Title: The Japanese Spirit
Author: Okakura, Yoshisaburo
Language: English
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THE JAPANESE SPIRIT

BY

OKAKURA-YOSHISABURO

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY

GEORGE MEREDITH

NEW YORK

JAMES POTT & CO.

1905



TO MY BROTHER

    _Bellario_       Sir, if I have made
    A fault in ignorance, instruct my youth:
    I shall be willing, if not able, to learn:
    Age and experience will adorn my mind
    With larger knowledge; and if I have done
    A wilful fault, think me not past all hope
    For once.

                  _Philaster_, Act. II. Sc. I.



PREFACE


The following pages owe their existence to Mr. Martin White, whose keen
interest in comparative sociology led to the opening of special courses
for its investigation in the University of London.

My thanks are due to Mr. P.J. Hartog, Academic Registrar of the
University, as well as to Dr. and Mrs. E.R. Edwards, who inspired me
with the courage to take the present task on my inexperienced shoulders.
But above all I render the expression of my deepest obligation to
Professor Walter Rippmann. Had it not been for his friendly interest and
help, I would not have been able thus to come before an English public.
For the peculiarities of thought and language, which, if nothing else,
might at least make the booklet worthy of a perusal, I naturally assume
the full responsibility myself.

With these prefatory words, I venture to submit this essay to the
lenient reception of my readers.



INTRODUCTION


We have had illuminating books upon Japan. Those of Lafcadio Hearn will
always be remembered for the poetry he brought in them to bear upon the
poetic aspects of the country and the people. Buddhism had a fascination
for him, as it had for Mr. Fielding in his remarkable book on the
practice of this religion in Burma.[1] There is also the work of Captain
Brinkley, to which we are largely indebted.

These Lectures by a son of the land, delivered at the University of
London, are compendious and explicit in a degree that enables us to form
a summary of much that has been otherwise partially obscure, so that we
get nearer to the secret of this singular race than we have had the
chance of doing before. He traces the course of Confucianism, Laoism,
Shintoism, in the instruction it has given to his countrymen for the
practice of virtue, as to which Lao-tze informs us with a piece of
'Chinese metaphysics' that can be had without having recourse to the
dictionary: '_Superior virtue is non-virtue. Therefore it has virtue.
Inferior virtue never loses sight of virtue. Therefore it has no virtue.
Superior virtue is non-assertive and without pretension. Inferior virtue
asserts and makes pretensions._' It is childishly subtle and easy to be
understood of a young people in whose minds Buddhism and Shintoism
formed a part.

The Japanese have had the advantage of possessing a native Nobility who
were true nobles, not invaders and subjugators. They were, in the
highest sense, men of honor to whom, before the time of this dreadful
war, Hara-kiri was an imperative resource, under the smallest suspicion
of disgrace. How rigidly they understood and practised Virtue, in the
sense above cited, is exemplified in the way they renounced their
privileges for the sake of the commonweal when the gates of Japan were
thrown open to the West.

Bushido, or the 'way of the Samurai,' has become almost an English word,
so greatly has it impressed us with the principle of renunciation on
behalf of the Country's welfare. This splendid conception of duty has
been displayed again and again at Port Arthur and on the fields of
Manchuria, not only by the Samurai, but by a glorious commonalty imbued
with the spirit of their chiefs.

All this is shown clearly by Professor Okakura in this valuable book.

It proves to general comprehension that such a people must be
unconquerable even if temporarily defeated; and that is not the present
prospect of things. Who could conquer a race of forty millions having
the contempt of death when their country's inviolability is at stake!
Death, moreover, is despised by them because they do not believe in it.
'The departed, although invisible, are thought to be leading their
ethereal life in the same world in much the same state as that to which
they had been accustomed while on earth.' And so, 'when the father of a
Japanese family begins a journey of any length, the raised part of his
room will be made sacred to his memory during his temporary absence; his
family will gather in front of it and think of him, expressing their
devotion and love in words and gifts in kind. In the hundreds of
thousands of families that have some one or other of their members
fighting for the nation in this dreadful war, there will not be even one
solitary house where the mother, wife, or sister is not practising this
simple rite of endearment for the beloved and absent member of the
family.' Spartans in the fight, Stoics in their grief.

