uddha himself. In later centuries,
successors of the founder compiled commentaries and reproclaimed the
teachings of this sect.

In A.D. 724 two Japanese priests went over to China, and having mastered
the Ris-shu doctrine, received permission to propagate it in Japan. With
eighty-two Chinese priests they returned a few years later, having
attempted, it is said, the journey five times and spent twelve years on
the sea. On their return, they received an imperial invitation to live
in the great monastery at Nara, and soon their teachings exerted a
powerful influence on the court. The emperor, empress and four hundred
persons of note were received into the Buddhist communion by a Chinese
priest of the Ris-shu school in the middle of the eighth century. The
Mikado Sh[=o]-mu resigned his throne and took the vow and robes of a
monk, becoming H[=o]-[=o] or cloistered emperor. Under imperial
direction a great bronze image of the Vairokana Buddha, or Perfection of
Morality, was erected, and terraces, towers, images and all the
paraphernalia of the new kind of Buddhism were prepared. Even the earth
was embroidered, as it were, with sutras and shastras. Symbolical
landscape gardening, which, in its mounds and paths, variously shaped
stones and lanterns, artificial cascades and streamlets, teaches the
holy geography as well as the allegories and hidden truths of Buddhism,
made the city of Nara beautiful to the eyes of faith as well as of
sight.

This sect, with its excellence in morality and benevolence, proved
itself a beautifier of human life, of society and of the earth itself.
Its work was an irenicon. It occupied itself exclusively with the higher
ethics, the higher meditations and the higher knowledge. Interdicting
what was evil and prescribing what was good, its precepts varied in
number and rigor according to the status of the disciple, lay or
clerical. It is by the observance of the _sila_, or grades of moral
perfection, that one becomes a Buddha. Besides making so powerful a
conquest at the southern capital, this sect was the one which centuries
afterward built the first Buddhist temple in Yedo. Being ordinary human
mortals, however, both monk and layman occasionally illustrated the
difference between profession and practice.

These three schools or sects, Ku-sha, J[=o]-jitsu, and Ris-shu, may be
grouped under the Hinayana or Smaller Vehicle, with more or less
affiliation with Southern Buddhism; the others now to be de