flat table-land that lies to the north behind our house, through which
runs a small road, untraveled and grass-grown, connecting somewhere or
other with the road of the great temples. I had intended to study there,
for several reasons; one, among others, because I saw every day, as I
looked through my screens, a little typical landscape-picture of Japan.
Near by, a small temple shrine all vermilion in the sun, with heavy,
black, oppressive roof; then a stretch of flat table-land, overgrown
with trees and bushes, from which stood up a single high tree, with
peaceful horizontal branches; on each side, conical hills, as if the
wings of a stage-scene; far beyond, a tumble of mountains behind the
great depression of the river hidden out of sight; and above, and
farther yet, the great green slopes that lead to the peak of Nio-ho. It
was very hot, and all the clouds seemed far away, the sun very high in
the early noon, and no shade. I passed the new priests' houses of the
old temple near us, where are billeted, to the inconvenience of the
owners, many sailor boys sent all the way from the navy yard of
Okotsuka, so that they escape the cholera, as we are doing. They are
usually washing their clothes in the torrent that runs under the bridge
of three carved stones, which I have to pass to get into the little
path, frequented by gadflies, that takes me up to my sketching-ground.
Were it not for the amiably obtrusive curiosity of these youngsters in
their leisure hours, I should pass through their courtyard into the
shady spaces near the little temples and the three-storied pagoda, which
the priests' houses adjoin.
I am always courteously saluted by the priests, and one of them, living
there in vacation, I know. He is off duty at the temples of Iyémitsŭ,
and I have seen him at the home of our friends. I send you a sketch of
his face, which appears to me impressed by sincerity and a certain
anxiety very sympathetic. When I sketch near the pagoda I see him
occasionally ringing the hanging-bell or cymbal, with the same step and
air of half-unconscious performance of habitual duty that I remember so
well in Catholic priests whom I knew as a boy.
Here the memory of Shodo Shonin comes up again, with a confusion of
intention in the assembled worship of Buddhist and native divinities.
For the "opener of mountains" built the temple here to the same god,
with the never-ending name, whom he met on the summit of Nan-tai-san.
And the adjoining chapel, dedicated to Kuwan-on, means that she was in
reality the essential being, behind the temporary manifestation, that
assumed the name and appearance of this mountain god,--the _genius
loci_. And the Latin words bring back the recollection of curious stones
in the mossy green shade, to which is attached the meaning of the oldest
past; for they are "male" and "female"--emblems and images of earliest
worship, empowered to remind, and perhaps obscurely to influence.
Seated at last under my umbrella, I could feel the hot moisture rising
from the grass beneath me. The heated hills on each side wore a thin
interlacing of violet in the green of their pines. The mountains across
the river were frosted in the sunlight, with the thinnest veil of a
glitter of wet.
Between them great walls of vapor rose from the hidden river, twisting
into draperies that slowly crawled up the slopes of the great mountain.
Far off, its top was capped with cloud, whose mass descended in a shower
over its face and between its peaks, and kept all its nearer side in a
trembling violet shadow.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A PRIEST.]
Above the peak the great mass of fog spread to the farthest mountains,
letting their highest tops shine through with a pale-blue faintness like
that of sky. But the great back of the long slope was distinct, and of a
vivid green against the background of violet mountains. So solid and
close-packed it looked under the high light that one might forget that
this green was not of turf, firm under foot, but was a trackless waste
of tall grasses high as a man's head. Farther on against the northern
sky the eastern slope was golden and sharp. In the highest sky of fiery
blue large cumulus clouds shone above and through the fog, whose ragged
edge blew like a great flag toward the south. The little temple blazed
in vermilion, one side all lighted up, its black-tiled roof hot in the
sun. In the shadow of its porch the columns and entablature were white
and pale gold and green.
My attempt to render the light and heat lasted for two or three hours:
my damp umbrella seemed penetrated by the light, my skin was scorched
and blistered, and a faint dizziness kept warning me to get back to a
larger shade. When I yielded, I was only just able to reach my welcome
mats, saved from something worse by my very scorching. Since yesterday I
have been ill; not sleeping, but dreaming uncomfortably; and visited and
comforted, however, by our fair hostess and the Doctor.
