[5] This compound of polytheism and pantheism, with
its sensuous paradise, its goddess of mercy and its pantheon of every
sort of worshipable beings, was also equipped with a system of
philosophy by which Buddhism could be adapted to almost every yearning
of human nature in its lowest or its highest form, and by which things
apparently contradictory could be reconciled. Furthermore--and this is
not the least important thing to consider when the work to be done is
for the ordinary man as an individual and for the common people in the
mass--it had also a tremendous apparatus for touching the imagination
and captivating the fancy of the unthinking and the uneducated.

For example, consider the equipment of the Buddhist priests of the ninth
century in the matter of art alone. Shint[=o] knows next to nothing of
art,[6] and indeed one might almost say that it knows little of
civilization. It is like ultra-Puritanic Protestantism and Iconoclasm.
Buddhism, on the contrary, is the mother of art, and art is her
ever-busy child and handmaid. The temples of the Kami were bald and
bare. The Kojiki told nothing of life hereafter, and kept silence on a
hundred points at which human curiosity is sure to be active, and at
which the Yoga system was voluble. Buddhism came with a set of visible
symbols which should attract the eye and fire the imagination, and
within ethical limits, the passions also. It was a mixed and variegated
system,--a resultant of many forces.[7] It came with the thought of
India, the art-influence of Greece, the philosophy of Persia, the
speculations of the Gnostics and, in all probability, with ideas
borrowed indirectly from Nestorian or other forms of Christianity; and
thus furnished, it entered Japan.

The Mission of Art.

Thus far the insular kingdom had known only the monochrome sketches of
the Chinese painters, which could have a meaning for the educated few
alone. The composite Tantra dogmas fed the fancy and stimulated the
imagination, filling them with pictures of life, past, present and
future. "The sketch was replaced by the illumination." Whole schools of
artists, imported from China and Korea, multiplied their works and
attracted the untrained senses of the people, by filling the temples
with a blaze of glory. "This result was sought by a gorgeous but studied
play of gold and color, and a lavish richness of mounting and
accessories, that appear strangely at variance with the begging bowl and
pat