Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (12 page)

Above the central altar Amida Buddha sits enthroned on his mystic golden
lotus in the attitude of the Teacher. On the altar to the right gleams a
shrine of five miniature golden steps, where little images stand in
rows, tier above tier, some seated, some erect, male and female, attired
like goddesses or like daimyo: the Sanjiubanjin, or Thirty Guardians.
Below, on the façade of the altar, is the figure of a hero slaying a
monster. On the altar to the left is the shrine of the Mother-of-Demons.

Her story is a legend of horror. For some sin committed in a previous
birth, she was born a demon, devouring her own children. But being saved
by the teaching of Buddha, she became a divine being, especially loving
and protecting infants; and Japanese mothers pray to her for their
little ones, and wives pray to her for beautiful boys.

The face of Kishibojin
[22]
is the face of a comely woman. But her eyes
are weird. In her right hand she bears a lotus-blossom; with her left
she supports in a fold of her robe, against her half-veiled breast, a
naked baby. At the foot of her shrine stands Jizo-Sama, leaning upon his
shakujo. But the altar and its images do not form the startling feature
of the temple-interior. What impresses the visitor in a totally novel
way are the votive offerings. High before the shrine, suspended from
strings stretched taut between tall poles of bamboo, are scores, no,
hundreds, of pretty, tiny dresses—Japanese baby-dresses of many
colours. Most are made of poor material, for these are the thank-
offerings of very poor simple women, poor country mothers, whose prayers
to Kishibojin for the blessing of children have been heard.

And the sight of all those little dresses, each telling so naively its
story of joy and pain—those tiny kimono shaped and sewn by docile
patient fingers of humble mothers-touches irresistibly, like some
unexpected revelation of the universal mother-love. And the tenderness
of all the simple hearts that have testified thus to faith and
thankfulness seems to thrill all about me softly, like a caress of
summer wind.

Outside the world appears to have suddenly grown beautiful; the light is
sweeter; it seems to me there is a new charm even in the azure of the
eternal day.

Then, having traversed the valley, we reach a main road so level and so
magnificently shaded by huge old trees that I could believe myself in an
English lane—a lane in Kent or Surrey, perhaps—but for some exotic
detail breaking the illusion at intervals; a torii, towering before
temple-steps descending to the highway, or a signboard lettered with
Chinese characters, or the wayside shrine of some unknown god.

All at once I observe by the roadside some unfamiliar sculptures in
relief—a row of chiselled slabs protected by a little bamboo shed; and
I dismount to look at them, supposing them to be funereal monuments.
They are so old that the lines of their sculpturing are half
obliterated; their feet are covered with moss, and their visages are
half effaced. But I can discern that these are not haka, but six images
of one divinity; and my guide knows him—Koshin, the God of Roads. So
chipped and covered with scurf he is, that the upper portion of his form
has become indefinably vague; his attributes have been worn away. But
below his feet, on several slabs, chiselled cunningly, I can still
distinguish the figures of the Three Apes, his messengers. And some
pious soul has left before one image a humble votive offering—the
picture of a black cock and a white hen, painted upon a wooden shingle.
It must have been left here very long ago; the wood has become almost
black, and the painting has been damaged by weather and by the droppings
of birds. There are no stones piled at the feet of these images, as
before the images of Jizo; they seem like things forgotten, crusted over
by the neglect of generations—archaic gods who have lost their
worshippers.

But my guide tells me, 'The Temple of Koshin is near, in the village of
Fujisawa.' Assuredly I must visit it.

The temple of Koshin is situated in the middle of the village, in a
court opening upon the main street. A very old wooden temple it is,
unpainted, dilapidated, grey with the greyness of all forgotten and
weather-beaten things. It is some time before the guardian of the temple
can be found, to open the doors. For this temple has doors in lieu of
shoji—old doors that moan sleepily at being turned upon their hinges.
And it is not necessary to remove one's shoes; the floor is matless,
covered with dust, and squeaks under the unaccustomed weight of entering
feet. All within is crumbling, mouldering, worn; the shrine has no
image, only Shinto emblems, some poor paper lanterns whose once bright
colours have vanished under a coating of dust, some vague inscriptions.
I see the circular frame of a metal mirror; but the mirror itself is
gone. Whither? The guardian says: 'No priest lives now in this temple;
and thieves might come in the night to steal the mirror; so we have
hidden it away.' I ask about the image of Koshin. He answers it is
exposed but once in every sixty-one years: so I cannot see it; but there
are other statues of the god in the temple court.