* * * * *
Murmurs of Buddhistic conversation remain in my mind: vague stories of
life in Southern monasteries, of refined ascetic life, of sublimated
delicate food, of gentle miraculous powers, known to the favored few
that behold them at times; of ascensions and disappearances like those
of the pilgrim saint of whom I was telling you yesterday--all of which
talk mingles with the vague intent of my painting. For I had proposed to
make my studies serve for the picture of the "Ascension"; to use the
clouds and the wilderness for my background; and to be, at least for
moments, in some relation to what I have to represent; that is to say,
in an atmosphere not inimical, as ours is, to what we call the
miraculous. Here, at least, I am not forced to consider external nature
as separate and opposed, and I can fall into moods of thought,--or, if
you prefer, of feeling,--in which the edges of all things blend, and
man and the outside world pass into each other.
[Illustration: OLD PAGODA NEAR THE PRIESTS' HOUSES.]
August 17.
And so, often, I like to think of these trees and rocks and streams, as
if from them might be evolved some spiritual essence. Has not Çakyamuni
said that all (living) beings possess the nature of Buddha, that is to
say, the absolute nature. The sun, the moon, the earth, and the
innumerable stars contain within themselves the absolute nature. So for
the little flowers, the grass, the clouds that rise from the waters, the
very drop of water itself; for they are begotten of nature absolute, and
all form a part of it, however great, however small. Absolute nature is
the essence of all things, and is the same as all things. This absolute
nature will be as are the waters of the sea, if we picture it, and its
modes will be as the waves, inseparable from the waters. Thus the
absolute and all things will be identical, inseparable views of the same
existence. This nature will be both essence and force, and appearance
and manner. And so my friends here, of the sect which holds the temple,
might teach me that the little plants, the great mountains, and the
rushing waters can become Buddhas.
In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds
three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind
whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the
movements of man and his voice,--or, indeed, his silence,--are the
expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought.
These mysteries are understood of the Buddha, but evolution, cultivated
by the "true word," or doctrine, will allow man, whose mysteries are
like the mysteries of the Buddhas, to become like unto them.
But since the path is open for all to Buddhahood,--since these animals
that pass me, this landscape about me, can become divine,--why, alas!
are not men more easily carried to that glorious end? It is because we
are living in the present; and as that present must have had a past,
since nothing is lost and nothing disappears, so it will have a future;
and that future depends on the present and on the past. Changes and
transformations are only a "play" of cause and effect, since spirit and
matter are one in absolute nature, which in its essence can neither be
born nor be dissolved. Actual life is absolutely determined by the
influencing action of merit and demerit in past existence, as the future
will be determined by present causes; so that it is possible for the
soul to pass through the six conditions of the infernal being, the
phantom, the beast, the demon, the human, and the celestial, and,
through painful transmigration, to reach the supreme salvation of
Nirvana. Then will end the universal metamorphoses, the trials, the
expiations, the unceasing whirlwind of life. Illusion will cease, and
reality last, in the complete calm of absolute truth.
NIRVANA
Have I told you my story of the word Nirvana, as used by the reporter at
Omaha, who managed to interview us? The association of a reporter with
any of the four states of Nirvana may seem impossible to you--but this
is the way it happened.
Owing to A----'s being the brother of the president of the road, we were
naturally suspected of business designs when we acknowledged that we
were going to Japan, and, in my shortsighted wisdom, I thought that I
should put to rout our interviewer by "allowing" that the purpose of our
going was to find Nirvana. I had misjudged the mind of the true
reporter, and did not expect the retort, "Are you not rather late in the
season?" Whether he knew or "builded better," he had certainly pointed
out the probable result. I often recur to this episode when, as now, I
enjoy, in dreaming action, that Nirvana which is called conditioned;
that state of the terrestrial being who understands truth by the
extinction of passions, but who is yet, indeed, very much tied to the
body--if I may speak so lightly of what is a contemplation of, and an
absorption in, eternal truth, a rest in supreme salvation.
* * * * *
Of all the images that I see so often, the one that touches me
most--partly, perhaps, because of the Eternal Feminine--is that of the
incarnation that is called Kuwan-on, when shown absorbed in the
meditations of Nirvana.
