide, the merchant resorted to the process known as Shokei-zan, a scheme of multiplication which seems in some way to have served for the inverse process as well. Nevertheless the assertion that the art of division was lost during this era of constant wars is not exact. Manuscripts on the calendar, corresponding to the European compotus rolls, and belonging to the period in question, contain examples of division, and it is probable that here, as in the West, the religious communities always had someone who knew the rudiments of clendar-reckoning. (Fig. 2.)

Three names stand out during these Dark Ages as worthy of mention. The first is that of Tenjin, or Michizane, counsellor and teacher in the court of the Emperor Uda (888—898).