me
many of its chief luminaries were immigrants from Central Asia and it
made its most rapid progress in that disturbed period of the third and
fourth centuries when North China was split up into contending Tartar
states which both in race and politics were closely connected with
Central Asia. Communication with India by land became frequent and
there was also communication _via_ the Malay Archipelago, especially
after the fifth century, when a double stream of Buddhist teachers
began to pour into China by sea as well as by land. A third tributary
joined them later when Khubilai, the Mongol conqueror of China, made
Lamaism, or Tibetan Buddhism, the state religion.

Tibetan Buddhism is a form of late Indian Mahayanism with a
considerable admixture of Hinduism, exported from Bengal to Tibet and
there modified not so much in doctrine as by the creation of a
powerful hierarchy, curiously analogous to the Roman Church. It is
unknown in southern China and not much favoured by the educated
classes in the north, but the Lamaist priesthood enjoys great
authority in Tibet and Mongolia, and both the Ming and Ching
dynasties did their best to conciliate it for political reasons.
Lamaism has borrowed little from China and must be regarded as an
invasion into northern Asia and even Europe[8] of late Indian religion
and art, somewhat modified by the strong idiosyncrasy of the Tibetan
people. This northern movement was started by the desire of imitation,
not of conquest. At the beginning of the seventh century the King
of Tibet, who had dealings with both India and China, sent a mission
to the former to enquire about Buddhism and in the eighth and eleventh
centuries eminent doctors were summoned from India to establish the
faith and then to restore it after a temporary eclipse.

In Korea, Annam, and especially in Japan, Buddhism has been a great
ethical, religious and artistic force and in this sense those
countries owe much to India. Yet there was little direct communication
and what they received came to them almost entirely through China. The
ancient Champa was a Hindu kingdom analogous to Camboja, but modern
Annam represents not a continuation of this civilization but a later
descent of Chinese culture from the north. Japan was in close touch
with the Chinese just at the period when Buddhism was fermenting their
whole intellectual life and Japanese thought and art grew up in the
glow of this new inspiration, which was more intens