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Besides making so powerful a conquest at the southern capital, this sect was the one which centuries afterward built the first Buddhist temple in Yedo. Being ordinary human mortals, however, both monk and layman occasionally illustrated the difference between profession and practice. Dai-ryo Takashi of the Shin-gon sect, is the school which studies the nature of Dharmas or things.
The thinking-chairs, so conspicuous in many old monasteries, though warmed at intervals through the ages by the living bodies of men absorbed in contemplation, are rarely much worn by the sitters, because almost absolute cessation of motion characterizes the long and hard thinkers of the Shin-gon philosophers.
The idols in the Shin-gon temples represent many a saint and disciple, who, by perseverance in what a critic of Buddhism calls "mind-murder," and the use of mystic finger twistings and magic formulas, has won either the Nirvana or the penultimate stage of the Bodhisattva. In the sermons and discourses of Shin-gon, the subtle points of an argument are seized and elaborated.
Born at Kominato, near the mouth of Yedo Bay, he became a neophite in the Shin-gon sect at the age of twelve, and was admitted into the priesthood when but fifteen years old. Then he adopted his name, which means Sun-lotus, because, according to a typical dream very common in Korea and Japan, his mother thought that she had conceived by the sun entering her body.
Such have been the later associations, in India, China and Japan with the term mantra. The burden of the philosophy of the Shin-gon, looked at from one point of view, is mysticism, and from another, pantheism. One of the forms of Buddha is the principle of everything. There are ten stages of thought, and there are two parts, "lengthwise" and "crosswise" or exoteric and esoteric.
Japanese authors usually classify the first six denominations at which we have glanced, some of which are phases of thought rather than organizations, as "the ancient sects." Ten-dai and Shin-gon are "the medieval sects." The remaining four, of which we shall now treat, and which are more particularly Japanese in spirit and development, are "the modern sects."
Other doctrines of Buddhism represent the first, or exoteric stage; and those of the Shin-gon or true word, the second, or esoteric. The primordial principle is identical with that of Maha-Vairokana, one of the forms of Buddha.
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