I go to look at them: a row of images, much like those upon the public
highway, but better preserved. One figure of Koshin, however, is
different from the others I have seen—apparently made after some
Hindoo model, judging by the Indian coiffure, mitre-shaped and lofty.
The god has three eyes; one in the centre of his forehead, opening
perpendicularly instead of horizontally. He has six arms. With one hand
he supports a monkey; with another he grasps a serpent; and the other
hands hold out symbolic things—a wheel, a sword, a rosary, a sceptre.
And serpents are coiled about his wrists and about his ankles; and under
his feet is a monstrous head, the head of a demon, Amanjako, sometimes
called Utatesa ('Sadness'). Upon the pedestal below the Three Apes are
carven; and the face of an ape appears also upon the front of the god's
tiara.

I see also tablets of stone, graven only with the god's name,—votive
offerings. And near by, in a tiny wooden shrine, is the figure of the
Earth-god, Ken-ro-ji-jin, grey, primeval, vaguely wrought, holding in
one hand a spear, in the other a vessel containing something
indistinguishable.

Perhaps to uninitiated eyes these many-headed, many-handed gods at first
may seem—as they seem always in the sight of Christian bigotry—only
monstrous. But when the knowledge of their meaning comes to one who
feels the divine in all religions, then they will be found to make
appeal to the higher aestheticism, to the sense of moral beauty, with a
force never to be divined by minds knowing nothing of the Orient and its
thought. To me the image of Kwannon of the Thousand Hands is not less
admirable than any other representation of human loveliness idealised
bearing her name—the Peerless, the Majestic, the Peace-Giving, or even
White Sui-Getsu, who sails the moonlit waters in her rosy boat made of a
single lotus-petal; and in the triple-headed Shaka I discern and revere
the mighty power of that Truth, whereby, as by a conjunction of suns,
the Three Worlds have been illuminated.

But vain to seek to memorise the names and attributes of all the gods;
they seem, self-multiplying, to mock the seeker; Kwannon the Merciful is
revealed as the Hundred Kwannon; the Six Jizo become the Thousand. And
as they multiply before research, they vary and change: less multiform,
less complex, less elusive the moving of waters than the visions of this
Oriental faith. Into it, as into a fathomless sea, mythology after
mythology from India and China and the farther East has sunk and been
absorbed; and the stranger, peering into its deeps, finds himself, as in
the tale of Undine, contemplating a flood in whose every surge rises and
vanishes a Face—weird or beautiful or terrible—a most ancient shoreless
sea of forms incomprehensibly interchanging and intermingling, but
symbolising the protean magic of that infinite Unknown that shapes and
re-shapes for ever all cosmic being.

I wonder if I can buy a picture of Koshin. In most Japanese temples
little pictures of the tutelar deity are sold to pilgrims, cheap prints
on thin paper. But the temple guardian here tells me, with a gesture of
despair, that there are no pictures of Koshin for sale; there is only an
old kakemono on which the god is represented. If I would like to see it
he will go home and get it for me. I beg him to do me the favour; and he
hurries into the street.

While awaiting his return, I continue to examine the queer old statues,
with a feeling of mingled melancholy and pleasure. To have studied and
loved an ancient faith only through the labours of palaeographers and
archaeologists, and as a something astronomically remote from one's own
existence, and then suddenly in after years to find the same faith a
part of one's human environment,—to feel that its mythology, though
senescent, is alive all around you—is almost to realise the dream of
the Romantics, to have the sensation of returning through twenty
centuries into the life of a happier world. For these quaint Gods of
Roads and Gods of Earth are really living still, though so worn and
mossed and feebly worshipped. In this brief moment, at least, I am
really in the Elder World—perhaps just at that epoch of it when the
primal faith is growing a little old-fashioned, crumbling slowly before
the corrosive influence of a new philosophy; and I know myself a pagan
still, loving these simple old gods, these gods of a people's childhood.

