In Ghostly Japan by Lafcadio Hearn

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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-ze chikusho 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.

Bits of Poetry

I

Among a people with whom poetry has been for centuries a
universal fashion of emotional utterance, we should naturally
suppose the common ideal of life to be a noble one. However
poorly the upper classes of such a people might compare with
those of other nations, we could scarcely doubt that its lower
classes were morally and otherwise in advance of our own lower
classes. And the Japanese actually present us with such a social
phenomenon.

Poetry in Japan is universal as the air. It is felt by everybody.
It is read by everybody. It is composed by almost everybody,--
irrespective of class and condition. Nor is it thus ubiquitous in
the mental atmosphere only: it is everywhere to be heard by the
ear, and _seen by the eye_!

As for audible poetry, wherever there is working there is
singing. The toil of the fields and the labor of the streets are
performed to the rhythm of chanted verse; and song would seem to
be an expression of the life of the people in about the same
sense that it is an expression of the life of cicadae.... As for
visible poetry, it appears everywhere, written or graven,--in
Chinese or in Japanese characters,--as a form of decoration. In
thousands and thousands of dwellings, you might observe that the
sliding- screens, separating rooms or closing alcoves, have
Chinese or Japanese decorative texts upon them;--and these texts
are poems. In houses of the better class there are usually a
number of gaku, or suspended tablets to be seen,--each bearing,
for all design, a beautifully written verse. But poems can be
found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil,--for example upon
braziers, iron kettles, vases, wooden trays, lacquer ware,
porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,--even toothpicks! Poems
are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans. Poems are
printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk-
linings, and women's crepe-silk underwear. Poems are stamped or
worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases,
travelling-bags. Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon
bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco-
pouches. It were a hopeless effort to enumerate a tithe of the
articles decorated with poetical texts. Probably my readers know
of those social gatherings at which it is the custom to compose
verses, and to suspend the compositions to blossoming frees,--
also of the Tanabata festival in honor of certain astral gods,
when poems inscribed on strips of colored paper, and attached to
thin bamboos, are to be seen even by the roadside,--all
fluttering in the wind like so many tiny flags.... Perhaps you
might find your way to some Japanese hamlet in which there are
neither trees nor flowers, but never to any hamlet in which there
is no visible poetry. You might wander,--as I have done,--into a
settlement so poor that you could not obtain there, for love or
money, even a cup of real tea; but I do not believe that you
could discover a settlement in which there is nobody capable of
making a poem.

II

Recently while looking over a manuscript-collection of verses,--
mostly short poems of an emotional or descriptive character,--it
occurred to me that a selection from them might serve to
illustrate certain Japanese qualities of sentiment, as well as
some little-known Japanese theories of artistic expression,--and
I ventured forthwith, upon this essay. The poems, which had been
collected for me by different persons at many different times and
places, were chiefly of the kind written on particular occasions,
and cast into forms more serried, if not also actually briefer,
than anything in Western prosody. Probably few Of my readers are
aware of two curious facts relating to this order of composition.
Both facts are exemplified in the history and in the texts of my
collection,--though I cannot hope, in my renderings, to reproduce
the original effect, whether of imagery or of feeling.

The first curious fact is that, from very ancient times, the
writing of short poems has been practised in Japan even more as a
moral duty than as a mere literary art. The old ethical teaching
was somewhat like this:--"Are you very angry?--do not say
anything unkind, but compose a poem. Is your best-beloved dead?--
do not yield to useless grief, but try to calm your mind by
making a poem. Are you troubled because you are about to die,
leaving so many things unfinished?--be brave, and write a poem on
death! Whatever injustice or misfortune disturbs you, put aside
your resentment or your sorrow as soon as possible, and write a
few lines of sober and elegant verse for a moral exercise."
Accordingly, in the old days, every form of trouble was
encountered with a poem. Bereavement, separation, disaster called
forth verses in lieu of plaints. The lady who preferred death to
loss of honor, composed a poem before piercing her throat The
samurai sentenced to die by his own hand, wrote a poem before
performing hara-kiri. Even in this less romantic era of Meiji,
young people resolved upon suicide are wont to compose some
verses before quitting the world. Also it is still the good
custom to write a poem in time of ill-fortune. I have frequently
known poems to be written under the most trying circumstances of
misery or suffering,--nay even upon a bed of death;-and if the
verses did not display any extraordinary talent, they at least
afforded extraordinary proof of self-mastery under pain....
Surely this fact of composition as ethical practice has larger
interest than all the treatises ever written about the rules of
Japanese prosody.

