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Buddhism first came to Japan in the sixth century
and played much the same role as Christianity in North Europe, as the means
of transmission of a whole higher culture. A great part of expression in
architecture, sculpture, and painting was associated with Buddhism, as it
was with Christianity in the West. The monastic establishments became rich
landowners, as in the West, and at times exercised a considerable military
and political power. The whole intellectual, artistic, social and
political life of Japan was influenced by Buddhism from the ninth through
the sixteenth centuries.
Buddhism is the Japanese religion that comes closest to paralleling
Christianity, because of its concern for the afterlife and salvation of the
individual. In this it shows its origin in India, a region that in religious
and philosophical terms is more like the West than East Asia.
 The historical Buddha started with the basic Indian idea of a never-ending
cycle of lives, each determining the next, and added to this that life is
painful, that its suffering is caused by human desires. However, these
desires can be overcome by the Buddha’s teaching, freeing the individual for
painless merging in Nirvana, or “nothingness.” As the teaching grew, it came
to stress reverence for the “Three Treasures,” which were the Buddha, the
“law” written in a book much like our Bible, and the religious community, or
the monastic organization.
The branch of Buddhism that spread throughout East
Asia is called Mahayana, or the “greater vehicle,” which contrasts
another belief called Theravada, or the “doctrine of the elders.” Mahayana
taught salvation into a paradise that seems closer to the Western concept of
Heaven than to the original Buddhist Nirvana. It also emphasized the
worship, not just of the historical Buddha, but of myriad Buddha-like
figures, including Bodhisattvas, who had stayed back one step short of
Nirvana and Buddhahood in order to aid the salvation of others.
In Japan, Mahayana Buddhism developed three major emphases. One
appearing in the ninth century was esoteric Buddhism, which stressed ritual
and art as well as doctrines. The second emphasis starting a century later
was on salvation through faith, particularly in Amida, the “Buddha of the
pure land” of the Western Paradise, or in the Lotus Sutra, a scripture in
which the Buddha promised the salvation of “all sentient beings,” or of all
animal life. This emphasis gave rise to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
of new sects--the Pure Land sect, the True sect, and Nichiren--which are
today the largest Buddhist sects in Japan. The third emphasis was on
self-reliance in seeking salvation through self-discipline and meditation.
This became embodied in the two Zen, or “meditation” sects, introduced from
China in 1191 and 1227. These developed methods of “sitting in meditation”
and of intellectual self-discipline through these means were supposed to
lead to salvation through sudden enlightenment.
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