Yet from such a task continental Buddhism had not shrunk before and did not shrink then, nor indeed from it do the insular Japanese sects shrink now.  Indeed, Buddhism is quite ready to adopt, absorb and swallow up Japanese Christianity.  With all encompassing tentacles, and with colossal powers of digestion and assimilation, Northern Buddhism had drawn into itself a large part of the Brahmanism out of which it originally sprang,[4] reversing the old myth of Chronos by swallowing its parents.  It had gathered in, pretty much all that was in the heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters that were under the earth, in Nepal, Tibet, China, and Korea.  Thoroughly exercised and disciplined, it was ready to devour and digest all that the imagination of Japan had conceived.

We must remember that, at the opening of the ninth century, the Buddhism rampant in China and indeed throughout Chinese Asia was the Tantra system of Yoga-chara.[5] This compound of polytheism and pantheism, with its sensuous paradise, its goddess of mercy and its pantheon of every sort of worshipable beings, was also equipped with a system of philosophy by which Buddhism could be adapted to almost every yearning of human nature in its lowest or its highest form, and by which things apparently contradictory could be reconciled.  Furthermore—­and this is not the least important thing to consider when the work to be done is for the ordinary man as an individual and for the common people in the mass—­it had also a tremendous apparatus for touching the imagination and captivating the fancy of the unthinking and the uneducated.

For example, consider the equipment of the Buddhist priests of the ninth century in the matter of art alone.  Shint[=o] knows next to nothing of art,[6] and indeed one might almost say that it knows little of civilization.  It is like ultra-Puritanic Protestantism and Iconoclasm.  Buddhism, on the contrary, is the mother of art, and art is her ever-busy child and handmaid.  The temples of the Kami were bald and bare.  The Kojiki told nothing of life hereafter, and kept silence on a hundred points at which human curiosity is sure to be active, and at which the Yoga system was voluble.  Buddhism came with a set of visible symbols which should attract the eye and fire the imagination, and within ethical limits, the passions also.  It was a mixed and variegated system,—­a resultant of many forces.[7] It came with the thought of India, the art-influence of Greece, the philosophy of Persia, the speculations of the Gnostics and, in all probability, with ideas borrowed indirectly from Nestorian or other forms of Christianity; and thus furnished, it entered Japan.

The Mission of Art.