ABSTRACT
The Confucian ethics had been reshaped to fit the existing social conditions, and its sanction was thus neither beyond nor different from the particular function a man performed there and then. Confucian philosophy thus did nothing but give ideological backing to the vertical order, the horizontal web and the ancestral authority. Nakamura comments on Buddhism as fulfilling the same role:
'Monks and faithful alike observed assiduously the requirements of their limited human nexus; they were highly moral in this respect. They were devoted to their parents and loyal to their sovereign. They were in every respect quite different from the monks and novices of India and China.'25
