[Footnote 33:  Even the Taketori Monogatari (The Bamboo Cutter’s Daughter), the oldest and the best of the Japanese classic romances is (at least in the text and form now extant) a warp of native ideas with a woof of Buddhist notions.]

[Footnote 34:  Mr. Percival Lowell argues, in Esoteric Shint[=o], T.A.S.J., Vol.  XXI., that besides the habit of pilgrimages, fire-walking, and god-possession, other practices supposed to be Buddhistic are of Shint[=o] origin.]

[Footnote 35:  The native literature illustrating Riy[=o]buism is not extensive.  Mr. Ernest Satow in the American Cyclopaedia (Japan:  Literature) mentions several volumes.  The Tenchi Reiki Noko, in eighteen books contains a mixture of Buddhism and Shint[=o], and is ascribed by some to Sh[=o]toku and by others to K[=o]b[=o], but now literary critics ascribe these, as well as the books Jimbetsuki and Tenshoki, to be modern forgeries by Buddhist priests.  The Kogoshiui, written in A.D. 807, professes to preserve fragments of ancient tradition not recorded in the earlier books, but the main object is that which lies at the basis of a vast mass of Japanese literature, namely, to prove the author’s own descent from the gods.  The Yuiitsu Shint[=o] Miyoho Yoshiu, in two volumes, is designed to prove that Shint[=o] and Buddhism are identical in their essence.  Indeed, almost all the treatises on Shint[=o] before the seventeenth century maintained this view.  Certain books like the Shint[=o] Shu, for centuries popular, and well received even by scholars, are now condemned on account of their confusion of the two religions.  One of the most interesting works which we have found is the San Kai Ri, to which reference has been made.]

[Footnote 36:  T.J., p. 224.]

[Footnote 37:  “Human life is but fifty years,” Japanese Proverb; M.E., p. 107.]

[Footnote 38:  Chamberlain’s Classical Poetry of the Japanese, p. 130.]

[Footnote 39:  S. and H., p. 416.]

[Footnote 40:  Things Chinese, by J. Dyer Ball, p. 70; see also Edkins and Eitel.]

[Footnote 41:  The Japan Weekly Mail of April 28, 1893, translating and condensing an article from the Bukky[=o], a Buddhist newspaper, gives the results of a Japanese Buddhist student’s tour through China—­“Taoism prevails everywhere....  Buddhism has decayed and is almost dead.”]

[Footnote 42:  Vaisramana is a Deva who guarded, praised, fed with heavenly food, and answered the questions of the Chinese D[=o]-sen (608-907 A.D.) who founded the Risshu or Vinaya sect.—­B.N., p. 25.]

[Footnote 43:  Anderson, Catalogue, pp. 29-45.]

[Footnote 44:  Some of those are pictured in Aime Humbert’s Japon Illustre, and from the same pictures reproduced by electro-plates which, from Paris, have transmigrated for a whole generation through the cheaper books on Japan, in every European language.]

CHAPTER VIII