Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: First Series — Ch 1: My First Day in the Orient, Part 2

Sec.

7 I pass on and climb more steps to a second gate with similar gargoyles and swarming of dragons, and enter a court where graceful votive lanterns of stone stand like monuments.

On my right and left two great grotesque stone lions are sitting--the lions of Buddha, male and female.

Beyond is a long low light building, with curved and gabled roof of blue tiles, and three wooden steps before its entrance.

Its sides are simple wooden screens covered with thin white paper.

This is the temple.

On the steps I take off my shoes; a young man slides aside the screens closing the entrance, and bows me a gracious welcome.

And I go in, feeling under my feet a softness of matting thick as bedding.

An immense square apartment is before me, full of an unfamiliar sweet smell--the scent of Japanese incense; but after the full blaze of the sun, the paper-filtered light here is dim as moonshine; for a minute or two I can see nothing but gleams of gilding in a soft gloom.

Then, my eyes becoming accustomed to the obscurity, I perceive against the paper-paned screens surrounding the sanctuary on three sides shapes of enormous flowers cutting like silhouettes against the vague white light.

I

approach and find them to be paper flowers--symbolic lotus-blossoms beautifully coloured, with curling leaves gilded on the upper surface and bright green beneath, At the dark end of the apartment, facing the entrance, is the altar of Buddha, a rich and lofty altar, covered with bronzes and gilded utensils clustered to right and left of a shrine like a tiny gold temple.

But I see no statue; only a mystery of unfamiliar shapes of burnished metal, relieved against darkness, a darkness behind the shrine and altar--whether recess or inner sanctuary I cannot distinguish.

The young attendant who ushered me into the temple now approaches, and, to my great surprise, exclaims in excellent English, pointing to a richly decorated gilded object between groups of candelabra on the altar: 'That is the shrine of Buddha.'

'And I would like to make an offering to Buddha,' I respond.

'It is not necessary,' he says, with a polite smile.

But I insist; and he places the little offering for me upon the altar.

Then he invites me to his own room, in a wing of the building--a large luminous room, without furniture, beautifully matted.

And we sit down upon the floor and chat.

He tells me he is a student in the temple.

He learned English in Tokyo and speaks it with a curious accent, but with fine choice of words.

Finally he asks me: 'Are you a Christian?'

And I answer truthfully: 'No.' 'Are you a Buddhist?'

'Not exactly.'

'Why do you make offerings if you do not believe in Buddha?'

'I revere the beauty of his teaching, and the faith of those who follow it.'

'Are there Buddhists in England and America?'

'There are, at least, a great many interested in Buddhist philosophy.'

And he takes from an alcove a little book, and gives it to me to examine.

It is an English copy of Olcott's Buddhist Catechism.

'Why is there no image of Buddha in your temple?'

I ask.

'There is a small one in the shrine upon the altar,' the student answers; 'but the shrine is closed.

And we have several large ones.

But the image of Buddha is not exposed here every day--only upon festal days.

And some images are exposed only once or twice a year.

From my place, I can see, between the open paper screens, men and women ascending the steps, to kneel and pray before the entrance of the temple.

They kneel with such naive reverence, so gracefully and so naturally, that the kneeling of our Occidental devotees seems a clumsy stumbling by comparison.

Some only join their hands; others clap them three times loudly and slowly; then they bow their heads, pray silently for a moment, and rise and depart.

The shortness of the prayers impresses me as something novel and interesting.

From time to time I hear the clink and rattle of brazen coin cast into the great wooden money-box at the entrance.

I turn to the young student, and ask him: 'Why do they clap their hands three times before they pray?'

He answers: 'Three times for the Sansai, the Three Powers: Heaven, Earth, Man.'

'But do they clap their hands to call the Gods, as Japanese clap their hands to summon their attendants?'

'Oh, no!'

he replied.

'The clapping of hands represents only the awakening from the Dream of the Long Night.'

[1] 'What night?

what dream?'

He hesitates some moments before making answer: 'The Buddha said: All beings are only dreaming in this fleeting world of unhappiness.'

'Then the clapping of hands signifies that in prayer the soul awakens from such dreaming?'

'Yes.'

'You understand what I mean by the word "soul"?'

'Oh, yes!

Buddhists believe the soul always was--always will be.'

'Even in Nirvana?'

'Yes.'

While we are thus chatting the Chief Priest of the temple enters--a very aged man-accompanied by two young priests, and I am presented to them;

and the three bow very low, showing me the glossy crowns of their smoothly-shaven heads, before seating themselves in the fashion of gods upon the floor.

I observe they do not smile; these are the first Japanese I have seen who do not smile: their faces are impassive as the faces of images.

