In the year A.D. 522, a Chinese priest named Shiba Tatsu, a subject of the Liang (502-557), made an attempt to establish a mission in Yamato, which failed. The Liang ruled in the south of China. Their first emperor, Wu-ti, was a powerful ruler who extended the dominions of his house to the sea-coast on tile east, and did much to foster trade and commerce. In his reign the Chinese began to be a seafaring people, and Chinese ships visited the Bay of Bengal, Ceylon, the west coast of India, and even penetrated as far as the Persian Gulf. Wu-ti, during the earlier years of his reign (502-549), was a great patron of Confucianism; in his later years he alienated his Confucian subjects by his zeal for Buddhism, which he adopted with all the ardour of a convert. In the north of China, his most powerful rival was the kingdom of the Wei, ruled over by a queen, Hushi, who, like Wu-ti, was a zealous Buddhist, much to the disgust of her Confucianist subjects, who objected to the worship of S'akyamuni on the ground that he was only a deified man, and not a god like Tientei, the ruler of Heaven. In the end they dethroned their queen and threw her into the Hoangho.

The Wei influence (386-584) would naturally be great in the Korean states which touched their boundaries.

[paragraph continues] Shiba Tatsu passed through Korea on his way to Japan. It is highly probable that he came on a semi-political mission which failed. Neither Korea nor Japan cared for an alliance with the distant Liang, whose fortunes were apparently bound up with the personality of one man. Wu-ti's death in 549 was practically the end of his house and dynasty.

But Shiba Tatsu's mission may very possibly have suggested a reason why the Korean kingdoms should seek to strengthen themselves by an alliance with Japan. Korea was practically a Buddhist realm. Both Wei and Liang, though ruled over by sovereigns with Buddhist propensities, had powerful aristocracies which were strongly anti-Buddhist. Had either of these kingdoms gained the ascendency in the Peninsula a grievous persecution would have followed, ending perhaps in the overthrow of Korean dynasties. Japan was as yet neither Buddhist nor Confucian. If she could be won over to the faith, the immediate future at least would be secured from danger.

Accordingly, in 545, and again in 552, King Seimei of Kudara sent presents to the Emperor of Japan--images of Buddha and Sacred Books--together with a recommendatory letter in which he pointed out the excellences of the Buddhist religion, as well as its evident destiny to travel constantly eastward from the land of its origin. The presents received but a doubtful welcome. One