Then grew up whole forests of monasteries and temples,
with an outburst of devilish art representing many-headed and many-eyed
and many-handed idols on the walls, on books, on the roadside, with
manifold charms and phrases the endless repetitions of which were
supposed to have efficacy with the hypothetical being who filled the
heavens. That was _the_ age of idols for China as well as for India; and
the old Chinese house, once empty, swept and garnished by Confucianism,
was now filled with a mob of unclean spirits each worse than the first.
With more courageous logic than the more matter-of-fact Chinese, the
Tibetan erected his prayer-mills[29] and let the winds of heaven and the
flowing waters continually multiply his prayers and holy syllables. And
these inventions were duly imported into Japan, and even now are far
from being absent.[30]
Passing over for the present the history of Buddhism in China,[31]
suffice it to say that the Buddhism which entered Japan from Korea in
the sixth century, was not the simple atheism touched with morality, the
bald skepticism or benevolent agnosticism of Gautama, but a religion
already over a thousand years old. It was the system of the Northern
Buddhists. These, dissatisfied, or unsatisfied, with absorption into a
passionless state through self-sacrifice and moral discipline, had
evolved a philosophy of religion in which were gods, idols and an
apparatus of conversion utterly unknown to the primitive faith.
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