You have seen her in pictures, seated near some waterfall, and I am
continually reminded of her by the beautiful scenes about us, of which
the waterfall is the note and the charm. Were it not that I hate
sightseeing, I should have made pilgrimages, like the good Japanese, to
all the celebrated ones which are about. Exercise, however, during the
day is difficult to me, and I don't like being carried, and the
miserable horses of the peasants are awfully slow and very stumbly. We
go about in single file, perched on the saddles upon their humped backs,
each horse led by the owner, usually a trousered peasant girl. Lately on
our visits to waterfalls we have passed the wide bed of the second
river, which makes an island of our mountain--a great mountain-river bed
filled with stones and boulders, through which the waters, now very low,
divide into rushing torrents; while in the winter this is a tremendous
affair, and in flood-times the very boulders are carried away. Far down
at Imaichi, some six miles off, is shown one of the long row of stone
Buddhas, several hundred in number, which line the right bank of the
main river, the Dayagawa, near the deep pool called Kamman-ga-fuchi.
It was there that I drew the biggest of them all, on one of my first
days here, a statue of Jizo, with Nan-tai-san half veiled in the
distance behind him--a great cedar shading him, and all but the little
path and the bridge of a single stone overgrown with weeds and bushes.
These gods along the river are all ugly and barbarous,--country gods, as
it were,--alien as possible, while the nature about them, though
strange, is not so far away from me.
[Illustration: STATUE OF OYA JIZO.]
Their ugliness was accentuated by a sort of efflorescence, or moss
growth, curled and ragged by weather, made of innumerable slips of
paper pasted upon them by troops of pilgrims to the holy places, who
make a point of thus marking off their visits to each successive sacred
object. Fortunately, they are what the Japanese call "wet goods,"
that is to say, unprotected by roof or temple, and the rains of heaven
cleanse them and leave only the black and white of the lichens. They
always worried me like a bad dream when I passed them in the evening,
on my way home from work, and I can sympathize with the superstition
which makes it impossible to count them. But this is on the Dayagawa,
the main confluent which rushes down from Lake Chiuzenji. Our path led
through the other river, over causeways and bridges, up to the hills on
the other side, and to a high moorland from which the immense southern
plain and distant mountains appeared swimming in light. Two faint blue
triangles in the air were the peaks of Tsŭkŭba; nearer on the west, the
mountains of Nikko were covered with cloud, through which the sunburst
poured down upon their bases.
As we rode we passed beneath plantations covered with water, so that
their mirror, at the level of the eye, reflected the mountains and
clouds and upper sky in a transparent picture, spotted with innumerable
tufts of brilliant green. And then we dismounted at a little tea-house,
and sat under a rustic arbor, while our feminine grooms, stripping to
the waist, wiped and sponged their sweating arm-pits and bosoms, in
unconcernedness of sex. Yet when they noticed my sketching them, as if I
did not take their nakedness for granted, sleeves and gowns were rapidly
pulled over the uncovered flesh. So true it is that conduct depends upon
the kind of attention it calls for. Nor was the universal standard of
feminine propriety unrespected by them, when, on our return, my guide,
who had, in every possible way that I could imagine, expressed her
adherence to the ways of nature, met with the disaster of having her
back hair come down; for then, with a shriek, she dropped the rein, and
retired, blushing, behind the nearest tree, where, in equal hurry,
another girl guide proceeded to console her, and to re-arrange the
proper structure of shining black hair and ivory pins.
Then we descended by a narrow path, over which hung tree-camellias,
still spotted with their last white blossoms, whose edges were rusted by
the heat.
The main fall of Urami-no-Taki drops into a deep basin, edged by rocks,
from a hollow in the highest hill, over which hang great trees. On each
side lesser cascades rush or tumble over the rocky faces, and under the
main column small streams slide down, or drop in thin pillars to join
it. There is a path, frequented by pilgrims, which passes behind and
underneath the fall, so that we can stand behind and look through it,
whence its name. All is wilderness; but a high relief of the protector
Fudo, guardian and friend of such places, is carved on the rock behind
the falls, and shows through the rumpled edges of the water. All was
shade, except where the sun struck in the emerald hollow above the fall,
or where a beam lighted up here and there a patch of the great and small
cascades, or the trees and rocks about them. And here, again, the
intense silence, broken by the rush of the waterfall, recalled the
pictures of K'wan-on, whose meaning and whose images bring back to me
the Buddhistic idea of compassion. The deity, or goddess, seated in
abstraction by the falling waters of life, represents, I suppose, more
especially an ideal of contemplation, as the original Indian name
indicated, I think; but her name to-day is that of the Compassionate
One.
