Of great significance are these Pan-Buddhist movements attempting to unite the Buddhist peoples in a strong Eastern civilisation such as that which welded them together for a thousand years in the Golden Age of the past. One such movement originates in Ceylon with the vigorous layman Dharmapala, in whom resentment against the West blends with a real enthusiasm for Buddhism. In 1893 he visited China, and stirred up some of the Chinese monks, calling upon them to go to India as missionaries; in Japan he attacked some of the great abbots as wine-drinkers and corrupt, and every where he is a pungent and provocative influence. In 1918 a Pan-Buddhist Association was started in Tokyo and in the following year a rival one was founded in Peking. It is, in fact, rather pathetic to find Buddhism being promoted by the Japanese in Korea as a part of their propaganda to Japanise the Koreans, and at the same time claiming in China to be _the_ religion for democratic nations. In justification of such claims, however, Buddhism is doing some good work in social service, and in education, and takes its part in famine relief, prison visitation, and the beneficent work of the Red Cross. The Chinese are a religious people, whatever critics may say. Vast armies of monks and innumerable temples and shrines witness to this other-worldly strain, and though much of their religion is superstitious, and almost all of it needs moralising, the sympathetic observer will find on every hand the evidences that these are not a "secular-minded" people. In almost every house are not only ancestor-tablets, but images of Kwanyin and other Buddhist deities, and pilgrimages play in China as elsewhere in Asia a great part in the national life. Follow this merry throng as it climbs the slopes of some great mountain; note the groves and the poetical inscriptions on the rocks; enter this noble group of temples with them and watch their acts of worship. Here before Kwanyin a young apprentice bows: carelessly he tosses the bamboo strips which will tell him if his prayer is to be answered, and defiantly he tosses his head as he turns away with a refusal from the goddess: but here is an old widow, with sorrowful persistence importuning the Compassionate One, and in even the most careless is a belief that Heaven rules in the affairs of men and that Heaven is just. Here prayers are offered for rain and harvest, for children and wealth, for release from suffering and demons.