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Updated: June 2, 2025
This is the gospel which Confucianist and Buddhist, Hindu and Mohammedan, need to-day, and which, thank God, our missionaries are giving them. Burma is the land of pagodas. These places of worship are the most striking feature of every landscape.
Hayashi, who was then probably the leading Confucianist in Japan, warmly defended his countrymen and superiors against the charge of intentional cruelty, and denounced the lawless character of many of the foreign sailors.
In the time of Wen Ti and especially of his successors, the revival at court of the Confucianist ritual and of the earlier Heaven-worship proceeded steadily. The sacrifices supposed to have been performed in ancient times, the ritual supposed to have been prescribed for the emperor in the past, all this was reintroduced.
The new greater gentry of the eleventh century adopted a number of elements of this reactionary Buddhism and incorporated them in the Confucianist system. This brought into Confucianism a metaphysic which it had lacked in the past, greatly extending its influence on the people and at the same time taking the wind out of the sails of Buddhism.
Many a Confucianist, sturdy in his faith that "devils only exist for those who believe in them," will hesitate to visit by night a lonely spot, or even to enter a disused tumbledown building by day. Some of the stories told are certainly well fitted to make a deep impression upon young and highly-strung nerves.
Contemporaneous with these littérateurs was the renowned Ogyu Sorai, whose profound knowledge of finance and of administrative affairs in general made him of great value to the Bakufu. Special favour was shown to the renowned Confucianist, Hayashi Nobuatsu.
All the property of foreigners and a large part of the property of the Buddhist Church came into the hands of the government. The law was not applied to Taoism, because the ruling gentry of the time were, as so often before, Confucianist and at the same time Taoist.
The literary revolution introduced the language of daily life, the language of the people, into literature: newspapers, novels, scientific treatises, translations, appeared in the vernacular, and could thus be understood by anyone who could read and write, even if he had no Confucianist education. It may be said that the literary revolution has achieved its main objects.
One element in their preference of Buddhism was certainly the fact that Buddhism accepted all foreigners alike both the Toba and the Chinese were "foreign" converts to an essentially Indian religion; whereas the Confucianist Chinese always made the non-Chinese feel that in spite of all their attempts they were still "barbarians" and that only real Chinese could be real Confucianists.
In 213 B.C. there took place the great holocaust of books which destroyed the Confucianist writings with the exception of one copy of each work for the State Library. In the fighting at the end of the Ch'in dynasty the State Library was burnt down, so that many of the old works have only come down to us in an imperfect state and with doubtful accuracy.
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