dhist monasteries themselves led in establishing these new contacts with China, sponsoring trading ventures overseas with a view to obtaining funds for the erection of new buildings. Many fine thirteenth and fourteenth century temples were to some extent paid for by such trading ventures, as was also the beautiful “Great Buddha” at Kamakura, erected in the second half of the thirteenth century and said still to be the largest bronze statue in the world.
Buddhism came to China as a highly intellectualized philosophy with rich and colorful religious ceremonials that appealed to the upper classes, but during the T’ang and post-T’ang periods a growing emphasis on the less austere and more popular philosophic concepts of Buddhism led to a general philosophic reorientation and popularization which made it increasingly a religion of the people.
Early Indian Buddhism stressed the evil and vanity of human existence. It held out little hope for improving man’s lot in this world but centered its interest primarily on what it called “release from the cycle of rebirth.” The Buddhists accepted the common Indian belief that the individual is born again and again into this world. He may be born into a better state or a worse one, depending on the sort of life he lives in each successive rebirth. This process goes on endlessly unless the individual realizes that his own desire for things that cannot really satisfy him brings about his repeated rebirth into an incurably evil world: the only way to escape “the cycle of rebirth” is to overcome all desire. One who has done this has attained nirvana, a state of mind in which one is indifferent to life’s trials and