Chapter 45

RIYŌBU, OR MIXED BUDDHISM

[Footnote 1: Is not something similar frankly attempted in Rev. Dr. Joseph Edkins's The Early Spread of Religious Ideas in the Far East (London, 1893)?]

[Footnote 2: M.E., p. 252; Honda the Samurai, pp. 193-194.]

[Footnote 3: See The Lily Among Thorns, A Study of the Biblical Drama Entitled the Song of Songs (Boston 1890), in which this subject is glanced at.]

[Footnote 4: See The Religion of Nepaul, Buddhist Philosophy, and the writings of Brian Hodgson in The Phoenix, Vols. I., II., III.]

[Footnote 5: See Century Dictionary, Yoga; Edkins's Chinese Buddhism, pp. 169-174; T. Rhys Davids's Buddhism, pp. 206-211; Index of B.N., under Vagrasattwa; S. and H., pp. 85-87.]

[Footnote 6: T.J., p. 226; Kojiki, Introduction.]

[Footnote 7: See in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1893, a very valuable paper by Mr. L.A. Waddell, on The Northern Buddhist Mythology, epitomized in the Japan Mail, May 5, 1894.]

[Footnote 8: See Catalogue of Chinese and Japanese Paintings in the British Museum, and The Pictorial Arts of Japan, by William Anderson, M.D.]

[Footnote 9: Anderson's Catalogue, p. 24.]

[Footnote 10: S. and H., p. 415; Chamberlain's Hand-book for Japan; T.J.; M.E., p. 162, etc.]

[Footnote 11: The names of Buddhist priests and monks are usually different from those of the laity, being taken from events in the life of Gautama, or his original disciples, passages in the sacred classics, etc. Among some personal acquaintances in the Japanese priesthood were such names as Lift-the-Kettle, Take-Hold-of-the-Dipper, Drivelling-Drunkard, etc. In the raciness, oddity, literalness, realism, and close connection of their names with the scriptures of their system, the Buddhists quite equal the British Puritans.]

[Footnote 12: Kern's Saddharma-Pundarika, pp. 311, 314; Davids's Buddhism p. 208; The Phoenix, Vol. I., p. 169; S. and H., p. 502; Du Bose's Dragon, Demon, and Image, p. 407; Fuso Mimi Bukuro, p. 134; Hough's Corean Collections, Washington, 1893, p. 480, plate xxviii.]

[Footnote 13: Japan in History, Folk-lore and Art, pp. 86, 80-88; A Japanese Grammar, by J.J. Hoffman, p. 10; T.J., pp. 465-470.]

[Footnote 14: This is the essence of Buddhism, and was for centuries repeated and learned by heart throughout the empire:

"Love and enjoyment disappear, What in our world endureth here? E'en should this day it oblivion be rolled, 'Twas only a vision that leaves me cold." ]

[Footnote 15: This legend suggests the mediaeval Jewish story, that Ezra, the scribe, could write with five pens at once; Hearn's Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, pp. 29-33.]

[Footnote 16: Brave Little Holland, and What She Taught Us, p. 124.]

[Footnote 17: T.J., pp. 75, 342; Chamberlain's Hand-book for Japan, p. 41; M.E., p. 162.]

[Footnote 18: T.A.S.J., Vol. II., p. 101; S. and H., p. 176.]

[Footnote 19: It was for lifting with his walking-stick the curtain hanging before the shrine of this Kami that Arinori Mori, formerly H.I.J.M. Minister at Washington and London, was assassinated by a Shintō fanatic, February 11, 1889; T. J., p. 229; see Percival Lowell's paper in the Atlantic Monthly.]

[Footnote 20: See Mr. P. Lowell's Esoteric Shintō, T.A.S.J., Vol. XXI, pp. 165-167, and his "Occult Japan."]

[Footnote 21: S. and H., Japan, p. 83.]

[Footnote 22: See the Author's Introduction to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Boston, 1891.]

[Footnote 23: B.N., Index and pp. 78-103; Edkins's Chinese Buddhism, p. 169.]

[Footnote 24: Satow's or Chamberlain's Guide-books furnish hundreds of other instances, and describe temples in which the renamed kami are worshipped.]

