xtend the sway of the Mikado over the whole Archipelago.

Shint[=o] was, in its formation, made use of as an engine to conquer,
unify and civilize all the tribes. In one sense, this conquest of men
having lower forms of faith, by believers in the Kami no Michi, or Way
of the Gods, was analogous to the Aryan conquest of India and the
Dravidians. However this may be, the energy and valor displayed in these
early ages formed the ideal of Yamato Damashii (The Spirit of
unconquerable Japan), which has so powerfully influenced the modern
Japanese. We shall see, also, how grandly Buddhism also came to be a
powerful force in the unification of the Japanese people. At first, the
new faith would be rejected as an alien invader, stigmatized as a
foreign religion, and, as such, sure to invoke the wrath of the native
gods. Then later, its superiority to the indigenous cult would be seen
both by the wise and the practically minded, and it would be welcomed
and enjoyed.

The Inviting Field.

Never had a new religion a more inviting field or one more sure of
success, than had Buddhism on stepping from the Land of Morning Dawn to
the Land of the Rising Sun. Coming as a gorgeous, dazzling and
disciplined array of all that could touch the imagination, stimulate the
intellect and move the heart of the Japanese, it was irresistible. For
the making of a nation, Shint[=o] was as a donkey engine, compared to
the system of furnaces, boilers, shaft and propeller of a
ten-thousand-ton steel cruiser, moved by the energies of a million years
of sunbeam force condensed into coal and released again through
transmigration by fire.

All accounts in the vernacular Japanese agree, that their Butsu-d[=o] or
Buddhism was imported from Korea. In the sixteenth year of Keitai, the
twenty-seventh Mikado (of the list made centuries after, and the
eleventh after the impossible line of the long-lived or mythical
Mikados), A.D. 534, it is said that a man from China brought with him an
image of Buddha into Yamato, and setting it up in a thatched cottage
worshipped it. The people called it "foreign-country god." Visitors
discussed with him the religion of Shaka, as the Japanese call
Shakyamuni, and some little knowledge of Buddhism was gained, but no
notable progress was made until A.D. 552, which is generally accepted
and celebrated as the year of the introduction of the faith into Japan.
Then a king of Hiaksai in Korea, sent over to the court and to the
M