Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/184

 sion of the key to all the stores of the Middle Kingdom's learning. Yet, when we come to ask whether from this array of secular and religious arguments the conclusion may be derived that the supernatural phases of Buddhism impressed themselves upon the hearts of the educated classes, the answer must be negative. It is hard, indeed, to imagine a total lack of that kind of faith among men who in mediæval times contributed vast sums to support or endow temples, made them the depositories of their ancestral tablets, and repaired thither at set seasons to hear orisons chaunted, sutras read, and sermons preached. But still more difficult is it to conceive that, had the transcendental doctrines of Buddhism sunk deep into the national mind, some evidence of the fact would not have been furnished in the growth of a philosophical literature, the product of lay pens. There is practically no such literature. On the contrary, there are plain indications that the supernatural beliefs of Buddhist teachers gradually became the object of open or covert ridicule among the learned, and were ultimately relegated to much the same place in the minds of educated men as ghost stories occupy in European or American thought to-day. In short, religion, as distinguished from morality, came to be quietly ignored. Nothing survived beyond an instinctive belief in the immortality of the soul, and a traditional faith in a future world peopled by the shades of parents and relatives loved in life and