Part 6
As to Kwannon, it is true that in Buddhist history she figures both as a man and woman (as also does the daughter of the Serpent-King in the astounding _sutra_ of the Lotus of the Good Law),--she is identified with the Sanscrit Avalokitesvara,-- about whose sex there may be some doubt. I have a translation of her Japanese _sutra_, in which she is female, however;--and in China and in Japan she has come to be considered the ideal of all that is sweet in womanliness, and her statues and the representations of her in the numerous pictures of the Buddhist pantheon are of a woman,--maiden. And after all, the people, not the scholars, make the gods, and the gods they make are the best.
I cannot help thinking that the identification of the Japanese Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with those of India is not sufficiently specified by Eitel and others as an identification of origin only. They have become totally transformed here,--they have undergone perfect avatars, and are not now the same. Shaka, Amida, Yakushi, Fudō, Dainichi, etc., may have been in India distinct personalities: in Japan they are but forms of the One,--as indeed are the innumerable Buddhas of the Lotus of the True Law. All are one. And Kshitigarbha is not our Japanese Jizō,--and Kwannon is not Avalokitesvara, and the Ni-ō are not the figures of Indra, and Emma-O is not Yama. "They were and are not." Don't you agree with me that the popular idea of a divinity is an element of weight in such questions of doubt as we are chatting about?
With every wish that you may enjoy your journey in Shikoku, I remain, most truly ever,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
P. S.... I have been teaching three days, and find no difference in the boys from those of Izumo, --they are gentle, polite, manly and eager. But I am greatly hampered by the books. There are not books enough, and the reading-books chosen are atrociously unsuited for the students. Fancy "Silas Marner" and "John Halifax," with the long double-compound complex semiphilosophical sentences of George Eliot, as text-books for boys who can scarcely speak in English! A missionary's choice! Ye gods of old Japan! I think the Mombushō is economical in the wrong direction. Too much money cannot be spent on good reading-books. Less money on buildings and more for books would give better results. Buildings worth a quarter of a million (as building costs in America), and "Lovell's Library" and "George Munro's" piracies bought for text-books. I could scream!!
TO MASANOBU ŌTANI
KUMAMOTO, January, 1892.
DEAR ŌTANI,--Your long and most interesting letter gave me much pleasure, as well as much information. I am very glad to have had my questions so nicely answered; for I am writing an essay on Shintō home-worship in Izumo,--all about the _kamidana_, etc. I know a good deal about general forms and rules, but very little about the reverence paid _in the house_ to the family dead (forefathers, father, mother, dead children, etc.)--in Shintō, which is very interesting to know. I think much of the modern customs shows a Chinese origin, though the spirit of pure Shintō seems to be wholly Japanese.
I think your first explanation of the form of the _omiki dokkuri no kuchi-sashi_ is the correct one,--so far as this is concerned. I am not sure, but the shape is strikingly like that of the mystic jewel of Buddhist art. There is another form in brass, which I have, that seems intended to represent a folded paper; but I am not sure what it means.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Many thanks for your very valuable notes about the January customs. You told me quite a number of things I did not know before,--such as the rules about the twist of the straw-rope, and the symbolism of the charcoal and many other articles. But I would like to know why the pendent straws should be 3-5-7: is there any mystic signification in those numbers? I thought the Japanese mystic number was 8....
Take good care of your health.
Ever very truly yours, LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
KUMAMOTO, January, 1892.
DEAR HENDRICK,--Your jolly letter just came--Jan. 3rd,--to find me celebrating the new year after the Japanese fashion. There is not one New Year's day here, but three. Over the gate, and all the alcoves of each apartment, the straw rope (_shimenawa_), which is the Shintō emblem of the gods, is festooned; upon the _kamidana_, or "god-shelf," lights are burning before the tablets of those deities who have pledged themselves in Japanese ideographs to love and protect this foreigner,--and I have given to them offerings of rice-cakes and sake. For the guests are dishes of raw fish, and others which it would take too long to describe, and hot sake. My little wife does the honours. Before the gate are Japanese flags and pine-trees--emblems of green old age and unflinching purpose.
