Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/169

 by teachers of the ideographic script which had then become the vehicle for transmitting all learning to Japan. Just as the student of the foreign symbols began by mastering their sounds and shapes and was afterwards inducted into their meanings, so an inquirer at the portals of Buddhism was first shown the letter of the law, and when he had learned how to obey, received an explanation of the principles underlying it. In the opening stage of discipline, his own salvation constituted his sole motive of conduct; in the subsequent stage of enlightenment, he developed an ardent desire to save others also. But in both stages alike salvation was separated from him by an interval which his individual exertions could not bridge. Is it not easy to conceive that the great majority of the new creed's disciples never passed beyond the first stage; and is it not easy also to see that to the plebeian and proletariat classes, banished beyond the range of Shintō instincts and the pale of its privileges, this arithmetically precise and comfortably explicit doctrine of the Buddha offered a welcome moral refuge?

But the difference between the ardent practicality of the Japanese mind and the dreamy patience of Oriental dispositions in general, quickly affected the reception accorded to the new creed. In its moral precepts there was nothing that could be called a revelation to the members of the patrician caste, nor did its immeasurably deferred hope