Thus far the insular kingdom had known only the monochrome sketches of the Chinese painters, which could have a meaning for the educated few alone.  The composite Tantra dogmas fed the fancy and stimulated the imagination, filling them with pictures of life, past, present and future.  “The sketch was replaced by the illumination.”  Whole schools of artists, imported from China and Korea, multiplied their works and attracted the untrained senses of the people, by filling the temples with a blaze of glory.  “This result was sought by a gorgeous but studied play of gold and color, and a lavish richness of mounting and accessories, that appear strangely at variance with the begging bowl and patched garments of primitive Buddhism."[8] The change in the Japanese temple was as though the gray clouds had been kissed by the sun and made to laugh rainbows.  The country of the Fertile Plain of Sweet Flags was transformed.  It suddenly became the land wherein gods grew not singly but in whole forests.  Like the Shulamite, when introduced among the jewelled ladies of Solomon’s harem, so stood the boor amid the sheen and gold of the new temples.

“Gold was the one thing essential to the Buddhist altar-piece, and sometimes, when applied on a black ground, was the only material used.  In all cases it was employed with an unsparing hand.  It appeared in uniform masses, as in the body of the Buddha or in the golden lakes of the Western Paradise; in minute diapers upon brocades and clothing, in circlets and undulating rays, to form the glory surrounding the head of Amitaba; in raised bosses and rings upon the armlets or necklets of the Bodhisattvas and Devas, and in a hundred other manners.  The pigments chosen to harmonize with this display were necessarily body colors of the most pronounced lines, and were untoned by any trace of chiaroscuro.  Such materials as these would surely try the average artist, but the Oriental painter knew how to dispose them without risk of crudity or gaudiness, and the precious metal, however lavishly applied, was distributed over the picture with a judgment that would make it difficult to alter or remove any part without detriment to the beauty of the work."[9]

In our day, Japanese art has won its own place in the world’s temple of beauty.  Even those familiar with the master-pieces of Europe do not hesitate to award to the artists of Nippon a meed of praise which, within certain limits, is justly applied to them equally with the masters of the Italian, the Dutch, the Flemish, or the French schools.  It serves our purpose simply to point out that art was a powerful factor in the religious conquest of the Japanese for the new doctrines of the Yoga system, which in Japan is called Riy[=o]bu, or Mixed Buddhism.

We say Mixed Buddhism rather than Riy[=o]bu Shint[=o], for Shint[=o] was less corrupted than swallowed up, while Buddhism suffered one more degree of mixture and added one more chapter of decay.  It increased in its visible body, while in its mind it became less and less the religion of Buddha and more and more a thing with the old Shint[=o] heart still in it, making a strange growth in the eyes of the continental believers.  To the Northern and Southern was now added an Eastern or Japanese Buddhism.