[Footnote 25: S. and H., p. 70.]

[Footnote 26: M.E., pp. 187, 188; S. and H., pp. 11, 12.]

[Footnote 27: San Kai Ri (Mountain, Sea, and Land). This work, recommended to me by a learned Buddhist priest in Fukui, I had translated and read to me by a Buddhist of the Shin Shu sect. In like manner, even Christian writers in Japan have occasionally endeavored to rationalize the legends of Shintō, see Kojiki, p. liii., where Mr. T. Goro's Shintō Shin-ron is referred to. I have to thank my friend Mr. C. Watanabé, of Cornell University, for reading to me Mr. Takahashi's interesting but unconvincing monographs on Shintō and Buddhism.]

[Footnote 28: T.J., p. 402; Some Chinese Ghosts, by Lafcadio Hearn, p. 129.]

[Footnote 29: S. and H., Japan, p. 397; Classical Poetry of the Japanese, p. 201, note.]

[Footnote 30: The Japanese word Ryō means both, and is applied to the eyes, ears, feet, things correspondent or in pairs, etc.; _bu_ is a term for a set, kind, group, etc.]

[Footnote 31: Rein, p. 432; T.A.S.J., Vol. XXI., pp. 241-270; T.J., p. 339.]

[Footnote 32: The Chrysanthemum, Vol. I., p. 401.]

[Footnote 33: Even the Takétori Monogatari (The Bamboo Cutter's Daughter), the oldest and the best of the Japanese classic romances is (at least in the text and form now extant) a warp of native ideas with a woof of Buddhist notions.]

[Footnote 34: Mr. Percival Lowell argues, in Esoteric Shintō, T.A.S.J., Vol. XXI., that besides the habit of pilgrimages, fire-walking, and god-possession, other practices supposed to be Buddhistic are of Shintō origin.]

[Footnote 35: The native literature illustrating Riyōbuism is not extensive. Mr. Ernest Satow in the American Cyclopædia (Japan: Literature) mentions several volumes. The Tenchi Réiki Noko, in eighteen books contains a mixture of Buddhism and Shintō, and is ascribed by some to Shōtoku and by others to Kōbō, but now literary critics ascribe these, as well as the books Jimbetsuki and Tenshoki, to be modern forgeries by Buddhist priests. The Kogoshiui, written in A.D. 807, professes to preserve fragments of ancient tradition not recorded in the earlier books, but the main object is that which lies at the basis of a vast mass of Japanese literature, namely, to prove the author's own descent from the gods. The Yuiitsu Shintō Miyoho Yoshiu, in two volumes, is designed to prove that Shintō and Buddhism are identical in their essence. Indeed, almost all the treatises on Shintō before the seventeenth century maintained this view. Certain books like the Shintō Shu, for centuries popular, and well received even by scholars, are now condemned on account of their confusion of the two religions. One of the most interesting works which we have found is the San Kai Ri, to which reference has been made.]

[Footnote 36: T.J., p. 224.]

[Footnote 37: "Human life is but fifty years," Japanese Proverb; M.E., p. 107.]

[Footnote 38: Chamberlain's Classical Poetry of the Japanese, p. 130.]

[Footnote 39: S. and H., p. 416.]

[Footnote 40: Things Chinese, by J. Dyer Ball, p. 70; see also Edkins and Eitel.]

[Footnote 41: The Japan Weekly Mail of April 28, 1893, translating and condensing an article from the Bukkyō, a Buddhist newspaper, gives the results of a Japanese Buddhist student's tour through China--"Taoism prevails everywhere.... Buddhism has decayed and is almost dead."]

[Footnote 42: Vaisramana is a Deva who guarded, praised, fed with heavenly food, and answered the questions of the Chinese Dō-sen (608-907 A.D.) who founded the Risshu or Vinaya sect.--B.N., p. 25.]

[Footnote 43: Anderson, Catalogue, pp. 29-45.]

[Footnote 44: Some of those are pictured in Aimé Humbert's Japon Illustré, and from the same pictures reproduced by electro-plates which, from Paris, have transmigrated for a whole generation through the cheaper books on Japan, in every European language.]