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The Ultra-realism of Northern Buddhism. This is the Japanese name for that famous sutra, the Saddharma Pundarika, so often mentioned in these chapters but a thousand-fold more so in Japanese literature. The Ten-dai and the Nichiren sects are allied, in that both lay supreme emphasis upon this sutra; but the former interprets it with an intellectual, and the latter with an emotional emphasis.

In practice, however, the Saddharma Pundarika is the book most honored by this sect; the other sutras being employed mainly as commentary. Furthermore, this sect makes as strenuous a claim for the true apostolical succession from the Founder, as do the other sects. The teachers of Ten-dai doctrine must fully estimate character and ability in their pupils, and so apportion instruction.

"To the millions of China, Corea, and Japan, creator and creation are new and strange terms," J.H. De Forest. He that fully grasps the Divine Body of Sakyamuni, holds ever, even without the written Sutra, the inner Saddharma Pundarika in his hand. He ever reads it mentally, even though he would never read it orally. He is unified with it though he has no thought about it.

In the Japanese tongue, Ho-ke-kyo; in Sanscrit, Saddharma Pundarika: 'The Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law, the divine book of the Nichiren sect. Very brief, indeed, is my little feathered Buddhist's confession of faith only the sacred name reiterated over and over again like a litany, with liquid bursts of twittering between. 'Ho ke-kyo!

All this multiplication of beings is unknown to Southern Buddhism, unknown to the Saddharma Pundarika, and very probably unknown also to the Chinese pilgrims who visited India in the fifth and seventh centuries. Professor Rhys Davids, in his compact little manual of Buddhism, says:

Avalokitesvara, the Lord of View or All-sided One, is the personification of power, the merciful protector and preserver of the world and of men. Both are frequently and voluminously mentioned in the Saddharma Pundarika, in which the good law is made plain by flowers of rhetoric, and of which we shall have occasion frequently to speak.

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.

Nevertheless those who are apparently farthest away from primitive Buddhism, claim to understand Buddha most clearly. The Standard Doctrinal Work. One of the most famous of books, honored especially by several of the later and larger sects in Japan, and probably the most widely read and most generally studied book of the canon, is the Saddharma Pundarika.