The other curious fact is only a fact of aesthetic theory. The
common art-principle of the class of poems under present
consideration is identical with the common principle of Japanese
pictorial illustration. By the use of a few chosen words the
composer of a short poem endeavors to do exactly what the painter
endeavors to do with a few strokes of the brush,--to evoke an
image or a mood,--to revive a sensation or an emotion. And the
accomplishment of this purpose,--by poet or by picture-maker,--
depends altogether upon capacity to suggest, and only to suggest.
A Japanese artist would be condemned for attempting elaboration
of detail in a sketch intended to recreate the memory of some
landscape seen through the blue haze of a spring morning, or
under the great blond light of an autumn after-noon. Not only
would he be false to the traditions of his art: he would
necessarily defeat his own end thereby. In the same way a poet
would be condemned for attempting any completeness of utterance
in a very short poem: his object should be only to stir
imagination without satisfying it. So the term ittakkiri--meaning
"all gone," or "entirely vanished," in the sense of "all told,"--
is contemptuously applied to verses in which the verse-maker has
uttered his whole thought;--praise being reserved for
compositions that leave in the mind the thrilling of a something
unsaid. Like the single stroke of a temple-bell, the perfect
short poem should set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of
the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long duration.

III

But for the same reason that Japanese short poems may be said to
resemble. Japanese pictures, a full comprehension of them
requires an intimate knowledge of the life which they reflect.
And this is especially true of the emotional class of such
poems,--a literal translation of which, in the majority of cases,
would signify almost nothing to the Western mind. Here, for
example, is a little verse, pathetic enough to Japanese
comprehension:--

ChochO ni!..
Kyonen shishitaru
Tsuma koishi!

Translated, this would appear to mean only,--"Two butterflies!...
Last year my dear wife died!" Unless you happen to know the
pretty Japanese symbolism of the butterfly in relation to happy
marriage, and the old custom of sending with the wedding-gift a
large pair of paper-butterflies (ocho-mecho), the verse might
well seem to be less than commonplace. Or take this recent
composition, by a University student, which has been praised by
good judges:--

Furusato ni
Fubo ari--mushi no
Koe-goe! (1)

--"In my native place the old folks [or, my parents] are--clamor
of insect-voices!"

1 I must observe, however, that the praise was especially evoked
by the use of the term koe-goe--(literally meaning "voice after
voice" or a crying of many voices);--and the special value of the
syllables here can be appreciated only by a Japanese poet.

The poet here is a country-lad. In unfamiliar fields he listens
to the great autumn chorus of insects; and the sound revives for
him the memory of his far-off home and of his parents. But here
is something incomparably more touching,--though in literal
translation probably more obscure,--than either of the preceding
specimens;--

Mi ni shimiru
Kaze ya I
Shoji ni
Yubi no ato!

--"Oh, body-piercing wind!--that work of little fingers in the
shoji!" (2).... What does this mean? It means the sorrowing of a
mother for her dead child. Shoji is the name given to those light
white-paper screens which in a Japanese house serve both as
windows and doors, admitting plenty of light, but concealing,
like frosted glass, the interior from outer observation, and
excluding the wind. Infants delight to break these by poking
their fingers through the soft paper: then the wind blows through
the holes. In this case the wind blows very cold indeed,--into
the mother's very heart;--for it comes through the little holes
that were made by the fingers of her dead child.

2 More literally:--"body-through-pierce wind--ah!
--shoji in the traces of [viz.: holes made by] fingers!"

The impossibility of preserving the inner quality of such poems
in a literal rendering, will now be obvious. Whatever I attempt
in this direction must of necessity be ittakkiri;--for the
unspoken has to be expressed; and what the Japanese poet is able
to say in seventeen or twenty-one syllables may need in English
more than double that number of words. But perhaps this fact will
lend additional interest to the following atoms of emotional
expression:--

A MOTHER'S REMEMBRANCE
Sweet and clear in the night, the voice of a boy at study,
Reading out of a book.... I also once had a boy!

A MEMORY IN SPRING
She, who, departing hence, left to the flowers of the plum-tree,
Blooming beside our eaves, the charm of her youth and beauty,
And maiden pureness of heart, to quicken their flush and
fragrance,--
Ah! where does she dwell to-day, our dear little vanished sister?

FANCIES OF ANOTHER FAITH
(1) I sought in the place of graves the tomb of my vanished
friend:
From ancient cedars above there rippled a wild doves cry.

(2) Perhaps a freak of the wind-yet perhaps a sign of
remembrance,--
This fall of a single leaf on the water I pour for the dead.

(3)I whispered a prayer at the grave: a butterfly rose and
fluttered--
Thy spirit, perhaps, dear friend!...

IN A CEMETERY AT NIGHT
This light of the moon that plays on the water I pour for the
dead,
Differs nothing at all from the moonlight of other years.

