For a thousand years (from 600 to 1600 A.D.) the Buddhist religious
teachers assisted in promulgating the ethics of Confucius; for during
all this time there was harmony between the various Buddhisms imported
from India, Tibet, China and Korea, and the simple undeveloped system of
Chinese Confucianism. Slight modifications were made by individual
teachers, and emphasis was laid upon this or that feature, while out of
the soil of Japanese feudalism were growths of certain virtues as phases
of loyalty, phenomenal beyond those in China. Nevertheless, during all
this time, the Japanese teachers of the Chinese ethic were as students
who did but recite what they learned. They simply transmitted, without
attempting to expand or improve.
Though the apparatus of distribution was early known, block printing
having been borrowed from the Chinese after the ninth century, and
movable types learned from the Koreans and made use of in the sixteenth
century,[1] the Chinese classics were not printed as a body until after
the great peace of Genna (1615). Nor during this period were
translations made of the classics or commentaries, into the Japanese
vernacular. Indeed, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries there was
little direct intercourse, commercial, diplomatic or intellectual,
between Japan and China, as compared with the previous eras, or the
decades since 1870.
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