What Shintō might have become in its full evolution had it been left alone, we cannot tell. Whether in the growth of the nation and without the pressure of Buddhism, Confucianism or other powerful influences from outside, the scattered and fragmentary mythology might have become organized into a harmonious system, or codes of ethics have been formulated, or the doctrines of a future life and the idea of a Supreme Being with personal attributes have been conceived and perfected, are questions the discussion of which may seem to be vain. History, however, gives no uncertain answer as to what actually did take place. We do but state what is unchallenged fact, when we say, that after commitment to writing of the myths, poems and liturgies which may be called the basis of Shintō, there came a great flood of Chinese and Buddhistic literature and a tremendous expansion of Buddhist missionary activity, which checked further literary growth of the kami system. These prepared the way for the absorption of the indigenous into the foreign cultus under the form called by an enthusiastic emperor, Riyōbu Shintō, or the "two-fold divine doctrine." Of this, we shall speak in another lecture. Suffice it here to say that by the scheme of syncretism propounded by Kōbō in the ninth century, Shintō was practically overlaid by the new faith from India, and largely forgotten as a distinct religion by the Japanese people. As late as A.D. 927, there were three thousand one hundred and thirty-two enumerated metropolitan and provincial temples, besides many more unenumerated village and hamlet shrines of Shintō. These are referred to in the revised codes of ceremonial law set forth by imperial authority early in the tenth century. Probably by the twelfth century the pure rites of the god-way were celebrated, and the unmixed traditions maintained, in families and temples, so few as to be counted on the fingers. The ancient language in which the archaic forms had been preserved was so nearly lost and buried, that out of the ooze of centuries of oblivion, it had to be rescued by the skilled divers of the seventeenth century. Mabuchi, Motöri and the other revivalists of pure Shintō, like the plungers after orient pearls, persevered until they had first recovered much that had been supposed irretrievably lost. These scholars deciphered and interpreted the ancient scriptures, poetry, prose, history, law and ritual, and once more set forth the ancient faith, as they believed, in its purity.