AFTER LONG ABSENCE
The garden that once I loved, and even the hedge of the garden,--
All is changed and strange: the moonlight only is faithful;--
The moon along remembers the charm of the time gone by!

MOONLIGHT ON THE SEA
O vapory moon of spring!--would that one plunge into ocean
Could win me renewal of life as a part of thy light on the
waters!

AFTER FAREWELL
Whither now should! look?--where is the place of parting?
Boundaries all have vanished;--nothing tells of direction:
Only the waste of sea under the shining moon!

HAPPY POVERTY
Wafted into my room, the scent of the flowers of the plum-tree
Changes my broken window into a source of delight.

AUTUMN FANCIES

(1) Faded the clover now;--sere and withered the grasses:
What dreams the matsumushi(1) in the desolate autumn-fields?

(2) Strangely sad, I thought, sounded the bell of evening;--
Haply that tone proclaimed the night in which autumn dies!

(3)Viewing this autumn-moon, I dream of my native village
Under the same soft light,--and the shadows about my home.

1 A musical cricket--calyptotryphus marmoratus.

IN TIME OF GRIEF, HEARING A SEMI (CICADA)
Only "I," "I,"--the cry of the foolish semi!
Any one knows that the world is void as its cast-off shell.

ON THE CAST-OFF SHELL OF A SEMI
Only the pitiful husk!... O poor singer of summer,
Wherefore thus consume all thy body in song?

SUBLIMITY OF INTELLECTUAL POWER
The mind that, undimmed, absorbs the foul and the pure together--
Call it rather a sea one thousand fathoms deep!(2)

2. This is quite novel in its way,--a product of the University:
the original runs thus:--

Nigoreru mo
Sumeru mo tomo ni
Iruru koso
Chi-hiro no umi no
Kokoro nari-kere!

SHINTO REVERY

Mad waves devour The rocks: I ask myself in the darkness,
"Have I become a god?" Dim is The night and wild!

"Have I become a god?"--that is to say, "Have I died?--am I only
a ghost in this desolation?" The dead, becoming kami or gods, are
thought to haunt wild solitudes by preference.

IV

The poems above rendered are more than pictorial: they suggest
something of emotion or sentiment. But there are thousands of
pictorial poems that do not; and these would seem mere
insipidities to a reader ignorant of their true purpose. When you
learn that some exquisite text of gold means only, "Evening-
sunlight on the wings of the water-fowl,"--or,"Now in my garden
the flowers bloom, and the butterflies dance,"--then your first
interest in decorative poetry is apt to wither away. Yet these
little texts have a very real merit of their own, and an intimate
relation to Japanese aesthetic feeling and experience. Like the
pictures upon screens and fans and cups, they give pleasure by
recalling impressions of nature, by reviving happy incidents of
travel or pilgrimage, by evoking the memory of beautiful days.
And when this plain fact is fully understood, the persistent
attachment of modern Japanese poets--notwithstanding their
University training--to the ancient poetical methods, will be
found reasonable enough.

I need offer only a very few specimens of the purely pictorial
poetry. The following--mere thumb-nail sketches in verse--are of
recent date.

LONESOMENESS
Furu-dera ya:
Kane mono iwazu;
Sakura chiru.
--"Old temple: bell voiceless; cherry-flowers fall."

MORNING AWAKENING AFTER A NIGHT'S REST IN A TEMPLE
Yamadera no
Shicho akeyuku:
Taki no oto.
--"In the mountain-temple the paper mosquito-curtain is lighted
by the dawn: sound of water-fall."

WINTER-SCENE
Yuki no mura;
Niwatori naite;
Ake shiroshi.
"Snow-village;--cocks crowing;--white dawn."

Let me conclude this gossip on poetry by citing from another
group of verses--also pictorial, in a certain sense, but chiefly
remarkable for ingenuity--two curiosities of impromptu. The first
is old, and is attributed to the famous poetess Chiyo. Having
been challenged to make a poem of seventeen syllables referring
to a square, a triangle, and a circle, she is said to have
immediately responded,--

Kaya no te wo
Hitotsu hazushite,
Tsuki-mi kana!
--"Detaching one corner of the mosquito-net, lo! I behold the
moon!" The top of the mosquito-net, suspended by cords at each of
its four corners, represents the square;--letting down the net at
one corner converts the square into a triangle;--and the moon
represents the circle.

The other curiosity is a recent impromptu effort to portray, in
one verse of seventeen syllables, the last degree of devil-may-
care-poverty,--perhaps the brave misery of the wandering
student;--and I very much doubt whether the effort could be
improved upon:--

Nusundaru
Kagashi no kasa ni
Ame kyu nari.
--"Heavily pours the rain on the hat that I stole from the
scarecrow!"

