Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/201

 BUSHI-DŌ OR THE WAY OF

THE WARRIOR

T is usual to call Buddhism or Shintō the religion of Japan, but if religion be the source from which spring the motives of men's noblest actions, then the religion of Japan was neither the law of the Buddha (Buppō) nor the Path of the Gods (Shin-tō) but the Way of the Warrior (Bushi-do). Shin-tō was never more than a cult. It invited men to obey the suggestions of conscience and to leave the rest to heaven. It provided occasions for festivals which made life perceptibly brighter, and it softened the sterner aspects of Nature's phenomena by associating them with placable spirits. Buddhism, indeed, was a living faith; a faith which often stirred its propagandists to deeds of high devotion and its disciples to acts of enthusiastic self-sacrifice. Yet in all ages Buddhism sat very lightly on the Japanese people. It presented itself to them much as the New Jerusalem presented itself to the writer of the Revelation,—a pageant of picturesqueness and 173