Although the latter T'ang era saw the persecution of Buddhism in China, with the coming of the Sung dynasty, Ch'an basked in the official encouragement of the court. The _koan _of T'ang masters were compiled and stuThed, while the _sutras_ of orthodox Buddhism suffered from neglect. But the real future of Ch'an Buddhism was to lie with the Japanese. In the latter part of the twelfth century a Japanese Tendai monk named Eisai (1141-1215), concluding that Japanese Buddhism had become stagnant and lifeless, journeyed to China to learn the developments that had taken place during the years that Japan had isolated herself. He naturally went to a T'ien-t'ai monastery, which had been the source of so much Japanese Buddhism, but there he discovered Chinese Buddhists immersed in Ch'an. The new faith seemed a healthy answer to Japanese needs, and on a second visit he stuThed Ch'an until he received the seal of enlightenment. A fully accredited Zen master, he returned to Japan in 1191 to found the first Rinzai temple, on the southern island of Kyushu. Although his introduction of a new sect inspired the customary opposition from the Tendai monks on Mt. Thei, the new faith challenging the usefulness of scholarship found a receptive audience among the newly emergent warrior class. Basically illiterate, the warriors often felt themselves intellectually inferior to the literary aristocracy, and they were delighted to be informed that a scholarly mind was an impediment rather than an asset in life. They also found Zen's emphasis on the quick, intuitive response agreeably in accord with their approach to armed combat. Eisai soon found himself invited to head a temple in Kyoto and later in the new warrior capital of Kamakura. Perhaps his most practical move was the composition of a treatise designed to win for Zen a place in the hearts of the nationalistic military establishment and at the same time to conciliate the Tendai monks on Mt. Thei. In his Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the Country he described Zen as follows: _In its rules of action and discipline, there is no confusion of right and wrong. . . . Outwardly it favors discipline over doctrine, inwardly it brings the Highest Inner Wisdom.8 _ Although it may seem paradoxical that a pacifist religion like Zen found immediate favor with the rough warrior class of Japan, it had an obvious appeal. As Sir George Sansom has explained it, _For a thoughtful warrior, whose life always bordered on death, there was an attraction, even a persuasion, in the belief that truth comes like the flash of a sword as it cuts through the problem of existence. Any line of religious thought that helped a man understand the nature of being without arduous literary stuThes was likely to attract the kind of warrior who felt that the greatest moments in life were the moments when death was nearest.9 _