It was not until modern Confucian philosophy entered the Mikado's empire
in the seventeenth century, that hostile criticism and polemic tenets
denounced Buddhism, and declared it only fit for savages. This bitter
denunciation of Buddhism at the lips and hands of Japanese who had
become Chinese in mind, was all the more inappropriate, because Buddhism
had for over a thousand years acted as the real purveyor and disperser
of the Confucian ethics and culture in Japan. Such denunciation came
with no better grace from the Yedo Confucianists than from the Shint[=o]
revivalists, like Motooeri, who, while execrating everything Chinese,
failed to remember or impress upon his countrymen the fact, that almost
all which constituted Japanese civilization had been imported from the
Middle Kingdom.
Buddhism, in its purely doctrinal development, seems to be rather a
system of metaphysics than a true religion, being a conglomeration, or
rather perhaps an agglomeration, of all sorts of theories relating to
the universe and its contents. Its doctrinal and metaphysical side,
however, is to be carefully distinguished from its popular and external
features, for in its missionary development Buddhism may be called a
system of national improvement.
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