For example, consider the equipment of the Buddhist priests of the ninth century in the matter of art alone. Shintō knows next to nothing of art,[6] and indeed one might almost say that it knows little of civilization. It is like ultra-Puritanic Protestantism and Iconoclasm. Buddhism, on the contrary, is the mother of art, and art is her ever-busy child and handmaid. The temples of the Kami were bald and bare. The Kojiki told nothing of life hereafter, and kept silence on a hundred points at which human curiosity is sure to be active, and at which the Yoga system was voluble. Buddhism came with a set of visible symbols which should attract the eye and fire the imagination, and within ethical limits, the passions also. It was a mixed and variegated system,--a resultant of many forces.[7] It came with the thought of India, the art-influence of Greece, the philosophy of Persia, the speculations of the Gnostics and, in all probability, with ideas borrowed indirectly from Nestorian or other forms of Christianity; and thus furnished, it entered Japan. The Mission of Art. Thus far the insular kingdom had known only the monochrome sketches of the Chinese painters, which could have a meaning for the educated few alone. The composite Tantra dogmas fed the fancy and stimulated the imagination, filling them with pictures of life, past, present and future. "The sketch was replaced by the illumination." Whole schools of artists, imported from China and Korea, multiplied their works and attracted the untrained senses of the people, by filling the temples with a blaze of glory. "This result was sought by a gorgeous but studied play of gold and color, and a lavish richness of mounting and accessories, that appear strangely at variance with the begging bowl and patched garments of primitive Buddhism."[8] The change in the Japanese temple was as though the gray clouds had been kissed by the sun and made to laugh rainbows. The country of the Fertile Plain of Sweet Flags was transformed. It suddenly became the land wherein gods grew not singly but in whole forests. Like the Shulamite, when introduced among the jewelled ladies of Solomon's harem, so stood the boor amid the sheen and gold of the new temples.