known as akunin shoki ("evil livers whose faith was right"), and Ryogen set himself to work with pen and word to put a stop to their malicious abuse of a good doctrine. He died a martyr to the cause he had taken in hand. In 1336, in the forty-second year of his life, and the twenty-first of his Abbot-ship, he was waylaid and killed by a party of akunin-shoki, dying with words on his lips of pious exhortation.

II.--The Senshuji ("temple of the exclusive devotion," i.e. to Amida) was founded by Shinran himself, at Takata, in Shimotsuke, in A.D. 1225, and entrusted by him to the care of one of his disciples. The group of believers attached to this subsect is called the Takata-ha. The most celebrated of its Abbots, Shinge, transferred his See from Takata to Isshinden, near Tsu, in Ise, and there built a temple, in 1465, which is now the head-temple of the Takata or Senshuji-ha. Shin-ye was much troubled by the activity of a heresy named Mugeko-ha "the sect of the unimpeded light,"--a sect of enthusiastic "perfectionists" who have had their counterparts in the history of European sectarianism.

III.--The Kinshokuji Temple, at Kibe in Omi is the head temple of the Kibe-ha. It was founded in 1235 by Shinran, and remained constantly under his jurisdiction and that of his successors Zenran and Kakunyo. On Kakunyo's death it became the head of an independent administration, in the hands of Kogen and his descendants, who are now represented by the Kibe (Baron) family, the hereditary heads of this sub-sect. I believe that the coming

into existence of this sect illustrates the policy of the early Shinshu leaders and their Imperialist (and Imperial) patrons. It seems to have been their idea to counterbalance the power of the great temporal lords, as also of the great monasteries, by the creation of a kind of spiritual peers, whose secular position and spiritual influence would, it was hoped, have great and beneficial weight in the State at large. [**]

IV. V.--We have already spoken about the Hongwanji, the headship of which remained in the direct line of Shinran's descendants. The Hongwanji at Kyoto was always looked upon throughout Japan as the truest representative of the Shinshu, and the believers who adhered to it far outnumbered those of the other divisions of the Shinshu household. After Shinran, by far the most influential of the Hongwanji Abbots was Rennyo Shonin, otherwise known as Yeto-Daishi (1415-1499) whose merits are so well recognized by the Shinshuists that they speak of him as the "Second Founder" of their Faith. Writer, preacher, organizer, poet, in the midst of a very troublesome world, Rennyo left behind him a great reputation, the memory of which still continues.