confessed that in practice there is not a little letter worship and a
good deal of pedantry; for, in all the teachings of abstract principles
by the different sects, there are endless puns or plays upon words in
the renderings of Chinese characters. This arises from that antithesis
of extreme poverty in sounds with amazing luxuriance in written
expression, which characterizes both the Chinese and Japanese languages.

In the temples we find that the later deities introduced into the
Buddhist pantheon are here also welcome, and that the triads or groups
of three precious ones, the "Buddhist trinity," so-called,[26] are
surrounded by gods of Chinese or Japanese origin. The Zen sect,
according to its professions and early history, ought to be indifferent
to worldly honors and emoluments, and indeed many of its devotees are.
Its history, however, shows how poorly mortals live up to their
principles and practise what they preach. Furthermore, these professors
of peace and of the joys of the inner life in the S[=o]-t[=o] or
sub-sect have made the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth years of Meiji, or
A.D. 1893 and 1894, famous and themselves infamous by their
long-continued and scandalous intestine quarrels. Of the three
sub-sects, those called Rin-zai and S[=o]-t[=o], take their names from
Chinese monks of the ninth century; while the third, O-baku, founded in
Japan in the seventeenth century, is one of the latest importations of
Chinese Buddhistic thought in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Japanese authors usually classify the first six denominations at which
we have glanced, some of which are phases of thought rather than
organizations, as "the ancient sects." Ten-dai and Shin-gon are "the
medieval sects." The remaining four, of which we shall now treat, and
which are more particularly Japanese in spirit and development, are "the
modern sects."