avages. This bitter
denunciation of Buddhism at the lips and hands of Japanese who had
become Chinese in mind, was all the more inappropriate, because Buddhism
had for over a thousand years acted as the real purveyor and disperser
of the Confucian ethics and culture in Japan. Such denunciation came
with no better grace from the Yedo Confucianists than from the Shint[=o]
revivalists, like Motooeri, who, while execrating everything Chinese,
failed to remember or impress upon his countrymen the fact, that almost
all which constituted Japanese civilization had been imported from the
Middle Kingdom.

Buddhism, in its purely doctrinal development, seems to be rather a
system of metaphysics than a true religion, being a conglomeration, or
rather perhaps an agglomeration, of all sorts of theories relating to
the universe and its contents. Its doctrinal and metaphysical side,
however, is to be carefully distinguished from its popular and external
features, for in its missionary development Buddhism may be called a
system of national improvement. The history of its propagation, in the
land farthest east from its cradle, is not only the outline of the
history of Japanese civilization, but is nearly the whole of it.

Pre-Buddhistic Japan.

It is not perhaps difficult to reconstruct in imagination the landscape
of Japan in pre-Buddhistic days. Certainly we may, with some accuracy,
draw a contrast between the appearance of the face of the earth then and
now. Supposing that there were as many as a million or two of souls in
the Japanese Archipelago of the sixth century--the same area which in
the nineteenth century contains over forty-one millions--we can imagine
only here and there patches of cultivated fields, or terraced gullies.
There were no roads except paths or trails. The horse was probably yet a
curiosity to the aborigines, though well known to the sons of the gods.
Sheep and goats then, as now, were unknown. The cow and the ox were in
the land, but not numerous.[2] In architecture there was probably little
but the primeval hut. Tools were of the rudest description; yet it is
evident that the primitive Japanese were able to work iron and apply it
to many uses. There were other metals, though the tell-tale etymology of
their names in Japanese metallurgy, as in so many other lines of
industry and articles of daily use, points to a Chinese origin. It is
the almost incredible fact that the Japanese man or woman wore on the