But their long eyes observe me very closely, while the student interprets their questions, and while I attempt to tell them something about the translations of the Sutras in our Sacred Books of the East, and about the labours of Beal and Burnouf and Feer and Davids and Kern, and others.

They listen without change of countenance, and utter no word in response to the young student's translation of my remarks.

Tea, however, is brought in and set before me in a tiny cup, placed in a little brazen saucer, shaped like a lotus-leaf; and I am invited to partake of some little sugar-cakes (kwashi), stamped with a figure which I recognise as the Swastika, the ancient Indian symbol of the Wheel of the Law.

As I rise to go, all rise with me; and at the steps the student asks for my name and address.

'For,' he adds, 'you will not see me here again, as I am going to leave the temple.

But I will visit you.'

'And your name?'

I ask.

'Call me Akira,' he answers.

At the threshold I bow my good-bye; and they all bow very, very low, one blue-black head, three glossy heads like balls of ivory.

And as I go, only Akira smiles.

Sec.

8 'Tera?'

queries Cha, with his immense white hat in his hand, as I resume my seat in the jinricksha at the foot of the steps.

Which no doubt means, do I want to see any more temples?

Most certainly I do: I have not yet seen Buddha.

'Yes, tera, Cha.'

And again begins the long panorama of mysterious shops and tilted eaves, and fantastic riddles written over everything.

I have no idea in what direction Cha is running.

I only know that the streets seem to become always narrower as we go, and that some of the houses look like great wickerwork pigeon-cages only, and that we pass over several bridges before we halt again at the foot of another hill.

There is a lofty flight of steps here also, and before them a structure which I know is both a gate and a symbol, imposing, yet in no manner resembling the great Buddhist gateway seen before.

Astonishingly simple all the lines of it are: it has no carving, no colouring, no lettering upon it; yet it has a weird solemnity, an enigmatic beauty.

It is a torii.

'Miya,' observes Cha.

Not a tera this time, but a shrine of the gods of the more ancient faith of the land--a miya.

I am standing before a Shinto symbol; I see for the first time, out of a picture at least, a torii.

How describe a torii to those who have never looked at one even in a photograph or engraving?

Two lofty columns, like gate-pillars, supporting horizontally two cross-beams, the lower and lighter beam having its ends fitted into the columns a little distance below their summits; the uppermost and larger beam supported upon the tops of the columns, and projecting well beyond them to right and left.

That is a torii: the construction varying little in design, whether made of stone, wood, or metal.

But this description can give no correct idea of the appearance of a torii, of its majestic aspect, of its mystical suggestiveness as a gateway.

The first time you see a noble one, you will imagine, perhaps, that you see the colossal model of some beautiful Chinese letter towering against the sky; for all the lines of the thing have the grace of an animated ideograph,--have the bold angles and curves of characters made with four sweeps of a master-brush.

[2] Passing the torii I ascend a flight of perhaps one hundred stone steps, and find at their summit a second torii, from whose lower cross-beam hangs festooned the mystic shimenawa.

It is in this case a hempen rope of perhaps two inches in diameter through its greater length, but tapering off at either end like a snake.

Sometimes the shimenawa is made of bronze, when the torii itself is of bronze; but according to tradition it should be made of straw, and most commonly is.

For it represents the straw rope which the deity Futo-tama-no-mikoto stretched behind the Sun-goddess, Ama-terasu-oho-mi-Kami, after Ame-no-ta-jikara-wo-no-Kami, the Heavenly-hand-strength-god, had pulled her out, as is told in that ancient myth of Shinto which Professor Chamberlain has translated.

[3] And the shimenawa, in its commoner and simpler form, has pendent tufts of straw along its entire length, at regular intervals, because originally made, tradition declares, of grass pulled up by the roots which protruded from the twist of it.

Advancing beyond this torii, I find myself in a sort of park or pleasure-ground on the summit of the hill.

There is a small temple on the right; it is all closed up; and I have read so much about the disappointing vacuity of Shinto temples that I do not regret the absence of its guardian.

And I see before me what is infinitely more interesting,--a grove of cherry-trees covered with something unutterably beautiful,--a dazzling mist of snowy blossoms clinging like summer cloud-fleece about every branch and twig; and the ground beneath them, and the path before me, is white with the soft, thick, odorous snow of fallen petals.

Beyond this loveliness are flower-plots surrounding tiny shrines; and marvellous grotto-work, full of monsters--dragons and mythologic beings chiselled in the rock; and miniature landscape work with tiny groves of dwarf trees, and Lilliputian lakes, and microscopic brooks and bridges and cascades.

Here, also, are swings for children.

