RELIGION AND SCIENCE
"For the Buddha of the deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor
yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man.
Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a
ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is
potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in
Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the
world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice
brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly
doubt--remembering the myriads of the centuries of man--that
even now there does not remain one place on earth where life
has not been freely given for love or duty?"
Though some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite
marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of
operations where effective work and fame awaited him.
"Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin.
"Splendid field in Japan--a climate just like England--perhaps a little
milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I
have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor
I may do well in Japan."
When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the
publishers--who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an
artist of their staff--now made an arrangement with him, by which he was
to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied
from photographs, of the principal exhibits.
On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in _Harper's Weekly_. In
it he describes the fans, the _kakemonos_, the screens in the Japanese
department. Long lines of cranes flying against a vermilion sky, a
flight of gulls sweeping through the golden light of a summer morning;
the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy
hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies; the modelling and painting
of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, not mere
copies of nature, but exquisite idealisations stirred his artistic sense
as did also the representations of the matchless mountain
Fuji-no-yama--of which the artist, Hokusai, alone drew one hundred
different views, on fans, behind rains of gold, athwart a furnace of
sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by some wizard dawn,
exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke, towering above
stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled
by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like some beauty of Yoshiwara.
It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy
world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of
clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty
day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he
ascended Fuji-no-yama.
* * * * *
A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young
Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at
West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He
was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn
frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy
was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last
century.
One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First
Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately
accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that
day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the
colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death.
The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest
mind that this world has yet produced--the mind that systematised all
human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated
materialism forever ... the mind that could expound with equal lucidity,
and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history
of a sun."
Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at
various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness
of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss
the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with
the offending individual.
"A memory of long ago ... I am walking upon a granite pavement that
rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a
cloudless noon.... Suddenly, an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of
tingling shock,--a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The
pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things
visible, are dreams! Light, colour, form, weight, solidity--all sensed
existences--are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one
infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word...."
This experience had been produced, he says, by the study of the first
volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had
taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like
that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in
darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of
things--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from
that time the world never again appeared to him quite the same as it had
appeared before.
It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and
philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in
London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to
have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the
present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new
survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of
thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been
proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher
demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature.
Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of
Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific
philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in
his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral
consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage
of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately,
moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than
we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and
faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put
forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural
selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it,
"Equilibration,"--a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from
which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were
eliminated.
These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring
that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or
pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as
efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world.
In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and
Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on
Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man
towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was
concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and
science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the
learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us
there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal
re-appearance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely
said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy--'the rest is silence!'"
It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn,
in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid
most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had
read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is
disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of
words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own
wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only
to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific
facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science.
Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental
religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical
theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean
only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great
Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty."
The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man.
Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to
imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and
self-effacement would exercise over a mind such as his. Shortly after
his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the great Dai Batsu with its
picturesque surroundings in the garden at Kamakura, he was carried away
by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that it embodied.
It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he
emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he
subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets.
Invariably the best critic of his own nature--"Truly we have no
permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The
opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods--at compound
interest!"
There is a characteristic anecdote told of him by a cousin who went to
visit him when a boy at Ushaw. He asked her to bow to the figure of the
Virgin Mary, which stood upon the stairway. She refused, upon which he
earnestly repeated his request. Shortly after this incident he
volunteered the statement to one of the college tutors, who found him
lying on his back in the grass, looking up at the sky, that he was a
pantheist.
After he had been reading some of the Russian novelists, though he
confessed to a world of romance in old Romanism, the Greek Church, he
thought, had a better chance of life. Russia seemed the coming race, a
Russian Mass would one day be sung in St. Peter's, and Cossack soldiers
would wait at Stamboul in the reconsecrated Basilica of Justinian for
the apparition of that phantom priest destined to finish the Mass,
interrupted by the swords of the Janizaries of Mahomet II.
In spite of frequently declaring himself a radical, the trend of Hearn's
mind was distinctly conservative. Old beliefs handed down from century
to century, old temples sanctified for generations, old emotions that
had moulded the life of the people, had for him supreme attraction. When
he arrived at Matsue and found an Arcadian state of things, a happy,
contented, industrious people, and an artistic development of a
remarkable kind, the girl he married, also, Setsu Koizumi, having been
brought up in the tenets of the ancient faith, it was a foregone
conclusion that he should endeavour to harmonise Shintoism and Buddhism
with the philosophy propounded by his high-priest, Herbert Spencer.
Following the lead of his master, he committed himself to the statement
that "ancestor worship was the root of all religion." Cut off from
communication with outside opinion, he did not know how hotly this idea
had been contested, Frederic Harrison, amongst others, asserting that
the worship of natural objects--not spirit or ancestor worship--was the
beginning of the religious sentiment in man.
It was of the nature of Hearn's mind that he should have taken up and
clung to this Spencerian idea of ghost-cult, the religion of the dead.
