Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/89

Rh form of Christianity. Knowledge, enlightenment, is the condition of Buddhistic grace, not faith. Self-perfectionment is the means of salvation, not the vicarious sufferings of a Redeemer. Not eternal life is the end, and active participation in unceasing praise and thanksgiving, but absorption into Nirvana (Jap. Nehan), practical annihilation. For Buddhism teaches that existence is itself an evil, springing from the double root of ignorance and the passions. In logical conformity with this tenet, it ignores the existence of a supreme God and Creator of worlds. There are, it is true, gods in the cosmogony which Buddhism inherited from Brahminism; but they are less important than the Hotoke, or Buddhas—men, that is, who have toiled upward through successive stages of existence to the calm of perfect holiness. In fact, philosophically speaking, two systems could hardly stand in more glaring contrast, though it is true that in the lives of quiet, pious folk not given to speculation or to the logical following out of the faith that is in them, the practical result of both may often coincide.

These few remarks are designed merely to point the reader along the true path of enquiry. It does not, of course, fall within the scope of a manual devoted to things Japanese to analyse the doctrines and practices of the great and complicated Indian religion, which, commencing with the birth of the Buddha Shaka Muni in the year B.C. 1027 (so say the Chinese and Japanese Buddhists, but European scholars prefer the date B.C. 653), gradually became the main factor in the religious life of all Eastern Asia.

Japan received Buddhism from Korea, whither it had spread from China. The account which the native history books give of the introduction of Buddhism into Japan is that a golden image of Buddha and some scrolls of the sutras were presented to the Mikado Kimmei by the King of Hyakusai, one of the Korean states, in A.D. 552. The Mikado inclined to the acceptance of the new religion; but the majority of his council, conservative Shintoists, persuaded him to reject the image from his Court. The golden Buddha was accordingly conferred upon one Soga-no-Iname, who turned his country-house into the first Buddhist