making of text-books and in descriptive lore, the pens of many priests
have been busy.[46] The earliest biography written in Japan was of
Sh[=o]toku, the great lay patron of Buddhism. In the ages of war the
monastery was the ark of preservation amid a flood of desolation.

The temple schools were early established, and in the course of
centuries became at times almost coextensive with the empire. Besides
the training of the neophytes in the Chinese language and the
vernacular, there were connected with thousands of temples, schools in
which the children, not only of the well-to-do, but largely of the
people, were taught the rudiments of education, chiefly reading and
writing. Most of the libraries of the country were those in monasteries.
Although it is not probable that K[=o]b[=o] invented the Kana or common
script, yet it is reasonably certain that the bonzes[47] were the chief
instrument in the diffusion and popularization of that simple system of
writing, which made it possible to carry literature down into the homes
of the merchant and peasant, and enabled even women and children to
beguile the tedium of their lives. Thus the people expanded their
thoughts through the medium of the written, and later of the printed,
page.[48] Until modern centuries, when the school of painters, which
culminated in Hok[)u]sai and his contemporaries, brought a love of art
down to the lowest classes of the people, the only teacher of pictorial
and sculptural art for the multitude, was Buddhism. So strong is this
popular delight in things artistic that probably, to this passion as
much as to the religious instinct, we owe many of the wayside shrines
and images, the symbolical and beautifully prepared landscapes, and
those stone stairways which slope upward toward the shrines on the
hill-tops. In Japan, art is not a foreign language; it is vernacular.

Thus, while we gladly point out how Buddhism, along the paths of