Japanese Buddhist Proverbs

As representing that general quality of moral experience which
remains almost unaffected by social modifications of any
sort, the proverbial sayings of a people must always possess a
special psychological interest for thinkers. In this kind of
folklore the oral and the written literature of Japan is rich to
a degree that would require a large book to exemplify. To the
subject as a whole no justice could be done within the limits of
a single essay. But for certain classes of proverbs and
proverbial phrases something can be done within even a few pages;
and sayings related to Buddhism, either by allusion or
derivation, form a class which seems to me particularly worthy of
study. Accordingly, with the help of a Japanese friend, I have
selected and translated the following series of examples,--
choosing the more simple and familiar where choice was possible,
and placing the originals in alphabetical order to facilitate
reference. Of course the selection is imperfectly representative;
but it will serve to illustrate certain effects of Buddhist
teaching upon popular thought and speech.

1.--Akuji mi ni tomaru.
All evil done clings to the body.*

*The consequence of any evil act or thought never,--so long as
karma endures,--will cease to act upon the existence of the
person guilty of it.

2.--Atama soru yori kokoro wo sore.
Better to shave the heart than to shave the head.*

*Buddhist nuns and priests have their heads completely shaven.
The proverb signifies that it is better to correct the heart,--to
conquer all vain regrets and desires,--than to become a
religious. In common parlance the phrase "to shave the head"
means to become a monk or a nun.

3.--Au wa wakare no hajime.
Meeting is only the beginning of separation.*

*Regret and desire are equally vain in this world of
impermanency; for all joy is the beginning of an experience that
must have its pain. This proverb refers directly to the sutra-
text,--Shoja bitsumetsu e-sha-jori,--" All that live must surely
die; and all that meet will surely part."

4.--Banji wa yume.
All things* are merely dreams.

*Literally, "ten thousand things."

5.--Bonbu mo satoreba hotoke nari.
Even a common man by obtaining knowledge becomes a Buddha.*

*The only real differences of condition are differences In
knowledge of the highest truth.

6.--Bonno kuno.
All lust is grief.*

*All sensual desire invariably brings sorrow.

7--Buppo to wara-ya no ame, dete kike.
One must go outside to hear Buddhist doctrine or the sound of
rain on a straw roof.*

*There is an allusion here to the condition of the sbuhhl
(priest): literally, "one who has left his house." The proverb
suggests that the higher truths of Buddhism cannot be acquired by
those who continue to live in the world of follies and desires.

8.--Bussho en yori okoru.
Out of karma-relation even the divine nature itself grows.*

*There is good as well as bad karma. Whatever hap-piness we enjoy
is not less a consequence of the acts and thoughts of previous
lives, than is any misfortune that comes to us. Every good
thought and act contributes to the evolution of the Buddha-nature
within each of us. Another proverb [No. 10],--En naki shujo wa
doshi gatashi,--further illustrates the meaning of this one.

9.--Enko ga tsuki wo toran to suru ga gotoshi.
Like monkeys trying to snatch the moon's reflection on water.*

*Allusion to a parable, said to have been related by the Buddha
himself, about some monkeys who found a well under a tree, and
mistook for reality the image of the moon in the water. They
resolved to seize the bright apparition. One monkey suspended
himself by the tail from a branch overhanging the well, a second
monkey clung to the first, a third to the second, a fourth to the
third, and so on,--till the long chain of bodies had almost
reached the water. Suddenly the branch broke under the
unaccustomed weight; and all the monkeys were drowned.

10.--En naki shujo wa doshi gatashi.
To save folk having no karma-relation would be difficult indeed!*

*No karma-relation would mean an utter absence of merit as well
as of demerit.

11.--Fujo seppo suru hoshi wa, biratake ni umaru.
The priest who preaches foul doctrine shall be reborn as a
fungus.

12.--Gaki mo ninzu.
Even gaki (pretas) can make a crowd.*

*Literally: "Even gaki are a multitude (or, 'population')." This
is a popular saying used in a variety of ways. The ordinary
meaning is to the effect that no matter how poor or miserable the
individuals composing a multitude, they collectively represent a
respectable force. Jocosely the saying is sometimes used of a
crowd of wretched or tired-looking people,--sometimes of an
assembly of weak boys desiring to make some demonstration,--
sometimes of a miserable-looking company of soldiers.--Among the
lowest classes of the people it is not uncommon to call a
deformed or greedy person a "gaki."

13.--Gaki no me ni midzu miezu.
To the eyes of gaki water is viewless.*

*Some authorities state that those pretas who suffer especially
from thirst, as a consequence of faults committed in former
lives, are unable to see water.--This proverb is used in speaking
of persons too stupid or vicious to perceive a moral truth.

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