Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/176

ised teachers. Concerning this marked departure from the intolerance of the preceding three centuries two explanations are offered. One is that the Emperor having seen in a dream the image of a foreign god, his thoughts turned naturally to India, where the religion of Siddartha could then count its disciples by tens of millions. The other is that Ming's action was prompted by belief in a saying attributed to Confucius: "The people of the West have sages." But Confucius died more than five hundred years before this invitation to the disciples of Buddha, and it has not been explained why a dictum of the great teacher, disregarded through all that long interval, should have suddenly inspired active obedience. The source of the Chinese Emperor's momentous impulse remains, therefore, uncertain.

Under imperial patronage the Indian creed spread quickly among all classes of the Chinese people, and became, before the middle of the fourth century, the chief religion of the nation. Its own liberality must have helped Buddhism to disarm opposition, for its propagandists made no attempt to interfere with the State religion which formed the basis of the country's polity. In China, as at a later era in Japan also, they followed eclectic rather than exclusive lines, and they were further assisted by the fact that Confucianism, the ethical creed permeating China at the time of Buddhism's advent, did not concern itself about the supernatural, and thus presented no obstacle