In Ghostly Japan by Lafcadio Hearn

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"From the Japanese point of view, likewise," my friend responded,
"Shinzaburo is rather contemptible. But the use of this weak
character helped the author to develop incidents that could not
otherwise, perhaps, have been so effectively managed. To my
thinking, the only attractive character in the story is that of
O-Yone: type of the old-time loyal and loving servant,--
intelligent, shrewd, full of resource,--faithful not only unto
death, but beyond death.... Well, let us go to Shin-Banzui-In."

We found the temple uninteresting, and the cemetery an
abomination of desolation. Spaces once occupied by graves had
been turned into potato-patches. Between were tombs leaning at
all angles out of the perpendicular, tablets made illegible by
scurf, empty pedestals, shattered water-tanks, and statues of
Buddhas without heads or hands. Recent rains had soaked the black
soil,--leaving here and there small pools of slime about which
swarms of tiny frogs were hopping. Everything--excepting the
potato-patches--seemed to have been neglected for years. In a
shed just within the gate, we observed a woman cooking; and my
companion presumed to ask her if she knew anything about the
tombs described in the Romance of the Peony-Lantern.

"Ah! the tombs of O-Tsuyu and O-Yone?" she responded, smiling;--"
you will find them near the end of the first row at the back of
the temple--next to the statue of Jizo."

Surprises of this kind I had met with elsewhere in Japan.

We picked our way between the rain-pools and between the green
ridges of young potatoes,--whose roots were doubtless feeding on
the sub-stance of many another O-Tsuyu and O-Yone;--and we
reached at last two lichen-eaten tombs of which the inscriptions
seemed almost obliterated. Beside the larger tomb was a statue of
Jizo, with a broken nose.

"The characters are not easy to make out," said my friend--"but
wait!".... He drew from his sleeve a sheet of soft white paper,
laid it over the inscription, and began to rub the paper with a
lump of clay. As he did so, the characters appeared in white on
the blackened surface.

"Eleventh day, third month--Rat, Elder Brother, Fire--Sixth year
of Horeki [A. D. 1756].'... This would seem to be the grave of
some innkeeper of Nedzu, named Kichibei. Let us see what is on
the other monument."

With a fresh sheet of paper he presently brought out the text of
a kaimyo, and read,--

"En-myo-In, Ho-yo-I-tei-ken-shi, Ho-ni':--'Nun-of-the-Law,
Illustrious, Pure-of-heart-and-will, Famed-in-the-Law,--
inhabiting the Mansion-of-the-Preaching-of-Wonder.'.... The grave
of some Buddhist nun."

"What utter humbug!" I exclaimed. "That woman was only making fun
of us."

"Now," my friend protested, "you are unjust to the, woman! You
came here because you wanted a sensation; and she tried her very
best to please you. You did not suppose that ghost-story was
true, did you?"

Footprints of the Buddha

I

I was recently surprised to find, in Anderson's catalogue of
Japanese and Chinese paintings in the British Museum, this
remarkable statement:--"It is to be noted that in Japan the
figure of the Buddha is never represented by the feet, or
pedestal alone, as in the Amravati remains, and many other Indian
art-relics." As a matter of fact the representation is not even
rare in Japan. It is to be found not only upon stone monuments,
but also in religious paintings,--especially certain kakemono
suspended in temples. These kakemono usually display the
footprints upon a very large scale, with a multitude of mystical
symbols and characters. The sculptures may be less common; but in
Tokyo alone there are a number of Butsu-soku-seki, or "Buddha-
foot stones," which I have seen,--and probably several which I
have not seen. There is one at the temple of Eko-In, near
Ryogoku-bashi; one at the temple of Denbo-In, in Koishikawa; one
at the temple of Denbo-In, in Asakusa; and a beautiful example at
Zojoji in Shiba. These are not cut out of a single block, but are
composed of fragments cemented into the irregular traditional
shape, and capped with a heavy slab of Nebukawa granite, on the
polished surface of which the design is engraved in lines about
one-tenth of an inch in depth. I should judge the average height
of these pedestals to be about two feet four inches, and their
greatest diameter about three feet. Around the footprints there
are carved (in most of the examples) twelve little bunches of
leaves and buds of the Bodai-ju ("Bodhidruma"), or Bodhi-tree of
Buddhist legend. In all cases the footprint design is about the
same; but the monuments are different in quality and finish. That
of Zojoji,--with figures of divinities cut in low relief on its
sides,--is the most ornate and costly of the four. The specimen
at Eko-In is very poor and plain.

