Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 13.djvu/19



MID all the wonderment expressed by our generation over Japan's sudden acceptance of modern conditions and her enormous stride into the foremost place among Asiatic nations, it has been seldom noted that this is the second time the Japanese have thus seized upon an advanced civilization, recognized its worth, and forcefully made it their own. Exactly what they are doing now, they did some thirteen hundred years ago with the Chinese civilization.

Before that time the Japanese could neither read nor write. They are thus the youngest among modern great nations. The Americans and Australians were colonists, the vigorous heirs of an older civilization; the Japanese have grown from the childhoodalmost from the infancyof barbarism within the sight, within reach of the study, of our older races.

It is this fact which makes the examination of Japan's literature and her religious thought so specially interesting. It is due to this fact that, while her literature is the youngest, her books are the oldest among eastern Asiatic nations. The Japanese treasured their early books with an almost superstitious reverence. As a matter of actual manuscripts, there is no Chinese book so old, no book among any of the yellow or Turanian races so old, as the volumes now treasured in the Rh