Both sides appealed to him, and he was at a loss how to act. He resolved to steer clear of the controversy altogether, and went off on a series of missionary journeys throughout the land. His first journey was to the Kwanto districts, and right away to Shimotsuke and beyond. He was more than a mere preacher; he planned roads, suggested the making of bridges, encouraged agriculture and education, and simplified the writing of Japanese. The traveller will find his posthumous name of Kobo Daishi in all parts of the land: he was the Apostle of the North, and the pacification of the troublesome northern tribes was much facilitated by his efforts. When he returned to Kyoto, the Kaidan controversy was still raging. So he

went off touring again, and this time perambulated his native island of Shikoku. On his next visit to Kyoto, Saicho, now known as Dengyo Daishi, was dead, and Kobo felt that he could at last hope to publish his own views of Buddhist doctrine without running counter to those of the friend for whom he had so warm an affection. He retired in the year 816 to his new monastery at Koya San, in the province of Kii, and there wrote his "Sangoshiki," "Jujushinron," and the other treatises in which he develops his system. He died in 835, a venerable and venerated man. Buddhist Japan scarcely believes him to be dead even now. He is said to be sitting in his tomb in Mount Koya, waiting for Maitreya to come and convert the world. Then he will go forth from his place of waiting and join in the glory of victory.

In the first of the two works that I have just mentioned, the "Sangoshiki," Kobo Daishi works out a comparison of the three great religions of the East, as he understood them--Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. All three were to be found in the Japan of his day. Confucianism (of the ancient, unreformed variety) had been there longer than Buddhism, and the Confucian literati had joined hands with the Kami worshippers in opposing Buddhism, just as they had done with Taoism, in opposition to the same religion in China. The Shinto of Japan Kobo seems to have treated as almost identical with the Taoism of China (etymologically, the two words are the same), and with very good reason. The inter-

course between Japan and China had been going on for over three centuries, during which period much had come into Japan besides Buddhism and Confucianism. The original Kami-worship had been raised, as it were, into a system by the very fact of its early controversies with Buddhism, and Dr. De Visser has recently shown us how much of Taoism there lurks in the Shintoistic folklore of Japan. Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, formed in Kobo's mind the three legs of a tripod on which the cauldron of the State might securely rest. Only the Buddhism which he taught was not quite the same as that with which we have been hitherto dealing.