INTRODUCTION

BY L. ADAMS BECK

It is a singular fact that though many of the earlier Buddhist
Scriptures have been translated by competent scholars, comparatively
little attention has been paid to later Buddhist devotional
writings, and this although the developments of Buddhism in China
and Japan give them the deepest interest as reflecting the spiritual
mind of those two great countries. They cannot, however, be
understood without some knowledge of the faith which passed so
entirely into their life that in its growth it lost some of its own
infant traits and took on others, rooted, no doubt, in the
beginnings in India, but expanded and changed as the features of the
child may be forgotten in the face of the man and yet perpetuate the
unbroken succession of heredity. It is especially true that Japan
cannot be understood without some knowledge of the Buddhism of the
Greater Vehicle (as the developed form is called), for it was the
influence that moulded her youth as a nation, that shaped her
aspirations, and was the inspiration of her art, not only in the
written word, but in every art and higher handicraftsmanship that
makes her what she is. Whatever centuries may pass or the future
hold in store for her, Japan can never lose the stamp of Buddhism in
her outer or her spiritual life.

The world knows little as yet of the soul of Mahayana Buddhism,
though much of its outer observance, and for this reason a crucial
injustice has been done in regarding it merely as a degraded form of
the earlier Buddhism--a rank off-shoot of the teachings of the
Gautama Buddha, a system of idolatry and priestly power from which