The first Butsu-soku-seki made in Japan was that erected at
Todaiji, in Nara. It was designed after a similar monument in
China, said to be the faithful copy of an Indian original.
Concerning this Indian original, the following tradition is given
in an old Buddhist book(1):--"In a temple of the province of
Makada [Maghada] there is a great stone. The Buddha once trod
upon this stone; and the prints of the soles of his feet remain
upon its surface. The length of the impressions is one foot and
eight inches,(2) and the width of them a little more than six
inches. On the sole-part of each footprint there is the
impression of a wheel; and upon each of the prints of the ten
toes there is a flower-like design, which sometimes radiates
light. When the Buddha felt that the time of his Nirvana was
approaching, he went to Kushina [Kusinara], and there stood upon
that stone. He stood with his face to the south. Then he said to
his disciple Anan [Ananda]: 'In this place I leave the impression
of my feet, to remain for a last token. Although a king of this
country will try to destroy the impression, it can never be
entirely destroyed.' And indeed it has not been destroyed unto
this day. Once a king who hated Buddhism caused the top of the
stone to be pared off, so as to remove the impression; but after
the surface had been removed, the footprints reappeared upon the
stone."

Concerning the virtue of the representation of the footprints of
the Buddha, there is sometimes quoted a text from the Kwan-butsu-
sanmai-kyo ["Buddha-dhyana-samadhi-sagara-sutra"], thus
translated for me:--"In that time Shaka ["Sakyamuni"] lifted up
his foot.... When the Buddha lifted up his foot all could
perceive upon the sole of it the appearance of a wheel of a
thousand spokes.... And Shaka said: 'Whosoever beholds the sign
upon the sole of my foot shall be purified from all his faults.
Even he who beholds the sign after my death shall be delivered
from all the evil results of all his errors." Various other texts
of Japanese Buddhism affirm that whoever looks upon the
footprints of the Buddha "shall be freed from the bonds of error,
and conducted upon the Way of Enlightenment."

An outline of the footprints as engraved on one of the Japanese
pedestals(3) should have some interest even for persons familiar
with Indian sculptures of the S'ripada. The double-page drawing,
accompanying this paper [Fig.1], and showing both footprints, has
been made after the tracing at Dentsu-In, where the footprints
have the full legendary dimension, It will be observed that there
are only seven emblems: these are called in Japan the Shichi-So,
or "Seven Appearances." I got some information about them from
the Sho-Eko-Ho-Kwan,--a book used by the Jodo sect. This book
also contains rough woodcuts of the footprints; and one of them I
reproduce here for the purpose of calling attention to the
curious form of the emblems upon the toes. They are said to be
modifications of the manji, or svastika, but I doubt it. In the
Butsu-soku-seki-tracings, the corresponding figures suggest the
"flower-like design" mentioned in the tradition of the Maghada
stone; while the symbols in the book-print suggest fire. Indeed
their outline so much resembles the conventional flamelet-design
of Buddhist decoration, that I cannot help thinking them
originally intended to indicate the traditional luminosity of the
footprints. Moreover, there is a text in the book called Ho-Kai-
Shidai that lends support to this supposition:--"The sole of the
foot of the Buddha is flat,--like the base of a toilet-stand....
Upon it are lines forming the appearance of a wheel of a thousand
spokes.... The toes are slender, round, long, straight, graceful,
and somewhat luminous." [Fig. 3]

The explanation of the Seven Appearances which is given by the
Sho-Eko-Ho-Kwan cannot be called satisfactory; but it is not
without interest in relation to Japanese popular Buddhism. The
emblems are considered in the following order:--

I.--The Svastika. The figure upon each toe is said to be a
modification of the manji (4); and although I doubt whether this
is always the case, I have observed that on some of the large
kakemono representing the footprints, the emblem really is the
svastika,--not a flamelet nor a flower-shape.(5) The Japanese
commentator explains the svastika as a symbol of "everlasting
bliss."
II.--The Fish (Gyo). The fish signifies freedom from all
restraints. As in the water a fish moves easily in any direction,
so in the Buddha-state the fully-emancipated knows no restraints
or obstructions.
III.--The Diamond-Mace (Jap. Kongo-sho;--Sansc. "Vadjra").
Explained as signifying the divine force that "strikes and breaks
all the lusts (bonno) of the world."
IV.--The Conch-Shell (Jap. "Hora ") or Trumpet. Emblem of the
preaching of the Law. The book Shin-zoku-butsu-ji-hen calls it
the symbol of the voice of the Buddha. The Dai-hi-kyo calls it
the token of the preaching and of the power of the Mahayana
doctrine. The Dai-Nichi-Kyo says:--" At the sound of the blowing
of the shell, all the heavenly deities are filled with delight,
and come to hear the Law."
V.--The Flower-Vase (Jap. "Hanagame"). Emblem of muro,--a
mystical word which might be literally rendered as "not-
leaking,"--signifying that condition of supreme intelligence
triumphant over birth and death.
VI.--The Wheel-of-a-Thousand-Spokes (Sansc. "Tchakra "). This
emblem, called in Japanese Senfuku-rin-so, is curiously explained
by various quotations. The Hokke-Monku says:--"The effect of a
wheel is to crush something; and the effect of the Buddha's
preaching is to crush all delusions, errors, doubts, and
superstitions. Therefore preaching the doctrine is called,
'turning the Wheel.'"... The Sei-Ri-Ron says: "Even as the common
wheel has its spokes and its hub, so in Buddhism there are many
branches of the Hasshi Shodo ('Eight-fold Path,' or eight rules
of conduct)."
VII.--The Crown of Brahma. Under the heel of the Buddha is the
Treasure-Crown (Ho-Kwan) of Brahma (Bon-Ten-O),--in symbol of the
Buddha's supremacy above the gods.