Concerning the foolish talk of the Yellow Peril, a studious perusal of
this book will show it to be fatuous. It is at least unlikely in an
extreme degree that such a people, reckless of life though they be in
front of danger, but Epicurean in their wholesome love of pleasure and
pursuit of beauty, will be inflated to insanity by the success of their
arms. Those writers who have seen something malignant and inimical
behind their gracious politeness, have been mere visitors on the fringe
of the land, alarmed by their skill in manufacturing weapons and
explosives--for they are inventive as well as imitative, a people not to
be trifled with; but this was because their instinct as well as their
emissaries warned them of a pressing need for the means of war. Japan
and China have had experience of Western nations, and that is at the
conscience of suspicious minds.

It may be foreseen that when the end has come, the Kaiser, always
honourably eager for the influence of his people, will draw a glove over
the historic 'Mailed Fist' and offer it to them frankly. It will surely
be accepted, and that of France, we may hope; Russia as well. England is
her ally--to remain so, we trust; America is her friend. She has, in
fact, won the admiration of Friend and Foe alike.

                              GEORGE MEREDITH.


[1] _The Soul of a People._



THE JAPANESE SPIRIT.


Since the end of the thirteenth century, when Marco Polo, on his return
to Venice, wrote about 'Cipango,' an island, as he stated, '1500 miles
off the coast of China, fabulously rich, and inhabited by people of
agreeable manners,' many a Western pen has been wielded to tell all
kinds of tales concerning the Land of the Rising Sun. Her long
seclusion; her anxious care to guard inviolate the simple faith which
had been gravely threatened by the Roman Church; her hearty welcome of
the honoured guests from the West, after centuries of independent
growth; the sudden, almost pathetic, changes she has gone through in the
past forty years in order to equip herself for a place on the world's
stage where powers play their game of balance; the lessons she lately
taught the still slumbering China through the mouths of thundering
cannon: all this has called into existence the expression of opinions
and comments of very varying merit and tone; and especially since the
out-break of the present war, when the daily news from the scenes of
action, where my brethren are fighting for the cause of wronged justice
and menaced liberty, is showing the world page after page of patriotism
and loyalty, written unmistakably in the crimson letters of heroes'
blood,--all this has given occasion to Europe and America to think the
matter over afresh. Here you have at least a nation different in her
development from any existing people in the Occident. Governed from time
immemorial by the immediate descendants of the Sun-Goddess, whose
merciful rule early taught us to offer them our voluntary tribute of
devotion and love, we have based our social system on filial piety, that
necessary outcome of ancestor-worship which presupposes altruism on the
one hand, and on the other loyalty and love of the fatherland. Different
doctrines of religion and morality have found their way from their
continental homes to the silvery shores of the Land of the Gods, only to
render their several services towards consolidating and widening the
so-called 'Divine Path,' that national cult whose unwritten tenets have
lurked for thousands of years hidden in the most sacred corner of our
hearts, whose pulse is ever beating its rhythm of patriotism and
loyalty. Buddhist metaphysics, Confucian and Taoist philosophy, have
been fused together in the furnace of Shintoism for fifteen centuries
and a half, and that apart from the outer world, in the island home of
Japan, where the blue sky looks down on gay blossoms and gracefully
sloping mountains. The final amalgamation of these forces produces,
among other results, the works of art and the feats of bravery now
before you, each bearing the ineffaceable hall-marks of Japan's past
history. Surely here you are face to face with a people worthy of
serious investigation, not only from the disinterested point of view of
a folk-psychologist. It is a study which will open to any impartial
observer a new horizon, more so than would be the case if he attempted
the sociological interpretation of a nation the history of whose
development was almost identical with that of his own. Here he meets
totally different sets of things with totally different ways of looking
at them; and this gives him ample occasion to realise the fact that
human thought and action may evolve in several forms and through several
channels before they reach their respective culmination where they all,
regardless of their original differences, melt into the common sea of
truth.

