Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/370

360 substantial progress. At his death in 621 there were in Japan 46 temples or monasteries and 1385 monastics, male and female. In 686 it was decreed that every household should have its domestic Buddhist shrine.

When Buddhism, after Christianity the great religion of the world, had once gained a foothold in Japan, its ultimate victory was certain. There was nothing in Shinto which could rival in attraction the sculpture, architecture, painting, costumes, and ritual of the foreign faith. Its organization was more complete and effective. It presented ideals of humanity, charity, self-abnegation, and purity, far higher than any previously known to the Japanese nation. Its doctrines of sin and repentance, of fate, of future bliss and woe, its profound metaphysics, and, perhaps more than aught else, the satisfaction which it offered to the yearnings of many a wounded spirit for a holy contemplative life, detached from the toil and worry, the sorrow and the disturbing passions of the world, were well calculated to find a welcome in their hearts.

At first the two religions held aloof from one another. But while Buddhism flourished more and more, Shinto was gradually weakened by the diversion into another channel of material resources and religious thought which might otherwise have been bestowed upon itself.

Ryôbu Shinto.—The two religions came into more direct contact in the eighth century, when there began a process of pacific penetration of the weaker by the stronger cult, which yielded some curious and important results. Buddhism is not a militant religion in the sense that Islam was. It owes little or nothing to the aid of the secular arm, and avoids rather than seeks open conflicts with other faiths. What the Japanese call hōben (pious device) and to which we should often apply the harsher terms "pious fraud" or " priestcraft," are more congenial to it. A notable application of the hōben method occurred in the time of the Mikado Shōmu, who reigned at Nara from 724 to 756.