Nine centuries after Gautama, Maitreya,[11] or the Buddha of
kindness, came down from the heaven of the Bodhisattva to the
lecture-hall in the kingdom in central India at the request of the
Buddhas elect, and discounted five shastras. After that two Buddhist
fathers who were brothers, composed many more shastras and cleared up
the meaning of the Mah[=a]yan[=a]. In 629 A.D., in his twenty-ninth
year, the famous Chinese pilgrim, Gen-j[=o] (Hiouen-thsang), studied
these shastras and sciences, and returning to China in 645 A.D., began
his great work of translation, at which he continued for nineteen years.
One of his disciples was the author of a hundred commentaries on sutras
and shastras. The doctrines of Gen-j[=o] and his disciples were at four
different times, from 653 to 712 A.D., imported into Japan, and named,
after the monasteries in which they were promulgated, the Northern and
Southern Transmission.
The Middle Path.
The burden of the teachings of this sect is subjective idealism. They
embrace principles enjoining complete indifference to mundane affairs,
and, in fact, thorough personal nullification and the ignoring of all
actions by its disciples. In these teachings, thought only, is real. As
we have already seen with the Ku-sha teaching, human beings are of three
classes, divided according to intellect, into higher, middle and lower,
for whom the systems of teachings are necessarily of as many kinds.
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