FOREIGN RELATIONS OF BUDDHISM
77
them and in Kyoto they were welcomed by a crowd of ten thousand persons. Their host both at the working sessions and on the tour was Mizuno Baigyo, the same monk who had helped Chinese monasteries resist confiscation in 1904. "It was chiefly through his good offices that the great conference in Tokyo was brought into being." Among those present was E. Kimura, Director of the Asiatic Bureau in the Foreign Ministry, which had apparently been at work in the background. Of course many of the Japanese who attended may have felt that they were using government help for their good purposes and would have denied that government was using them. Similarly the Chinese participants, although they were aware of the threat of Japanese militarism, probably felt that by taking part in the conference they had more to gain for their religion than to lose for their country. They saw the hope not only of a central role in the world Buddhist movement, but also of higher status for Buddhism at home, where a Japanese connection would impress their adversaries. Thus three years later, when the Japanese Buddhologist, Tokiwa Daijo, toured the monasteries of southeast China, he met Yüan-ying, who was soon to set up the Chinese Buddhist Association (Shanghai 1929) in an effort to protect monastery property. Yüan-ying told Tokiwa that his visit had given him courage and that from then on one of the arguments he would use to win over public opinion for the protection of Buddhism was the existence of a Department of Buddhist Studies at Japanese Imperial University. Japan was a country that had successfully modernized, yet it paid attention to Buddhism.10
This did not mean that the Japanese form of Buddhism was uncritically regarded in China. When T'ai-hsü was addressing the East Asian Buddhist Conference in 1925, he said quite frankly that Japanese monks were too sectarian and nationalistic; too much tainted by modernism and, compared to monks in China, less devout in their religious life and unable to undergo austerities. So strongly did T'ai-hsü feel about this that when he returned from the conference he decided that the Chinese sangha could not model itself upon its counterpart in Japan, since monks there married and ate meat.11 For their part, the Japanese thought that Chinese Buddhists were ignorant of modern critical methods and were content to take a traditional approach to Buddhist texts.12