Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/183

 the grandeur of whose architectural proportions and the gorgeousness of whose decoration surpassed Japanese conception. Its priests manifested a spirit of activity, benevolence, and self-denial that could not but impress a nation entirely strange to the spectacle of religious zeal. It found a people devoting themselves to the study of Chinese literature with all the fervour that marks their descendants' excursions into the domain of Western learning, and it presented to them a library of books within whose ideographic pages was enshrined a mine of speculative thought, a mass of obscure, intricate, subtle metaphysical suggestions that derived a semblance of profundity from their very strangeness, of magnificence from the ignorance of their students. The minute mechanism of the new system constituted an additional attraction. It carried men from the simplest and vaguest of creeds to the most complex and definite; from a faith without ethical code or canons of dogma to a faith extraordinarily rich in both. If there is, as we know there is, a tendency in the human mind to pass from one extreme to another, it is easy to understand how gladly the feet of many turned from wandering in the trackless deserts of Shintō to march in the beaten paths and along the carefully graded highways of Buddhism. Further, the monasteries were the chief seats of learning. Proficiency in Buddhism was synonymous with proficiency in the Chinese language; with posses-