THE MONTO TEMPLES AND THE DAIMONJI
As an evidence of the vitality of their faith the Monto Buddhists
point to their great new temple in the southern part of the city. This
Higashi Hongwanji (Eastern Temple) was eight years in building, at an
enormous cost, and is the largest temple in Japan. The squared trunks of
keyaki-trees that support floor and roof are of a fine, close grain, that
lasts for centuries without paint or preserving process. A collection
of thick black ropes hangs from the beams, all of them made from the
hair of pious women too poor to offer other contributions. The largest
rope is five inches in diameter and two hundred and fifty feet long, the
hair, wound in a dozen separate strands around a slender core of hemp,
having been given by three thousand five hundred of the pious maids and
matrons of the province of Echizen. Here and there in this giant cable
are pathetic threads of white hair, the rest being deep black. Each
summer pious men came to give their days’ labor to the temple when they
had no money. The best workers in wood from several provinces, craftsmen
descended from generations of wood-carvers, were brought together to
labor for several years on the decorative panels, carving from solid
blocks of hard keyaki wonderful birds and flowers, curling waves and
dashing spray—designs full of movement and life.
This Shin, or Monto sect of Buddhists, is one of the richest and largest.
Its temples are always built in the heart of cities, and always in
pairs, a Nishi Hongwanji (Western Temple) and a Higashi Hongwanji
(Eastern Temple) being found in Tokio, Kioto, and Osaka. At the Nishi
Hongwanji of Kioto the vast interior discloses masses of carving,
gilding, lacquer, damascening, and paintings on golden groundwork,
and Monto altars are more splendid than those of any other sect. This
Hongwanji is very rich, having been endowed with lands and mines in
the days of Hideyoshi, its special protector, and the temple enclosure
holds many relics of the Taiko. Connected with the temple is a great
yashiki, or abbot’s residence, and the wall-screens and superb ceilings,
brought from Hideyoshi’s castle at Fushimi, south of Kioto, to adorn the
suites of reception-rooms, are finer than any in the imperial palace.
The carved, gilded, and lacquered ceilings, the wonderful paintings on
gold-leaf surfaces, the damascened mountings of the screens, the vast
audience hall, the private rooms, the No pavilion, and the court where
the enemies’ heads were displayed, are all magnificent. In a corner of
the grounds is the pleasure-garden of Hideyoshi, a leafy, lake-centred
paradise, and a marvel of artistic arrangement, with its winding water
overhung with wistaria arbors, crossed by picturesque bridges, reflecting
its stone lanterns, thickets of oleander, bamboo, pine, palm, and banana
trees, and the two beautiful miniature palaces within the maze. On a
pine-covered knoll is the thatched summer-house, where the fierce yet
poetic warrior sat in his armor to watch the moon rise over the trees and
turn the lake to a silver shield at his feet.
The Hongwanji services are splendid and impressive ceremonies; the
companies of gorgeously-clad priests, the chanting, the incense, the
lighted tapers, the bells, the opening of the doors of the golden shrine
to display the image of Buddha, all bearing a strange resemblance to the
worship of Romish churches. The faithful kneel, touch themselves, and
use the rosary in prayer; and high mass at the Hongwanji might almost
be high mass at St. Mark’s. Mass is celebrated at five o’clock on every
morning of the year, and all day worshippers may come to kneel and pray
before the altars. On the first and fifteenth days of each month special
services are held at two o’clock in the afternoon, and every January
recurs a week of prayer in honor of the founder of the Shin sect, when
priests come from all parts of the empire to the mother-temple. The
fortnightly afternoon services consist of readings from the sacred
scriptures, and the chanting of Japanese and Chinese sacred poems by some
twenty priests in black gauze stoles; a larger chorus, hidden behind the
central shrine and altar, joining in and responding. The high-priest,
in a cardinal and gold brocade kesa, sits directly facing the shrine,
and at intervals touches the swinging plate of bronze used as a gong
in the order of worship. The golden shrine, in a great gilded alcove,
or chancel, bears countless gilded lotus flowers and candelabra, and
slender columns of incense rise from the priests’ low reading-desk. At
the conclusion of the chanted service the doors of the shrine are opened,
and the sacred image displayed in a silence broken only by low strokes on
the gong. Then the priests file away, and the faithful, flocking into the
vacant place behind the rail, and kneeling where the priests have knelt,
prostrate themselves, rub their rosaries in their palms, and repeat with
ecstatic fervor the invocation: “_Namu Amida Butsu_” (Hail, Great Lord
Buddha).
