Part 14

The grandmother told Genzō and his wife what Katsugorō had related to her; and after that the boy was not afraid to speak freely with his parents on the subject of his former existence, and would often say to them: "I want to go to Hodokubo. Please let me make a visit to the tomb of Kyūbei San." Genzō thought that Katsugorō, being a strange child, would probably die before long, and that it might therefore be better to make inquiry at once as to whether there really was a man in Hodokubo called Hanshirō. But he did not wish to make the inquiry himself, because for a man to do so [_under such circumstances?_] would seem inconsiderate or forward. Therefore, instead of going himself to Hodokubo, he asked his mother Tsuya, on the twentieth day of the first month of this year, to take her grandson there.

Tsuya went with Katsugorō to Hodokubo; and when they entered the village she pointed to the nearer dwellings, and asked the boy," Which house is it?--is it this house or that one?" "No," answered Katsugorō,--"it is further on--much further,"--and he hurried before her. Reaching a certain dwelling at last, he cried, "This is the house!"--and ran in, without waiting for his grandmother. Tsuya followed him in, and asked the people there what was the name of the owner of the house. "Hanshirō," one of them answered. She asked the name of Hanshirō's wife. "Shidzu," was the reply. Then she asked whether there had ever been a son called Tōzō born in that house. "Yes," was the answer; "but that boy died thirteen years ago, when he was six years old."

Then for the first time Tsuya was convinced that Katsugorō had spoken the truth; and she could not help shedding tears. She related to the people of the house all that Katsugorō had told her about his remembrance of his former birth. Then Hanshirō and his wife wondered greatly. They caressed Katsugorō and wept; and they remarked that he was much handsomer now than he had been as Tözö before dying at the age of six. In the mean time, Katsugorō was looking all about; and seeing the roof of a tobacco shop opposite to the house of Hanshirō, he pointed to it, and said:--"That used not to be there." And he also said,--"The tree yonder used not to be there." All this was true. So from the minds of Hanshirō and his wife every doubt departed [_ga wo orishi_].

On the same day Tsuya and Katsugorō returned to Tanitsuiri, Nakano-mura. Afterwards Genzō sent his son several times to Hanshirō's house, and allowed him to visit the tomb of Kyūbei his real father in his previous existence.

Sometimes Katsugorō says:--"I am a _Nono-Sama_:[13] therefore please be kind to me." Sometimes he also says to his grandmother:--"I think I shall die when I am sixteen; but, as Ontaké Sama[14] has taught us, dying is not a matter to be afraid of." When his parents ask him, "Would you not like to become a priest?" he answers, "I would rather not be a priest."

The village people do not call him Katsugoro any more; they have nicknamed him "Hodokubo-Kozō" (the Acolyte of Hodokubo).[15] When any one visits the house to see him, he becomes shy at once, and runs to hide himself in the inner apartments. So it is not possible to have any direct conversation with him. I have written down this account exactly as his grandmother gave it to me.

I asked whether Genzō, his wife, or Tsuya, could any of them remember having done any virtuous deeds. Genzō and his wife said that they had never done anything especially virtuous; but that Tsuya, the grandmother, had always been in the habit of repeating the _Nembutsu_ every morning and evening, and that she never failed to give two _mon_[16] to any priest or pilgrim who came to the door. But excepting these small matters, she never had done anything which could be called a particularly virtuous act.

(--This is the End of the Relation of the Rebirth of Katsugorō.)

7.--(Note by the Translator.) The foregoing is taken from a manuscript entitled _Chin Setsu Shū Ki_; or, "Manuscript-Collection of Uncommon Stories,"--made between the fourth month of the sixth year of Bunsei and the tenth month of the sixth year of Tempo [1823-1835]. At the end of the manuscript is written,--"From the years of Bunsei to the years of Tempo.--Minamisempa, Owner: Kurumachō, Shiba, Yedo" Under this, again, is the following note:--"Bought from Yamatoya Sakujirō Nishinohubo: twenty-first day [?], Second Year of Meiji [1869]." From which it would appear that the manuscript had been written by Minamisempa, who collected stories told to him, or copied them from manuscripts obtained by him, during the thirteen years from 1823 to 1835, inclusive.