--Well, here I am in Kyūshū, a thousand miles and more south of Yokohama, at a salary of 200 yen a month. All my Izumo servants came with me. Our house is not nearly so beautiful as that in Matsue, and the city is devilishly ugly and commonplace,--an enormous, half-Europeanized garrison-town, full of soldiers. I don't like it; but Lord! I must try to make money, for nothing is sure in Japan, and I am now so tied down to the country that I can't quit it, except for a trip, whether the Government employs me or not. I have nine lives depending on my work--wife, wife's mother, wife's father, wife's adopted mother, wife's father's father, and then servants, and a Buddhist student. How would _you_ like that? It wouldn't do in America. But it is nothing here--no appreciable burden. The _moral_ burden, however, is heavy enough. You can't let a little world grow up around you, to depend on you, and then break it all up--not if you are a respectable person. And I indulge in the luxury of "filial piety"--a virtue of which the good and evil results are only known to us Orientals.
I translated into Hearnian dialect all you said. And my wife, whose name is Setsu, or Chi-yo (alternative), knows you well by your photograph, and said such nice things about that photograph that I dare not tell you. Which is all the more extraordinary because when I showed her some pictures of "distinguished foreigners" she and the girls all said that if they should ever meet such people they would "become Buddhas for fear"--i. e., die of fright. American and English faces--their deep-set eyes--terrify unsophisticated Japanese. Children cry with fear at the sight of a foreigner. So your photo must reveal exceptional qualities to make such an impression....
Everybody gets drunk here to-day; but a cultivated Japanese is never offensively drunk. To get _properly_, politely drunk upon sake is the _summum bonum_.... Although a gentleman knows how to act, however drunk, it is the custom, when your host makes you drunker than usual (which delights him), to call at the house next morning, and thank him for the entertainment--at the same time apologizing for any _possible_ mistakes. Of course, there are no ladies at men's dinners--only professional dancing-girls, _maiko_ or _geisha_.
Work progresses; but the barrier of language is a serious one. My project to study Buddhism must be indefinitely delayed on that account. For the deeper mysteries of Buddhism cannot be explained in the Hearnian dialect.
What some people say about Miss Bisland--ah! I mean Mrs. Wetmore--being only beautiful when she wants to be is, I think, perfectly true. She can change into seventeen different women. She used to make me almost believe the stories about Circe and Lilith. She laughed to scorn the terrible scientific test of the photograph--of the science which reveals new _nebulae_ and tells a man in advance whether he is going to get the small-pox or not. No two photos of her ever represented the same human being. In ordinary mortals the sort of thing called _Ego_, which is not "I" but "They," is worked up into a recognizable composite photo. But in her case, 'tis quite otherwise. The different dead that live in her, live quite separately from each other, in different rooms, and receive upon different afternoons. And yet--if even Rudyard Kipling were to write the truth about that person--or rather that ghostly congregation of persons called Elizabeth Bisland,--who but a crazy man would believe that truth? Assuredly Mr. W. ought to think himself lucky. Ever to get tired of Elizabeth is out of human possibility. There are too many different Elizabeths, belonging to different historical epochs, countries, and conditions. If he should tire of one Elizabeth,--lo! there will appear another. And there is one very terrible Elizabeth, whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement. But I am glad for the compound Elizabeth that she has this Protector in reserve.--Lord! how irreverently I have been talking! But that is because you can read under the irreverence....
What can't be insured against is earthquake. I have become afraid. Do you know that the earthquake the other day in Gifu, Aichi, etc., destroyed nearly 200,000 houses and nearly 10,000 lives? My house in far-off Matsue rocked and groaned like a steamer in a typhoon. It isn't the quake one's afraid of: it is being held down under a ton of timber and slowly burned alive. That is what happened to most of the dead. Five millions of dollars will scarcely relieve the distress....
Well, here's a thousand happy New Years to you and yours,--all luck, all blessings, all glorious sensations.
Ever from your old disoccidentalized chum, LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
KUMAMOTO, April, 1892.
DEAR HENDRICK,--Just had a long and delightful letter from you, and Mallock's book. I hate the Jesuit; but he has a particular cleverness of his own indeed. I hate him first because he is insincere, as you suggest; then I hate him because he is morbid, with a priestly morbidness--sickly, cynical, unhealthy. I like Kipling's morbidness, which is manly and full of enormous resolve and defiance in the teeth of God and hell and nature,--but the other--no! This book is not free from the usual faults. It is like Paul Bourget boiled into thin soup, and flavoured with a dash of M. de Camors. The Markham girl was certainly Feuillet's imagination; but she is excellently done. Really, I don't know;--I asked myself: "If it was I?" ... And conscience answered: "If it was _you_, in spite of love and duty and honour and hellfire staring you in the face you would have gone after her,--and tried to console yourself by considering the Law of Attraction of Bodies and Souls in the incomprehensible cosmical order of things, which is older than the gods." And I was very much inclined to demur; but conscience repeated: "Oh! don't be such a liar and quibbler;--you know you would! That was the only part of the book you really liked. Your ancestors were not religious people: you lack constitutional morality. That's why you are poor, and unsuccessful, and void of mental balance, and an exile in Japan. You know you cannot be happy in an English moral community. You are a fraud--a vile Latin--a vicious French-hearted scalawag."