Every year, on the temple steps, the contributions of rice from distant
provinces are stacked high in their cylindrical straw bales, themselves
emblems of abundance. This rice is sent as an annual tribute from
different parts of the empire to the head-temple of the sect at Kioto, to
be used for offerings in the sanctuaries, for the priests’ food, and for
alms to the poor.
The present high priest has a longer genealogy than the Emperor, and is
the seventy-third of his family, in direct succession, to live in the
same Kioto yashiki. Besides his ecclesiastical rank, he is a nobleman of
the first order, and moves in the imperial circle, his modern brougham
with liveried men being often seen driving in and out of the palace
enclosures in the western end of the city. Besides his temple services,
he directs the large college which the Hongwanji maintains for the
education of young men for the priesthood and for advanced philosophical
studies for lay students. In its library is a vast literature of
Buddhism, the scrolls of silk and paper in boxes of priceless gold
lacquer facing the neatly-bound volumes of Sinnett, Sir Edwin Arnold,
and other foreign writers. The college employs teachers of all European
languages, and intends to send missionary workers to European countries.
One of the priestly instructors, Mr. Akamatsu, spent several years
in England, and has made comparative religions his great study. This
admirable scholar is an admirable talker as well, and every student of
Buddhism in Japan is referred to his vast stores of information. The
breadth and liberality of Mr. Akamatsu’s views are shown in his belief in
the brotherhood of all religions, their likeness, and their convergence
towards “that far-off, divine event, towards which the whole creation
moves.” It was he who drew up and translated that new canon of his faith,
which introduced passages from the Sermon on the Mount, and who explained
that these contained exactly the Buddhist tenets. The Shin Buddhists are
called the Protestants of that faith. The priests may marry, and are
not required to fast, to do penance, make pilgrimages, or abstain from
animal food. They believe in salvation by faith in Buddha, and in those
ever-higher transmigrations of the soul which finally attain Nirvana.
Their priests maintain that the presence of Christian missionaries has
made no difference with their people, the scholarly and intelligent
seeing that the two faiths differ only in a few articles and practices.
For the lower orders, these spiritual shepherds declare Buddhism to be
the better religion, its practice for centuries having made the masses
the gentle, kindly, patient, and contented souls that they are. One
priest, sent to Europe to study the effects of Christianity, reported
that vice, crime, and misery were greater there than in Japan, and that
the belief of the west seemed less able to repress those evils than the
belief of the east. These Monto priests, too, express broad views about
the reciprocity of nations and the fair exchange of missionaries. Now
that English clergymen and thinkers study Buddhism in the monasteries
of Ceylon, avowing their acceptance of the articles with much sacred
ceremony, Monto apostles may yet preach to the people of England and
America. However this may be, the priests do not fear the proselyting
labors of the Doshisha teachers in Kioto, and speak warmly of its good
works, and particularly of its hospital and training-school for nurses.
In 1885 the first American missionaries came to Kioto, and as the sacred
city is beyond the treaty limits, the college and hospital are maintained
under the name of the Doshisha company, and the foreigners engaged in the
work are ostensibly in Japanese employ. Back of the Christian Japanese,
who stands as president of this company, are the rich Mission Boards,
which furnish the money, and direct its expenditure and the method
of work. Each teacher in the Doshisha school is really a missionary,
and outside the class-room carries on active evangelical work. School
buildings, hospital, and residences for the foreign teachers all front
on the high yellow walls of the imperial palace grounds, significant
testimony to the changes that have come, the barriers and prejudices
that have given way. The school is crowded to its furthest capacity,
the hospital is besieged, and physicians overworked. The teachers claim
that all the students are Christians, that the new religion is spreading,
and that the people are most anxious to know about it. While they do
not affirm that Buddhism and the old religions are dying, the success
of their work sustains their conviction. They have erected substantial
brick buildings and comfortable dwellings, and have a general air of
permanency. The Doshisha was fortunate in its founders and first corps of
instructors and the records they made, so that, when disasters overtook
it, that prestige prevailed, and after unhappy dissensions the Doshisha
returned to its original purposes and lines, and the schools and hospital
continue their excellent work.
Of foreign missions in Japan there are the French Catholic,
Russian-Greek, English and Canadian workers belonging to both Established
Church and dissenting sects, while the Foreign Mission Boards of the
United States have more than three hundred agents and teachers in Japan,
nearly all of whom have families. Meanwhile, 191,968 Shinto temples,
101,085 Shinto priests, and the whole influence of the Government
encourages this state religion, of which the Emperor is the visible head.
