tive Japanese in their isolated island country felt the reflected glory of the new Chinese empire and awoke to a new awareness of the great land across the sea.
The start of the heavy flow of Chinese influence to Japan is usually dated about 552, the year when the Buddhist religion is said to have been officially introduced to the Yamato clan by a missionary from a kingdom in southern Korea. Actually, Buddhism had probably entered Japan even earlier, but this incident affords a convenient date to mark the time when the Japanese first started consciously to learn from the Chinese.
During the next few centuries Buddhism served as an important vehicle for the transmission of Chinese culture to Japan. Buddhism is by origin an Indian religion. It had slowly spread to China and had won a place of importance in Chinese culture during the troubled era between the two great empires. It was a vigorous missionary religion at that time, and missionary zeal carried it beyond China to Korea and from there to Japan. Korean, Chinese, and even occasional Indian priests came to Japan from the sixth to eighth centuries. In turn, scores of Japanese converts went to China to learn more of the new faith. Returning from the continent, these Japanese student priests, even more than foreign missionary teachers, took the lead in transmitting to Japan the new religion and many other aspects of Chinese civilization. They were the true pioneers in planting and nurturing in Japan the borrowed culture of China.
In the second half of the sixth century Buddhism and other new influences from abroad so affected the Yamato clan that clashes broke out between factions