Sometimes it
was even of bronze with gilded crests and Sanskrit monograms,
surmounted, it may be, with tablets of painted or stained wood, on which
were Chinese letters glittering with gold. This departure from the
primitive idea of using only the natural trunks of trees, "somewhat on
the principle of Exodus, 20:25,"[32] was a radical one in the ninth
century. The elongated barrels with iron hoops, or the riveted
boiler-plate and stove-pipe pattern, in this era of Meiji is a still
more radical and even scandalous innovation.
Shint[=o] Buried in Buddhism.
So complete was the victory of Riy[=o]buism, that for nearly a thousand
years Shint[=o] as a religion, except in a few isolated spots, ceased
from sight and sank to a mere mythology or to the shadow of a mythology.
The very knowledge even of the ancient traditions was lost in the
Buddhaized forms in which the old stories[33] were cast, or in the
omnipresent ritual of the Buddhist tera.
Yet, after all, it is a question as to which suffered most, Buddhism or
Shint[=o]. Who can tell which was the base and which was the true metal
in the alloy that was formed? The San Kai Ri shows how superstitious
manifold became imbedded in Buddhism. It was not alone through the
Shingon sect, which K[=o]b[=o] introduced, that this Yoga or union came.
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