Generally speaking, we construct for endurance, the Japanese for
impermanency. Few things for common use are made in Japan with a
view to durability. The straw sandals worn out and replaced at
each stage of a journey, the robe consisting of a few simple
widths loosely stitched together for wearing, and unstitched
again for washing, the fresh chopsticks served to each new guest
at a hotel, the light shoji frames serving at once for windows
and walls, and repapered twice a year; the mattings renewed every
autumn,--all these are but random examples of countless small
things in daily life that illustrate the national contentment
with impermanency.
What is the story of a common Japanese dwelling? Leaving my home
in the morning, I observe, as I pass the corner of the next
street crossing mine, some men setting up bamboo poles on a
vacant lot there. Returning after five hours' absence, I find on
the same lot the skeleton of a two-story house. Next forenoon I
see that the walls are nearly finished already,--mud and wattles.
By sundown the roof has been completely tiled. On the following
morning I observe that the mattings have been put down, and the
inside plastering has been finished. In five days the house is
completed. This, of course, is a cheap building; a fine one would
take much longer to put up and finish. But Japanese cities are
for the most part composed of such common buildings. They are as
cheap as they are simple.
I cannot now remember where I first met with the observation that
the curve of the Chinese roof might preserve the memory of the
nomad tent. The idea haunted me long after I had ungratefully
forgotten the book in which I found it; and when I first saw, in
Izumo, the singular structure of the old Shinto temples, with
queer cross-projections at their gable-ends and upon their
roof-ridges, the suggestion of the forgotten essayist about the
possible origin of much less ancient forms returned to me with
great force. But there is much in Japan besides primitive
architectural traditions to indicate a nomadic ancestry for the
race. Always and everywhere there is a total absence of what we
would call solidity; and the characteristics of impermanence seem
to mark almost everything in the exterior life of the people,
except, indeed, the immemorial costume of the peasant and the
shape of the implements of his toil. Not to dwell upon the fact
that even during the comparatively brief period of her written
history Japan has had more than sixty capitals, of which the
greater number have completely disappeared, it may be broadly
stated that every Japanese city is rebuilt within the time of a
generation. Some temples and a few colossal fortresses offer
exceptions; but, as a general rule, the Japanese city changes its
substance, if not its form, in the lifetime of a man. Fires,
earth-quakes, and many other causes partly account for this; the
chief reason, however, is that houses are not built to last. The
common people have no ancestral homes. The dearest spot to all
is, not the place of birth, but the place of burial; and there is
little that is permanent save the resting-places of the dead and
the sites of the ancient shrines.
The land itself is a land of impermanence. Rivers shift their
courses, coasts their outline, plains their level; volcanic peaks
heighten or crumble; valleys are blocked by lava-floods or
landslides; lakes appear and disappear. Even the matchless shape
of Fuji, that snowy miracle which has been the inspiration of
artists for centuries, is said to have been slightly changed
since my advent to the country; and not a few other mountains
have in the same short time taken totally new forms. Only the
general lines of the land, the general aspects of its nature, the
general character of the seasons, remain fixed. Even the very
beauty of the landscapes is largely illusive,--a beauty of
shifting colors and moving mists. Only he to whom those
landscapes are familiar can know how their mountain vapors make
mockery of real changes which have been, and ghostly predictions
of other changes yet to be, in the history of the archipelago.
The gods, indeed, remain,--haunt their homes upon the hills,
diffuse a soft religious awe through the twilight of their
groves, perhaps because they are without form and substance.
Their shrines seldom pass utterly into oblivion, like the
dwellings of men. But every Shinto temple is necessarily rebuilt
at more or less brief intervals; and the holiest,--the shrine of
Ise,--in obedience to immemorial custom, must be demolished every
twenty years, and its timbers cut into thousands of tiny charms,
which are distributed to pilgrims.
From Aryan India, through China, came Buddhism, with its vast
doctrine of impermanency. The builders of the first Buddhist
temples in Japan--architects of another race--built well: witness
the Chinese structures at Kamakura that have survived so many
centuries, while of the great city which once surrounded them not
a trace remains. But the psychical influence of Buddhism could in
no land impel minds to the love of material stability. The
teaching that the universe is an illusion; that life is but one
momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all attachment to
persons, to places, or to things must be fraught with sorrow;
that only through suppression of every desire--even the desire of
Nirvana itself--can humanity reach the eternal peace, certainly
harmonized with the older racial feeling. Though the people never
much occupied themselves with the profounder philosophy of the
foreign faith, its doctrine of impermanency must, in course of
time, have profoundly influenced national character. It explained
and consoled; it imparted new capacity to bear all things
bravely; it strengthened that patience which is a trait of the
race. Even in Japanese art--developed, if not actually created,
under Buddhist influence--the doctrine of impermanency has left
its traces. Buddhism taught that nature was a dream, an illusion,
a phantasmagoria; but it also taught men how to seize the
fleeting impressions of that dream, and how to interpret them in
relation to the highest truth. And they learned well. In the
flushed splendor of the blossom-bursts of spring, in the coming
and the going of the cicada, in the dying crimson of autumn
foliage, in the ghostly beauty of snow, in the delusive motion of
wave or cloud, they saw old parables of perpetual meaning. Even
their calamities--fire, flood, earthquake, pestilence--
interpreted to them unceasingly the doctrine of the eternal
Vanishing.
_All things which exist in Time must perish. The forests, the
mountains,--all things thus exist. In Time are born all things
having desire._
_The Sun and Moon, Sakra himself with all the multitude of his
attendants, will all, without exception, perish; there is not one
that will endure._
_In the beginning things were fixed; in the end again they
separate: different combinations cause other substance; for in
nature there is no uniform and constant principle._
_All component things must grow old; impermanent are all
component things. Even unto a grain of sesamum seed there is no
such thing as a compound which is permanent. All are transient;
all have the inherent quality of dissolution._
_All component things, without exception, are impermanent,
unstable, despicable, sure to depart, disintegrating; all are
temporary as a mirage, as a phantom, or as foam.... Even as all
earthen vessels made by the potter end in being broken, so end
the lives of men._
_And a belief in matter itself is unmentionable and
inexpressible,--it is neither a thing nor no-thing: and this is
known even by children and ignorant persons._