THE EARLY ERAS OF HISTORY
and educationalists in the eighth century. The foundations of the national polity rested on the Shintô tenets that the sovereign was the son of heaven, that his intervention with the gods was essential to the well-being of the people, and that every unit of the nation must look up to him with the profoundest veneration. Confucian ethics, as expounded by Mencius, taught that the sovereign's title to rule rested entirely on his qualities as a ruler; that the people's welfare took precedence of the monarch's prerogatives, and that filial piety was the highest of all virtues. Buddhism placed at the head of its scripture the instability of everything human; compared each series of worldly events, however great the actors, however large the issues, to a track left by a ship upon the wide ocean, and educated a pessimistic mood of indifference to sovereign and parent alike. Can anything less consistent be conceived than the conduct of a government which employed all its influence to popularise the religion of Buddha, which appealed to Shintô shrines for heavenly guidance in every administrative perplexity, and which adopted Confucianism as an ethical code in the education of youth? The difficulty, in the case of Buddhism and Shintô, was to some extent overcome, as already shown, by a clever adjustment which recognised incarnations of Buddha in the principal Shintô deities. But it was not overcome in the case of the Confucian philosophy, nor is there any room
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