was the third son of a king of the Kashis, in Southern India, and the historic original of the tobacconist’s shop-sign in Japan, who is known as Daruma.  The imperial Chinaman was not yet able to understand the secret key of Buddha’s thought.  So the Hindu missionary went to the monastery on Mount Su, where in meditation, he sat down cross-legged with his face to a wall, for nine years, by which time, says the legend, his legs had rotted off and he looked like a snow-image.  During that period, people did not know him, and called him simply the Wall-gazing Brahmana.  Afterward he had a number of disciples, but they had different views that are called the transmissions of the skin, flesh, or bone of the teacher.  Only one of them got the whole body of his teachings.  Two great sects were formed:  the Northern, which was undivided, and the Southern, which branched off into five houses and seven schools.  The Northern Sect was introduced into Japan by a Chinese priest in 729 A.D., while the Southern was not brought over until the twelfth century.  In both it is taught that perfect tranquillity of body and mind is essential to salvation.  The doctrine is the most sublime one, of thought transmitted by thought being entirely independent of any letters or words.  Another name for them is, “The Sect whose Mind Assimilates with Buddha,” direct from whom it claims to have received its articles of faith.

Too often this idea of Buddhaship, consisting of absolute freedom from matter and thought, means practically mind-murder, and the emptiness of idle reverie.

Contrasting modern reality with their ancient ideal, it must be confessed that in practice there is not a little letter worship and a good deal of pedantry; for, in all the teachings of abstract principles by the different sects, there are endless puns or plays upon words in the renderings of Chinese characters.  This arises from that antithesis of extreme poverty in sounds with amazing luxuriance in written expression, which characterizes both the Chinese and Japanese languages.

In the temples we find that the later deities introduced into the Buddhist pantheon are here also welcome, and that the triads or groups of three precious ones, the “Buddhist trinity,” so-called,[26] are surrounded by gods of Chinese or Japanese origin.  The Zen sect, according to its professions and early history, ought to be indifferent to worldly honors and emoluments, and indeed many of its devotees are.  Its history, however, shows how poorly mortals live up to their principles and practise what they preach.  Furthermore, these professors of peace and of the joys of the inner life in the S[=o]-t[=o] or sub-sect have made the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth years of Meiji, or A.D. 1893 and 1894, famous and themselves infamous by their long-continued and scandalous intestine quarrels.  Of the three sub-sects, those called Rin-zai and S[=o]-t[=o], take their names from Chinese monks of the ninth century; while the third, O-baku, founded in Japan in the seventeenth century, is one of the latest importations of Chinese Buddhistic thought in the Land of the Rising Sun.