[Illustration: PEASANT GIRLS AND MOUNTAIN HORSES OF NIKKO.]
Of the divinity's many incarnations one has interested me as typical,
and will amuse you. It is when--in the year 696 B. C., though the
precise date is not exactly material--this power is born as a girl,
daughter to one of the many kings of China. Then follows a legend like
that of Saint Barbara. She is in no hurry to follow her princess's duty
of getting married, and pleasing her parents thereby. She is satisfied
with a virgin life, and makes delays by persuading her father to build
palaces for her bridal to come; and when all this has been done, and
there is no final escape, she ends by an absolute refusal of marriage.
At which, evidently from a long experience of the uselessness of
argument with her sex, her father cuts her head off, and I regret to say
that she thereupon goes to Hell. I suppose that she goes there, because,
however laudable and high her ideal of life might have been, it should
have been confined within the views of her country, that is to say, of
obedience to parents first and foremost. However, she went there, and
put up with it, and that so admirably that the divinity who rules the
place was obliged to dismiss her, for her contentment with her lot was
spreading as an example to the damned, and threatened the very existence
of Hell. Since then her appearances again in this world have been on
errands of compassion and of help. Nor is this constant willingness to
act on behalf of others, and thereby to leave the realm of absolute
peace, incompatible with that continual contemplation of which her
pictures or images offer an ideal, enchanting to me.
For, indeed, the fourth Nirvana is that state of truth in which supreme
salvation is not distinct from sorrowful transmigration, and for these
blessed beings this is Nirvana; that, possessing the fullness of wisdom,
they cannot desire to delay in transmigration, nor do they reënter
Nirvana, because they feel the extreme of compassion for other beings.
For, in the Buddhist doctrine, compassion is the first of all virtues,
and leads and is the essence of the five cardinal virtues, which
are--note the sequence--pity, justice, urbanity, sincerity, _and_ wise
behavior. To the Buddhist, the pitiless are the ungodly. Hence the
teaching of kindliness to all living beings, which is one of the "pure
precepts" of the "greater vehicle," and through which all beings can
obtain salvation.
For the happiness, which is the aim of Buddhism, is not limited to the
individual, but is to be useful, to be of profit, to all mankind--a
happiness which can only be moral, but which must act on the body as
intimately as the soul is united with it.
These are the aspirations of higher Buddhism--its supreme end, to
achieve the happiness of this life and of the future one--of the
individual and of humanity, but differently, according to times and
circumstances and human powers. In its full ideal here below civil and
religious society would be the same; the continual rest of Nirvana
becoming finally inseparable from our transmigrations--our passions
living together with complete wisdom, and our further existence not
demanding, then, another world. And if civilization shall have finally
perfected the world of mind and the world of matter, we shall have here
below Nirvana, and we shall dwell in it as Buddhas.
SKETCHING.--THE FLUTES OF IYÉYASŬ
August 24.
In the afternoon I go through the little road toward the west, whose
walls are spotted with mosses and creepers, and where the gutters are
filled with clear, noisy torrents, echoing in answer to the general
sound of waters. Rarely do I meet any one--perhaps some trousered
peasant girls, drowsily leading pack-horses; or naked peasants, with
muscles of yellow bronze, carrying brushwood on their backs. The sun is
at its hottest. Above the beat of the waters rises the perpetual
strident, interminable cry of the locusts, like the shrill voice of
mourners in this abode of tombs--the voice of dust and aridity. I turn a
corner of high wall and tall trees and enter, through a dilapidated
gateway and up some high steps in the wall, an open space, whose unknown
borders are concealed behind the enormous trunks of cryptomeria. For
weeks carpenters have been slowly repairing a temple building in this
court, the big beams and planks of freshly-cut wood perfuming the place
with the smell of cedar. In the grass and on the broken pavement lie
moldering fragments of the older work, still with a waxy covering of the
red lacquer which holds together the dark, dusty fibers.
A little bell-tower, lacquered red, stands near the other entrance,
to which I pass. That one has its wall and high fence all lacquered
red, and a gateway also red and spotted with yellow and gray mosses.
