Shoko's successor, Go-Hanazono (1429-1465) had a long reign of thirty-six years entirely filled with civil wars. The great families of Hosokawa, Hatakeyama, Yamana, Shiba, etc., were engaged in a constant scramble for territories, power, and wealth. The Shogun Yoshimasa, who lived in luxury in his palace at Muromachi, added fuel to the fire by a high-handed act which produced a schism in his own family. He had been for a long time childless, and, an heir being imperatively necessary, had adopted his own younger brother Gijin, whom he took from a monastery for the purpose. The next year, however, a son was born to him, and he then proposed to disinherit Gijin and send him back to the monastery. But Gijin, having tasted the sweets of secular life, refused to go, and the distracted state of the country made an appeal to arms seem an obvious remedy. The Civil War which followed is known in Japanese history as the Onin no tairan. It lasted for over ten years (1467-1477); then, after a short interval, broke out afresh at the death of Yoshimasa, after which it raged for an unbroken century. When the

[paragraph continues] Emperor Go-Hanazono's son, Go-Tsuchimikado, died in A.D. 1500, his corpse remained unburied for forty days, because there was not, in the Imperial Palace, the money with which to bury him. Such was the poverty to which the Imperial House was reduced.

Go-Kashiwabara reigned from 1501 to 1527. The fighting was still going on, but a few of the more enterprising daimyos, the Mori, the Shimazu, the Otomo, the Hojo of Odawara, and others, were organizing their territories into semi-independent states, and a few well-administered daimyates here and there stood out like oases in the wilderness of confusion and distress. In the succeeding reign, that of Go-Nara (1527-1558), the same kind of thing went on. Some of the great families, the Ouchi and the Hosokawa, etc., disappeared; whilst others, such as the Mori and the Hojo, increased in power and wealth. When the Emperor Go-Nara died, neither he nor the Ashikaga Shogun had any actual power. But Nobunaga was twenty-four years of age, Hideyoshi twenty-one, and Iyeyasu fifteen, and there was the first dawn of the Hope of Peace and Order. St. Francis Xavier and his band of Jesuits were in the country, and Christianity was being openly preached.

And what, we may ask, did Japanese Buddhism do, during this period of terrible misery, to alleviate the sufferings of the people and to bring about a better state of affairs?

It would seem as though its record throughout the thousand years of its existence in Japan had been nothing but a dismal chronicle of broken promises. How often have we not read, in the pages of this history, of distinguished and saint-like men, Shotoku, Kobo, Dengyo, Honen, Shinran, Nichiren, and the fathers of the Zen sects, who, moved by the afflictions of their times, set their hands