III

Perhaps somebody will now be unreasonable enough to ask whether I believe this story,--as if my belief or disbelief had anything to do with the matter! The question of the possibility of remembering former births seems to me to depend upon the question what it is that remembers. If it is the Infinite All-Self in each one of us, then I can believe the whole of the Jatakas without any trouble. As to the False Self, the mere woof and warp of sensation and desire, then I can best express my idea by relating a dream which I once dreamed. Whether it was a dream of the night or a dream of the day need not concern any one, since it was only a dream.

[Footnote 1: The Western reader is requested to bear in mind that the year in which a Japanese child is born is counted always as one year in the reckoning of age.]

[Footnote 2: Lit.: "A wave-man,"--a wandering samurai without a lord. The rōnin were generally a desperate and very dangerous class; but there were some fine characters among them.]

[Footnote 3: The Buddhist services for the dead are celebrated at regular intervals, increasing successively in length, until the time of one hundred years after death. The _jiū-san kwaiki_ is the service for the thirteenth year after death. By "thirteenth" in the context the reader must understand that the year in which the death took place is counted for one year.]

[Footnote 4: The second husband, by adoption, of a daughter who lives with her own parents.]

[Footnote 5: Children in Japan, among the poorer classes, are not weaned until an age much later than what is considered the proper age for weaning children in Western countries. But "four years old" in this text may mean considerably less, than three by Western reckoning.]

[Footnote 6: From very ancient time in Japan it has been the custom to bury the dead in large jars,--usually of red earthenware,--called _Kamé_. Such jars are still used, although a large proportion of the dead are buried in wooden coffins of a form unknown in the Occident.]

[Footnote 7: The idea expressed is not that of lying down with the pillow under the head, but of hovering about the pillow, or resting upon it as an insect might do. The bodiless spirit is usually said to rest upon the roof of the home. The apparition of the aged man referred to in the next sentence seems a thought of Shinto rather than of Buddhism.]

[Footnote 8: The repetition of the Buddhist invocation _Namu Amida Butsu_! is thus named. The _nembutsu_ is repeated by many Buddhist sects besides the sect of Amida proper,--the Shinshū.]

[Footnote 9: Botamochi, a kind of sugared rice-cake.]

[Footnote 10: Such advice is a commonplace in Japanese Buddhist literature. By Hotokė Sama here the boy means, not the Buddhas proper, but the spirits of the dead, hopefully termed Buddhas by those who loved them,--much as in the West we sometimes speak of our dead as "angels."]

[Footnote 11: The cooking-place in a Japanese kitchen. Sometimes the word is translated "kitchen-range," but the _kamado_ is something very different from a Western kitchen-range.]

[Footnote 12: Here I think it better to omit a couple of sentences in the original rather too plain for Western taste, yet not without interest. The meaning of the omitted passages is only that even in the womb the child acted with consideration, and according to the rules of filial piety.]

[Footnote 13: _Nono-San_ (or _Sama_) is the child-word for the Spirits of the dead, for the Buddhas, and for the Shintō Gods,--Kami. _Nono-San wo ogamu_,--"to pray to the Nono-San," is the child-phrase for praying to the gods. The spirits of the ancestors become Nono-San,--_Kami_,--according to Shintō thought.]

[Footnote 14: The reference here to Ontaké Sama has a particular interest, but will need some considerable explanation.

