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It is a singular fact that though many of the earlier BuddhistScriptures have been translated by competent scholars, comparativelylittle attention has been paid to later Buddhist devotionalwritings, and this although the developments of Buddhism in Chinaand Japan give them the deepest interest as reflecting the spiritualmind of those two great countries. They cannot, however, beunderstood without some knowledge of the faith which passed soentirely into their life that in its growth it lost some of its owninfant traits and took on others, rooted, no doubt, in thebeginnings in India, but expanded and changed as the features of thechild may be forgotten in the face of the man and yet perpetuate theunbroken succession of heredity. It is especially true that Japancannot be understood without some knowledge of the Buddhism of theGreater Vehicle (as the developed form is called), for it was theinfluence that moulded her youth as a nation, that shaped heraspirations, and was the inspiration of her art, not only in thewritten word, but in every art and higher handicraftsmanship thatmakes her what she is. Whatever centuries may pass or the futurehold in store for her, Japan can never lose the stamp of Buddhism inher outer or her spiritual life.
The world knows little as yet of the soul of Mahayana Buddhism,though much of its outer observance, and for this reason a crucialinjustice has been done in regarding it merely as a degraded form ofthe earlier Buddhism—a rank off-shoot of the teachings of theGautama Buddha, a system of idolatry and priestly power from whichthe austere purity of the earlier faith has passed away.
The truth is that Buddhism, like Christianity, in every countrywhere it has sowed its seed and reaped its harvest, developed alongthe lines indicated by the mind of that people. The Buddhism ofJapan differs from that of Tibet as profoundly as the Christianityof Abyssinia from that of Scotland—yet both have conserved theessential principle.
Buddhism was not a dead abstraction, but a living faith, and ittherefore grew and changed with the growth of the mind of man,enlarg