Japanese Pilgrims to China.

The Ris-shu or Vinaya sect is one of purely Chinese origin, and was founded, or rather re-founded, by the Chinese priest D[=o]sen, who lived on Mount Shunan early in the seventh century, and claimed to be only re-proclaiming the rules given by Gautama himself.  He was well acquainted with the Tripitaka and especially versed in the Vinaya or rules of discipline.  His purpose was to unite the teachings of both the Greater and the Lesser Vehicle in a sutra whose burden should be one of ethics and not of dogma.

The founder of this sect was greatly honored by the Chinese Emperor.  Furthermore, he was honored in vision by the holy Pindola or Binzura,[10] who praised the founder as the best man that had promulgated the discipline since Buddha himself.  In later centuries, successors of the founder compiled commentaries and reproclaimed the teachings of this sect.

In A.D. 724 two Japanese priests went over to China, and having mastered the Ris-shu doctrine, received permission to propagate it in Japan.  With eighty-two Chinese priests they returned a few years later, having attempted, it is said, the journey five times and spent twelve years on the sea.  On their return, they received an imperial invitation to live in the great monastery at Nara, and soon their teachings exerted a powerful influence on the court.  The emperor, empress and four hundred persons of note were received into the Buddhist communion by a Chinese priest of the Ris-shu school in the middle of the eighth century.  The Mikado Sh[=o]-mu resigned his throne and took the vow and robes of a monk, becoming H[=o]-[=o] or cloistered emperor.  Under imperial direction a great bronze image of the Vairokana Buddha, or Perfection of Morality, was erected, and terraces, towers, images and all the paraphernalia of the new kind of Buddhism were prepared.  Even the earth was embroidered, as it were, with sutras and shastras.  Symbolical landscape gardening, which, in its mounds and paths, variously shaped stones and lanterns, artificial cascades and streamlets, teaches the holy geography as well as the allegories and hidden truths of Buddhism, made the city of Nara beautiful to the eyes of faith as well as of sight.

This sect, with its excellence in morality and benevolence, proved itself a beautifier of human life, of society and of the earth itself.  Its work was an irenicon.  It occupied itself exclusively with the higher ethics, the higher meditations and the higher knowledge.  Interdicting what was evil and prescribing what was good, its precepts varied in number and rigor according to the status of the disciple, lay or clerical.  It is by the observance of the sila, or grades of moral perfection, that one becomes a Buddha.  Besides making so powerful a conquest at the southern capital, this sect was the one which centuries afterward built the first Buddhist temple in Yedo.  Being ordinary human mortals, however, both monk and layman occasionally illustrated the difference between profession and practice.