But this simple fact that 'God fulfills Himself in many ways,' as your
Tennyson has it, so necessary to ensure freedom from national bigotry
and conventional ignorance, so necessary too for a proper understanding
of oneself as the cumulative product of a nation's history, has not
always been kept in mind, even by those otherwise well-meaning authors,
whose works have some charm as descriptive writing, but give only a
superficial and often misleading account of the inner life of the
nation. True, a great deal of excellent work has been achieved by a
number of scholars of lasting merit, from Kaempfe's memorable work first
published in its English translation as early as 1727, down to the
admirable _Interpretation_ written last year by the late Mr. Lafcadio
Hearn, in whose death Japan lost one of her most precious friends,
possessing as he did the scholar's insight and the poet's pen, two
heavenly gifts seldom found united in a single man. It is mainly through
the remarkable labour of two learned bodies, the Asiatic Society of
Japan, and the _Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde
Ostasiens_, both with their headquarters in Tôkyô--in whose
indefatigable researches the 'Japan Society' in this city has ably
joined since 1892--that most valuable data have been constantly brought
to light, furnishing for future students sure bases for wider
generalizations. But owing to the numerous hindrances--some of which
look almost insurmountable to the Western investigator--a fair synthetic
interpretation of Japan as a nation, explaining all the important forces
that underlie the psychic and physical phenomena, still remains to be
written. The most formidable of the difficulties which meet a European
or American student at the very threshold of his researches is the
totally different construction of Japanese society, a difficulty which
makes it impossible to understand properly any set of the phenomena
belonging to it apart from the others which surround them. One could as
well cut a single mesh from a net without prejudice to the neighbouring
ones! The proper understanding of things Japanese therefore presupposes
freedom from your conventional philosophy of life, and the power of
viewing things through other people's eyes.

Besides this obstacle, there are many others; for example, that of the
language. Like most other nations in the East, we have been accustomed,
up to this very day, to use a written language, divided within itself
into several styles, which is considerably different from the
vernacular. To make this state of things still more complicated, Chinese
characters are profusely resorted to in the native writings, and are
used not only as so many ideographs for words of Chinese origin, but
also to represent native words. To make confusion worse confounded, they
are not infrequently used as pure phonetic symbols without any further
meaning attaching to them. So one and the same sign may be read in half
a dozen different ways, according to the hints, more or less sure, given
by the context. All this makes the study of Japanese immensely
difficult. It is difficult even for a Japanese with the best
opportunities; a hundred times more so, then, for a Western scholar who,
if he cares to study the subject at first hand at all, begins this
study, comparatively speaking, late in life, when his memory has
well-nigh lost the capacity of bearing such an enormous burden!

Still, there have been many Western scholars who, nothing daunted by the
above-mentioned hindrances, have done much valuable work. English names
like those of Sir E. Satow, G.W. Aston, B.H. Chamberlain, Lafcadio Hearn
are to be gratefully remembered by all future students in this field of
inquiry, as well as such German scholars as Dr. Baelz and Dr. Florenz.
Leaving the enumeration of general works on Japan, whose name is legion,
for some other time, let me mention one or two of those works of
reference which a would-be English scholar of Japanese matters might
find very useful. First of all Mr. B.H. Chamberlain's _Things
Japanese_--a book which gave birth to Mr. J.D. Hall's equally
indispensable _Things Chinese_--containing in cyclopædic form a mine of
information about Japan. Dr. Wenckstern's painstaking _Japanese
Bibliography_, with M. de Losny's earlier attempt as a supplement, gives
you the list of all writings on Japan in European tongues that have
appeared up to 1895. For those who want good books on the Japanese
language, Mr. Aston's _Grammar of the Japanese Written Language_, Mr.
Chamberlain's _Handbook of Colloquial Japanese_, as well as the same
author's _Monzi-no-Shirubi, a Practical Introduction to the Study of the
Japanese Writing_, are the best. As for books on the subject from the
pen of the Japanese themselves, Dr. Nitobe's _Bushido, Explanations of
the Japanese Thought_, and my brother K. Okakura's _Ideals of the East_,
besides a volume by several well-known Japanese, entitled _Japan by the
Japanese_, are to be specially mentioned.[1]


[1] Professor T. Inouye's little pamphlet, published first in French,
entitled _Sur le Développement des Idées Philosophiques au Japon avant
l'Introduction de la Civilisation Européenne_, will give you some idea
of our philosophic systems. For a serious perusal, its German
translation, annotated and amplified, by Dr. A. Gramatzky (_Kurze
Übersicht über die Entwicklung der philosophischen Ideen in Japan_,
Berlin, 1897), is to be preferred.

What I myself propose to do in this essay is to give to the best of my
ability, and so far as is possible with the scanty knowledge and the
limited space at my disposal, a simple statement in plain language of
what I think to be the fundamental truths necessary for the proper
understanding of my fatherland. I am not vain enough to attempt any
original solution of the old difficulty; knowing as I do my own
deficiencies, I should be well satisfied if I could manage to give you
some kind of general introduction to the Japanese views of life.

