The fashionable form of religious metaphysics was that adopted by the Sanron sect, which commenced its Japanese existence in the year 624, three years after the death of Shotoku. This sect professed to accept the whole of the Buddhist Canon so far as it existed in China in those days. The diseases of the human mind were many and various, so they said, and the prescriptions for so many diseases must be many also. The object of Buddha's teaching was to destroy error and establish the truth: the one implied the other, for the destruction of error left truth in its place, and when all errors were destroyed truth would have the field all to itself. But to set to work to establish positive truth would of necessity involve the establishment of error. [There can, therefore, never be such a thing as a positive and infallible Revelation of Truth.] Truth was of two kinds, absolute () and apparent (), and error, though infinite in its possibilities, might all be summed up under eight great heads. There

were errors connected with positive views of Life and Death, about Oneness and Multiplicity, about the Determinate and the Indeterminate, about Going and Coming. Place the word "No" () in front of each of these eight notions, and the Truth would be clear. "No Life and No Death, No Oneness and No Multiplicity, No Determinate and No Indeterminate, No Going and No Coming." The Universe and the Microcosm, Man, are nothing but negations.

Speculations such as these, the products of the hairsplitting Indian mind, had no charm for the practical Japanese intellect, and the Sanron sect was never more than a shadow among the Buddhist denominations in Japan. If it had not been for the simple faith of the Japanese women, who took the Buddha of the Vinaya books as their model, with his plain, straightforward directions as to the religious life of the believer, it is possible that Buddhism might have had to wait some years longer before gaining the ear of the Japanese people. The lesson is one not to be thrown away.

Footnotes

^169:1 Takakusu gives for Vasubandhu's date A.D. 445.

^170:1 It is not impossible that this may have been Buddhism. A.D. 64 marks the official recognition of Buddhism in China, not its popular acceptance, and there is an early Japanese tradition that at a very early period certain Ratai no hito brought an image of Kwannon to Japan, which they set up at Kumano-ura for worship ("Bukkyo Seiten," App., p. 12).

^171:1 See "Bukkyo Mondo Shu," pp. 14-24.

^171:2 Kaeuffer, "Geschichte Ostasiens," vol. ii. p. 397.

^171:3 There were three Wei dynasties, all in the north of China: (1) Northern Wei, 386-534; (2) Western Wei, 534-557; (3) Eastern Wei, 534-550.