“The choice of the Chinese philosophy and the rejection of Buddhism was not because of any inherent quality in the Japanese mind.  It was not the rejection of supernaturalism or the miraculous.  The Chinese philosophy is as supernaturalistic as some forms of Buddhism.  The distinction is not between the natural and the supernatural in either system, but between the seen and the unseen.”

“The Chinese philosophy is as religious as the original teaching of Gautama.  Neither Shushi nor Gautama believed in a Creator, but both believed in gods and demons....  It has little place for prayer, but has a vivid sense of the Infinite and the Unseen, and fervently believes that right conduct is in accord with the ‘eternal verities.’”—­George William Knox.

    “In him is the yea.”—­Paul.

CHAPTER V — CONFUCIANISM IN ITS PHILOSOPHICAL FORM

Japan’s Millennium of Simple Confucianism.

Having seen the practical working of the ethics of Confucianism, especially in the old and simple system, let us now glance at the developed and philosophical forms, which, by giving the educated man of Japan a creed, made him break away from Buddhism and despise it, while becoming often fanatically Confucian.

For a thousand years (from 600 to 1600 A.D.) the Buddhist religious teachers assisted in promulgating the ethics of Confucius; for during all this time there was harmony between the various Buddhisms imported from India, Tibet, China and Korea, and the simple undeveloped system of Chinese Confucianism.  Slight modifications were made by individual teachers, and emphasis was laid upon this or that feature, while out of the soil of Japanese feudalism were growths of certain virtues as phases of loyalty, phenomenal beyond those in China.  Nevertheless, during all this time, the Japanese teachers of the Chinese ethic were as students who did but recite what they learned.  They simply transmitted, without attempting to expand or improve.

Though the apparatus of distribution was early known, block printing having been borrowed from the Chinese after the ninth century, and movable types learned from the Koreans and made use of in the sixteenth century,[1] the Chinese classics were not printed as a body until after the great peace of Genna (1615).  Nor during this period were translations made of the classics or commentaries, into the Japanese vernacular.  Indeed, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries there was little direct intercourse, commercial, diplomatic or intellectual, between Japan and China, as compared with the previous eras, or the decades since 1870.