Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/154

 Japanese history that religion was thus excluded from the range of education. Services were performed at the university and at the schools in honour of ancient men of erudition, and Confucius was deified under the title of Bunsen-o; but while sovereign, princes, and nobles were possessed by passionate zeal for the propagandism of Buddha's creed, and were impoverishing themselves and the nation to build magnificent temples and furnish them with thousands of costly images and quantities of gorgeous paraphernalia, they were equally persistent in telling the people that filial piety, as exemplified in the Chinese records, should be the basis of all action, and that the whole code of every-day ethics was comprised in the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. Perhaps if Buddhism had possessed a literature of its own, the field might not have been exclusively occupied by the Chinese classics. But Buddhism has no literature, or to speak more accurately, no literature intelligible to laymen. Its scriptures are couched in language which specialists only can understand, and by sermons and oral teaching alone are its precepts communicable to the public. Shintô, on the other hand, has no code of morals at all. Thus Confucianism presented itself as the sole working system of ethics available for educational purposes in ancient Japan.

It is easy to appreciate what a perplexing problem presented itself to Japanese publicists