Magians, Christians, Manichaeans, three rivals, and the old enemies to boot, Confucianism and Taoism. With Kaotsu and Taitsung on the throne of the united empire, and putting down Buddhist monasteries with a strong hand, things looked very dark indeed for the Chinese Mahayana. Hiouen Thsang was the man who saved it in this crisis. Born in 602, and admitted to the priesthood in 622, Hiouen Thsang determined to travel to India and collect accurate information and materials from the original home of Buddhism for the defence of the faith which he saw threatened from within and from without. It is quite possible that he mistrusted the Central Asian traditions.

[paragraph continues] Starting in 629, he made a tour of such Buddhist countries in Central Asia as had not yet fallen a prey to the Arabs, and in India, where he was royally treated by the great king Siladitya Harsha, one of the last of its Buddhist sovereigns. When he returned to China, the movement hostile to Buddhism had for the time spent its strength, and when, about 646, he published translations of some of the new books he had brought with him, the Emperor himself deigned to write a preface.

Hiouen Thsang, the Max Muller of his day, was in direct relations with Japan. In 655, about the time of the accession of the Empress Saimei, a priest from Kawachi, a Sozu of the name of Doso, went over to China with the ambassadors sent to announce the new sovereign's accession, and there, meeting with Hiouen Thsang, learnt from him the Hosso or Dharma-lakshana doctrines, which the great doctor was preaching. Five years later, in the same reign, two more priests, Chitsu and Chitatsu, crossed to China in a ship of Shiragi, and were initiated into the Hosso mysteries by Hiouen Thsang and his coadjutor Jion daishi. In the third year of Taiho (704), another batch of these priests went to China, armed with letters from their sovereign, and studied the doctrines

of the Unity (Yuishiki) under Chisho Daishi. Thus three distinct strains of Hosso teachings came to Japan, and blended there, and though the Hosso sect, qua sect, disappeared shortly after the close of the Nara age, it left permanent traces in the religious history of the country. For Doso and Chitatsu had as their principal disciple the celebrated Gyogi Bosatsu to whom is attributed the invention of the Ryobu Shinto, which made it possible for Buddhism to strike deep roots in the religious consciousness of Japan.

If we trace back this teaching to its earliest origin we shall see what it meant, and how powerfully it was likely to affect the situation in Japan. We shall also see, incidentally, how far the Mahayana had by this time travelled from the simplicity of S'akyamuni's teachings.