ng the educated man of
Japan a creed, made him break away from Buddhism and despise it, while
becoming often fanatically Confucian.

For a thousand years (from 600 to 1600 A.D.) the Buddhist religious
teachers assisted in promulgating the ethics of Confucius; for during
all this time there was harmony between the various Buddhisms imported
from India, Tibet, China and Korea, and the simple undeveloped system of
Chinese Confucianism. Slight modifications were made by individual
teachers, and emphasis was laid upon this or that feature, while out of
the soil of Japanese feudalism were growths of certain virtues as phases
of loyalty, phenomenal beyond those in China. Nevertheless, during all
this time, the Japanese teachers of the Chinese ethic were as students
who did but recite what they learned. They simply transmitted, without
attempting to expand or improve.

Though the apparatus of distribution was early known, block printing
having been borrowed from the Chinese after the ninth century, and
movable types learned from the Koreans and made use of in the sixteenth
century,[1] the Chinese classics were not printed as a body until after
the great peace of Genna (1615). Nor during this period were
translations made of the classics or commentaries, into the Japanese
vernacular. Indeed, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries there was
little direct intercourse, commercial, diplomatic or intellectual,
between Japan and China, as compared with the previous eras, or the
decades since 1870.

Suddenly in the seventeenth century the intellect of Japan, all ready
for new surprises in the profound peace inaugurated by Iyeyas[)u],
received, as it were, an electric thrill. The great warrior, becoming
first a unifier by arms and statecraft, determined also to become the
architect of the national culture. Gathering up, from all parts of the
country, books, manuscripts, and the appliances of intellectual
discipline, he encouraged scholars and stimulated education. Under his
supervision the Chinese classics were printed, and were soon widely
circulated. A college was established in Yedo, and immediately there
began a critical study of the texts and principal commentaries. The fall
of the Ming dynasty in China, and the accession of the Manchiu Tartars,
became the signal for a great exodus of learned Chinese, who fled to
Japan. These received a warm welcome, both at the capital and in Yedo,
as well as in some of the castle towns of t