So much for the preliminary remarks. Let us now take a step further and
see what factors are to be considered as the bases of modern Japan.

'To which race do the Japanese belong?' is the first question asked by
any one who wants to approach our subject from the historical point of
view. Unfortunately not much is known as yet about our place in racial
science. If we do not take into account the inhabitants of the newly
annexed island of Formosa, we have, roughly speaking, two very different
races in our whole archipelago--the hairy Aino and the ruling Yamato
race, the former being the supposed aborigines, physically sturdy and
well developed, with their characteristic abundant growth of hair, who
are at present to be found only in the Yezo island in the northern
extremity of Japan, and whose number, notwithstanding all the care of
our government, is fast dwindling, the sum total being not much more
than 15,000. The Aino have a tradition that the land had been occupied
before them by another race of dwarfish stature called Koropokguru, who
are identified by some scholars with those primitive pit-dwellers known
in our history as Tuchigumo,[2] whose traces, although scanty, are still
to be met with in various parts of Yezo. Anyhow, we see at the first
dawn of history the aborigines gradually receding before the conquering
Yamato race, who are found steadily pushing on towards the northeast,
and who finally established themselves as a ruling body under the divine
banner of the first emperor Jimmu, from whose accession we reckon our
era, the present year being the 2565th, according to our recognised way
of counting dates.


[2] Professor Milne, _Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan_,
vol. viii. p. 82.

Suggestions, audacious rather than strictly scientific, have been put
forward as to the original home both of the Aino and the Japanese. The
Rev. I. Dooman, for instance, proposed in his paper read before the
meeting of the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1897 to derive both from the
people who had been living, according to him, on both sides of the great
Himalayan range. 'The Aino,' he says, 'the first inhabitants of these
(Japanese) islands, belong to the South Himalayan Centre; while the
Japanese, the second comers, belong to the North Himalayan, commonly
called Altaic races.'[3] But in face of the scanty knowledge at our
command about the respective sets of people in question, such wholesale
conjecture had better be postponed until some later time, when further
research shall have supplied surer data for our speculations. As regards
the Aino, we must for the present say, on the authority of Mr.
Chamberlain, that, remembering how the Aino race is isolated from all
other living races by its hairiness and by the extraordinary flattening
of the tibia and humerus, it is not strange to find the language
isolated too.[4]


[3] _Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan_, vol. xxv.

With respect to the Japanese proper, the only thing known about their
racial affinity is the theory proposed by the German scholar Dr. Baelz,
as the result of his elaborate measurements both of living specimens and
skeletons.[5] He considers the Yamato race to belong to the Mongolian
stock of the Asiatic continent, from where they proceeded to Japan by
way of the Corean peninsula. There are two distinct types noticeable
among them at present, one characterised by a delicate, refined
appearance, with oval face, rather oblique eyes, slightly Roman nose,
and a frame not vigorous yet well proportioned; the other marked out by
broader face, projecting cheek bones, flat nose, and horizontal eyes,
while the body is more robust and muscular, though not so well
proportioned and regular. The former is to be met with among the better
classes and in the southern parts of Japan, while the specimens of the
latter are found rather among the labouring population, and are more
abundant in the northern provinces. This difference of types,
aristocratic and plebeian, which is still more conspicuous among the
fair sex, is with good reason attributed to the two-fold wave of
Mongolian emigration which reached our island in prehistoric times. The
first emigrants, consisting of coarser tribes of the Mongolian race,
landed most probably on the northern coast of the main island somewhere
in the present Idzumo province, and settled down there, while the second
wave broke on the shores of Kyûshû. These emigrants seem to have
belonged to the more refined branch of the great Mongolian stock. This
hypothesis is borne out by our mythology, which divides itself into two
cycles, one centring at Idzumo and the other at Kyûshû, and which tell
us how the great-grandfather of the first great emperor Jimmu descended
from heaven on to the peak of the mountain Takachiho in Hyûga in Kyûshû.
Accompanied by his brother, he started from this spot on his march of
conquering migration to Yamato, fighting and subduing on his way tribes
who on the continent were once his kith and kin.


[4] _Memoirs of the Literary Department of the University of Tôkyô_,
vol. i.

[5] _Die körperlichen Eigenschaften der Japaner_, vols. xxviii. and
xxxii. of _Mittheilungen der Gesellschaft für die Natur- und Völkerkunde
Ostasiens_.

