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.