There are 72,039 Buddhist temples, and 109,922 Buddhist priests and
13,922 students proclaim that faith, while pilgrims to the thirty-three
famous Kwannons of the empire do not lessen in number. A large fraction
of the people profess no religion whatever, among whom are many of the
younger generation of nobles, who, having studied and lived abroad,
have adopted materialism, atheism, or agnosticism, like other foreign
fashions. When an American devotee of theosophy expounded his occult
science in a round of temple addresses he aroused a polite interest, but
caused no excitement and attracted no body of followers. A Unitarian
agent enjoyed greatest favor among the highest circles of the capital,
his system of higher philosophy appealing strongly to those cultivated
thinkers and men of letters.
The common people, like the ignorant of other races, do not at all
comprehend the religion they do profess, observing its forms as a
habit or a matter of blind convention, and celebrating its events
with ceremonies and decorations, festivals and anniversaries, whose
significance they cannot explain. Japanese streets suddenly blossom out
with flags and lanterns at every door-way and along miles of eaves,
and if you ask a shopkeeper what this rejoicing means, he will reply,
“_Wakarimasen_,” or “_Shirimasen_” (I do not know). Then some learned
man tells you that it is the anniversary of the death of Jimmu Tenno, or
the autumn festival, when the first rice of the garnered crop is offered
to the gods by the Emperor in the palace chapel, by the priests at every
Shinto shrine, and at every household altar in pious homes, or some other
traditional occasion kept as a Government holiday. Closing the Government
offices on Sunday, and making that a day of rest, was a matter of
practical convenience merely, and the result of the adoption of a uniform
calendar with the rest of the world, and a modern military establishment
on foreign models.
One of the festivals of a religious character which is understood by
the people, and is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all Kioto’s great
summer illuminations, is that of the Daimonji, at the end of the Bon
Matsuri, or Festival of the Dead. According to Buddhist belief, the
spirits of the departed return to earth for three days in mid-August,
visiting their families and earthly haunts, and flitting back to their
graves on the night of the third day. During the continuance of the Bon
Matsuri, lanterns and paper strips are hung in front of those houses
in which a death has occurred during the year, and burning tapers and
bowls of food are set before the little household shrines. Alike in the
backs of shops, in the humblest abodes, and in villas and noble yashikis,
lights, offerings, and fragrant incense welcome back the dead. In the
cemeteries the bamboo sticks at each gravestone are daily filled with
fresh flowers, and on the night of their return the spirits are guided
to their resting-places by the light of lanterns and oil-tapers burning
throughout these cities of their silent habitation. This beautiful
custom, sanctified by the observance of many centuries, is tinged with
little sadness, and the last night of the Festival of the Dead is
the great Festival of Lanterns, the most brilliant of the long, gay,
fantastic Kioto summer.
We were kindly invited by a Japanese gentleman to witness the
illumination from the upper story of a pagoda-like school-house, that
rose high above all the roofs in the heart of the city. Two hundred
children were chirping and chattering in the open-sided class-rooms of
the lower floors, all eager to see the Daimonji, the great signal-fires
on the hills. All sat on their heels in orderly rows, and silently bobbed
to the mats at sight of us, going on afterwards with their merry babble,
which all through the summer evening floated up to us in happy chorus.
As dusk gave way to dark, we beheld a glimmer of light like a waving
torch on the side of the mountain that stands like a tower beyond
Maruyama. Another and another flash shone out against the dark face of
Daimonji-yama’s long slope, until the flames joined and lines of fire ran
upward, touched, crossed, and finally blazed out in the gigantic written
character Dai, in outline not unlike a capital A. Next a junk appeared in
fiery outlines on the slope north of the city; another mystic character
glowed on the next hill; and to the north-west a smaller Dai showed,
like the reflection of the first huge symbol. Full in the west gleamed
a torii, a pillared gate-way of fire. From every house-top and from the
bridges came the shouts of enthusiastic spectators, and the children in
the rooms below us twittered like a box full of sparrows. For centuries
the priests of mountain temples have taught their simple parishioners to
lay their gathered firewood in the proper lines, and regular trenches
mark the course of each device. The longer lines of the big Dai are each
a half-mile in length, and the five miles’ distance of our point of view
dwarfed them to perfect proportions. These fiery symbols burned for half
an hour before they began to waver, and long after their images still
danced and burned in our vision against the succeeding blackness.
Down in the city the crowds surged through the lanterned streets, each
adding the illumination of his hand-lantern to the scene. The river-bed
was all recrossing lines and arches of lights, and myriad points of
uncovered flames were reflected in the waters. The hill-sides twinkled
and glowed with the innumerable torches in the cemeteries, and thus,
lighted back to their tombs by all the city and the hill-side, the
Buddhist spirits rest until the next midsummer season recalls them to
their joyous Kioto.