It is to be noted here that the arts and letters of early medieval Japan are all Buddhist, or, at least, are so thoroughly impregnated and saturated with the spirit of that religion that it is impossible to understand their inner beauties without some knowledge of the Faith which inspired the artists. The Emperor Kwammu had moved his capital from Nara to Kyoto to be free from the intervention of the meddling priesthood in matters of State, and Dengyo had founded his monastery upon Hieizan in the hopes of finding a quiet spot where he might be free from "earth's many voices." The event was quite the opposite of what either of these men expected. The Tendai reforms turned Japanese Buddhism into a wide-spreading organization with far-reaching ramifications. The Fujiwaras knew how to use that organization for their own ends, and the Buddhist

priesthood in their hands became a political machine. The monks were the votaries of art and science; they composed the songs, painted the pictures, laid out the gardens, and designed the palaces in which the luxuriously trained court found its pleasures and forgot its feebleness, and when the captain of the ship, as sometimes happened, began to know too much, and to stir about on his soft cushions, some monastery would furnish a convenient desert island upon which the restless skipper might be marooned.

Sometimes a skipper, more long-headed than the rest, did not wait to be marooned, but shut himself up voluntarily in his own cabin, as it were, and continued to direct the ship of State, from the safe shelter of some monastery, through the person of some infant son or grandson, whom he put on the throne instead of himself, and for whom he acted as guardian or regent. Such was the course adopted, e.g., by the Emperors Shirakawa and Toba, and it seemed quite natural in a country like Japan, where the "power behind the throne" has always been so potent a reality. An ex-Emperor, living in a monastery, and from thence directing the affairs of State in the name of his immature son or grandson, would seem to be an ideal state of things from the point of view of an ambitious priesthood. But the Fujiwaras understood the principle of divide et impera. The Nara