I wonder if I can buy a picture of Koshin. In most Japanese temples
little pictures of the tutelar deity are sold to pilgrims, cheap prints
on thin paper. But the temple guardian here tells me, with a gesture of
despair, that there are no pictures of Koshin for sale; there is only an
old kakemono on which the god is represented. If I would like to see it
he will go home and get it for me. I beg him to do me the favour; and he
hurries into the street.
While awaiting his return, I continue to examine the queer old statues,
with a feeling of mingled melancholy and pleasure. To have studied and
loved an ancient faith only through the labours of palaeographers and
archaeologists, and as a something astronomically remote from one's own
existence, and then suddenly in after years to find the same faith a
part of one's human environment,--to feel that its mythology, though
senescent, is alive all around you--is almost to realise the dream
of the Romantics, to have the sensation of returning through twenty
centuries into the life of a happier world. For these quaint Gods of
Roads and Gods of Earth are really living still, though so worn and
mossed and feebly worshipped. In this brief moment, at least, I am
really in the Elder World--perhaps just at that epoch of it when the
primal faith is growing a little old-fashioned, crumbling slowly before
the corrosive influence of a new philosophy; and I know myself a pagan
still, loving these simple old gods, these gods of a people's childhood.
And they need some human love, these naive, innocent, ugly gods. The
beautiful divinities will live for ever by that sweetness of womanhood
idealised in the Buddhist art of them: eternal are Kwannon and Benten;
they need no help of man; they will compel reverence when the great
temples shall all have become voiceless and priestless as this shrine
of Koshin is. But these kind, queer, artless, mouldering gods, who have
given ease to so many troubled minds, who have gladdened so many simple
hearts, who have heard so many innocent prayers--how gladly would
I prolong their beneficent lives in spite of the so-called 'laws of
progress' and the irrefutable philosophy of evolution!
The guardian returns, bringing with him a kakemono, very small, very
dusty, and so yellow-stained by time that it might be a thousand years
old. But I am disappointed as I unroll it; there is only a very common
print of the god within--all outline. And while I am looking at it, I
become for the first time conscious that a crowd has gathered about
me,--tanned kindly-faced labourers from the fields, and mothers with
their babies on their backs, and school children, and jinricksha
men--all wondering that a stranger should be thus interested in their
gods. And although the pressure about me is very, very gentle, like a
pressure of tepid water for gentleness, I feel a little embarrassed. I
give back the old kakemono to the guardian, make my offering to the god,
and take my leave of Koshin and his good servant.
All the kind oblique eyes follow me as I go. And something like a
feeling of remorse seizes me at thus abruptly abandoning the void,
dusty, crumbling temple, with its mirrorless altar and its colourless
lanterns, and the decaying sculptures of its neglected court, and its
kindly guardian whom I see still watching my retreating steps, with the
yellow kakemono in his hand. The whistle of a locomotive warns me that
I shall just have time to catch the train. For Western civilisation has
invaded all this primitive peace, with its webs of steel, with its ways
of iron. This is not of thy roads, O Koshin!--the old gods are dying
along its ash-strewn verge!