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The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji by William Elliot Griffis
page 296 of 455 (65%)

Looking at early Japanese pictures with the eye of the historian, as
well as of the connoisseur of art, one will see that the first real
school of Japanese art was Buddhistic. The modern school of pictorial
art, named from the monkish phrase, Ukioyé--pictures of the Passing
World--is indeed very interesting to the western student, because it
seems to be more in touch with the human nature of the whole world, as
distinct from what is local, Chinese, or sectarian. Yet, casting a
glance back of the mediaeval Kano, Chinese and Yamato-Tosa styles, he
finds that Buddhism gave Japan her first examples of and stimulus to
pictorial art.[28] He sees further that instead of the monochrome of
Chinese exotic art, or the first rude attempts of the native pencil,
Buddhism began Japanese sculpture, carving and nearly every other form
of plastic or pictorial representation, in which are all the elements of
Northern Buddhism, as so lavishly represented, for example, in that
great sutra which is the book, _par excellence_, of Japanese Buddhism,
the Saddharma Pundarika.

Turning from text to art, we behold the golden lakes of joy, the
mountain of gems, the floating female angels with their marvellous
drapery and lovely faces, the gentle benignity of the goddesses of
mercy, the rays of light and the glory streaming from face and head of
the holy ones, the splendors of costume, the varied beauties of the
lotus, the hosts of ministering intelligences, the luxuriant symbolism,
the purple clouds, the wheel of the law, the swastika[29] or double
cross, and the vagra,[30] or diamond trefoil. All that color, perfume,
sensuous delights, art and luxury can suggest, are here, together with
all the various orders of beings that inhabit the Buddhist universe; and
these are set forth in their fulness and detail. In the six conditions
of sentient existence are devas or gods, men, asuras or monsters, pretas
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