It might perhaps interest you to know something of our prevailing idea
of personal beauty, especially as, in such a homogeneous nation as the
Japanese, ruled from time immemorial by one and the same line of
dynasty, it may help us to make some vague conjectures as to the
physical appearances of at least one of those continental tribes out of
which our nation has been formed. The standard of beauty naturally
fluctuates a little according to sex and locality. In a lady, for
example, mildness and grace are, generally speaking, preferred to that
strength or manliness of expression which would be thought more becoming
in her brother. Tôkyô again does not put so much stress on the
fleshiness of limbs and face as does Kyôto. But, as a whole, there is
only one ideal throughout the Empire. So let me try to enumerate all the
qualities usually considered necessary to make a beautiful woman. She is
to possess a body not much exceeding five feet in height, with
comparatively fair skin and proportionately well-developed limbs; a head
covered with long, thick, and jet-black hair; an oval face with a
straight nose, high and narrow; rather large eyes, with large deep-brown
pupils and thick eyelashes; a small mouth, hiding behind its red, but
not thin, lips, even rows of small white teeth; ears not altogether
small; and long and thick eyebrows forming two horizontal but slightly
curved lines, with a space left between them and the eyes. Of the four
ways in which hair can grow round the upper edge of the forehead, viz.,
horned, square, round, and Fuji-shaped, one of the last two is
preferred, a very high as well as a very low forehead being considered
not attractive.

Such are, roughly speaking, the elements of Japanese female beauty. Eyes
and eyebrows with the outer ends turning considerably upwards, with
which your artists depict us, are due to those Japanese colour prints
which strongly accentuate our dislike of the reverse, for straight eyes
and eyebrows make a very bad impression on us, suggesting weakness,
lasciviousness, and so on. It must also be understood that in Japan no
such variety of types of beauty is to be met with as is noticed here in
Europe. Blue eyes and blond hair, the charms of which we first learn to
feel after a protracted stay among you, are regarded in a Japanese as
something extraordinary in no favourable sense of the term! A girl with
even a slight tendency to grey eyes or frizzly hair is looked upon as an
unwelcome deviation from the national type.

If we now consider our mythology, with a view to tracing the continental
home of the Yamato race, we find, to our disappointment, that our
present knowledge is too scanty to allow us to arrive at a conclusion.
Indeed, so long as the general science of mythology itself remains in
that unsettled condition in which its youth obliges it to linger, and
especially so long as the Indian and Chinese bodies of myths--by which
our mythology is so unmistakably influenced--do not receive more serious
systematic treatment, the recorded stories of the Japanese deities
cannot be expected to supply us with much indication as to our
continental home. One thing is certain about them, that they were not
free from influences exerted by the different myths prevalent among the
Chinese and the Indians at the time when they were written down in our
earliest history, the _Ko-ji-ki_ or _Records of Ancient Matter_,
completed in A.D. 712. There is an excellent English translation of the
book, with an admirable introduction and notes, by Mr. B.H. Chamberlain.
According to this book, the original ethereal chaos with which the world
began gradually congealed, and was finally divided into heaven and
earth. The male and female principles now at work gave birth to several
deities, until a pair of deities named Izanagi and Izanami, or the
'Male-who-invites' and the 'Female-who-invites,' were produced. They
married, and produced first of all the islands of Japan big and small,
and then different deities, until the birth of the Fire-God cost the
divine mother her life. She subsequently retired to the Land of Darkness
or Hades, where her sorrowful consort descended, Orpheus-like, in quest
of his spouse. He failed to bring her back to the outer world, for, like
the Greek musician, he broke his promise not to look at her in her more
profound retirement. The result was disastrous. Izanagi barely escaped
from his now furious wife, and on coming back to daylight he washed
himself in a stream, in order to purify himself from the hideous sights
and the pollution of the nether-world. This custom of lustration is, by
the way, kept up to this day in the symbolic sprinkling of salt over
persons returning from a funeral--salt representing pure water, as our
name for it, 'the flower of the waves,' well indicates. Our love of
cleanliness and of bathing might be also recognised in this early
custom. Impurity, whether mental or corporal, has always been regarded
as a great evil, and even as a sin.

Now one of the most important results of the purification of the god
Izanagi was the birth of three important deities through the washing of
his eyes and nose. The Moon-God and the Sun-Goddess emerged from his
washing his right and left eyes, while Susanowo, their youngest brother,
owed his existence to the washing of his nose; three illustrious
children to whom the divine father trusted the dominion of night, day,
and the seas.