And I could not say anything, because what conscience observed was true--to a considerable extent. "_Vive le monde antique!_" ...
I have been thinking a heap, because of being much alone. (The Japanese do not understand Western thought at all--at least not its emotional side. Therefore devour time and devour thought even while they stimulate it.) ...
Now about these Shadows. Yes, there are forces about one,--vague, working soundlessly, imperceptibly, softening one as the action of air softens certain surfaces of rock while hardening others. The magnetism of another faith about you necessarily polarizes that loose-quivering needle of desire in a man that seeks source of attraction in spite of synthetic philosophy. The general belief in an infinite past and future interpenetrates one somehow. When you find children who do wrong are always warned, "Ah! your future birth will be unhappy;" when you find two lovers drinking death together, and leaving behind them letters saying, "This is the influence of our last birth, when we broke our promise to become husband and wife;" and last, but not least, when some loving woman murmurs, laughingly: "In the last life thou wert a woman and I a man, and I loved thee much; but thou didst not love me at all,"--you begin to doubt if you do not really believe like everybody else.
About the training of the senses. The idea is admirable, but _alas!_--a very clever Frenchman five years ago, in the _Revue Politique et Littéraire_, almost exhausted it. He represented a man who had cultivated his eye so that he could see the bacteria in the air, and the grain of metals,--also being able to adjust his eyes to distance. He had trained his ear so as to hear all sounds of growth and decomposition. He had trained his nose to smell all substances supposed to have no smell. He made a diagram of the five senses thus:--
The way impressions come to--
YOU [Illustration] ME [Illustration]
I translated it for the _T.-D._
For a little while, good-bye and best happiness.
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
KUMAMOTO, 1892.
DEAR E. H.,-- ... Your thoughts about the Shadows of the East are touching. You ought to be able to write something beautiful and quite new if you had time....
You have been seized by the fascination of monstrous cities built up to heaven, and eternally sending their thunder to the smoke-blacked sky,--cities where we live by machinery. I can shudder now only to think of walking down a street between miles of houses two hundred feet high, with a roaring of traffic through them as of a torrent in a cañon. And that fascination means elegance, fashion, social duties.... I have been trying to deal with these two problems: "What has been the moral value of Christianity to mankind?" and "Why is Western civilization still in slavery to religious hypocrisy?" The answer to the former seems to be that without the brutal denial of the value of life and pleasure by Christianity, we could never have learned that the highest enjoyments are, after all, intellectual, and that progress can be effected only by self-sacrifice to interest and indifference to physical gratifications. And the latter question, though I have not yet solved it, seems to suggest that the hypocrisy itself may have large hidden value,--may be in process of transmutation into a truth.
Yes, Japanese women are all that your question implies you would wish them to be. They are children, of course. They perceive every possible shade of thought,--vexation, doubt, or pleasure,--as it passes over the face; and they know all you do not tell them. If you are unhappy about anything, then they say: "I will pray to the Kami-sama for my lord,"--and they light a little lamp, and clap their hands and pray. And the ancient gods hearken unto them; and the heart of the foreign barbarian is therewith lightened and made luminous with sunshine. And he orders the merchants of curious textures to bring their goods to the house, which they do--piling them up like mountains; and there is such choice that the pleasure of the purchase is dampened by the sense of inability to buy everything in this world. And the merchants, departing, leave behind them dreams in little Japanese brains of beautiful things to be bought next year.
Also Japanese women have curious Souls. The other day in Nagano, a politician told a treacherous lie. Whereupon his wife robed herself all in white as those are robed who are about to journey to the world of ghosts, and purified her lips according to the holy rite, and, taking from the storeroom an ancient family sword, thereupon slew herself. And she left a letter, regretting that she had but one life to give in expiation of the shame and the wrong of that lie. And the people do now worship at her grave, and strew flowers thereupon, and pray for daughters with hearts as brave.... But the worms are eating her.