And here are belvederes, perched on the verge of the hill, wherefrom the whole fair city, and the whole smooth bay speckled with fishing-sails no bigger than pin-heads, and the far, faint, high promontories reaching into the sea, are all visible in one delicious view--blue-pencilled in a beauty of ghostly haze indescribable.

Why should the trees be so lovely in Japan?

With us, a plum or cherry tree in flower is not an astonishing sight; but here it is a miracle of beauty so bewildering that, however much you may have previously read about it, the real spectacle strikes you dumb.

You see no leaves--only one great filmy mist of petals.

Is it that the trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the Gods, that they have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude, like women loved, by making themselves more beautiful for man's sake?

Assuredly they have mastered men's hearts by their loveliness, like beautiful slaves.

That is to say, Japanese hearts.

Apparently there have been some foreign tourists of the brutal class in this place, since it has been deemed necessary to set up inscriptions in English announcing that 'IT IS FORBIDDEN TO INJURE THE TREES.'

Sec.

9 'Tera?'

'Yes, Cha, tera.'

But only for a brief while do I traverse Japanese streets.

The houses separate, become scattered along the feet of the hills: the city thins away through little valleys, and vanishes at last behind.

And we follow a curving road overlooking the sea.

Green hills slope steeply down to the edge of the way on the right; on the left, far below, spreads a vast stretch of dun sand and salty pools to a line of surf so distant that it is discernible only as a moving white thread.

The tide is out; and thousands of cockle-gatherers are scattered over the sands, at such distances that their stooping figures, dotting the glimmering sea-bed, appear no larger than gnats.

And some are coming along the road before us, returning from their search with well-filled baskets--girls with faces almost as rosy as the faces of English girls.

As the jinricksha rattles on, the hills dominating the road grow higher.

All at once Cha halts again before the steepest and loftiest flight of temple steps I have yet seen.

I climb and climb and climb, halting perforce betimes, to ease the violent aching of my quadriceps muscles; reach the top completely out of breath; and find myself between two lions of stone; one showing his fangs, the other with jaws closed.

Before me stands the temple, at the farther end of a small bare plateau surrounded on three sides by low cliffs,-a small temple, looking very old and grey.

From a rocky height to the left of the building, a little cataract rumbles down into a pool, ringed in by a palisade.

The voice of the water drowns all other sounds.

A sharp wind is blowing from the ocean: the place is chill even in the sun, and bleak, and desolate, as if no prayer had been uttered in it for a hundred years.

Cha taps and calls, while I take off my shoes upon the worn wooden steps of the temple; and after a minute of waiting, we hear a muffled step approaching and a hollow cough behind the paper screens.

They slide open; and an old white-robed priest appears, and motions me, with a low bow, to enter.

He has a kindly face; and his smile of welcome seems to me one of the most exquisite I have ever been greeted with.

Then he coughs again, so badly that I think if I ever come here another time, I shall ask for him in vain.

I go in, feeling that soft, spotless, cushioned matting beneath my feet with which the floors of all Japanese buildings are covered.

I pass the indispensable bell and lacquered reading-desk; and before me I see other screens only, stretching from floor to ceiling.

The old man, still coughing, slides back one of these upon the right, and waves me into the dimness of an inner sanctuary, haunted by faint odours of incense.

A colossal bronze lamp, with snarling gilded dragons coiled about its columnar stem, is the first object I discern; and, in passing it, my shoulder sets ringing a festoon of little bells suspended from the lotus-shaped summit of it.

Then I reach the altar, gropingly, unable yet to distinguish forms clearly.

But the priest, sliding back screen after screen, pours in light upon the gilded brasses and the inscriptions;

and I look for the image of the Deity or presiding Spirit between the altar-groups of convoluted candelabra.

And I see--only a mirror, a round, pale disk of polished metal, and my own face therein, and behind this mockery of me a phantom of the far sea.

Only a mirror!

Symbolising what?

Illusion?

or that the Universe exists for us solely as the reflection of our own souls?

or the old Chinese teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our own hearts?

Perhaps some day I shall be able to find out all these things.

As I sit on the temple steps, putting on my shoes preparatory to going, the kind old priest approaches me again, and, bowing, presents a bowl.

I

hastily drop some coins in it, imagining it to be a Buddhist alms-bowl, before discovering it to be full of hot water.

But the old man's beautiful courtesy saves me from feeling all the grossness of my mistake.

Without a word, and still preserving his kindly smile, he takes the bowl away, and, returning presently with another bowl, empty, fills it with hot water from a little kettle, and makes a sign to me to drink.

Tea is most usually offered to visitors at temples; but this little shrine is very, very poor; and I have a suspicion that the old priest suffers betimes for want of what no fellow-creature should be permitted to need.

