KUMAMOTO, November, 1891.
DEAR PROFESSOR,--Your welcome postal to hand. One must travel out
of Izumo after a long residence to find out how utterly different
the place is from other places,--for instance, this country. Matsue
is incomparably prettier and better built and in every way more
interesting than Kumamoto. What Kumamoto is religiously, I have not
yet been able to find out. There are no shops here full of household
shrines of _hinoki_-wood for sale, no display of _shimenawa_ over
doors, no charms in the fields, no _o fuda_ pasted upon house-doors,
no profusion of Shintō emblems, no certainty of seeing a _kamidana_
or a _butsudan_ in every house, and a strange scarcity of temples
and images. Religiously, the place seems to be uninteresting; and
to-day it is infernally cold. Everything is atrociously dear, and the
charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here exist. My own
people--four came with me--feel like fish out of water. My little wife
said the other morning, with an amusing wonder in her eyes, that there
was a _mezurashii kedamono_ in the next yard. We looked out, and the
extraordinary animal was a goat. Some geese were also a subject of
wonder, and a pig. None of these creatures are to be seen in Izumo.
About Inari. I may enquire again, but I think that the representation of
Inari as a man with a beard, riding upon a white fox, in the pictures
of Toyokuni, for instance, and in the sacred _kakemono_ is tolerably
good evidence. Also the relief carving I have seen representing him as a
man. Also the general popular idea concerning him, about which there is
no mistake. Also the letter of Hideyoshi to Inari Daimyōjin cited in
Walter Dening's Readers, under the heading: "Hideyoshi's Letter to Gods."
As to Kwannon, it is true that in Buddhist history she figures both as
a man and woman (as also does the daughter of the Serpent-King in the
astounding _sutra_ of the Lotus of the Good Law),--she is identified
with the Sanscrit Avalokitesvara,-- about whose sex there may be
some doubt. I have a translation of her Japanese _sutra_, in which
she is female, however;--and in China and in Japan she has come to
be considered the ideal of all that is sweet in womanliness, and her
statues and the representations of her in the numerous pictures of the
Buddhist pantheon are of a woman,--maiden. And after all, the people,
not the scholars, make the gods, and the gods they make are the best.
I cannot help thinking that the identification of the Japanese Buddhas
and Bodhisattvas with those of India is not sufficiently specified by
Eitel and others as an identification of origin only. They have become
totally transformed here,--they have undergone perfect avatars, and
are not now the same. Shaka, Amida, Yakushi, Fudō, Dainichi, etc.,
may have been in India distinct personalities: in Japan they are but
forms of the One,--as indeed are the innumerable Buddhas of the Lotus
of the True Law. All are one. And Kshitigarbha is not our Japanese
Jizō,--and Kwannon is not Avalokitesvara, and the Ni-ō are not the
figures of Indra, and Emma-O is not Yama. "They were and are not." Don't
you agree with me that the popular idea of a divinity is an element of
weight in such questions of doubt as we are chatting about?
With every wish that you may enjoy your journey in Shikoku, I remain,
most truly ever,