Wisdom of the East | Page 2

in dim ages before the Gautama Buddha taught in India, and
have since rushed hundred-armed to the sun. Such is the religious
history of mankind, and Buddhism obeys its sequence.
The development of Mahayana Buddhism from the teaching of the
Gautama Buddha has been often compared with that of the Christian
faith from the Jewish, but it may be better compared with the growth of
a sacerdotal system from the simplicities of the Gospel of St. Mark.
That the development should have been on the same lines in all
essential matters of symbol and (in the most important respects) of
doctrine, modified only by Eastern habits of thought and environment,
is a miracle of coincidence which cannot be paralleled in the world
unless it be granted that Christianity filtering along the great trade
routes of an earlier world joined hands with Buddhism in many
unsuspected ways and places. Evidence is accumulating that this is so,
and in a measure at present almost incredible. And if it be so--if it be
true that in spite of racial distinctions, differences of thought and
circumstance, the religious thought of East and West has so many and
so great meeting-points, the hope of the world in things spiritual may
lie in the recognition of that fact and in a future union now shadowed
forth only in symbol and in a great hope. This, however, is no essay on
Buddhism, either earlier or later, and what I have said is necessary to
the introduction of these Jodo-Wasan, or Psalms of the Pure Land,
which are a part not only of the literature, but also of the daily worship
and spiritual life of Japan. Their history may be briefly told.
Buddhism passed into Japan from China and Korea about 1320 years

ago, in or about the year A.D. 552. It adapted itself with perfect
comprehension to the ideals of the Japanese people, inculcating among
them the teachings of morality common to the great faiths with, in
addition, the spiritual unction, the passion of love and sympathy,
self-devotion, and compassion, in which Buddhism and Christianity are
alike pre-eminent. The negative side of Buddhism, with its passionless
calm and self-renunciation, is the only one that has been realised in the
West, and the teachings of Mahayana which have borne fruit and
flower, visible to all the world, of happiness, courtesy, kindliness in the
spiritual attitude of a whole people, have never received the honour
which was their due.
For with the Buddhist faith there came the germ of the belief that the
Gautama Buddha in his own grandeur bore witness to One Greater--the
Amitabha or Amida Buddha--that One who in boundless light abideth,
life of the Universe, without colour, without form, the Lover of man,
his Protector and Refuge. He may, He must be worshipped, for in Him
are all the essential attributes of Deity, and He, the Saviour of mankind,
has prepared a pure land of peace for his servants, beyond the storms of
life and death. This belief eventually crystallised and became a dogma
in the faith of the Pure Land, known in Japan as Jodo Shinshu, a faith
held by the majority of the Japanese people. It is a Belief which has
spread also in Eastern Siberia, many parts of China, Hawaii, and, in
fact, whereever the Japanese race has spread. And the man who stated
this belief for all time was Shinran Shonin, author of the Psalms here
presented.
He was born in the year A.D. 1175 near City-Royal--Kyoto, the ancient
capital of Japan. He was a son of one of the noblest families, in close
connection with the Imperial House, and had it not been for the passion
for truth and the life of the spirit which consumed him, his history
would have been that of the many other brilliant young men who sank
into mere courtiers--"Dwellers above the Clouds," as the royalties and
courtiers of the day were called among the people. But the clear air
above the clouds in which his spirit spread its wings was not that of
City-Royal, and the Way opened before him as it has opened before
many a saint of the Christian Church, for while still a child he lost both
his parents, and so, meditating on the impermanence of mortal life, and
seeing how the fashion of this world passes away, he abandoned his

title and became a monk in one of the noble monasteries whose
successors still stand glorious among the pine woods above Lake Biwa.
These were not only monasteries, but seats of learning, as in Europe in
the Middle Ages, and here the Doctrines were subjected to brilliant
analysis and logical subtleties which had almost superseded the living
faith. In that cold atmosphere the spirit of Shiran Shonin could not
spread its wings, though