The last-mentioned deity, whose name would mean in English 'Prince
Impetuous,' lost his father's favour by his obstinate longing to see
Izanami, the divine mother, in Hades, and was expelled from the father's
presence. He eventually went up to heaven to pay a visit to his sister,
the Sun-Goddess, whom he gravely offended by his monstrous outrages on
her person, and who was consequently so angry that she shut herself up
in a rocky chamber, thus causing darkness in the world outside. In
accordance with the deliberate plans worked out by an assembly of a
myriad gods, she was at last allured from her cavern by the sounds of
wild merriment caused by the burlesque dancing of a female deity, and
day reigned once more.

The now repenting offender was driven down from heaven, and he wandered
about the earth. It was during this wandering that in Idzumo he, like
Perseus, rescued a beautiful young maid from an eight-headed serpent. He
won her hand and lived very happily with her ever after.

In the meantime the state of things in the 'High Plain of Heaven'
ripened to the point that the Sun-Goddess began to think of sending her
august child to govern the
'Luxuriant-Reed-Plain-Land-of-Fresh-Rice-Ears,' that is to say, Japan.
Messages were previously sent to pacify the land for the reception of
the divine ruler. This took much time, during which a grandson was born
to the Sun-Goddess, and in the end it was this grandson who was
designated to come down to earth instead of his father. On his departure
a formal command to descend and rule the land now placed under his care
was accompanied by the present of a mirror, a sword, and a string of
crescent-shaped jewels. These treasures, still preserved in our imperial
household as regalia, are generally interpreted to mean the three
virtues of wisdom, courage, and mercy--necessary qualities for a perfect
ruler. It was on the high peak of Mount Takachiho that the divine ruler
descended to earth. He settled down in the country until his
great-grandson, known in history as Emperor Jimmu, founded the empire
and began that unique line of rulers who have governed the 'Land of the
Gods' for more than two thousand years, the present emperor being the
hundred and twenty-first link in the eternal chain.

Such is, in brief, the story about my country before it was brought
under the rule of one central governing body. Subjected to scientific
scrutiny the whole tale presents many gaps in logical sequence. It
betrays, besides, traces of an intermingling of the early beliefs of
other nations. Still, it must be said that the divine origin of our
emperors has invested their throne with the double halo of temporal and
of spiritual power from the earliest days of their ascendancy; and the
people, themselves the descendants of those patriarchs who served under
the banners of Emperor Jimmu, or else of those who early learned to bow
themselves down before the divine conqueror, have looked up to this
throne with an ever-growing reverence and pride.

In primitive Japan, as in every other primitive human society,
ancestor-worship was the first form of belief. Each family had its own
departed spirits of forefathers to whom was dedicated a daily homage of
simple words and offerings in kind. The guardian ghosts demanded of
their living descendants that they should be good and brave in their own
way. As these families of the same race and language gathered themselves
around the strongest of them all, imbued with a firm belief in its
divine origin, they contributed in their turn their own myths to the
imperial ones, thus eventually forming and consolidating a national
cult; and it was but natural that the people's heart should come in
course of time to re-echo in harmony with the keynote struck by the one
through whom the gods breathe eternal life. The whole nation is bound by
that sacred tie of common belief and common thought. Here lies the great
gap that separates, for example, the Chinese cult of fatalism from our
Path of Gods as a moral force. The Chinese have believed from the
earliest times in one supreme god whom they called the Divine Presider
(_Shang-ti_) or the August Heaven (_Hwang-t'ien_ or simply _T'ien_),
who, according to their notion, carefully selects a fit person from
among swarming mankind to be the temporary ruler of his
fellow-countrymen, but only for so long as it pleases the god to let him
occupy the throne. At the expiration of a certain period, the heavenly
mission (_T'ien-ming_) is transferred through bloodshed and national
disaster to another mortal, who exercises the earthly rule until he or
his descendants incur the disfavour of the 'Heaven above.' To this day
the Chinese word for revolution means the 'renovation of missions'
(_kweh-ming_). This fatalistic idea, which is but a natural outcome of
the almost too democratic nature of the people of the Celestial Empire
and of the frequent changes of dynasties it has had to go through, is
almost unknown in our island home in its gravest aspects; more than
that, ever since its introduction into Japan, this idea, along with the
Indian doctrine of pitiless fate, has gradually taught us to offer a
more resigned and determined service to our respective superiors who
culminate in the divine person of the Emperor himself. This is well
illustrated by the fact that no attempt at the formal occupation of the
throne has ever been made, even on the part of those powerful Shoguns
who were the real rulers of our country; they knew full well how
dangerous and fatal for themselves it would be to tamper with that hinge
on which the nation's religious life turns. Only once in our long
history is there an example of an unsuccessful attempt (and it is the
highest treason a Japanese subject can think of), when a Buddhist monk
named Dôkyô, encouraged by the undue devotion of the ruling empress,
tried to ascend the throne by means of the recognition of the higher
temporal rank of the Buddhist priesthood over the imperial ministry of
the native cult. This imminent danger was averted by the bold and
resolute patriotism of a Shinto priest, Wake-no-Kiyomaro, who, in
Luther-like defiance of all peril and personal risks, declared
fearlessly, in the very presence of the haughty and menacing head of the
Buddhist Church, the divine will, 'Japan is to know no emperor except in
the person of the divine descendants of the Sun-Goddess!'

