It was in India a period of religious strife and confusion. The Hindus were protesting, vigorously and successfully, against Mahayana and Hinayana alike, and were gradually absorbing into their own systems all that was good in the Buddhist religion. A great opposition (we might better call it a persecution ) was being raised against the "sons of S'akyamuni," and many Buddhist priests found it convenient to leave India and seek refuge abroad. Many of them found their way to China, which was then divided into two rival kingdoms, of the north under the Wei, of the south under the Sung, with several minor principalities. Both dynasties favoured the Buddhist religion, partly, it may be presumed, for political reasons, and many embassies came from India and Central Asia to ask for the assistance of China, the leading Buddhist power in Asia. The prince of the Wei, like Shotoku Taishi, lectured publicly on Buddhism, but his Confucianist subjects observed that his Buddhist principles did not prevent him from waging an active war against the neighbouring principality of the Liang. In the early years of the sixth century it was estimated

that there were over three thousand refugee Indian missionaries at work in China. It was observed with concern that there was a tremendous multiplication of Mahayana books, many of them evidently spurious, and the rapid spread of magical arts among the Buddhists was very rightly viewed as a matter of very ill omen. The early "harmonists" (as they may be called) were trying to bring order out of the chaos by constructing schemes of S'akyamuni's life and ministry which might embrace the whole of this wide cycle of doctrines and scriptures. The predecessors of Chisha Daishi, the founder of the Chinese Tendai, were already hard at work in framing their philosophy of religion. But the temporal authorities of the time had other and more drastic measures. In A.D. 515 the rulers of the Wei put to death a number of Chinese Buddhist priests for practising magical arts; in 518 the Wei Government dispatched two commissioners to India to report on religion and bring back authentic books; and in 526 Bodhidharma arrived to put things in order.

Bodhidharma was no ordinary priest. He was esteemed amongst the Buddhists as the twenty-eighth Patriarch of their Church, as the legitimate successor of the first Apostles of S'akyamuni, the rightful occupant of the chair in which Mahakas'yapa had sat in the first Council immediately after the Master's death. Troubles in India had undoubtedly something to do with Bodhidharma's visit to China; but, apart from that, he had undoubtedly also come to fulfil a mission of reform. His visit to China had very much the same significance as would have that of an Archbishop of Canterbury who should undertake a "mission of help" to the Anglican Missions in Japan.

He was a man of strong will and character. He did