Down its big steps I go, seeing just before me, through the gigantic
trees and their gray and red trunks, the face of the tall pagoda, which
flanks one side of the court before Iyéyasŭ, and whose other side turns
toward the avenue of Iyémitsŭ. The road upon which I come is the avenue
of Iyéyasŭ. Three different slopes lead within it to the paved court,
where stands the high Torii of stone, through which one goes by the
middle path to the high steps and the wall, the boundary of the temple.
Two great banks, blocked with great dressed stones, separate the three
paths--the central path being cut into wide steps which lead up to
the Torii. On each of these masses of earth and masonry grow great
cryptomeria trees, each of their trunks almost filling, from side to
side, the entire width of the surface. They are planted irregularly. As
the further ends of the banks are less high from the ground, I climb
up, and sit to sketch against one of the ragged and splintered trunks.
For all these late afternoons but one all has been the same. Far above
me, through the needle branches of bright or shadowy green, large white
clouds roll and spread in a brilliant, blotty, wet, blue sky. The court
is framed in dark green, all above dazzling in light. The great Torii
stands in the half shade--the edge of its upper stone shining as if
gilded with yellow moss, and stains of black and white and rusty red
contrasting with the delicate gilded inscriptions incised on the lower
part of the two supporting columns.
[Illustration: OUR LANDLORD THE BUDDHIST PRIEST.]
Beyond, the white wall and steps of the temple inclosure are crowned
with white stone palings and a red lacquer wall behind them, and the red
lacquer and bronzed-roofed gateway. Here and there gold glitters on the
carvings and on the ends of its many roof-beams. Near it the great gray
tree-trunks are spaced, and out of the green branches shows the corner
of the stable of the Sacred Horses. Its gray walls are spotted in places
with gold and color. Beyond it are the red walls of one of the treasure
houses, made of beams with slanting edges; and in the gable under its
black eaves two symbolic animals, the elephant and the tapir, are carved
and painted gray and white on the gilded wall. At this distance the
bands of many-colored ornament make a glimmering of nameless color.
Farther back in the trees spots of heavy black and shining gold mark the
roofs of other buildings. The great trees near me almost hide the great
pagoda, and I can see of it only a little red, and the green under its
many eaves, which melts like a haze into the green of the trees.
All these effects of color and shape seem but as a decoration of the
trees, and as modes of enhancing their height and their stillness. The
great court becomes nothing but a basin with highly-finished edges, sunk
into the mass of mountain greenery. The Torii, alone, stands lonely and
mysterious. On the space between its upper stone beams is placed a great
blue tablet with gold letters that designate the sacred posthumous name
of Iyéyasŭ.
It is late in the year, and the place is no longer filled with pilgrims.
I look down, occasionally, on a few stragglers who come up the steps
below me--a few pilgrims in white dresses; peasants, sometimes with
their children; Japanese tourists, who, even here, at home, seem out of
place. This afternoon a couple of women, earnestly whispering, sailed
across the court and turned the corner of the avenue of Iyémitsŭ--with
toes turned in, as is the proper thing in this land of inversion. Their
dresses of gray and brown and black had all the accentuated refinement
of simplicity in color which is the character of good taste here, and
which gives one the gentle thrill of new solutions of harmony. Our own
absurdities were not unknown to them, for their velvet slits of eyes
were partly hid under eye-glasses, in emulation of Boston or Germany.
They might have been ladies: I am not sufficiently clear yet as to
limits: perhaps they were _gei-shas_, who now, I understand, learn
German and affect the intellectual look of nearsightedness. If they
were, they were far above the two little creatures that posed for me
yesterday--with all the impatience of girls who, knowing what it was all
about, still could not put up with the slow ways of European work, when
their own artists would have been as agile and rapid and sketchy as
themselves.
The _gei-shas_ are one of the institutions of Japan,--a reminder of old,
complete civilizations like that of Greece. They are, voluntarily,
exiles from regular society and family, if one can speak of consent when
they are usually brought up to their profession of the "gay science"
from early girlhood. They cultivate singing and dancing, and often
poetry, and all the accomplishments and most of the exquisite politeness
of their country. They are the ideals of the elegant side of woman. To
them is intrusted the entertainment of guests and the solace of idle
hours. They are the _hetairai_ of the old Greeks--and sometimes they are
all that that name implies. But no one has the right to assume it from
their profession, any more than that all liberties are bordered by
possible license.