Turning now to the question of language, we must confess that the
linguistic affinities of Japanese are as little cleared up as the other
problems we have been considering. The only thing we know about the
Japanese language amounts to this: it belongs, morphologically speaking,
to the so-called agglutinative languages, _e.g._, those which express
their grammatical functions by the addition of etymologically
independent elements--prefixes and suffixes--to the unchangeable roots
or base forms. Genealogically, to follow the classification expounded by
Friedrich Müller in his _Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft_, who based
his system on Haeckel's division of the human race by the nature and
particularly the section of the hair, Japanese is one of the languages
or groups of languages spoken by the Mongolian race.

But this characterisation of our tongue does not help us much. One could
as well point to the East at large to show where Japan lies!
Notwithstanding the general uncertainty as regards the exact position of
our language, this much is sure, that Japanese has, in spite of the
immense number of loan-words of Chinese origin, no fundamental
connection with the monosyllabic language of China, whose different
syntactical nature and want of common roots baffles the attempts on the
part of some speculative Europeans to connect it with our own tongue. At
the same time, it is well known among competent scholars that Japanese,
with its most distant dialect Luchuan, bears great kinship to the
Corean, Manchurian, and Mongolian languages. It shares with them,
besides the dislike of commencing a word with a trilled sound or with a
sonant, almost the same rules for the arrangement of the component
elements of a sentence. According to the Japanese syntax, the following
rules can, for instance, be applied to Corean without alteration:--

1. All the qualifying words and phrases are put before those they
qualify. Attributive adjectives and adverbs, and their equivalents, are
placed before nouns and verbs they modify.

2. The grammatical subject stands at the beginning of the sentence.

3. Predicative elements are at the end of a sentence.

4. Direct and indirect objects follow the subject.

5. Subordinate sentences precede the principal ones.

One thing worthy of notice is the fact that, notwithstanding the most
convincing structural similarity that exists between these affiliated
languages, they contain, comparatively speaking, few words in common,
even among the numerals and personal pronouns, which have played such an
important part in Indo-European philology. We must still wait a long
time before a better knowledge of linguistic affinity reveals such
decisive links of connection as will enable us to trace our Japanese
home on the continent.

Let us now consider what were the effects of the continental
civilisation on the mental development of the Japanese within their
insular home.

Before entering into details about the various continental doctrines
implanted in our country from China and India, it may be well to tell
you something of the mental attitude of the Japanese in facing a new
form of culture, in many senses far superior to their own. Nothing
definite can perhaps be said about it; but when we grope along the main
cord of historical phenomena we think we find that the Japanese as a
whole are not a people with much aptitude for deep metaphysical ways of
thinking. They are not of the calibre from which you expect a Kant or a
Schopenhauer. Warlike by nature more than anything else, they have been
known from the very beginning to have had the soldier-like simplicity
and the easy contentment of men of action--qualities which the practical
nature of Confucian ethics had ample chance to develop. The abstruse
conceptions of Chinese or Indian origin have been received into the
Japanese mind just as they were preached, and usually we have not
troubled ourselves to think them out again; but in accordance with our
peculiarly quick habit of perceiving the inner meaning of things, we
have generalised them straight away and turned them immediately into so
many working principles. There are any number of instances of slight
hints given by some people on the continent and worked out to suit our
own purposes into maxims of immediate and practical value. Ideals in
their original home are ideals no longer in our island home. They are
interpreted into so many realities with a direct bearing on our daily
life. We have been and are, even to this day, always in need of some new
hints and suggestions to work up into so many dynamic forces for
practical use. Upon Europe and America the full power of our mental
searchlight is now playing, in quest of those new ideas for future
development for which we have been accustomed to draw mainly on China
and India. Even such a commonplace thing as the drinking of a cup of tea
becomes in our hands something more: it becomes a training in stoic
serenity, in the capacity of smiling at life's troubles and
disturbances. Some day you might learn from us a new philosophy based on
the use of motor cars and telephones as applied to life and conduct!

