Buddhism in the Modern World

by Kenneth J. Saunders

Japan is, in many ways, the best country for an intelligent study of its achievements.

She has been called the custodian of Asiatic civilisation: India, China, and Korea have all poured their rich gifts into her lap, and she has preserved them with wise discrimination. But she has always assimilated them till they are her own, and express her own genius. This is perhaps especially true of Buddhism, which is a very different thing in Japan even from what it is in China and Korea. Still more does it differ from that which we have studied in Ceylon and Burma. To turn away from these monastic expressions of the ancient faith to the elaborate Buddhism of Japan is to realise that a development has taken place not unlike that of Christianity, in its transition from the simplicity of Galilean hillsides and the upper chamber at Jerusalem to the pomp of high mass in St. Peter's at Rome or St. Mark's at Venice. Into each great process there have entered similar elements, the growth of a theology by which the historic founder is related to the eternal order, the absorption of ideas and rituals from peoples converted to the new faith and the making over of the faith in each new land till it becomes indigenous, and racy of the soil. The story of Buddhism as it developed its philosophical systems and its elaborate pantheon cannot be told here;[12] but we may attempt, as in the case of Ceylon and Burma, to give a few impressions of the Buddhism of Japan, which will indicate the processes of change and suggest what are the vital forces of this amazingly flexible religion, whose watchwords have been adaptation and compromise.

When Buddhism entered Japan in the seventh century A.D. it was already the religion of all Asia. It found amidst the semi-barbarous peoples of the islands certain deeply rooted ideas, such as the worship of heroes and especially of the Emperor, who was believed to be descended from the Sun-goddess Amaterasu. Within three centuries it had civilised the country, and had triumphantly identified this goddess with its own Sun-Buddha Vairochana, producing a blended faith made up of elements of the old Shinto (Shen Tao or Way of the Gods, Kami no michi) and of highly philosophical Buddhism which saw in the sun the source of all cosmic energy. This new Buddhism or Ryobu Shinto is different indeed from the faith of the founder, but it claims to be the logical and only legitimate evolution of his teachings.

Let us glance at it first in its great mountain fastness of Kōya San, where its founder Kobo Daishi lived and died, and where the faithful await with him the coming of Miroku—or Maitri—the next Buddha.

Koya San.

Like a great lotus of eight petals are the hills of Kōya San, and up their wooded slopes wind the pilgrim roads. It is the season of pilgrimage and they are thronged with pilgrims clad in white; here is a litter in which some invalid is being borne to the great temple where priests by the performance of mystic ritual and incantations will attempt to restore him to physical as well as spiritual health; here an aged couple are helping one another over steep parts of the way. As they approach the shrines they say a prayer to the pitiful Jizō, that he will be merciful to their dead; then as they pass the wooden octagonal library they turn it upon its axis in order that the merit of reading its voluminous scriptures may be theirs: and near by some afflicted person rubs the portion of the wooden figure of Binzuru which is affected in himself. Behind these somewhat childish superstitions is an elaborate philosophy, and if one is fortunate one may find a monk with leisure and ability to explain the elaborate mandaras, the pictures of this Shingon, or Trueword; Buddhism. Founded in the ninth century by the great scholar Kobo Daishi, it is a pantheistic worship of Dainichi, the great sun Buddha, the indwelling and pervading essence of the world. Present in all things, he is most present where men worship him, and so by mystic rite and incantation the worshipper is identified with this source of his being, and lays hold of certain secrets of bodily and spiritual health. Japan, like other countries, is eagerly looking for a religion which works, and which has a message for this life as well as for that beyond the grave. Amongst the great trees are innumerable tombs of the faithful, and here in their midst sits Kobo Daishi himself awaiting the coming of Miroku, the next Buddha. Nor is his spirit of loving-kindness, which is the essence of Buddhism, forgotten. Unique amongst the monuments of war stands this seventeenth-century pillar calling down the mercies of heaven upon all who fell in the war with Korea, both friend and foe.

In these temples, too, one will see the simple mirror, emblem at once of Amaterasu and of Dainichi, of Shinto and of Buddhism: are not the two now reconciled, and have they not become an integral part of the soul of Japan, Yamato Damashii? Here on Kōyasan mingle Japanese nature-worship, Indian idealistic philosophy, gods from central Asia, and the superstitions of needy human hearts. There is much that is fine as well as much that is corrupt, and it is noteworthy that the impatient reformer, Nichiren, called Kōbo "the prize liar" of Japan, and abominated the beliefs and practices of Shingon. Yet he was not unbiased in his judgments!

Hieisan and its Sects.

Another great mountain-fastness of Japanese Buddhism is Hieisan. Here amidst vast cryptomerias and redwoods a contemporary of Kōbo, named Saichō or Dengyō, established just eleven hundred years ago a synthetic Buddhism, which strove to reconcile the conflicting schools and to represent at once the founder Sākyamuni as he is revealed in the Lotus Scripture, seated in glory and opening a way for all to become Buddhas, and the eternal Amida Buddha of the Western Paradise. Side by side are preaching-halls for these two schools of Buddhist devotion, and from the parent stock of Tendai have sprung the three great sects of Jōdo, Shinshu, and Nichiren-Shu. The two former are extreme developments of the Way of Faith in Amida, and the latter is a revolt from their pietism and vain repetitions to the historical Sākyamuni and the famous "Lotus Scripture," the Hokkekyō which is found to-day in every Buddhist temple in Japan. At the foot of the great mountain clusters the old imperial city of Kyōto, or Miyako, with its thousand temples. Let us visit some of them.

A Shinshu Temple.