Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/172

 further noble precepts, and there was also an elaborate system of daily worship and prayer. All idea of abstention from the affairs of every-day life disappeared, and the hereafter became, not a state of absolute non-existence (nirvana), but the "infinite perception of a beatific vision;" a condition in which each of the saved formed one of a band of great intercessors, pleading continually for their ignorant and struggling brethren upon earth that they might attain to the same heights of perfect enlightenment and bliss.

This is the Shingon Sect, the sect of the "True Word," the sect of the Logos, founded in 816 A.D. by one of the greatest of Japanese religious teachers, Kōbō Daishi. So far as it has been here set down, its outlines might easily be adapted to a partial picture of Christianity. There is a great presiding spirit; there is an ethical system that the followers of the Nazarene might endorse; there is a band of interceding saints in heaven; there is an eternity of happiness; there is an everlasting law of retribution, every infraction of the moral code entailing a commensurate penalty; there are incarnations of the supreme being — not one incarnation, indeed, but several — whose mission is to lead men to the knowledge of the truth. But if such affinities with Christianity exist, so also do differences. There is a belief in previous existences and in their