Ontaké, or Mitaké, is the name of a celebrated holy peak in the province of Shinano--a great resort for pilgrims. During the Tokugawa Shōgunate, a priest called Isshin, of the Risshū Buddhists, made a pilgrimage to that mountain. Returning to his native place (Sakamoto-chō, Shitaya, Yedo), he began to preach certain new doctrines, and to make for himself a reputation as a miracle-worker, by virtue of powers said to have been gained during his pilgrimage to Ontaké. The Shōgunate considered him a dangerous person, and banished him to the island of Hachijō, where he remained for some years. Afterwards he was allowed to return to Yedo, and there to preach his new faith,--to which he gave the name of Azuma-Kyō. It was Buddhist teaching in a Shintō disguise,--the deities especially adored by its followers being Okuni-nushi and Sukuna-hi-kona as Buddhist avatars. In the prayer of the sect called Kaibyaku-Norito it is said:--"The divine nature is immovable (fudō); yet it moves. It is formless, yet manifests itself in forms. This is the Incomprehensible Divine Body. In Heaven and Earth it is called Kami; in all things it is called Spirit; in Man it is called Mind.... From this only reality came the heavens, the four oceans, the great whole of the three thousand universes;--from the One Mind emanate three thousands of great thousands of forms." ...

In the eleventh year of Bunkwa (1814) a man called Shi moyama Osuké, originally an oil-merchant in Heiyemon-chō, Asakusa, Yedo, organized, on the basis of Isshin's teaching, a religious association named Tomoyé-Ko. It flourished until the overthrow of the Shōgunate, when a law was issued forbidding the teaching of mixed doctrines, and the blending of Shintō with Buddhist religion. Shimo-yama Osuké then applied for permission to establish a new Shinto sect, under the name of Mitaké-Kyō,--popularly called Ontaké-Kyō; and the permission was given in the sixth year of Meiji (1873). Osuké then remodeled the Buddhist sutra Fudō Kyō into a Shinto prayer-book, under the title, Shintō-Fudō-Norito. The sect still flourishes; and one of its chief temples is situated about a mile from my present residence in Tōkyō.

"Ontaké San" (or "Sama") is a popular name given to the deities adored by this sect. It really means the Deity dwelling on the peak Mitaké, or Ontaké. But the name is also sometimes applied to the high-priest of the sect, who is supposed to be oracularly inspired by the deity of Ontaké, and to make revelations of truth through the power of the divinity. In the mouth of the boy Katsugoro "Ontaké Sama" means the high-priest of that time (1823), almost certainly Osuké himself,--then chief of the Tomoyé-Kyō.]

[Footnote 15: Kozō is the name given to a Buddhist acolyte, or a youth studying for the priesthood. But it is also given to errand-boys and little boy-servants sometimes,--perhaps because in former days the heads of little boys were shaved. I think that the meaning in this text is "acolyte."]

[Footnote 16: In that time the name of the smallest of coins = 1/10 of 1 cent. It was about the same as that now called rin, a copper with a square hole in the middle and bearing Chinese characters.]

XI

WITHIN THE CIRCLE

Neither personal pain nor personal pleasure can be really expressed in words. It is never possible to communicate them in their original form. It is only possible, by vivid portrayal of the circumstances or conditions causing them, to awaken in sympathetic minds some kindred qualities of feeling. But if the circumstances causing the pain or the pleasure be totally foreign to common human experience, then no representation of them can make fully known the sensations which they evoked. Hopeless, therefore, any attempt to tell the real pain of seeing my former births. I can say only that no combination of suffering possible to _individual_ being could be likened to such pain,--the pain of countless lives interwoven. It seemed as if every nerve of me had been prolonged into some monstrous web of sentiency spun back through a million years,--and as if the whole of that measureless woof and warp, over all its shivering threads, were pouring into my consciousness, out of the abysmal past, some ghastliness without name,--some horror too vast for human brain to hold. For, as I looked backward, I became double, quadruple, octuple;--I multiplied by arithmetical progression;--I became hundreds and thousands,--and feared with the terror of thousands,--and despaired with the anguish of thousands,--and shuddered with the agony of thousands; yet knew the pleasure of none. All joys, all delights appeared but mists or mockeries: only the pain and the fear were real,--and always, always growing. Then in the moment when sentiency itself seemed bursting into dissolution, one divine touch ended the frightful vision, and brought again to me the simple consciousness of the single present. Oh! how unspeakably delicious that sudden shrinking back out of multiplicity into unity!--that immense, immeasurable collapse of Self into the blind oblivious numbness of individuality!

