Then grew up whole forests of monasteries and temples, with an outburst of devilish art representing many-headed and many-eyed and many-handed idols on the walls, on books, on the roadside, with manifold charms and phrases the endless repetitions of which were supposed to have efficacy with the hypothetical being who filled the heavens.  That was the age of idols for China as well as for India; and the old Chinese house, once empty, swept and garnished by Confucianism, was now filled with a mob of unclean spirits each worse than the first.  With more courageous logic than the more matter-of-fact Chinese, the Tibetan erected his prayer-mills[29] and let the winds of heaven and the flowing waters continually multiply his prayers and holy syllables.  And these inventions were duly imported into Japan, and even now are far from being absent.[30]

Passing over for the present the history of Buddhism in China,[31] suffice it to say that the Buddhism which entered Japan from Korea in the sixth century, was not the simple atheism touched with morality, the bald skepticism or benevolent agnosticism of Gautama, but a religion already over a thousand years old.  It was the system of the Northern Buddhists.  These, dissatisfied, or unsatisfied, with absorption into a passionless state through self-sacrifice and moral discipline, had evolved a philosophy of religion in which were gods, idols and an apparatus of conversion utterly unknown to the primitive faith.

Buddhism Already Corrupted when brought to Japan.

This sixth century Buddhism in Japan was not the army with banners, which was introduced still later with the luxuriances of the fully developed system, its paradise wonderfully like Mohammed’s and its over-populated pantheon.  It was, however, ready with the necessary machinery, both material and mental, to make conquest of a people which had not only religious aspirations, but also latent aesthetic possibilities of a high order.  As in its course through China this Northern Buddhism had acted as an all-powerful absorbent of local beliefs and superstitions, so in Japan it was destined to make a more remarkable record, and, not only to absorb local ideas but actually to cause the indigenous religion to disappear.

Let us inquire who were the people to whom Buddhism, when already possessed of a millenium of history, entered its Ultima Thule in Eastern Asia.  At what stage of mutual growth did Buddhism and the Japanese meet each other?

Instead of the forty millions of thoroughly homogeneous people in Japan—­according to the census of December 31, 1892—­all being loyal subjects of one Emperor, we must think of possibly a million of hunters, fishermen and farmers in more or less warring clans or tribes.  These were made up of the various migrations from the main land and the drift of humanity brought by the ocean currents from the south; Ainos, Koreans, Tartars and Chinese, with probably some Malay and Nigrito stock.  In the central