Because you sent me that horrid book, I revenge myself. I send you a much more horrid book. But if you do not enjoy it, I shall commit _hara kiri_, or _seppuku_, which is the polite name. And a woman wrote it--a woman! Christopher Columbus! what a _terrible_ woman she must be!...
The "tract" you sent is giving much amusement to friends here. Send anything _really_ good of that sort you can find: it makes life happier for the exile.
I am not easy about my book, of which I now await the proofs. It lacks colour--it isn't like the West Indian book. But the world here is not forceful: it is all washed in faint blues and greys and greens. There are really gamboge, or saffron-coloured valleys,--and lilac fields; but these exist only in the early summer and the rape-plant season, and ordinarily Japan is chromatically spectral. My next book will probably be on Buddhism in common life.
You write me delightful letters, which, alas! I can't answer. Well, they are not answerable in themselves. They are thinking. I can only say this about one point: the isolation ought--unless you are physically tired by the day's work--to prove of value. All the best work is done the way ants do things--by tiny but tireless and regular additions. I wouldn't recommend introspection,--except in commentary. You _must_ see interesting life. Of course only in flashes and patches. But preserve in writing the memory of these. In a year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging, kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,--and trying to live. Then play God, and breathe into the nostrils,--and be astonished and pleased.
Lovingly ever yours LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO PAGE M. BAKER
KUMAMOTO, June, 1892.
DEAR PAGE,--To-day, second of June, your kind letter came, enclosing a draft for £163; and I write in haste to catch the mail.... And now, ten thousand thanks, from the bottom of my much-scarified heart.
I am sorry I did not get the _T.-D._, as it would have helped me to get out my book quicker,--my first book. It ought to be out this Fall; and I think it will be tolerably large,--a little larger than "Two Years in the French West Indies;" but it is only an introductory book.
Really, it is very queer; but you seem to be the best friend I've got outside of Japan. You really do things for a fellow--great big things; and nobody else seems inclined to do much of anything....
I send you to-day a better photo of my little wife, and some other things; and you will shortly get a copy of Chamberlain's "Things Japanese" I have ordered for you.... As for making a present to Setsu (that is her name in Japanese; in Chinese Chi-yo, or Tchi-yo[1]), I don't think you could send her anything Western she would understand. And I would not wish you to take so much trouble. The best thing you can do to please her is to be good to me. She has really everything she wants (you know Japanese women wear no earrings, necklaces, or jewelry as ours do); and what she really wants is only made in Japan; and I am wickedly trying to keep her as innocent of foreign life as possible. So whenever she shows a liking even for foreign textures (many are now thrown on the market) I persuade her that Japanese goods are twice as pretty and durable, and for fear she might not believe me I usually manage to find some Japanese stuff that really is much better than the foreign article on sale....
[1] (Like Tchi-Nim?)--It means "Life-for-a-Thousand-Years,"--a name of good omen.]
Oh, about distances. I am in Kyūshū, the southern island, you know,--very far from Tōkyō, and by the route much farther than as the crow flies. What I meant by 2000 miles south of Tōkyō was the Loochoo Islands. You know they belong to Japan, but perhaps I am wrong as to distance. The Loochoo Islands compose what is called _Okinawa Ken_ (ken is province).... I find I shall not be able to go to Loochoo this summer, however; I must make studies somewhere else for a new book. Of course you will get my book as soon as it comes out.
In that book you will find a good deal about what you ask in relation to my way of living, etc. But as to eating, I have said very little. The fact is I lived for one year exclusively on Japanese food, which Europeans, among others Mr. Chamberlain, consider almost impossible. I must confess, however, that it broke me down. After twelve months I could not eat at all. You know Japanese food is raw fish and fresh fish, rice, bean-curds (they look like custard), seaweed, dried cuttle-fish,--rarely chicken or eggs. In short, of five hundred Japanese dishes, the basis is rice, fish, beans, lotus, various vegetables, including bamboo shoots, and seaweed. Confectionery is eaten between meals only, and sparingly. Tea is never allowed to become strong: it is a pale straw-colour, without sugar or milk, and once used to it, you cannot bear the sight of European tea any more. But I had to return to the flesh-pots of Egypt. I now eat Japanese food only once a day; and morning and evening indulge in beefsteak, bread, and Bass's Ale.