the country was visited by a
pestilence, and the calamity being regarded as an expression of the
Kami's resentment, the o-muraji of the Mononobe and the muraji of the
Nakatomi urged the Emperor to cast out the emblems of a foreign
faith. Accordingly, the statue of the Buddha was thrown into the
Naniwa canal and the temple was burned to the ground. Necessarily
these events sharply accentuated the enmity between the Soga and the
Mononobe. Twenty-five years passed, however, without any attempt to
restore the worship of the Buddha. Iname, the o-omi of the Soga,
died; Okoshi, the o-muraji of the Mononobe, died, and they were
succeeded in these high offices by their sons, Umako and Moriya,
respectively.

When the Emperor Bidatsu ascended the throne in A.D. 572, the
political stage was practically occupied by these two ministers only;
they had no competitors of equal rank. In 577, the King of Kudara
made a second attempt to introduce Buddhism into Japan. He sent to
the Yamato Court two hundred volumes of sacred books; an ascetic; a
yogi (meditative monk); a nun; a reciter of mantras (magic spells); a
maker of images, and a temple architect. If any excitement was caused
by this event, the annals say nothing of the fact. It is briefly
related that ultimately a temple was built for the new-comers in
Naniwa (modern Osaka). Two years later, Shiragi also sent a Buddhist
eidolon, and in 584--just sixty-two years after the coming of Shiba
Tachito from Liang and thirty-two years after Soga no Iname's attempt
to popularize the Indian faith--two Japanese high officials returned
from Korea, carrying with them a bronze image of Buddha and a stone
image of Miroku.* These two images were handed over, at his request,
to the o-omi, Umako, who had inherited his father's ideas about
Buddhism. He invited Shiba Tachito, then a village mayor, to
accompany one Hida on a search throughout the provinces for Buddhist
devotees. They found a man called Eben, a Korean who had originally
been a priest, and he, having resumed the stole, consecrated the
twelve-year-old daughter of Shiba Tachito, together with two other
girls, as nuns. The o-omi now built a temple, where the image of
Miroku was enshrined, and a pagoda on the top of whose central pillar
was deposited a Buddhist relic which had shown miraculous powers.

*The Sanskrit Maitreya, the expected Messiah of the Buddhist.

Thus, once more the creed of Sakiya Muni seemed to have found a
footing in J