the austere purity of the earlier faith has passed away.

The truth is that Buddhism, like Christianity, in every country
where it has sowed its seed and reaped its harvest, developed along
the lines indicated by the mind of that people. The Buddhism of
Japan differs from that of Tibet as profoundly as the Christianity
of Abyssinia from that of Scotland--yet both have conserved the
essential principle.

Buddhism was not a dead abstraction, but a living faith, and it
therefore grew and changed with the growth of the mind of man,
enlarging its perception of truth. As in the other great faiths, the
ascent of the Mount of Vision reveals worlds undreamed, and
proclaims what may seem to be new truths, but are only new aspects
of the Eternal. Japanese Buddhists still base their belief on the
utterances of the Buddhas, but they have enlarged their conception
of the truths so taught, and they hold that the new flower and fruit
spring from the roots that were planted in dim ages before the
Gautama Buddha taught in India, and have since rushed hundred-armed
to the sun. Such is the religious history of mankind, and Buddhism
obeys its sequence.

The development of Mahayana Buddhism from the teaching of the
Gautama Buddha has been often compared with that of the Christian
faith from the Jewish, but it may be better compared with the growth
of a sacerdotal system from the simplicities of the Gospel of
St. Mark. That the development should have been on the same lines in
all essential matters of symbol and (in the most important respects)
of doctrine, modified only by Eastern habits of thought and
environment, is a miracle of coincidence which cannot be paralleled