Opposed again and again by the Confucian _literati_, its temples destroyed, its religious houses suppressed, its monks and nuns driven back into the world, Buddhism has still lived on. It has created impressive devotions, and generated numerous sects. It has spread through Corea, Mongolia, and Japan; on the west it is planted in Tibet. It has exercised immense influence on Chinese culture; architecture, art and letters being all deeply indebted to it. In numerical estimates of different religions common in the last century Buddhism always headed the list, for the whole population of China--vaguely reckoned at 400,000,000--was included in its fold. Such estimates are no longer trustworthy.[3] The ancestral cultus of the dead under the shelter of Confucianism, the rites of Taoist and of Buddhist priests, are strangely blended. The incidents of life from birth to death are never completed without help from one or other of the two faiths once rivals, and now { 67} so curiously intertwined. As early as the sixth century a famous Buddhist scholar Fu Hhi was asked by the Emperor Wu-ti if he was a Buddhist, and he pointed to his Taoist cap. "Are you a Taoist?" he showed his Confucian shoes. "Are you a Confucian?" he wore a Buddhist scarf. When the Abbé Hue made his famous journey two generations ago, he observed that when strangers met, politeness required that each should ask his neighbour, "To what sublime religion do you belong?" The first might be a Confucian, the second a Taoist, the third a disciple of the Buddha. Each would then begin to commend the religion not his own, and they would conclude by saying, "Religions are many, reason is one, we are all brothers." It was the maxim of Lu Shun Yang (a distinguished Buddhist) centuries ago that "the teaching of the sects is not different. The large-hearted man regards them as embodying the same truths. The narrow-minded man observes only their differences."
[3] The latest official estimate, February 1911, based on a reckoning of families, gives 312,400,590 for the total Chinese people.
Yet another great religion, the latest born among the higher faiths of the world, has established itself in both India and China. The first Mohammedan invasion of India took place in A.D. 664. The followers of the prophet are now reckoned at more than 66 millions. In 628 Mohammed himself sent his uncle to China with presents to the Emperor. He travelled by sea to Canton, where the first mosque was afterwards built. { 68} Good observers number the Mohammedans in China to-day at 30 millions, mostly in the north and west; and it is supposed that there are about as many more in the Malay Archipelago. In Africa, especially among the negroes of the west, their numbers have increased enormously in the last century, and some two-fifths of the multitudinous peoples of the Dark Continent, 80 millions out of 200, are believed to live in the obedience of Islam.