Note (return) — Chapter VII · - RIYŌBU, OR MIXED BUDDHISM

We must remember that, at the opening of the ninth century, the Buddhism rampant in China and indeed throughout Chinese Asia was the Tantra system of Yoga-chara.5 This compound of polytheism and pantheism, with its sensuous paradise, its goddess of mercy and its pantheon of every sort of worshipable beings, was also equipped with a system of philosophy by which Buddhism could be adapted to almost every yearning of human nature in its lowest or its highest form, and by which things apparently contradictory could be reconciled. Furthermore—and this is not the least important thing to consider when the work to be done is for the ordinary man as an individual and for the common people in the mass—it had also a tremendous apparatus for touching the imagination and captivating the fancy of the unthinking and the uneducated.