But I think that the inscriptions upon any of these Butsu-soku-
seki will be found of more significance than the above imperfect
attempts at an explanation of the emblems. The inscriptions upon
the monument at Dentsu-In are typical. On different sides of the
structure,--near the top, and placed by rule so as to face
certain points of the compass,--there are engraved five Sanscrit
characters which are symbols of the Five Elemental Buddhas,
together with scriptural and commemorative texts. These latter
have been translated for me as follows:--

The HO-KO-HON-NYO-KYO says:--"In that time, from beneath his
feet, the Buddha radiated a light having the appearance of a
wheel of a thousand spokes. And all who saw that radiance became
strictly upright, and obtained the Supreme Enlightenment."

The KWAN-BUTSU-SANMAI-KYO says:--"Whosoever looks upon the
footprints of the Buddha shall be freed from the results even of
innumerable thousands of imperfections."

The BUTSU-SETSU-MU-RYO-JU-KYO says:--"In the land that the Buddha
treads in journeying, there is not even one person in all the
multitude of the villages who is not benefited. Then throughout
the world there is peace and good will. The sun and the moon
shine clear and bright. Wind and rain come only at a suitable
time. Calamity and pestilence cease. The country prospers; the
people are free from care. Weapons become useless. All men
reverence religion, and regulate their conduct in all matters
with earnestness and modesty."

[Commemorative Text.]

--The Fifth Month of the Eighteenth Year of Meiji, all the
priests of this temple made and set up this pedestal-stone,
bearing the likeness of the footprints of the Buddha, and placed
the same within the main court of Dentsu-In, in order that the
seed of holy enlightenment might be sown for future time, and for
the sake of the advancement of Buddhism.

TAIJO, priest,--being the sixty-sixth chief-priest by succession
of this temple,--has respectfully composed.

JUNYU, the minor priest, has reverentially inscribed.

1 The Chinese title is pronounced by Japanese as Sei-iki-ki.
"Sei-iki"(the Country of the West) was the old Japanese name for
India; and thus the title might be rendered, "The Book about
India." I suppose this is the work known to Western scholars as
Si-yu-ki.

2 "One shaku and eight sun." But the Japanese foot and inch are
considerably longer than the English.

3 A monument at Nara exhibits the S'ripada in a form differing
considerably from the design upon the Tokyo pedestals.

4 Lit.: "The thousand-character" sign.

5 On some monuments and drawings there is a sort of disk made by
a single line in spiral, on each toe,--together with the image of
a small wheel.

II

Strange facts crowd into memory as one contemplates those graven
footprints,--footprints giant-seeming, yet less so than the human
personality of which they remain the symbol. Twenty-four hundred
years ago, out of solitary meditation upon the pain and the
mystery of being, the mind of an Indian pilgrim brought forth the
highest truth ever taught to men, and in an era barren of science
anticipated the uttermost knowledge of our present evolutional
philosophy regarding the secret unity of life, the endless
illusions of matter and of mind, and the birth and death of
universes. He, by pure reason,--and he alone before our time,--
found answers of worth to the questions of the Whence, the
Whither, and the Why;--and he made with these answers another and
a nobler faith than the creed of his fathers. He spoke, and
returned to his dust; and the people worshipped the prints of his
dead feet, because of the love that he had taught them.
Thereafter waxed and waned the name of Alexander, and the power
of Rome and the might of Islam;--nations arose and vanished;--
cities grew and were not;--the children of another civilization,
vaster than Romes, begirdled the earth with conquest, and founded
far-off empires, and came at last to rule in the land of that
pilgrim's birth. And these, rich in the wisdom of four and twenty
centuries, wondered at the beauty of his message, and caused all
that he had said and done to be written down anew in languages
unborn at the time when he lived and taught. Still burn his foot-
prints in the East; and still the great West, marvelling, follows
their gleam to seek the Supreme Enlightenment. Even thus, of old,
Milinda the king followed the way to the house of Nagasena,--at
first only to question, after the subtle method of the Greeks;
yet, later, to accept with noble reverence the nobler method of
the Master.

Ululation

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 ex-
ample. 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 per-
formed, 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_.

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