As I descend the windy steps to the roadway I see him still looking after me, and I hear once more his hollow cough.

Then the mockery of the mirror recurs to me.

I am beginning to wonder whether I shall ever be able to discover that which I seek--outside of myself!

That is, outside of my own imagination.

Sec.

10 'Tera?'

once more queries Cha.

'Tera, no--it is getting late.

Hotel, Cha.'

But Cha, turning the corner of a narrow street, on our homeward route, halts the jinricksha before a shrine or tiny temple scarcely larger than the smallest of Japanese shops, yet more of a surprise to me than any of the larger sacred edifices already visited.

For, on either side of the entrance, stand two monster-figures, nude, blood-red, demoniac, fearfully muscled, with feet like lions, and hands brandishing gilded thunderbolts, and eyes of delirious fury; the guardians of holy things, the Ni-O, or "Two Kings."

[4] And right between these crimson monsters a young girl stands looking at us; her slight figure, in robe of silver grey and girdle of iris-violet, relieved deliciously against the twilight darkness of the interior.

Her face, impassive and curiously delicate, would charm wherever seen; but here, by strange contrast with the frightful grotesqueries on either side of her, it produces an effect unimaginable.

Then I find myself wondering whether my feeling of repulsion toward those twin monstrosities be altogether lust, seeing that so charming a maiden deems them worthy of veneration.

And they even cease to seem ugly as I watch her standing there between them, dainty and slender as some splendid moth, and always naively gazing at the foreigner, utterly unconscious that they might have seemed to him both unholy and uncomely.

What are they?

Artistically they are Buddhist transformations of Brahma and of Indra.

Enveloped by the absorbing, all-transforming magical atmosphere of Buddhism, Indra can now wield his thunderbolts only in defence of the faith which has dethroned him: he has become a keeper of the temple gates; nay, has even become a servant of Bosatsu (Bodhisattvas), for this is only a shrine of Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy, not yet a Buddha.

'Hotel, Cha, hotel!'

I cry out again, for the way is long, and the sun sinking,--sinking in the softest imaginable glow of topazine light.

I have not seen Shaka (so the Japanese have transformed the name Sakya-Muni); I have not looked upon the face of the Buddha.

Perhaps I may be able to find his image to-morrow, somewhere in this wilderness of wooden streets, or upon the summit of some yet unvisited hill.

The sun is gone; the topaz-light is gone; and Cha stops to light his lantern of paper; and we hurry on again, between two long lines of painted paper lanterns suspended before the shops: so closely set, so level those lines are, that they seem two interminable strings of pearls of fire.

And suddenly a sound--solemn, profound, mighty--peals to my ears over the roofs of the town, the voice of the tsurigane, the great temple-bell of Nogiyama.

All too short the day seemed.

Yet my eyes have been so long dazzled by the great white light, and so confused by the sorcery of that interminable maze of mysterious signs which made each street vista seem a glimpse into some enormous grimoire, that they are now weary even of the soft glowing of all these paper lanterns, likewise covered with characters that look like texts from a Book of Magic.

And I feel at last the coming of that drowsiness which always follows enchantment.

Sec.

11 'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'

A woman's voice ringing through the night, chanting in a tone of singular sweetness words of which each syllable comes through my open window like a wavelet of flute-sound.

My Japanese servant, who speaks a little English, has told me what they mean, those words: 'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'

And always between these long, sweet calls I hear a plaintive whistle, one long note first, then two short ones in another key.

It is the whistle of the amma, the poor blind woman who earns her living by shampooing the sick or the weary, and whose whistle warns pedestrians and drivers of vehicles to take heed for her sake, as she cannot see.

And she sings also that the weary and the sick may call her in.

'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!'

The saddest melody, but the sweetest voice.

Her cry signifies that for the sum of 'five hundred mon' she will come and rub your weary body 'above and below,' and make the weariness or the pain go away.

Five hundred mon are the equivalent of five sen (Japanese cents); there are ten rin to a sen, and ten mon to one rin.

The strange sweetness of the voice is haunting,--makes me even wish to have some pains, that I might pay five hundred mon to have them driven away.

I lie down to sleep, and I dream.

I see Chinese texts--multitudinous, weird, mysterious--fleeing by me, all in one direction; ideographs white and dark, upon signboards, upon paper screens, upon backs of sandalled men.

They seem to live, these ideographs, with conscious life; they are moving their parts, moving with a movement as of insects, monstrously, like phasmidae.

I am rolling always through low, narrow, luminous streets in a phantom jinricksha, whose wheels make no sound.

And always, always, I see the huge white mushroom-shaped hat of Cha dancing up and down before me as he runs.

Chapter Two The Writing of Kobodaishi