She is lean as a wolf, and very old,—the white bitch that guards my
gate at night. She played with most of the young men and women of the
neighborhood when they were boys and girls. I found her in charge of my
present dwelling on the day that I came to occupy it. She had guarded
the place, I was told, for a long succession of prior
tenants—apparently with no better reason than that she had been born in
the woodshed at the back of the house. Whether well or ill treated she
had served all occupants faultlessly as a watch. The question of food
as wages had never seriously troubled her, because most of the families
of the street daily contributed to her support.
She is gentle and silent,—silent at least by day; and in spite of her
gaunt ugliness, her pointed ears, and her somewhat unpleasant eyes,
everybody is fond of her. Children ride on her back, and tease her at
will; but although she has been known to make strange men feel
uncomfortable, she never growls at a child. The reward of her patient
good-nature is the friendship of the community. When the dog-killers
come on their bi-annual round, the neighbors look after her interests.
Once she was on the very point of being officially executed when the
wife of the smith ran to the rescue, and pleaded successfully with the
policeman superintending the massacres. “Put somebody’s name on the
dog,” said the latter: “then it will be safe. Whose dog is it?” That
question proved hard to answer. The dog was everybody’s and
nobody’s—welcome everywhere but owned nowhere. “But where does it
stay?” asked the puzzled constable. “It stays,” said the smith’s wife,
“in the house of the foreigner.” “Then let the foreigner’s name be put
upon the dog,” suggested the policeman.
Accordingly I had my name painted on her back in big Japanese
characters. But the neighbors did not think that she was sufficiently
safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobudera painted the
name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the
smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the
vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for
“eight-hundred,”—which represent the customary abbreviation of the word
yaoya (vegetable-seller),—any yaoya being supposed to sell eight
hundred or more different things. Consequently she is now a very
curious-looking dog; but she is well protected by all that calligraphy.
I have only one fault to find with her: she howls at night. Howling is
one of the few pathetic pleasures of her existence. At first I tried to
frighten her out of the habit; but finding that she refused to take me
seriously, I concluded to let her howl. It would have been monstrous to
beat her.
Yet I detest her howl. It always gives me a feeling of vague disquiet,
like the uneasiness that precedes the horror of nightmare. It makes me
afraid,—indefinably, superstitiously afraid. Perhaps what I am writing
will seem to you absurd; but you would not think it absurd if you once
heard her howl. She does not howl like the common street-dogs. She
belongs to some ruder Northern breed, much more wolfish, and retaining
wild traits of a very peculiar kind.
And her howl is also peculiar. It is incomparably weirder than the howl
of any European dog; and I fancy that it is incomparably older. It may
represent the original primitive cry of her species,—totally unmodified
by centuries of domestication. It begins with a stifled moan, like the
moan of a bad dream,—mounts into a long, long wail, like a wailing of
wind,—sinks quavering into a chuckle,—rises again to a wail, very much
higher and wilder than before,—breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious
laughter,—and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a
little child. The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly—though not
entirely—in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with
the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you
think of madness. And I imagine a corresponding incongruity in the soul
of the creature. I know that she loves me,—that she would throw away
her poor life for me at an instant’s notice. I am sure that she would
grieve if I were to die. But she would not think about the matter like
other dogs,—like a dog with hanging ears, for example. She is too
savagely close to Nature for that. Were she to find herself alone with
my corpse in some desolate place, she would first mourn wildly for her
friend; but, this duty performed, she would proceed to ease her sorrow
in the simplest way possible,—by eating him,—by cracking his bones
between those long wolf’s-teeth of hers. And thereafter, with spotless
conscience, she would sit down and utter to the moon the funeral cry of
her ancestors.
