FOREIGN RELATIONS OF BUDDHISM
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anti-Western anti-Christian united front among the people of the East. Visits were exchanged with Buddhists in Thailand, China, and India. In 1904 Dr. Inoue Entyu, after returning from a trip to India, proposed that the Japanese should establish a great Confucian-Buddhist university that would serve the whole Buddhist world and maintain branches in Korea, China, and Mongolia.
Other possibilities for work in China were opened that very year. The Ch'ing government had been encouraging local officials to confiscate monastic property and use it for the establishment of modern schools. Chinese monks were looking desperately for a way to save their property. At this juncture a Japanese priest named Mizuno Baigyo advised them to start schools of their own in order to "get the jump" on the confiscators. He and other Japanese also suggested that protection might be obtained by applying to the headquarters of the Higashi Honganji sect in Japan; and indeed, the latter was pleased to accept the affiliation of some thirty-five monasteries in Chekiang province towards the end of 1904.5 It sent its representatives to protect them. A test case soon arose. Part of one Hangchow monastery was about to be turned into a technical school. On January 10, 1905, with a blaze of firecrackers, a large wooden plaque was installed over its front gate, reading: "General place of worship of the Imperial Japanese Shinshu-Honganji sect."
This caused deep consternation among literati and officials throughout the province. The governor appealed, without success, to the Japanese Consul. The Japanese priests stood pat on their passports. Peking wrung its hands, but said that the Japanese would have to be respected. All that the local officials accomplished was the removal of the plaque; Japanese protection remained in force.
This was the signal for general resistance by the monasteries of neighboring provinces against the confiscation of their property. In Fukien and Kwangtung they began to place themselves under Japanese protection. Such immunity was the latter believed to confer that in Canton, on February 26, 1905, a school established on monastery land was completely destroyed by a group of infuriated Buddhists. The newspaper Shen-pao castigated the insolence of Chinese monks in accepting Japanese protection