THE EARLY ERAS OF HISTORY
trative title was that they interceded with the gods for the people they governed. All their principal traditions and temporal interests should have dictated the rejection of a creed which preached the supremacy of a new god and took no cognisance of their divine descent. It would have been in accord with the nature of political evolution that the people should have espoused the doctrines of a faith which absolved them from allegiance to their rulers, but how can the fact be explained that the rulers themselves patronised a creed which annulled their sovereign title? During the first century and a half after the introduction of Buddhism, that question does not seem to have troubled anyone in ancient Japan. If it was sometimes urged that the tutelary deities might be offended by the worship of a strange god, all manifestations of their umbrage were associated with the people's welfare, not with the sovereign's titles, and no one seems to have thought it necessary to assert the divinity of the Mikado against the alien theocracy.[1] When the Prime Minister, Soga no Umako, caused the Emperor Sujun to be assassinated (592 a. d.), Prince Shotoku justified the act by explaining that the sovereign's death had been in accordance with the Buddhist doctrine which condemns a man to suffer in this life for sins committed in a previous state of existence. Thus, only forty years after the introduction of Buddhism, the
- ↑ See Appendix, note 14.
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