One day, a distinguished member of the Fujiwara family, Kanezane, came to Genku with a request. ''I want to find," he said, "amongst your disciples a husband for my daughter. I wish my daughter's husband to be a priest as well as a householder, to retain his sacred character whilst yet living the life of the ordinary layman and mixing with the world. I desire him, by means of a concrete example, to demonstrate that the religion of Salvation by Faith in Amida is one which concerns the layman as well as the monk. It will be for the good of the country if we can show that the family and not the monastery is the true focus of religion." Fujiwara Kanezane is one of the great men of Japan, and I am glad to have called attention to his action in this matter. It must have required courage, in a Buddhist country, with religion at a low ebb, (a time when people will often cling with desperate tenacity to the externals of religion), to propose to sweep away an ecclesiastical discipline that has held its ground undisputed for two thousand years or more, and Kanezane deserves credit for the courage of his convictions.

Genku accepted Kanezane's proposition, and his choice fell on Shinran. Shinran (always a retiring man) was at first most unwilling to undertake the

responsibility. But Kanezane and Genku repeated their request with great insistence, and at last, after more than a year of hesitation, Shinran gave his consent. He became the son-in-law of Kanezane, by so doing became also the Founder of a sect of Buddhism, which, while proclaiming Salvation by Faith in Amida, also proclaimed that if a man be saved by Faith only, and not by works at all, he must let no man judge him in the matter of meats and drinks, of marriage or celibacy, because these things fall at once into insignificance when compared with the far greater principles now at stake. [**]

But before Shinran's Sect came into definite existence, he was called upon to suffer.

Kanezane died in 1207, and by his death Genku and Shinran lost their firm protector. The monks of the older schools, whether at Kyoto or at Nara, alarmed by the radical character of the changes advocated by the two friends, lost no time in trying to compass their ruin. Kyoto and Nara represented, as a rule, two hostile camps of Buddhism; but their common hatred for Genku's doctrines united them against his person, and a few weeks only remained for Kanezane to live when the intriguing monks procured Genku's degradation and banishment, first to Tosa, and then to Sanuki. Shinran shared his

teacher's fate, being banished to Echigo, and for the moment it seemed that the Jodo movement had been entirely suppressed. [**]