Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/118

 to Buddhism in the seventh and eighth centuries. Innumerable temples were built at enormous expense and endowed with great revenues. Quantities of the precious metals were devoted to the casting of idols and the decoration of edifices to hold them. Arbitrary edicts were issued thrusting the faith upon the people by force of official authority. It even became customary to surrender the highest posts and honours in the empire for the sake of taking the tonsure and leading a recluse life. Striking testimony to the religious fervour of the Court survives in the magnificent assemblage of temples in and about Nara. Almost the whole of these were built and furnished during the seventy-five years (710–785) of the Court's residence at that place, and when it is remembered that the immense outlay required for such works had to be defrayed by taxing a nation of only four and a half millions of people, it is apparent that religious zeal completely outran financial discretion. It is a constant assertion of foreign critics that the religious instinct is absent from the character of the Japanese, but their history cannot be reconciled with such a theory.

Japanese sovereignty, as has been shown already, was based upon Shintô. The sovereigns—"sons of heaven" (Tenshi) as they were, and are still, called—traced their descent to the deities of that creed, and the essence of their adminis