or Confucianism.  Though as a nation the Japanese of the Meiji era are grossly forgetful of this fact, yet, as Professor Chamberlain says,[1] “All education was for centuries in Buddhist hands.  Buddhism introduced art; introduced medicine; created the folk-lore of the country; created its dramatic poetry; deeply influenced politics, and every sphere of social and intellectual activity; in a word, Buddhism was the teacher under whose instruction the Japanese nation grew up.”

For many centuries all Japanese, except here and there a stern Shint[=o]ist, or an exceptionally dogmatic Confucian, have acknowledged these patent facts, and from the emperor to the eta, glorified in them.  It was not until modern Confucian philosophy entered the Mikado’s empire in the seventeenth century, that hostile criticism and polemic tenets denounced Buddhism, and declared it only fit for savages.  This bitter denunciation of Buddhism at the lips and hands of Japanese who had become Chinese in mind, was all the more inappropriate, because Buddhism had for over a thousand years acted as the real purveyor and disperser of the Confucian ethics and culture in Japan.  Such denunciation came with no better grace from the Yedo Confucianists than from the Shint[=o] revivalists, like Motooeri, who, while execrating everything Chinese, failed to remember or impress upon his countrymen the fact, that almost all which constituted Japanese civilization had been imported from the Middle Kingdom.

Buddhism, in its purely doctrinal development, seems to be rather a system of metaphysics than a true religion, being a conglomeration, or rather perhaps an agglomeration, of all sorts of theories relating to the universe and its contents.  Its doctrinal and metaphysical side, however, is to be carefully distinguished from its popular and external features, for in its missionary development Buddhism may be called a system of national improvement.  The history of its propagation, in the land farthest east from its cradle, is not only the outline of the history of Japanese civilization, but is nearly the whole of it.

Pre-Buddhistic Japan.

It is not perhaps difficult to reconstruct in imagination the landscape of Japan in pre-Buddhistic days.  Certainly we may, with some accuracy, draw a contrast between the appearance of the face of the earth then and now.  Supposing that there were as many as a million or two of souls in the Japanese Archipelago of the sixth century—­the same area which in the nineteenth century contains over forty-one millions—­we can imagine only here and there patches of cultivated fields, or terraced gullies.  There were no roads except paths or trails.  The horse was probably yet a curiosity to the aborigines, though well known to the sons of the gods.  Sheep and goats then, as now, were unknown.  The cow and the ox were in the land, but not numerous.[2] In architecture there was probably little but the primeval hut.  Tools were of the rudest description;