Some books held by particular
sects as holy scripture were composed in Japan itself, the very books
themselves being worshipped. Nevertheless those who are apparently
farthest away from primitive Buddhism, claim to understand Buddha most
clearly.
The Standard Doctrinal Work.
One of the most famous of books, honored especially by several of the
later and larger sects in Japan, and probably the most widely read and
most generally studied book of the canon, is the Saddharma Pundarika.[2]
Professor Kern, who has translated this very rhetorical work into
English, thinks it existed at or some time before 250 A.D., and that in
its most ancient form it dates some centuries earlier, possibly as early
as the opening of the Christian era. It has now twenty-seven chapters,
and may be called the typical scripture of Northern Buddhism. It is
overflowingly full of those sensuous images and descriptions of the
Paradise, in which the imagination of the Japanese Buddhist so revels,
and in it both rhetoric and mathematics run wild. Of this book, "the
cream of the revealed doctrine," we shall hear often again. It is the
standard of orthodoxy in Japanese Buddhism, the real genius of which is
monastic asceticism in morals and philosophical scepticism in religion.
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