And they need some human love, these naive, innocent, ugly gods. The
beautiful divinities will live for ever by that sweetness of womanhood
idealised in the Buddhist art of them: eternal are Kwannon and Benten;
they need no help of man; they will compel reverence when the great
temples shall all have become voiceless and priestless as this shrine of
Koshin is. But these kind, queer, artless, mouldering gods, who have
given ease to so many troubled minds, who have gladdened so many simple
hearts, who have heard so many innocent prayers—how gladly would I
prolong their beneficent lives in spite of the so-called 'laws of
progress' and the irrefutable philosophy of evolution!

The guardian returns, bringing with him a kakemono, very small, very
dusty, and so yellow-stained by time that it might be a thousand years
old. But I am disappointed as I unroll it; there is only a very common
print of the god within—all outline. And while I am looking at it, I
become for the first time conscious that a crowd has gathered about me,
-tanned kindly-faced labourers from the fields, and mothers with their
babies on their backs, and school children, and jinricksha men, all
wondering that a stranger should be thus interested in their gods. And
although the pressure about me is very, very gentle, like a pressure of
tepid water for gentleness, I feel a little embarrassed. I give back the
old kakemono to the guardian, make my offering to the god, and take my
leave of Koshin and his good servant.

All the kind oblique eyes follow me as I go. And something like a
feeling of remorse seizes me at thus abruptly abandoning the void,
dusty, crumbling temple, with its mirrorless altar and its colourless
lanterns, and the decaying sculptures of its neglected court, and its
kindly guardian whom I see still watching my retreating steps, with the
yellow kakemono in his hand. The whistle of a locomotive warns me that I
shall just have time to catch the train. For Western civilisation has
invaded all this primitive peace, with its webs of steel, with its ways
of iron. This is not of thy roads, O Koshin!—the old gods are dying
along its ash-strewn verge!

IT is just past five o'clock in the afternoon. Through the open door of
my little study the rising breeze of evening is beginning to disturb the
papers on my desk, and the white fire of the Japanese sun is taking that
pale amber tone which tells that the heat of the day is over. There is
not a cloud in the blue—not even one of those beautiful white
filamentary things, like ghosts of silken floss, which usually swim in
this most ethereal of earthly skies even in the driest weather.

A sudden shadow at the door. Akira, the young Buddhist student, stands
at the threshold slipping his white feet out of his sandal-thongs
preparatory to entering, and smiling like the god Jizo.

'Ah! komban, Akira.'

'To-night,' says Akira, seating himself upon the floor in the posture of
Buddha upon the Lotus, 'the Bon-ichi will be held. Perhaps you would
like to see it?'

'Oh, Akira, all things in this country I should like to see. But tell
me, I pray you; unto what may the Bon-ichi be likened?'

'The Bon-ichi,' answers Akira, 'is a market at which will be sold all
things required for the Festival of the Dead; and the Festival of the
Dead will begin to-morrow, when all the altars of the temples and all
the shrines in the homes of good Buddhists will be made beautiful.'

'Then I want to see the Bon-ichi, Akira, and I should also like to see a
Buddhist shrine—a household shrine.'

'Yes, will you come to my room?' asks Akira. 'It is not far—in the
Street of the Aged Men, beyond the Street of the Stony River, and near
to the Street Everlasting. There is a butsuma there—a household shrine
-and on the way I will tell you about the Bonku.'

So, for the first time, I learn those things—which I am now about to
write.

From the 13th to the 15th day of July is held the Festival of the Dead—
the Bommatsuri or Bonku—by some Europeans called the Feast of
Lanterns. But in many places there are two such festivals annually; for
those who still follow the ancient reckoning of time by moons hold that
the Bommatsuri should fall on the 13th, 14th, and 15th days of the
seventh month of the antique calendar, which corresponds to a later
period of the year.