Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/199

 and eve prayers and the fumes of incense ascended thence to heaven, while, in addition to these acts of daily worship, there were unfailing visits to temples to tell rosaries and place flowers in memory of the dead, and there were pilgrimages to the thirty-three shrines of Kwannon, to the twenty-four sanctuaries of the Spirit Sect, the twenty-five of the Pure Land, the eighty-eight of Daishi, to those of the Seven Deities in spring and of the six Amidas in autumn, to the six Jizō at all times, or to the twelve Yakushi, or the thirty Benzaiten, or the twenty-one temples of Nichiren, or the thousand sacred places of the central provinces. In short, Buddhism with its fêtes, its festivals, its ceremonials, its duties to the dead, its pilgrimages, its sermons, and its registers, occupied as large a place in the daily life of the Japanese middle and lower orders as Christianity has ever occupied in the life of any Western nation, though the former never exercised the same emotional influence as the latter, nor ever furnished an equally potent code of practical ethics.

It must be repeated, however, that Shintō, the ancient faith of the land, retained its place side by side with Buddhism. If in every district a temple stood for the worship of Buddha, there stood also a shrine for supplications to the guardian deity (Ujigami), and if each household had a Buddhist image, it had also a Shintō altar. From the Nara epoch when, as already stated, the Buddhist prop-