of the excessive formalism and aestheticism of the Chinese, but give
expression to simple emotions in unpolished language with a direct
appeal. The epic of the Turkish peoples had clearly been developed
already, and in north China it produced a rudimentary ballad literature,
to which four hundred years later no less attention was paid than to the
emotional world of contemporary songs. The actual literature, however,
and the philosophy of this period are Buddhist. How can we explain that
Buddhism had gained such influence?

It will be remembered that Buddhism came to China overland and by sea in
the Han epoch. The missionary monks who came from abroad with the
foreign merchants found little approval among the Chinese gentry. They
were regarded as second-rate persons belonging, according to Chinese
notions, to an inferior social class. Thus the monks had to turn to the
middle and lower classes in China. Among these they found widespread
acceptance, not of their profound philosophic ideas, but of their
doctrine of the after life. This doctrine was in a certain sense
revolutionary: it declared that all the high officials and superiors who
treated the people so unjustly and who so exploited them, would in their
next reincarnation be born in poor circumstances or into inferior rank
and would have to suffer punishment for all their ill deeds. The poor
who had to suffer undeserved evils would be born in their next life into
high rank and would have a good time. This doctrine brought a ray of
light, a promise, to the country people who had suffered so much since
the later Han period of the second century A.D. Their situation remained
unaltered down to the fourth century; and under their alien rulers the
Chinese country population became Buddhist.

The merchants made use of the Buddhist monasteries as banks and
warehouses. Thus they, too, were well inclined towards Buddhism and gave
money and land for its temples. The temples were able to settle peasants
on this land as their tenants. In those times a temple was a more
reliable landlord than an individual alien, and the poorer peasants
readily became temple tenants; this increased their inclination towards
Buddhism.

The Indian, Sogdian, and Turkestani monks were readily allowed to settle
by the alien rulers of China, who had no national prejudice against
other aliens. The monks were educated men and brought some useful
knowledge from abroad. Educated Chinese were scarcely to b