difficulty. Although Buddhism
ostensibly adopted Shinto deities and the Shinto sanctions for the
social order, it could not wholeheartedly accept the sanctions nor
take the deities into full and legitimate partnership. It found no
place in its circle of doctrine to teach the important tenets of
Shintoism.

It left them to survive or perish as chance would have it. In
proportion as Buddhism absorbed the life and love of the people,
Shinto fell into decay and with it its sanctions. Then came the
centuries of civil war during which Imperial power and authority sank
to a minimum, and Japan's ignominy and disorder reached their maximum.
What the land now needed was the re-introduction, first, of social
order, even though it must be by the hand of a dictator, and second,
the development of religious sanctions for the order that should be
established. The first was secured by those three great generals of
Japan, Oda Nobunaga, the Taiko Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. "The
first conceived the idea of centralizing all the authority of the
state in a single person; the second, who has been called the Napoleon
of Japan, actually put the idea into practice," but died before
consolidating his work; the third, by his unsurpassed skill as a
diplomat and administrator, carried the idea completely out, arranging
the details of the new order so that, without special military genius
or power on the part of his successors, the order maintained itself
for 250 years.

Yet it is doubtful if this long maintenance of the social order
introduced by Ieyasu would have been possible had he not found ready
to hand a system of essentially religious sanctions for the social
order he had established by force. Confucianism had lain for a
thousand years a dormant germ, receiving some study from learned men,
but having no special relation to the education of the day or to the
political problems that became each century more pressing. In the
Confucian doctrines of loyalty to ruler and piety to parents, a
doctrine sanctioned by Heaven and by the customs of all the ancients,
Ieyasu, with the insight of a master mind, found just the sanctions he
desired. He had the Confucian classics printed--it is said for the
first time in Japan--"and the whole intellect of the country became
molded by Confucian ideas." The classics, edited with diacritical
marks for Japanese students, "formed the chief vehicle of every boy's
education." These were interpreted by learned