Buddhist Psalms - Translated From the Japanese of Shinran Shōnin #248220

The world knows little as yet of the soul of Mahayana Buddhism, though much of its Outer Observance, and for this reason a crucial injustice has been done in regarding it merely as a degraded form of the earlier Buddhism — a rank off-shoot of the teachings of the Gautama Buddha, a system of idolatry and priestly power from which the austere purity of the earlier faith has passed away. The truth is that Buddhism, like Christianity, in every country where it has sowed its seed and reaped its harvest, developed along the lines indicated by the mind of that people. The Buddhism of Japan differs from that of Tibet as profoundly as the Christianity of Abyssinia from that of Scotland — yet both have conserved the essential principle.