o]ist might quarrel as to his title, and divide,
even to anger, on minor points, they would both agree in letting the
common people take their pleasure, enjoy the festivals and merriment,
and preserve their reverence and worship.

(4) Still another spectator studied with critical interest the swaying
figure high in air. With a taste for archaeology, he admired the
accuracy of the drapery and associations. He was amused, it may be, with
occasional anachronisms as to garments or equipments. He knew that the
original of this personage had been nothing more than a human being, who
might indeed have been conspicuous as a brave soldier in war, or as a
skilful physician who helped to stop the plague, or as a civilizer who
imported new food or improved agriculture.

In a word, had this subject of the ancient Mikado lived in modern
Christendom, he might be honored through the government, patent office,
privy council, the admiralty, the university, or the academy, as the
case or worth might be. He might shine in a plastic representation by
the sculptor or artist, or be known in the popular literature; but he
would never receive religious worship, or aught beyond honor and praise.
In this swamping of history in legend and of fact in dogma, we behold
the fruit of K[=o]b[=o]'s work, Riy[=o]bu Buddhism.

K[=o]b[=o]'s Work Undone.

Buddhism calls itself the jewel in the lotus. Japanese poetry asks of
the dewdrop "why, having the heart of the lotus for its home, does it
pretend to be a gem?" For a thousand years Riy[=o]bu Buddhism was
received as a pure brilliant of the first water, and then the
scholarship of the Shint[=o] revivalists of the eighteenth century
exposed the fraudulent nature of the unrelated parts and declared that
the jewel called Riy[=o]bu was but a craftsman's doublet and should be
split apart. Only a splinter of diamond, they declared, crowned a mass
of paste. Indignation made learning hot, and in 1870 the cement was
liquefied in civil war. The doublet was rent asunder by imperial decree,
as when a lapidist melts the mastic that holds in deception adamant and
glass, while real diamond stands all fire short of the hydro-oxygen
flame. The Riy[=o]bu temples were purged of all Buddhist symbols,
furniture, equipment and personnel, and were made again to assume their
august and austere simplicity. In the eyes of the purely aesthetic
critic, this national purgation was Puritanical iconoclasm; in those of
the priest