For more than a thousand years “the Three Religions” has been a stereotyped phrase in China, meaning what we call Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. The phrase itself simply means “the Three Teachings,” or systems of instruction, leaving the subject-matter of each “Teaching” to be learned by inquiry. Of the three, Buddhism is of course the most recent, having been introduced into China only the first century of our Christian era. Both the others were indigenous to the country, and are traceable to a much greater antiquity, so that it is a question to which the earlier origin should be assigned. The years of Confucius’s life lay between BC 551 and 478; but his own acknowledgement that he was “a transmitter and not a maker,” and the testimony of his grandson, that “he handed down the doctrines of Yao and Shun ( BC 2300), and elegantly displayed the regulations of Wên and