It fills me, that cry, with a strange curiosity not less than with a
strange horror,—because of certain extraordinary vowellings in it which
always recur in the same order of sequence, and must represent
particular forms of animal speech,—particular ideas. The whole thing is
a song,—a song of emotions and thoughts not human, and therefore
humanly unimaginable. But other dogs know what it means, and make
answer over the miles of the night,—sometimes from so far away that
only by straining my hearing to the uttermost can I detect the faint
response. The words—(if I may call them words)—are very few; yet, to
judge by their emotional effect, they must signify a great deal.
Possibly they mean things myriads of years old,—things relating to
odors, to exhalations, to influences and effluences inapprehensible by
duller human sense,—impulses also, impulses without name, bestirred in
ghosts of dogs by the light of great moons.
Could we know the sensations of a dog,—the emotions and the ideas of a
dog, we might discover some strange correspondence between their
character and the character of that peculiar disquiet which the howl of
the creature evokes. But since the senses of a dog are totally unlike
those of a man, we shall never really know. And we can only surmise, in
the vaguest way, the meaning of the uneasiness in ourselves. Some notes
in the long cry,—and the weirdest of them,—oddly resemble those tones
of the human voice that tell of agony and terror. Again, we have reason
to believe that the sound of the cry itself became associated in human
imagination, at some period enormously remote, with particular
impressions of fear. It is a remarkable fact that in almost all
countries (including Japan) the howling of dogs has been attributed to
their perception of things viewless to man, and awful,—especially gods
and ghosts;—and this unanimity of superstitious belief suggests that
one element of the disquiet inspired by the cry is the dread of the
supernatural. To-day we have ceased to be consciously afraid of the
unseen;—knowing that we ourselves are supernatural,—that even the
physical man, with all his life of sense, is more ghostly than any
ghost of old imagining: but some dim inheritance of the primitive fear
still slumbers in our being, and wakens perhaps, like an echo, to the
sound of that wail in the night.
Whatever thing invisible to human eyes the senses of a dog may at times
perceive, it can be nothing resembling our idea of a ghost. Most
probably the mysterious cause of start and whine is not anything
_seen_. There is no anatomical reason for supposing a dog to possess
exceptional powers of vision. But a dog’s organs of scent proclaim a
faculty immeasurably superior to the sense of smell in man. The old
universal belief in the superhuman perceptivities of the creature was a
belief justified by fact; but the perceptivities are not visual. Were
the howl of a dog really—as once supposed—an outcry of ghostly terror,
the meaning might possibly be, “_I smell Them!_”—but not, “_I see
Them!_” No evidence exists to support the fancy that a dog can see any
forms of being which a man cannot see.
But the night-howl of the white creature in my close forces me to
wonder whether she does not _mentally_ see something really
terrible,—something which we vainly try to keep out of moral
consciousness: the ghoulish law of life. Nay, there are times when her
cry seems to me not the mere cry of a dog, but the voice of the law
itself,—the very speech of that Nature so inexplicably called by poets
the loving, the merciful, the divine! Divine, perhaps, in some
unknowable ultimate way,—but certainly not merciful, and still more
certainly not loving. Only by eating each other do beings exist!
Beautiful to the poet’s vision our world may seem,—with its loves, its
hopes, its memories, its aspirations; but there is nothing beautiful in
the fact that life is fed by continual murder,—that the tenderest
affection, the noblest enthusiasm, the purest idealism, must be
nourished by the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood. All life,
to sustain itself, must devour life. You may imagine yourself divine if
you please,—but you have to obey that law. Be, if you will, a
vegetarian: none the less you must eat forms that have feeling and
desire. Sterilize your food; and digestion stops. You cannot even drink
without swallowing life. Loathe the name as we may, we are
cannibals;—all being essentially is One; and whether we eat the flesh
of a plant, a fish, a reptile, a bird, a mammal, or a man, the ultimate
fact is the same. And for all life the end is the same: every creature,
whether buried or burnt, is devoured,—and not only once or twice,—nor a
hundred, nor a thousand, nor a myriad times! Consider the ground upon
which we move, the soil out of which we came;—think of the vanished
billions that have risen from it and crumbled back into its latency to
feed what becomes our food! Perpetually we eat the dust of our
race,—_the substance of our ancient selves_.
