Such as we may glean, was Buddhism in its moral code and philosophical doctrines, it had almost nothing. An ecclesiastical system it was not in any sense. Its progress was rapid and remarkable. Though finally driven out of India, it swept through Burmah, Siam, China, Thibet, Manchuria, Korea, Siberia, and finally, after twelve centuries, entered Japan.
By this time the bare and bald original doctrines were glorious in the apparel with which Asiatic imagination and priestly necessity had clothed and adorned them. The ideas had been expanded into a complete theological system, with all the appurtenances of a stock religion.
General councils had been held, decrees had been issued, dogmas defined or abolished; Buddhism had emerged from philosophy into religion. The Buddhist missionaries entered Japan having a mechanism perfectly fitted to play upon the fears and hopes of an ignorant people, and to bring them into obedience to the new and aggressive faith.
If there was one country in which the success of Buddhism as a popular religion seemed foreordained, that country was Japan. It was virgin soil for anything that could be called a religion. Before Buddhism came, very little worthy of name existed. Day by day, each new ray of the light of research that now falls upon that gray dawn of Japanese history shows that Shinto was a pale and shadowy cult, and that the coming of Buddhism quickened it, by the force of opposition, into something approaching a religious system.
If the heart of the ancient Japanese longed after a solution of the question whence? whither? why? -- if it yearned for religious truth, as the hearts of all men doubtless do -- it must have been ready to welcome something more tangible than the emptiness of Shinto.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
