over a thousand years, and antedated the general spread of Confucianism by many centuries. Coming in long before literature, as such, had made any headway in the peninsula, Buddhism took a firm hold upon all ranks of society, determined the mould into which the thought of the nation should be poured, and gained an ascendency over the Korean imagination which has never been successfully disputed. It is probable that at the present time three stories hinge upon Buddhism, where one draws its motive from Confucian principles. The former cult entered Korea about three centuries after Christ, but it was not until 1 100 A. D. that there was any serious rivalry between it and Confucianism. By that time Buddhism had moulded Korean fancy to its own shape, and had constituted itself some sort of substitute for genuine religion ; but Confucianism never went deeper than the reason, and so the former cult, by the priority of its occupancy and by its deeper touch, made an impression that the latter code of morals has never been able to efface.
Another cause of the survival of Buddhistic ideas, especially in folk-lore, even after Confucianism became nominally the state religion, was that the latter gave such an inferior place to women. Buddhism makes no such invidious comparisons. The very nature of the cult forbids it, and Korean history is full of incidents showing that women were equal sharers in what were believed to be the benefits of religion. Confucianism, on the other hand, gave woman a subordinate place, afforded no outlet to her religious aspirations, and made child-bearing her only service. It is a literary cult, a scholastic religion, and women are debarred from its most sacred arcana. They retorted by clinging the closer to Buddhism, where they found food for their devotional instincts, albeit the superstition was Egyptian in its darkness. In this they were not opposed. Confucianism, the man's religion, seemed to fancy that by letting despised woman grovel in the darkness its own prestige would be enhanced. The fact remains that one of the most striking peculiarities about Korean society to-day is that while the men are all nominal Confucian
