JAPAN
lives of the "sons of heaven" were declared subject to its decrees. A century later, one of the Imperial Princes was ordered to commit suicide because he had struck a mendicant and clamorous priest. Only from the sufferings they inflicted on the people was the displeasure of the Shintô deities inferred. Twice their hostility to Buddhism was supposed to have been displayed by visitations of pestilence, and at last, during the reign of Shomu (724–748), when the enormous expenditure incurred on account of temple building and idol casting had so impoverished the people as to produce a famine with its usual sequel, pestilence, the Shintô disciples once again insisted that these calamities were the deities' protest against the strange faith. It was then that the great Buddhist priest Giyogi saved the situation by a singularly clever theory. He taught that the Sun Goddess, the chief of the Shintô deities, had been merely an incarnation of the Buddha, and that the same was true of all the members of the Shintô pantheon. The two creeds were thus reconciled, and as evidence of their union the Emperor caused a colossal idol to be set up, the celebrated Daibutsu (great Buddha) of Nara; the copper used for the body of the image representing the Shintô faith, the gold that covered it typifying Buddhism. This amalgamation was for the sake of the people's safety; it had nothing to do with rehabilitating the divine title of the sovereign. In the face of these facts,
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