Many students have asked what is the peculiar, the characteristic difference between the Buddhism of Japan and the other Buddhisms of the Asian continent.  If there be one cause, leading all others, we incline to believe it is because Japanese Buddhism is not the Buddhism of Gautama, but is so largely Riy[=o]bu or Mixed.  Yet in the alloy, which ingredient has preserved most of its qualities?  Is Japanese Buddhism really Shint[=o]ized Buddhism, or Buddhaized Shint[=o]?  Which is the parasite and which the parasitized?  Is the hermit crab Shint[=o], and the shell Buddhism, or vice versa?  About as many corrupt elements from Shint[=o] entered into the various Buddhist sects as Buddhism gave to Shint[=o].

This process of Shint[=o]izing Buddhism or of Buddhaizing Shint[=o]—­that is, of combining Shint[=o] or purely Japanese ideas and practices with the systems imported from India, went on for five centuries.  The old native habits and mental characteristics were not eradicated or profoundly modified; they were rather safely preserved in so-called Buddhism, not indeed as dead flies in amber but as live creatures, fattening on a body, which, every year, while keeping outward form and name, was being emptied of its normal and typical life.  It is no gain to pure water to add either microbes or the food which nourishes them.

Buddhism Writes New Chapters of Decay.

Phenomenally, the victory was that of Buddhism.  The mustard-seed has indeed become a great tree, lodging every fowl of heaven, clean and unclean; but potentially and in reality, the leavening power, as now seen, seems to have been that of Shint[=o].  Or, to change metaphor, since the hermit crab and the shell were separated by law only one generation ago, in 1870, we shall soon, before many generations, discern clearly which has the life and which has only the shell.[34]

There are but few literary monuments[35] of Riy[=o]buism, and it has left few or no marks in the native chronicles, misnamed history, which utterly omit or ignore so many things interesting to the student and humanist.[36] Yet to this mixture or amalgamation of Buddhism with Shint[=o], more probably than to any other direct influence, may also be ascribed that striking alteration in the system of Chinese ethics or Confucianism which differentiates the Japanese form from that prevalent in China.  That is, instead of filial piety, the relation of parent and child, occupying the first place, loyalty, the relation of lord and retainer, master and servant, became supreme.  Although Buddhism made the Mikado first a King (Tenn[=o]) or Son of Heaven (Ten-Shi), and then a monk (H[=o]-[=o]), and after his death a Hotoke or Buddhist deity, it caused him early to abdicate from actual life.  Buddhism is thus directly responsible for the habitual Japanese resignation from active life almost as soon as it is entered, by men in all classes.  Buddhism started all along and down through the lines of Japanese society the idea