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GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS

STUDIES OF HAND AND SOUL
IN THE FAR EAST

BY

LAFCADIO HEARN

LECTURER ON ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF JAPAN



BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1897




CONTENTS

       I. A LIVING GOD
      II. OUT OF THE STREET
     III. NOTES OF A TRIP TO KYŌTO
      IV. DUST
       V. ABOUT FACES EN JAPANESE ART
      VI. NINGYŌ-NO-HAKA
     VII. IN ŌSAKA
    VIII. BUDDHIST ALLUSIONS IN JAPANESE FOLK-SONG
      IX. NIRVANA
       X. THE REBIRTH OF KATSUGORŌ
      XI. WITHIN THE CIRCLE



GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS




I


A LIVING GOD


I


Of whatever dimension, the temples or shrines of pure Shintō are all
built in the same archaic style. The typical shrine is a windowless
oblong building of unpainted timber, with a very steep overhanging
roof; the front is the gable end; and the upper part of the perpetually
closed doors is wooden lattice-work,--usually a grating of bars
closely set and crossing each other at right angles. In most cases
the structure is raised slightly above the ground on wooden pillars;
and the queer peaked façade, with its visor-like apertures and the
fantastic projections of beam-work above its gable-angle, might remind
the European traveler of certain old Gothic forms of dormer. There is
no artificial color. The plain wood[1] soon turns, under the action of
rain and sun, to a natural grey, varying according to surface exposure
from the silvery tone of birch bark to the sombre grey of basalt. So
shaped and so tinted, the isolated country _yashiro_ may seem less like
a work of joinery than a feature of the scenery,--a rural form related
to nature as closely as rocks and trees,--a something that came into
existence only as a manifestation of Ohotsuchi-no-Kami, the Earth-god,
the primeval divinity of the land.

Why certain architectural forms produce in the beholder a feeling of
weirdness is a question about which I should like to theorize some
day: at present I shall venture only to say that Shinto shrines evoke
such a feeling. It grows with familiarity instead of weakening; and a
knowledge of popular beliefs is apt to intensify it. We have no English
words by which these queer shapes can be sufficiently described,--much
less any language able to communicate the peculiar impression which
they make. Those Shinto terms which we loosely render by the words
"temple" and "shrine" are really untranslatable;--I mean that the
Japanese ideas attaching to them cannot be conveyed by translation. The
so-called "august house" of the Kami is not so much a temple, in the
classic meaning of the term, as it is a haunted room, a spirit-chamber,
a ghost-house; many of the lesser divinities being veritably
ghosts,--ghosts of great warriors and heroes and rulers and teachers,
who lived and loved and died hundreds or thousands of years ago. I
fancy that to the Western mind the word "ghost-house" will convey,
better than such terms as "shrine" and "temple," some vague notion of
the strange character of the Shinto _miya_ or _yashiro,_--containing
in its perpetual dusk nothing more substantial than symbols or tokens,
the latter probably of paper. Now the emptiness behind the visored
front is more suggestive than anything material could possibly be;
and when you remember that millions of people during thousands of
years have worshipped their great dead before such _yashiro,--_that
a whole race still believes those buildings tenanted by viewless
conscious personalities,--you are apt also to reflect how difficult
it would be to prove the faith absurd. Nay! in spite of Occidental
reluctances,--in spite of whatever you may think it expedient to say
or not to say at a later time about the experience,--you may very
likely find yourself for a moment forced into the attitude of respect
toward possibilities. Mere cold reasoning will not help you far in the
opposite direction. The evidence of the senses counts for little: you
know there are ever so many realities which can neither be seen nor
heard nor felt, but which exist as forces,--tremendous forces. Then
again you cannot mock the conviction of forty millions of people while
that conviction thrills all about you like the air,--while conscious
that it is pressing upon your psychical being just as the atmosphere
presses upon your physical being. As for myself, whenever I am alone in
the presence of a Shinto shrine, I have the sensation of being haunted;
and I cannot help thinking about the possible apperceptions of the
haunter. And this tempts me to fancy how I should feel if I myself were
a god,--dwelling in some old Izumo shrine on the summit of a hill,
guarded by stone lions and shadowed by a holy grove.

Elfishly small my habitation might be, but never too small, because I
should have neither size nor form. I should be only a vibration,--a
motion invisible as of ether or of magnetism; though able sometimes to
shape me a shadow-body, in the likeness of my former visible self, when
I should wish to make apparition.

As air to the bird, as water to the fish, so would all substance be
permeable to the essence of me. I should pass at will through the walls
of my dwelling to swim in the long gold bath of a sunbeam, to thrill in
the heart of a flower, to ride on the neck of a dragon-fly.

Power above life and power over death would be mine,--and the power of
self-extension, and the power of self-multiplication, and the power of
being in all places at one and the same moment. Simultaneously in a
hundred homes I should hear myself worshiped, I should inhale the vapor
of a hundred offerings: each evening, from my place within a hundred
household shrines, I should see the holy lights lighted for me in
lamplets of red clay, in lamplets of brass,--the lights of the Kami,
kindled with purest fire and fed with purest oil.

But in my yashiro upon the hill I should have greatest honor: there
betimes I should gather the multitude of my selves together; there
should I unify my powers to answer supplication.

From the dusk of my ghost-house I should look for the coming of
sandaled feet, and watch brown supple fingers weaving to my bars the
knotted papers which are records of vows, and observe the motion of the
lips of my worshipers making prayer:--

_--"Harai