The Buddhist body of scriptures has several times been imported and printed in Japan, but has never been translated into the vernacular.  The canon[1] is not made up simply of writings purporting to be the words of Buddha or of the apostles who were his immediate companions or followers.  On the contrary, the canon, as received in Japan, is made up of books, written for the most part many centuries after the last of the contemporaries of Gautama had passed away.  Not a few of these writings are the products of the Chinese intellect.  Some books held by particular sects as holy scripture were composed in Japan itself, the very books themselves being worshipped.  Nevertheless those who are apparently farthest away from primitive Buddhism, claim to understand Buddha most clearly.

The Standard Doctrinal Work.

One of the most famous of books, honored especially by several of the later and larger sects in Japan, and probably the most widely read and most generally studied book of the canon, is the Saddharma Pundarika.[2] Professor Kern, who has translated this very rhetorical work into English, thinks it existed at or some time before 250 A.D., and that in its most ancient form it dates some centuries earlier, possibly as early as the opening of the Christian era.  It has now twenty-seven chapters, and may be called the typical scripture of Northern Buddhism.  It is overflowingly full of those sensuous images and descriptions of the Paradise, in which the imagination of the Japanese Buddhist so revels, and in it both rhetoric and mathematics run wild.  Of this book, “the cream of the revealed doctrine,” we shall hear often again.  It is the standard of orthodoxy in Japanese Buddhism, the real genius of which is monastic asceticism in morals and philosophical scepticism in religion.

In most of the other sutras the burden of thought is ontology.  Doctrinally, Buddhism seems to be less a religion than a system of philosophy.  Hundreds of volumes in the canon concern themselves almost wholly with ontological speculations.  The Japanese mind,[3] as described by those who have studied most acutely and profoundly its manifestations in language and literature, is essentially averse to speculation.  Yet the first forms of Buddhism presented to the Japanese, were highly metaphysical.  The history of thought in Japan, shows that these abstractions of dogma were not congenial to the islanders.  The new faith won its way among the people by its outward sensuous attractions, and by appeals to the imagination, the fancy and the emotions; though the men of culture were led captive by reasoning which they could not answer, even if they could comprehend it.  Though these early forms of dogma and philosophy no longer survive in Japan, having been eclipsed by more concrete and sensuous arguments, yet it is necessary to state them in order to show:  first, what Buddhism really is; second, doctrinal development in the farthest East; and, third, the peculiarities of the Japanese mind.