Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/166

 indeed, was essentially the creed of the upper classes. They alone enjoyed the guardianship of the celestial and terrestrial divinities from whom they claimed descent and to whose ranks they would be admitted after death, and they obeyed the inductive system of Shintō morality which, though lacking codified tenets, certainly tended in many cases to produce a high type of character and to nurture a happy faith in the possibilities of a future state. But the heimin and the semmin, the commoners and the serfs, what religion did they embrace? Some of them, especially the farmers and artisans, might consider that they belonged remotely to the congregation of Shintō worshippers; but others were effectually excluded, since they lacked the essential qualification of consanguinity with the deities. Looking at the sharp lines of caste cleavage that divided both heimin and semmin from the patrician class, it seems evident that all these commoners and serfs stood originally outside the pale of the patrician creed. At any rate, if the place of the commoner in the hierarchy of the hereafter is to be regulated by his station in the society of the present, the life beyond the grave cannot have presented to him a very smiling aspect.

To a nation thus constituted Buddhism came in the second half of the sixth century. Buddhism has no element of exclusiveness. It resembles that house of many mansions on which the hopes of the numerous multiple-minded sec-