not stoop to flatter kings. When he first met the Emperor Wu of the Sung Dynasty, the Emperor began to speak of the good works that he had done. "I have built many temples," he said, "and endowed thousands of priests. What merit have I acquired?" "None at all," was the priest's blunt reply. The man who would thus address an Emperor was not likely to spare his own religious household. He sat in the Chair once occupied by As'vaghosha, Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, and the great Doctors whose names have come before us so often in the course of this history, but he would not recognize as genuine the many works that claimed to come from their pens. "You cannot get Buddhism from books," was his contention. "If you want Enlightenment you must get it as S'akyamuni did, as the great Kas'yapa did, as Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu did--by meditation. Books will only tell you about it--meditation and contemplation will procure it for you." And he established a discipline of contemplation which may be compared with the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.

[paragraph continues] Zazen, as the Japanese call it, is a very difficult course of contemplations, with suggestions from the spiritual director which furnish topics and hints, but no more. When the postulant has got through the course, he may have obtained Enlightenment, or he may not; he has, at any rate, gone through a course of mental discipline which has given him to some extent the mind of a soldier.

Such was the Buddhism which the Hojo Regents called to their aid when they were engaged in making Kamakura the military centre of a reformed Japan. The Contemplative Teaching had, it is true, been for some time in the country, under the name of the Busshinshu, or Sect of Buddha's Heart, but it had been too Puritanic to find favour with the courtiers of Nara or Kyoto. In the year 1201, when Yoriie, the son of Yoritomo, was Shogun, with his widowed mother Masako as the power behind the throne, and her father Hojo Masamune as Regent and Head of the Kamakura Bakufu, Eisai Zenshi, the founder of the Rinzai Sect of the Zen, was invited to establish himself, first in Kyoto at the Kenninji, and afterwards at Kenkoji in Kamakura. A few years later, between 1222 and 1232, Shoyo Daishi, or Dogen, as he was known to his contemporaries, founded the sister sect of the Soto which has its headquarters in the province of Echizen.

The Rinzai and the Soto, both of which came to Japan from the south of China, differ in this, that the former depends wholly and entirely on contemplation as the sole means of obtaining saving Enlightenment, while the latter adds the use of books as subsidiary aids. A translation of the chief manual used by the Zen will be found in the published transactions of the Oxford Congress of the