itude, was Buddhism. So strong is this
popular delight in things artistic that probably, to this passion as
much as to the religious instinct, we owe many of the wayside shrines
and images, the symbolical and beautifully prepared landscapes, and
those stone stairways which slope upward toward the shrines on the
hill-tops. In Japan, art is not a foreign language; it is vernacular.

Thus, while we gladly point out how Buddhism, along the paths of
exploration, commerce, invention, sociology, military and political
influence, education and literature, not only propagated religion, but
civilized Japan,[49] it is but in the interest of fairness and truth
that we point out that wherein the great system was deficient. If we
make comparison with Christendom and the religion of Jesus, it is less
with the purpose of the polemic who must perhaps necessarily disparage,
and more with the idea of making contrast between what we have seen in
Japan and what we have enjoyed as commonplace in the United States and
Europe.

Things Which Buddhism Left Undone.

In the thirteen hundred years of the life of Buddhism in Japan, what are
the fruits, and what are the failures? Despite its incessant and
multifarious activities, one looks in vain for the hospital, the orphan
asylum, the home for elderly men or women or aged couples, or the asylum
for the insane, and much less, for that vast and complicated system of
organized charities, which, even amid our material greed of gain, make
cities like New York, or London, or Chicago, so beautiful from the point
of view of humanity. Buddhism did indeed teach kindness to animals,
making even the dog, though ownerless and outcast, in a sense sacred.
Because of his faith in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the
toiling laborer will keep his wheels or his feet from harming the cat or
dog or chicken in the road, even though it be at risk and trouble and
with added labor to himself. The pious will buy the live birds or eels
from the old woman who sits on the bridge, in order to give them life
and liberty again in air or water. The sacred rice is for sale at the
temples, not only to feed but to fatten the holy pigeons.

Yet, while all this care is lavished on animals, the human being
suffers.[50] Buddhism is kind to the brute, and cruel to man. Until the
influx of western ideas in recent years, the hospital and the orphanage
did not exist in Japan, despite the gentleness and tenderness of Shak