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Updated: June 17, 2025
But supposing that we had reliable returns of the whole population, how shall we proceed to apportion that among Confucianists, Taoists, and Buddhists? Confucianism is the orthodoxy of China. The common name for it is Ju Chiao, "the Doctrines held by the Learned Class," entrance into the circle of which is, with a few insignificant exceptions, open to all the people.
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.
For three centuries this system had already held sway over the intellect of China. For two centuries and a half it has dominated the minds of the Samurai so that the majority of them to-day, even with the new name Shizoku, are Confucianists so far as they are anything.
The literature of the Confucianists, which, as regards purity and utter absence of immoral suggestions, stands unrivalled by any other nation in the world, does not countenance prostitution in any form.... The laws and public opinion ... agree in keeping prostitution rigidly out of sight.
They sent out a force to waylay him; which surrounded him in the wilderness and held him besieged but unmolested for seven days. Food ran out, and the Confucianists were so enfeebled at last that they could hardly stand.
Further one should live frugally and not expend endless money on effete rites, as the Confucianists demanded. The expenditure on weddings and funerals under the Confucianist ritual consumed so much money that many families fell into debt and, if they were unable to pay off the debt, sank from the upper into the lower class.
Dr. Eitel, in concluding his discussion of this point in his "Lecture on Buddhism, an Event in History," says: "It is not too much to say that most Chinese are theoretically Confucianists, but emotionally Buddhists or Taoists.
The critic just quoted states that the pressing need of the times is that Buddhist ethics should be disentangled from Buddhist mythology. The great moralists of Japan have been Confucianists. Distinctively Japanese morality has derived its impulse from Confucian classics. A new spirit, however, is abroad among the Buddhist priesthood. Their preaching is increasingly ethical.
These injunctions of the Prophet had always been heeded, and down to our own days the hatred of Moslems for Christians, however bitter, had been as nothing compared with their loathing and contempt for "Idolaters" like the Brahmanist Hindus or the Buddhists and Confucianists of the Far East. The first symptom of a change in attitude appeared during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904.
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