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.


The Nichiren Sect.


The Japanese mind runs to pantheism as naturally as an unpruned
grape-vine runs to fibre and leaves.

When Nichiren, the ultra-patriotic and ultra-democratic bonze, saw the
light in A.D. 1222, he was destined to bring religion not only down to
man, but even down to the beasts and to the mud. He founded the
Saddharma-Pundarika sect, now called Nichiren Shu.

Born at Kominato, near the mouth of Yedo Bay, he became a neophite in
the Shin-gon sect at the age of twelve, and was admitted into the
priesthood when but fifteen years old. Then he adopted his name, which
means Sun-lotus, because, according to a typical dream very common in
Korea and Japan, his mother thought that she had conceived by the sun