scribed were
wholly of the Northern division.

The Hoss[=o]-shu, or the Dharma-lakshana sect, as described by the Rev.
Dai-ryo Takashi of the Shin-gon sect, is the school which studies the
nature of Dharmas or things. The three worlds of desire, form and
formlessness, consist in thought only; and there is nothing outside
thought. Nine centuries after Gautama, Maitreya,[11] or the Buddha of
kindness, came down from the heaven of the Bodhisattva to the
lecture-hall in the kingdom in central India at the request of the
Buddhas elect, and discounted five shastras. After that two Buddhist
fathers who were brothers, composed many more shastras and cleared up
the meaning of the Mah[=a]yan[=a]. In 629 A.D., in his twenty-ninth
year, the famous Chinese pilgrim, Gen-j[=o] (Hiouen-thsang), studied
these shastras and sciences, and returning to China in 645 A.D., began
his great work of translation, at which he continued for nineteen years.
One of his disciples was the author of a hundred commentaries on sutras
and shastras. The doctrines of Gen-j[=o] and his disciples were at four
different times, from 653 to 712 A.D., imported into Japan, and named,
after the monasteries in which they were promulgated, the Northern and
Southern Transmission.

The Middle Path.

The burden of the teachings of this sect is subjective idealism. They
embrace principles enjoining complete indifference to mundane affairs,
and, in fact, thorough personal nullification and the ignoring of all
actions by its disciples. In these teachings, thought only, is real. As
we have already seen with the Ku-sha teaching, human beings are of three
classes, divided according to intellect, into higher, middle and lower,
for whom the systems of teachings are necessarily of as many kinds. The
order of progress with those who give themselves to the study of the
Hoss[=o] tenets, is,[12] first, they know only the existence of things,
then the emptiness of them, and finally they enter the middle path of
"true emptiness and wonderful existence."

From the first, such discipline is long and painful, and ultimate
victory scarcely comes to the ordinary being. The disciple, by training
in thought, by destroying passions and practices, by meditating on the
only knowledge, must pass through three kalpas or aeons. Constantly
meditating, and destroying the two obstacles of passion and cognizable
things, the disciple then obtains four kinds of wisdom and truly attains
perfect e