stimulated traffic and the exchange of merchandise; they created the
commerce between Japan and China; and they acted as peacemakers and
mediators in the wars between the Japanese and Koreans. For centuries
they had the monopoly of high learning. In the dark middle ages when
civil war ruled, they were the only scholars, clerks, diplomatists,
mediators and peacemakers.

Japanese diet became something new under the direction of the priests.
The bonzes taught the wickedness of slaughtering domestic animals, and
indeed, the wrong of putting any living thing to death, so that kindness
to animals has become a national trait. To this day it may be said that
Japanese boys and men are, at least within the limits of their light,
more tender and careful with all living creatures than are those of
Christendom.[8] The bonzes improved the daily fare of the people, by
introducing from Korea and China articles of food hitherto unknown. They
brought over new seeds and varieties of vegetables and trees.
Furthermore, necessity being the mother of invention, not a few of the
shorn brethren made up for the prohibition of fish and flesh, by
becoming expert cooks. They so exercised their talents in the culinary
art that their results on the table are proverbial. Especially did they
cultivate mushrooms, which in taste and nourishment are good substitutes
for fish.

The bonzes were lovers of beauty and of symbolism. They planted the
lotus, and the monastery ponds became seats of splendor, and delights to
the eye. Their teachings, metaphysical and mystical, poetical and
historical, scientific and literary, created, it may be said, the
Japanese garden, which to the refined imagination contains far more than
meets the eye of the alien.[9] Indeed, the oriental imitations in earth,
stone, water and verdure, have a language and suggestion far beyond what