The Zen, whose record has always been a good one, and whose tenets made the adoption of Confucianist notions comparatively easy, was much favoured by the half-philosophical, half-religious priests whom the policy of the early Tokugawas did so much to encourage. In 1654, a little while after the death of Iemitsu (1651), a celebrated priest was summoned from China to become the founder of a new and enlightened sect of the Zen. His name was Ingen, and the sect he founded is known as the Obaku, a small body, but always influential. It shows the practical character of the Buddhism which the Tokugawas tried to propagate that Ingen's sect adopted modern Chinese as the language in which the Buddhist Scriptures and services should be read. The great mass of the Buddhist worship is in a dead language, the Chinese of fifteen centuries ago; in the Obaku worship, the ordinary Sinico-Japanese of the modern literary style has been, as it were, consecrated to the purposes of religion.

One part of Nichiren's contention had been now fulfilled. He had said that but one Sun ruled in the Heavens, but one Lord in the religious world, but one Ruler in the Empire. The Empire had been unified, and there was but one Ruler. It is true that it was not yet the legitimate ruler, but the reign of the usurper seems to have been necessary for the welding together of the whole.

Our sympathies as Christians naturally go out to the heroic martyrs and confessors of that strangely interesting

period. They seem to have been only the pawns on the chessboard, played by the hands of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu. In our next chapter we shall see how the great men themselves were, after all, but the knights and castles on the same great chessboard of history, and that the Master Hand that played them was one far greater than they deemed Him to be when they set aside the testimony of His servants.

Footnotes

^351:1 For detailed information on this period, the student is referred to papers in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, by Sir Ernest Satow, Mr. Gubbins, the late Rev. J. Summers, and others. Also to the more recent histories, e.g. "Die Entwickelung des Christentums in Japan," by Dr. Haas, the "Christian Daimyos," by Father Steichen, and Murdoch and Yamagata's "History of Japan." Papinot's "Dictionnaire d'Histoire et de Geographie du Japon" gives very useful information.

^352:1 We read of the Jesuits sending some of their converts to Europe to show them the glories of the Catholic countries. But it was a dangerous remedy. One man, at least, went as a spy, got himself ordained, and then, returning to Japan, threw off the mask, and became one of the most determined enemies of the Jesuits. And Iyeyasu sent a special envoy of his own, a man named Nishi Soin (Murdoch, p. 495).