Page:A modern pioneer in Korea-Henry G. Appenzeller-by William Elliot Griffis.djvu/40

 32 The great outstanding event in the development of the Korean nation is the introduction of Buddhism A.D. 352, when the various tribes were already- organised into three kingdoms, or states. Buddhist missionaries came in, bringing images, writings and art. In their train, for centuries, followed a long line of teachers, artificers, scholars and men of skill and learning, by whom the native people were made cultured and enlightened and given hope of life hereafter, of which Confucianism knows nothing. By the tenth century, when the three warring states were fused into one kingdom of Korai, Buddhism had become the faith of the mass of people. From Quelpart Island to the Ever White Mountains, Korea gained religious as well as political unity.

During this period of a thousand years of Buddhism's establishment and expansion, Korea enjoyed her most brilliant era of prosperity. Those monuments of skilled labor, in the cutting and rearing of stone tablets, pagodas, astronomical observatories and other structures, the ruins of which litter Korean cities, colossal images, carved out of granite and still rearing their imposing forms above the forest that covers the overgrown debris of what were once monasteries, temples and cities, show what the Koreans could do when in the full strength of faith and the energy of belief. The almost utter absence of artistic memorials after the fall of Buddhism and the devastations of hostile armies in ruthless invasions from Tartary, China and Japan, have left the country scraped so bare, that travel-