can they, in their existence as women, reach the higher grades of holiness which lead to Nirvana.  According to the Shin Shu system, on the other hand, a believing woman may hope to attain the goal of the Buddhist at the close of her present life."[17] This doctrine seems to be founded on that passage in the eleventh chapter of the Saddharma Pundarika, in which the daughter of S[=a]gara, the N[=a]ga-king, loses her sex as female and reappears as a Bodhisattva of male sex.[18]

The Shin sect is the largest in Japan, having more than twice as many temples as any four of the great sects, and five thousand more than the So-d[=o] or sub-sect of J[=o]-d[=o], which is the next largest; or, over nineteen thousand in all.  It is also supposed to be one of the richest and most powerful of all the Japanese sects.  In reality, however, it possesses no fixed property, and is dependent entirely upon the voluntary contributions of its adherents.  To-day, it is probably the most active of them all in education, learning and missionary operations in Yezo, China and Korea.

Interesting as is the development of the J[=o]-d[=o] and Shin sects, which became popular largely through their promulgation of dogmas founded on the Western Paradise, we must not forget that both of them preached a new Buddha—­not the real figure in history, but an unhistoric and unreal phantom, the creation and dream of the speculator and visionary.  Amida, the personification of boundless light, is one of the luxuriant growths of a sickly scholasticism—­a hollow abstraction without life or reality.  Amidaism is utterly repudiated by many Japanese Buddhists, who give no place to his idol on their altars, and reject utterly the teaching as to Paradise and salvation through the merits of another.

Yet these two special developments by natives, though embodying tendencies of the Japanese mind, did not reach the limit to which Northern Buddhism was to go in those almost incredible lengths, which prompted Professor Whitney[19] to call it “the high-faluting school,” and which we have seen in our own time under the cultivation of western admirers.

The Nichiren Sect.

The Japanese mind runs to pantheism as naturally as an unpruned grape-vine runs to fibre and leaves.

When Nichiren, the ultra-patriotic and ultra-democratic bonze, saw the light in A.D. 1222, he was destined to bring religion not only down to man, but even down to the beasts and to the mud.  He founded the Saddharma-Pundarika sect, now called Nichiren Shu.

Born at Kominato, near the mouth of Yedo Bay, he became a neophite in the Shin-gon sect at the age of twelve, and was admitted into the priesthood when but fifteen years old.  Then he adopted his name, which means Sun-lotus, because, according to a typical dream very common in Korea and Japan, his mother thought that she had conceived by the sun entering her body.  Through a miracle, he acquired a thorough knowledge