Literature, and Education.

In its literary and scholastic development, Japanese Buddhism on its popular educational side deserves great praise.  Although the Buddhist canon[41] was never translated into the vernacular,[42] and while the library of native Buddhism, in the way of commentary or general literature, reflects no special credit upon the priests, yet the historian must award them high honor, because of the part taken by them as educators and schoolmasters.[43] Education in ancient and mediaeval times was, among the laymen, confined almost wholly to the imperial court, and was considered chiefly to be, either as an adjunct to polite accomplishments, or as valuable especially in preparing young men for political office.[44] From the first introduction of letters until well into the nineteenth century, there was no special provision for education made by the government, except that, in modern and recent times in the castle towns of the Daimi[=o]s, there were schools of Chinese learning for the Samurai.  Private schools and school-masters[45] were also creditably numerous.  In original literature, poetry, fiction and history, as well as in the humbler works of compilation, in the making of text-books and in descriptive lore, the pens of many priests have been busy.[46] The earliest biography written in Japan was of Sh[=o]toku, the great lay patron of Buddhism.  In the ages of war the monastery was the ark of preservation amid a flood of desolation.

The temple schools were early established, and in the course of centuries became at times almost coextensive with the empire.  Besides the training of the neophytes in the Chinese language and the vernacular, there were connected with thousands of temples, schools in which the children, not only of the well-to-do, but largely of the people, were taught the rudiments of education, chiefly reading and writing.  Most of the libraries of the country were those in monasteries.  Although it is not probable that K[=o]b[=o] invented the Kana or common script, yet it is reasonably certain that the bonzes[47] were the chief instrument in the diffusion and popularization of that simple system of writing, which made it possible to carry literature down into the homes of the merchant and peasant, and enabled even women and children to beguile the tedium of their lives.  Thus the people expanded their thoughts through the medium of the written, and later of the printed, page.[48] Until modern centuries, when the school of painters, which culminated in Hok[)u]sai and his contemporaries, brought a love of art down to the lowest classes of the people, the only teacher of pictorial and sculptural art for the multitude, was Buddhism.  So strong is this popular delight in things artistic that probably, to this passion as much as to the religious instinct, we owe many of the wayside shrines and images, the symbolical and beautifully prepared landscapes, and those stone stairways which slope upward toward the shrines on the hill-tops.  In Japan, art is not a foreign language; it is vernacular.