iests, besides composing a _sh[=a]stra_ on Reality and Semblance.
Dying in 417, his body was cremated, as is still usual with priests,
but his tongue, which had done such eminent service during life,
remained unharmed in the midst of the flames. In the year 520
B[=o]dhidharma, or Ta-mo, as he is affectionately known to the
Chinese, being also called the White Buddha, reached Canton, bringing
with him the sacred bowl of the Buddhist Patriarchate, of which he was
the last representative in the west and the first to hold office in
the east. Summoned to Nanking, he offended the emperor by asserting
that real merit lay, not in works, but solely in purity and wisdom
combined. He therefore retired to Lo-yang, crossing the swollen waters
of the Yangtsze on a reed, a feat which has ever since had a great
fascination for Chinese painters and poets. There he spent the rest of
his life, teaching that religion was not to be learnt from books, but
that man should seek and find the Buddha in his own heart. Thus
Buddhism gradually made its way. It had to meet first of all the
bitter hostility of the Taoists; and secondly, the fitful patronage
and opposition of the court. Several emperors and empresses were
infatuated supporters of the faith; one even went so far as to take
vows and lead the life of an ascetic, further insisting that to render
full obedience to the Buddhist commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," the
sacrificial animals were to be made of dough. Other emperors,
instigated by Confucian advisers, went to the opposite extreme of
persecution, closed all religious houses, confiscated their property,
and forced the priests and nuns to return to the world. From about the
11th century onwards Buddhism has enjoyed comparative immunity from
attack or restriction, and it now covers the Chinese empire from end
to end. The form under which it appears in China is to some extent of
local growth; that is to say, the Chinese have added and subtracted
not a little to and from the parent stock. The cleavage which took
place under Kanishka, ruler of the Indo-Scythian empire, about the 1st
century A.D., divided Buddhism into the Mah[=a]y[=a]na, or Greater
Vehicle, and the Hin[=a]y[=a]na, as it is somewhat contemptuously
styled, or Lesser Vehicle. The latter was the nearer of the two to the
Buddhism of Sh[=a]kyamuni, and exhibits rather the mystic and esoteric
sides of the faith