*

"To others also," said the voice of the divine one who had thus saved me,--"to others in the like state it has been permitted to see something of their preëxistence. But no one of them ever could endure to look far. Power to see all former births belongs only to those eternally released from the bonds of Self. Such exist outside of illusion,--outside of form and name; and pain cannot come nigh them.

"But to you, remaining in illusion, not even the Buddha could give power to look back more than a little way.

"Still you are bewitched by the follies of art and of poetry and of music,--the delusions of color and form,--the delusions of sensuous speech, the delusions of sensuous sound.

"Still that apparition called Nature--which is but another name for emptiness and shadow--deceives and charms you, and fills you with dreams of longing for the things of sense.

"But he who truly wishes to know, must not love this phantom Nature,--must not find delight in the radiance of a clear sky,--nor in the sight of the sea,--nor in the sound of the flowing of rivers,--nor in the forms of peaks and woods and valleys,--nor in the colors of them.

"He who truly wishes to know must not find delight in contemplating the works and the deeds of men, nor in hearing their converse, nor in observing the puppet-play of their passions and of their emotions. All this is but a weaving of smoke,--a shimmering of vapors,--an impermanency,--a phantasmagory.

"For the pleasures that men term lofty or noble or sublime are but larger sensualisms, subtler falsities: venomous fair-seeming flowerings of selfishness,--all rooted in the elder slime of appetites and desires. To joy in the radiance of a cloudless day,--to see the mountains shift their tintings to the wheeling of the sun,--to watch the passing of waves, the fading of sunsets,--to find charm in the blossoming of plants or trees: all this is of the senses. Not less truly of the senses is the pleasure of observing actions called great or beautiful or heroic,--since it is one with the pleasure of imagining those things for which men miserably strive in this miserable world: brief love and fame and honor,--all of which are empty as passing foam.

"Sky, sun, and sea;--the peaks, the woods, the plains;--all splendors and forms and colors,--are spectres. The feelings and the thoughts and the acts of men,--whether deemed high or low, noble or ignoble,--all things imagined or done for any save the eternal purpose, are but dreams born of dreams and begetting hollowness. To the clear of sight, all feelings of self,--all love and hate, joy and pain, hope and regret, are alike shadows;--youth and age, beauty and horror, sweetness and foulness, are not different;--death and life are one and the same; and Space and Time exist but as the stage and the order of the perpetual Shadow-play.

"All that exists in Time must perish. To the Awakened there is no Time or Space or Change,--no night or day,--no heat or cold,--no moon or season,--no present, past, or future. Form and the names of form are alike nothingness:--Knowledge only is real; and unto whomsoever gains it, the universe becomes a ghost. But it is written:--'_He who hath overcome Time in the past and the future must be of exceedingly pure understanding_.'

"Such understanding is not yours. Still to your eyes the shadow seems the substance,--and darkness, light,--and voidness, beauty. And therefore to see your former births could give you only pain."

*

I asked:--

"Had I found strength to look back to the beginning,--back to the verge of Time,--could I have read the Secret of the universe?"

"Nay," was answer made. "Only by Infinite Vision can the Secret be read. Could you have looked back incomparably further than your power permitted, then the Past would have become for you the Future. And could you have endured even yet more, the Future would have orbed back for you into the Present."

"Yet why?" I murmured, marveling.... "What is the Circle?"

"Circle there is none," was the response;--"Circle there is none but the great phantom-whirl of birth and death to which, by their own thoughts and deeds, the ignorant remain condemned. But this has being only in Time; and Time itself is illusion."

End of Project Gutenberg's Gleanings in Buddha-Fields, by Lafcadio Hearn