From his earliest childhood the "ghostly" had always haunted him. Even
the name of the Holy Ghost as taught him in his childish catechism was
invested with a vague reverential feeling of uncanny, ghostly
influences. When therefore in the "Synthetic Philosophy" he found
Spencer declaring that ancestor worship, the influence of spirits or
ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same
idea. "The real religion of Japan," he says in his essay on the ancient
cult, "the religion still professed in one form or other by the entire
nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilised
religion and of all civilised society, 'Ancestor worship.' Patriotism
belongs to it, filial power depends upon it, family love is rooted in
it, loyalty is based upon it. The soldier who, to make a path for his
comrades through the battle, deliberately flings away his life with a
shout of 'Teikoku manzai' (Empire, good-bye), obeys the will and fears
the approval of ghostly witnesses."
Mr. Robert Young, editor of the _Japan Chronicle_, and Mr. W. B. Mason,
who both of them have lived in Japan for many years, keen observers of
Japanese characteristics and tendencies, in discussing the value of
Hearn's books as expositions of the country, were unanimous in declaring
that he greatly overestimated the influence of ancestor worship.
The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their
heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all
their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but
practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every
direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of
modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every
means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness--arguing by analogy, it is
not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at
every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn
describes for "millions long buried"--for "the nameless dead."
Nature worship, the worship of the sun, that gave its name to the
ancient kingdom, the natural phenomena of their volcanic mountains
Fuji-no-yama or Asama-yama, inspired feelings of reverence in the
ancient Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their
"ancestral spirits."
In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form
to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most
ancient Japanese religion, continue to exist in the world, they mingle
with the viewless forces of Nature and act through them, still
surrounding the living, expecting daily offerings and prayers. What a
charm and mysticism is imparted to all the literary work done by Hearn
in Japan by the Shinto idea of ancestral ghosts, which he really seems
for a time to have adopted, woven into the Buddhist belief in
pre-existence, the continuity of mind connected again with the
scientific theory of evolution.
"He stands and proclaims his mysteries," says an American critic, "at
the meeting of Three Ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism
in particular,--which history has engrafted on the aesthetic heart of
Japan, Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and
these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind
into one rich and novel compound,--a compound so rare as to have
introduced into literature a psychological sensation unknown before.
More than any other living author he has added a new thrill to our
intellectual experience."
When at Tokyo, if you find your way into the street called Naka-dori,
where ancient curios and embroideries are to be bought--you will
perchance be shown a wonderful fabric minutely intersected with delicate
traceries on a dark-coloured texture. If you are accompanied by any one
who is acquainted with ancient Japanese embroidery, they will show you
that these traceries are fine Japanese ideographs; poems, proverbs,
legends, embroidered by the laying on of thread by thread all over the
tissue, producing a most harmonious and beautiful effect. Thus did
Hearn, like these ancient artificers, weave ancient theories of
pre-existence and Karma into spiritual fantasies and imaginations. Ever
in consonance with wider interests his work opened up strange regions of
dreamland, touched trains of thought that run far beyond the boundaries
of men's ordinary mental horizon. In his sketch, for instance, called
the "Mountain of Skulls,"[17] how weirdly does he make use of the idea of
pre-existence. A young man and his guide are pictured climbing up a
mountain, where was no beaten path, the way lying over an endless
heaping of tumbled fragments.
[17] "In Ghostly Japan," Little, Brown & Co.
Under the stars they climbed, aided by some superhuman power, and as
they climbed the fragments under their feet yielded with soft dull
crashings.... And once the pilgrim youth laid hand on something smooth
that was not stone--and lifted it--and was startled by the cheekless
gibe of death.
In his inimitable way, Hearn tells how the dawn breaks, casting a light
on the monstrous measureless height round them. "All of these skulls and
dust of bones, my son, are your own!" says his guide. "Each has at some
time been the nest of your dreams and delusions and desires."
The Buddhist idea of pre-existence has been believed in by orientals
from time immemorial; in the Sacontala the Indian poet, Calidas, says:
"Perhaps the sadness of men, in seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet
music, arises from some remembrance of past joys, and the traces of
connections in a former state of existence." The idea has been re-echoed
by many in our own time, but by none more exquisitely and fancifully
than by Lafcadio Hearn.
In one of his sketches, entitled, "A Serenade," his prose is the essence
of music, weird and pathetic as a nocturne by Chopin; setting thrilling
a host of memories and dreams, suggesting hints and echoes of ineffable
things. You feel the violet gloom, the warm air, and see the fire-flies,
the plumes of the palms, and the haunting circle of the sea beyond, the
silence only broken by the playing of flutes and mandolines.
"The music hushed, and left me dreaming and vainly trying to explain the
emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,--that the
mystery was of other existences than mine."[18]
[18] "Exotics and Retrospectives," Little, Brown & Co.
Then he brings forward the favourite theme, that our living present is
the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products
of evolution--created by experiences of vanished being more countless
than the sands of a myriad seas.... Echoing into his own past, he
imagines the music startling from their sleep of ages countless buried
loves, the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakening endless
remembrance, and with that awakening the delight passed, and in the dark
the sadness only lingered--unutterable--profound.