wn axes but also round
a central sun.

This was the "world of golden effulgence"--a world permeated by the
light of truth. The sect was called the Shingon (True Word); and the
central body was Dainichi (Great Sun), the Spirit of Truth, anterior
to Shaka and greater than him. "To reach the realization of the Truth
that Dainichi is omnipresent and that everything exists only in him,
a disciple must ascend by a double ladder, each half of which has ten
steps, namely, the intellectual ladder and the moral ladder." These
ladders constitute, in fact, a series of precepts, warnings, and
exhortations; some easily comprehensible, others demanding profound
thought, and the whole calculated to educate an absorbing aspiration
for the "transcendental virtues," to possess which is to attain to
perfect Buddhahood. Unquestionably the offspring of a great mind,
this Shingon system, with its mysterious possibilities and its lofty
morality, appealed strongly to the educated and leisured classes in
Kyoto during the peaceful Heian epoch, while for the illiterate and
the lower orders the simpler canons of the Tendai had to suffice.

THE JODO SECT

It has been shown, however, that the preachers of these sects, one
and all, were readily prone to resort to violence and bloodshed in
pursuit of worldly interests, not even the exponents of the exalted
"True Word" creed being exempt from the reproach. Teachers of a
doctrine having for cardinal tenet the sacredness of life, the
inmates of the great monasteries nevertheless did not hesitate to
appeal to arms, at any time, in defence of their temporal privileges
or in pursuit of their ambitious designs. Yet the discredit attaching
to such a flagrant discrepancy between precept and practice might not
have produced very signal result had not the twelfth century brought
the Gen-Hei struggle, which plunged the empire into a state of
turbulence and reduced the lower orders to a condition of pitiable
misery.

For this distress neither the Tendai doctrines nor the Shingon
conceptions were sufficiently simple to supply a remedy. Something
more tangible and less recondite was needed, and it came (1196), in
the sequel of twenty-five years' meditation and study, to
Genku--posthumously called Honen Shonin--a priest of the Tendai sect.
The leading characteristics of the Jodo (pure land) system introduced
by him are easily stated. "Salvation is by faith, but it is a faith
ritually expressed. The virtue that s