Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/150

 them as nothing compared with the promptings of conscience. He maintained that all mankind are one family, separated only into those that have found the truth and those that are still without it. He denied that God has any existence separate from the forms of his manifestations, and while affirming that the deity who created all things is anthropopathic and capable of meting out rewards and punishments according to man's deserts, he attributed to that deity a kind of omnipresence incompatible with anthropomorphism of any kind, though consistent with the attribute of boundless mercy. But he declined to attach importance to the conception of an imaginary universe, or to admit that human beings need concern themselves about a supernatural world of which they have no evidence nor can acquire any information.

It is evident that Wang's creed, as submitted to the Japanese nation by Nakaye Toju, [sic] partook of Shintō, of Buddhism, and of Confucianism. Its simple faith in the power and sufficiency of a pure heart represented the essence of Shintō. Its doctrine of introspection and abstraction, as well as the methods it prescribed for educating self-knowledge, resembled the teachings of the Zen sect of Buddhism. Its refusal to indulge in speculations about a supernatural realm, as well as its assertion of universal brotherhood, placed it in touch with Confucianism.

Of these two creeds that of Chu commended