It is also supposed to be one of the richest
and most powerful of all the Japanese sects. In reality, however, it
possesses no fixed property, and is dependent entirely upon the
voluntary contributions of its adherents. To-day, it is probably the
most active of them all in education, learning and missionary operations
in Yezo, China and Korea.
Interesting as is the development of the J[=o]-d[=o] and Shin sects,
which became popular largely through their promulgation of dogmas
founded on the Western Paradise, we must not forget that both of them
preached a new Buddha--not the real figure in history, but an unhistoric
and unreal phantom, the creation and dream of the speculator and
visionary. Amida, the personification of boundless light, is one of the
luxuriant growths of a sickly scholasticism--a hollow abstraction
without life or reality. Amidaism is utterly repudiated by many Japanese
Buddhists, who give no place to his idol on their altars, and reject
utterly the teaching as to Paradise and salvation through the merits of
another.
Yet these two special developments by natives, though embodying
tendencies of the Japanese mind, did not reach the limit to which
Northern Buddhism was to go in those almost incredible lengths, which
prompted Professor Whitney[19] to call it "the high-faluting school,"
and which we have seen in our own time under the cultivation of western
admirers.
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