dhism, was himself a narrow nationalist, a forerunner of the nationalistic movement of modern times. To him Japan was the land of the gods and the center of the universe, and Japanese Buddhism was the only true Buddhism.
It is, indeed, a curious fact that the popular Buddhism of feudal Japan had in many ways come to resemble Christianity more than historic Buddhism. Reversing the basic pessimism of the early faith, it had come to stress a real after-life and salvation through faith. And the early feudal religious reformers, in their translations of the scriptures, their creation of lay congregations, their marriage of the clergy, their militant sectarianism, and their nascent nationalism, resembled to a surprising degree the Protestant reformers of Europe. These religious trends, coupled with the development of a feudal system which found much closer parallels in medieval Europe than in East Asia, make the early feudal period in Japan a time for startling comparisons with Europe and strong contrasts with other countries in the Far East.
While the lower classes were turning to the popular Buddhist sects for religious and intellectual expression, the warrior caste found a different answer to its religious and philosophic needs in still another Buddhist sect brought to Japan in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by Japanese monks returning to their homeland from study in China. This sect was known as Zen, a word meaning “meditation,” and it derived perhaps as much from native Chinese schools of mysticism as from the early Buddhist emphasis on meditation.
In Zen the emphasis was on being in harmony with