We now come to Ieyasu (1542-1616), the founder of the Tokugawa line of Shoguns, the man who had the wisdom as well as the good fortune to be able to wait patiently until the nightingale sang to his tune. He was in a position to do so. Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had laboured at the unification of the Empire. Ieyasu had but one battle to fight: after Sekigahara, he was able to enter into the labours of his illustrious predecessors. His talents were shown in the wonderful administrative

machine which he constructed, and the minute care with which he provided for the transmission of the supreme power to his descendants of remote generations.

We need not here speak of his secular administration and reforms. Of his activities in the sphere of religion it may be said that, whilst disapproving of Christianity and mistrusting, nay disliking, the foreign missionary clergy, he never put a single one of them to death during the whole of his tenure of office. It was reserved for Iemitsu, his grandson, the third Shogun of the Tokugawa line, to become a persecutor, and Iemitsu was a very different person from his grandfather.

With regard to Buddhism, Ieyasu was in a position to make use of it for his own purposes, and ho did so with great success. Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had broken for ever the military power of the Buddhist monasteries. There was no fear of a new Hieizan, or Negoro, rising out of the ruins of the temples, and the sects whom the sword had spared, Hideyoshi had managed effectually to impoverish by his heavy imposts. Ieyasu was able to use the broken forces of the clergy for his own purposes. He encouraged the monks, and made of them a kind of religious police. For himself, he claimed to have been converted to the Tendai faith, and his great mausoleum at Nikko was entrusted to Tendai hands, as was also the great temple he erected at Uyeno Park. But the women of his household seem to have divided their attention between the Nichiren and Jodo, and the Jodo Temple of Zojoji was likewise of his founding.

But it is evident that his ideas of Buddhism were those of a reformer. The Confucianist school of Shushi, with its enlightened views of statesmanship and statecraft, was much encouraged, and it was Ieyasu's evident endeavour to graft this reformed Confucianism on to a

[paragraph continues] Buddhist stock, in the hopes of thereby producing a better variety of fruit. Many of the early leaders of this new Confucianism were Buddhist priests, and this was notably the case with Jigendaishi, the Abbot of the Great Temple at Uyeno, and the friend and counsellor of both Ieyasu and Iemitsu.