life a sheer impossibility in any of the great barrack-monasteries (it is the only name for them) on Hieizan, at Mii, at Nara, at Negoro, and which drew from the Emperor Shirakawa (1073-86) the plaintive sigh that he could control the monks of Hieizan no more than he could restrain the turbulent waters of the Kamo river, or regulate the cast of the dice. In 1124, Ryonen Shonin had his vision of Amida, which told him to clear out of Hieizan as a den of thieves, and found a sect which should have but one ceremony for all men,--the Invocation of Amida's name. [**] Fifty years later, in 1174, Genku, better known as Honen Shonin, the Japanese St. Francis, had founded a sect now known as the Jodo, which was a revolt against the complexity of Tendai doctrine and the unspirituality of the Tendai life. Mongaku Shonin (1186) can scarcely be reckoned among religious reformers, but the first year of the thirteenth century saw the foundation in Japan of the Zen sects which, like the Jodo, carne out from Hieizan. [*+] The orphan Shinran fell into the midst of a whirlwind of unrest, and was caught by it.

Shinran's progress, whilst he remained in the Tendai fold, seems to have been fairly satisfactory, for we presently find him, whilst still a young man, Rector of one of the Hieizan temples. His undoubted piety, the organizing and administrative powers which he afterwards so strikingly displayed

in the direction of the great religious movement of which he was the originator, perhaps also the family influence which he could command for the benefit of the clergy, all marked him out as a man destined for promotion, just as a few years previously the self-same qualities had directed the favourable attention of the authorities to the saintly Genku.