the sect had been perfected by the fifth
patriarch and he lectured on the sutra, rays of white light came from
his mouth, and there rained wonderful heavenly flowers. In A.D. 736 a
Chinese Vinaya teacher or instructor in Buddhist discipline, named
D[=o]-sen, first brought the Kegon scriptures to Japan. Four years later
a Korean priest gave lectures on them in the Golden-Bell Hall of the
Great Eastern Monastery at Nara. He completed his task of expounding the
sixty volumes in three years. Henceforth, lecturing on this sutra became
one of the yearly services of the Eastern Great Monastery.

"The Ke-gon sutra is the original book of Buddha's teachings of his
whole life. All his teachings therefore sprang from this sutra. If we
attribute all the branches to the origin, we may say that there is no
teaching of Buddha for his whole life except this sutra."[15] The title
of the book, when literally translated, is
Great-square-wide-Buddha-flower-adornment-teaching--a title sufficiently
indicative of its rhetoric. The age of hard or bold thinking was giving
way to flowery diction, and the Law was to be made easy through fine
writing.

The burden of doctrine is the unconditioned or realistic, pantheism.
Nature absolute, or Buddha-tathata, is the essence of all things.
Essence and form were in their origin combined and identical. Fire and
water, though phenomenally different, are from the point of view of
Buddha-tathata absolutely identical. Matter and thought are one--that is
Buddha-tathata. In teaching, especially the young, it must be remembered
that the mind resembles a fair page upon which the artist might trace a
design, especial care being needed to prevent the impression of evil
thoughts, in order to accomplish which one must completely and always
direct the mind to Buddha.[16] One notable sentence in the text is,
"when one first raises his thoughts toward the perfect knowledge, he at
once becomes fully enlightened."

In some parts of the metaphysical discussions of this sect we are
reminded of European mediaeval scholasticism, especially of that
discussion as to how many angels could dance on the point of a cambric
needle without jostling each other. It says, "Even at the point of one
grain of dust, of immeasurable and unlimited worlds, there are
innumerable Buddhas, who are constantly preaching the Ke-gon ki[=o]
(sutra) throughout the three states of existence, past, present and
future, so that the preaching is not at