We must remember that, at the opening of the ninth century, the Buddhism
rampant in China and indeed throughout Chinese Asia was the Tantra
system of Yoga-chara.[5] This compound of polytheism and pantheism, with
its sensuous paradise, its goddess of mercy and its pantheon of every
sort of worshipable beings, was also equipped with a system of
philosophy by which Buddhism could be adapted to almost every yearning
of human nature in its lowest or its highest form, and by which things
apparently contradictory could be reconciled. Furthermore--and this is
not the least important thing to consider when the work to be done is
for the ordinary man as an individual and for the common people in the
mass--it had also a tremendous apparatus for touching the imagination
and captivating the fancy of the unthinking and the uneducated.
For example, consider the equipment of the Buddhist priests of the ninth
century in the matter of art alone. Shint[=o] knows next to nothing of
art,[6] and indeed one might almost say that it knows little of
civilization. It is like ultra-Puritanic Protestantism and Iconoclasm.
Buddhism, on the contrary, is the mother of art, and art is her
ever-busy child and handmaid. The temples of the Kami were bald and
bare.
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