THE AWAKENING OF JAPAN
enjoyed, the monasteries became universities whose occupants were famed more for their erudition than for their holiness. The single new sect which originated in that era differed from the others only in discipline, a subject widely discussed in that age of order and strict régime.
Like Buddhism, Confucianism had in its later developments become supersocial and indifferent to politics through its absorption of Taoist and Buddhist ideals. In China, from the latter part of the Tang dynasty, Confucianism tended to become religious instead of being purely ethical, as in previous days. In Japan this tendency was even more pronounced, for during our feudal age all branches of learning were confined to the Buddhists, so that the early teachers in the Tokugawa
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