(3) To the Buddhist, this or that personage, in his lifetime, in the early ages of Japanese history, had been an avatar of Buddha who had appeared in human flesh and brought blessings to the people and neighborhood; yet the people of the early ages being unprepared to receive his doctrine or revelation, he had not then revealed or preached it; but now, as for a thousand years since the time of the illustrious and saintly K[=o]b[=o], he had his right name and received his just honors and worship as an avatar of the eternal Buddha.  So, although Buddhist and Shint[=o]ist might quarrel as to his title, and divide, even to anger, on minor points, they would both agree in letting the common people take their pleasure, enjoy the festivals and merriment, and preserve their reverence and worship.

(4) Still another spectator studied with critical interest the swaying figure high in air.  With a taste for archaeology, he admired the accuracy of the drapery and associations.  He was amused, it may be, with occasional anachronisms as to garments or equipments.  He knew that the original of this personage had been nothing more than a human being, who might indeed have been conspicuous as a brave soldier in war, or as a skilful physician who helped to stop the plague, or as a civilizer who imported new food or improved agriculture.

In a word, had this subject of the ancient Mikado lived in modern Christendom, he might be honored through the government, patent office, privy council, the admiralty, the university, or the academy, as the case or worth might be.  He might shine in a plastic representation by the sculptor or artist, or be known in the popular literature; but he would never receive religious worship, or aught beyond honor and praise.  In this swamping of history in legend and of fact in dogma, we behold the fruit of K[=o]b[=o]’s work, Riy[=o]bu Buddhism.

K[=o]b[=o]’s Work Undone.

Buddhism calls itself the jewel in the lotus.  Japanese poetry asks of the dewdrop “why, having the heart of the lotus for its home, does it pretend to be a gem?” For a thousand years Riy[=o]bu Buddhism was received as a pure brilliant of the first water, and then the scholarship of the Shint[=o] revivalists of the eighteenth century exposed the fraudulent nature of the unrelated parts and declared that the jewel called Riy[=o]bu was but a craftsman’s doublet and should be split apart.  Only a splinter of diamond, they declared, crowned a mass of paste.  Indignation made learning hot, and in 1870 the cement was liquefied in civil war.  The doublet was rent asunder by imperial decree, as when a lapidist melts the mastic that holds in deception adamant and glass, while real diamond stands all fire short of the hydro-oxygen flame.  The Riy[=o]bu temples were purged of all Buddhist symbols, furniture, equipment and personnel, and were made again to assume their august and austere simplicity.  In the eyes of the purely aesthetic critic, this national purgation was Puritanical iconoclasm; in those of the priests, cast out to earn rice elsewise and elsewhere, it was outrage, which in individual instances called for reprisal in blood, fire and assassination; to the Shint[=o]ist, it was an exhibition of the righteous judgment of the long-insulted gods; in the ken of the critical student, it seems very much like historic and poetic justice.