ne, had
evolved a philosophy of religion in which were gods, idols and an
apparatus of conversion utterly unknown to the primitive faith.

Buddhism Already Corrupted when brought to Japan.

This sixth century Buddhism in Japan was not the army with banners,
which was introduced still later with the luxuriances of the fully
developed system, its paradise wonderfully like Mohammed's and its
over-populated pantheon. It was, however, ready with the necessary
machinery, both material and mental, to make conquest of a people which
had not only religious aspirations, but also latent aesthetic
possibilities of a high order. As in its course through China this
Northern Buddhism had acted as an all-powerful absorbent of local
beliefs and superstitions, so in Japan it was destined to make a more
remarkable record, and, not only to absorb local ideas but actually to
cause the indigenous religion to disappear.

Let us inquire who were the people to whom Buddhism, when already
possessed of a millenium of history, entered its Ultima Thule in Eastern
Asia. At what stage of mutual growth did Buddhism and the Japanese meet
each other?

Instead of the forty millions of thoroughly homogeneous people in
Japan--according to the census of December 31, 1892--all being loyal
subjects of one Emperor, we must think of possibly a million of hunters,
fishermen and farmers in more or less warring clans or tribes. These
were made up of the various migrations from the main land and the drift
of humanity brought by the ocean currents from the south; Ainos,
Koreans, Tartars and Chinese, with probably some Malay and Nigrito
stock. In the central part of Hondo, the main island, the Yamato tribe
dominated, its chief being styled Sumeru-mikoto, or Mikado. To the south
and southwest, the Mikado's power was only more or less felt, for the
Yamato men had a long struggle in securing supremacy. Northward and
eastward lay great stretches of land, inhabited by unsubdued and
uncivilized native tribes of continental and most probably of Korean
origin, and thus more or less closely akin to the Yamato men. Still
northward roamed the Ainos, a race whose ancestral seats may have been
in far-off Dravidian India. Despite the constant conflicts between the
Yamato people who had agriculture and the beginnings of government, law
and literature, and their less civilized neighbors, the tendency to
amalgamation was already strong. The problem of the statesman, was to
e