But even so-called inanimate matter is self-devouring. Substance preys
upon substance. As in the droplet monad swallows monad, so in the vast
of Space do spheres consume each other. Stars give being to worlds and
devour them; planets assimilate their own moons. All is a ravening that
never ends but to recommence. And unto whomsoever thinks about these
matters, the story of a divine universe, made and ruled by paternal
love, sounds less persuasive than the Polynesian tale that the souls of
the dead are devoured by the gods.
Monstrous the law seems, because we have developed ideas and sentiments
which are opposed to this demoniac Nature,—much as voluntary movement
is opposed to the blind power of gravitation. But the possession of
such ideas and sentiments does but aggravate the atrocity of our
situation, without lessening in the least the gloom of the final
problem.
Anyhow the faith of the Far East meets that problem better than the
faith of the West. To the Buddhist the Cosmos is not divine at
all—quite the reverse. It is Karma;—it is the creation of thoughts and
acts of error;—it is not governed by any providence;—it is a
ghastliness, a nightmare. Likewise it is an illusion. It seems real
only for the same reason that the shapes and the pains of an evil dream
seem real to the dreamer. Our life upon earth is a state of sleep. Yet
we do not sleep utterly. There are gleams in our darkness,—faint
auroral wakenings of Love and Pity and Sympathy and Magnanimity: these
are selfless and true;—these are eternal and divine;—these are the Four
Infinite Feelings in whose after-glow all forms and illusions will
vanish, like mists in the light of the sun. But, except in so far as we
wake to these feelings, we are dreamers indeed,—moaning unaided in
darkness,—tortured by shadowy horror. All of us dream; none are fully
awake; and many, who pass for the wise of the world, know even less of
the truth than my dog that howls in the night.
Could she speak, my dog, I think that she might ask questions which no
philosopher would be able to answer. For I believe that she is
tormented by the pain of existence. Of course I do not mean that the
riddle presents itself to her as it does to us,—nor that she can have
reached any abstract conclusions by any mental processes like our own.
The external world to her is “a continuum of smells.” She thinks,
compares, remembers, reasons by smells. By smell she makes her
estimates of character: all her judgments are founded upon smells.
Smelling thousands of things which we cannot smell at all, she must
comprehend them in a way of which we can form no idea. Whatever she
knows has been learned through mental operations of an utterly
unimaginable kind. But we may be tolerably sure that she thinks about
most things in some odor-relation to the experience of eating or to the
intuitive dread of being eaten. Certainly she knows a great deal more
about the earth on which we tread than would be good for us to know;
and probably, if capable of speech, she could tell us the strangest
stories of air and water. Gifted, or afflicted, as she is with such
terribly penetrant power of sense, her notion of apparent realities
must be worse than sepulchral. Small wonder if she howl at the moon
that shines upon such a world!
And yet she is more awake, in the Buddhist meaning, than many of us.
She possesses a rude moral code—inculcating loyalty, submission,
gentleness, gratitude, and maternal love; together with various minor
rules of conduct;—and this simple code she has always observed. By
priests her state is termed a state of darkness of mind, because she
cannot learn all that men should learn; but according to her light she
has done well enough to merit some better condition in her next
rebirth. So think the people who know her. When she dies they will give
her an humble funeral, and have a sutra recited on behalf of her
spirit. The priest will let a grave be made for her somewhere in the
temple-garden, and will place over it a little sotoba bearing the
text,—_Nyo-zé chikushō hotsu Bodai-shin_:[1] “Even within such as this
animal, the Knowledge Supreme will unfold at last.”
[1] Lit., “the Bodhi-mind;”—that is to say, the Supreme Enlightenment,
the intelligence of Buddhahood itself.