Note (return) — Chapter VIII · - NORTHERN BUDDHISM IN ITS DOCTRINAL EVOLUTIONS

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.2 Professor Kern, who has translated this very rhetorical work into English, thinks it existed at or some time before 250 A.D., and that in its most ancient form it dates some centuries earlier, possibly as early as the opening of the Christian era. It has now twenty-seven chapters, and may be called the typical scripture of Northern Buddhism. It is overflowingly full of those sensuous images and descriptions of the Paradise, in which the imagination of the Japanese Buddhist so revels, and in it both rhetoric and mathematics run wild. Of this book, "the cream of the revealed doctrine," we shall hear often again. It is the standard of orthodoxy in Japanese Buddhism, the real genius of which is monastic asceticism in morals and philosophical scepticism in religion.