Kublai was the first of the Mongol rulers who formally adopted Buddhism as his own personal religion. It is to him that the world owes that peculiar institution, the Dalai Lama, the Supreme Pope of the Thibetan and Mongolian Buddhists. The first Dalai Lama was appointed in 1261, not long after the visit of the Franciscan ambassadors from the Court of Rome. Imitation is very often the sincerest form of flattery. But the Dalai Lama and the Lamaist form of Buddhism has nothing to do with the Japanese Mahayana. We may therefore content ourselves with the bare mention of the fact of the institution. Kennyo Shonin, one of Shinran's successors in the fifteenth

century, is credited with having harboured designs of establishing something very much like it in Japan for his own benefit.

It is of distinct importance for the student to keep in mind the Buddhist conception of the three "millenniums," the last of which is to witness the decay of the Faith taught by S'akyamuni. There is a tendency to shirk the obvious conclusions of the doctrine as at first enunciated, by expanding the third millennium to a period of two or even ten thousand years. It is a tendency caused by fear. Buddhists not unnaturally dread the coming of the time when their faith shall disappear. There is another way of looking at the question. If it should disappear it will do so only to make room for something better, and that "something better" is what the whole world is prepared to welcome. I shall refer to it again in my concluding chapter.

Footnotes

^329:1 "Seigoroku."

^330:1 H. E. Parker.

^330:2 I have consulted D'Ohsson's "Histoire des Mongols," Karamsin's "History of the Russian Empire" (German trans.), and Black, "Proselytes of Ishmael."

^330:3 It has pleased certain Japanese writers to identify Genghis Khan with Yoshitsune, the popular hero of the Minamoto, who disappears from Japanese history in the year 1189, at the age of thirty-one. No proof can be given for the assumption. It is made to rest on the Sinico-Japanese reading of the name Minnamoto Yoshitsune, which is Gen Gikyo, a fair approximation to Genghis Khan. Yoshitsune certainly had the same adventurous spirit that is to be found in Gengis Khan and his descendants, and the suggested identification is a very flattering one to certain Japanese minds.

^334:1 Cf. D'Ohsson, "Histoire des Mongols," bk. ii. cap. 4, p. 208.

^334:2 Karamsin, "Geschichte des Russischen Reichs," vol. iv. cap. 1, pp. 33 ff.

^335:1 Ibid., vol. iv. cap. i. p. 30.

^335:2 The resemblance to Nichiren's initial and oft-repeated sermon is striking. There is also a general resemblance in the ecclesiastical policies of the Mongols and Japanese which should be kept in mind.

^336:1 Karamsin, op. cit., iv. 1.