This, as you will see, explains why we have failed to produce any
original thinkers; this is why we have to recognise our indebtedness
for almost all the important ideas which have brought about social
innovation either to China or to India, or else to the modern Western
nations; and this notwithstanding so many national idiosyncrasies and
characteristics which are to be found in the productions of our art and
in our life and ways, and which are even as handfuls of grain gathered
in foreign fields and brewed into a national drink of utterly Japanese
flavour. We are, I think, a people of the Present and the Tangible, of
the broad Daylight and the plainly Visible. The undeniable proclivity of
our mind in favour of determination and action, as contrasted with
deliberation and calm, makes it an uncongenial ground for the sublimity
and grandeur of that 'loathed melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest
midnight born,' to take deep root in it. Pure reasoning as such has had
for us little value beyond the help it affords us in harbouring our
drifting thought in some nearest port, where we can follow any peaceful
occupation rather than be fighting what we should call a useless fight
with troubled billows and unfathomable depths. Such, according to my
personal view, are the facts about our mentality considered generally.
And now it is necessary to speak of the main waves of cult and culture
that successively washed our shores.

The first mention in our history of the introduction of the Chinese
learning into the imperial household places it in the reign of the
fifteenth emperor Ô-jin, in the year 284 after Christ according to the
earliest native records, but according to more trustworthy recent
computation[6] considerably later than that date. We are told that a
certain prince was put under the tutorship of a learned Corean scholar
of Chinese, who, at the request of the emperor, came over to Japan with
the _Confucian Analects_ (_Iun-yü_) and some other Chinese classics as a
tribute from the King of Kudara. But long before the learning of the
Celestial Empire found its way through Corea into our imperial court, it
had in all probability been making its silent influence felt here and
there among the Japanese people. Great swarms of immigrants had sought a
final place of rest in our sea-girt country from many parts of China,
where raging tyranny and menacing despotism made life intolerable even
for Chinese meekness; these, and the bands of daring invaders which
Japan sent out from time to time to the Corean and Chinese coasts, had
given us many opportunities of coming into contact with the learning
prevalent among our continental neighbours. In this manner Chinese
literature, with its groundwork of Confucian ethics, surrounded by the
strange lore derived from Taoism, and perhaps also from Hindu sources,
had been gradually but surely attracting the ever-increasing attention
of our warlike forefathers, who were to become in course of time its
devoted admirers.


[6] Cp. Bramsen's _Japanese Chronological Tables_.

Now, Confucianism pure and simple, as taught by the sage Kung-foo-tsze
(551-478 B.C.), from whom the doctrine derived its name, was,
notwithstanding the contention of the famous English sinologue Dr.
Legge, nothing more and nothing less than an aggregate of ethical ideas
considered in their application to the conduct and duties of our
everyday life. 'The great teacher never allowed himself to be considered
an expounder of any new system of either religious or metaphysical
ideas. He was content to call himself 'a transmitter and not a maker,
believing in and loving the ancients.' True to the spirit of these
words, and most probably having no other course open to him on account
of his extremely utilitarian turn of mind, he devoted his whole life to
the elucidation of the True Path of human life, as exemplified by those
half-mythical rulers of old China, Yaô, Shun, etc., from whom he derived
his ideals and his images of perfect man in flesh and blood. These early
kings were of course no creation of Confucius himself; the only thing he
did was to place the forms, which popular tradition had handed down
surrounded by legendary halos, in high relief before the people, as
perfect models to regulate the earthly conduct of the individuals as
members of a society. His attitude towards the ancient classics which he
compiled and perpetuated was that of one transmitting faithfully. He
studied them, and exhorted and helped his disciples to do the same, but
he did not alter them, nor even digest them into their present form.'[7]
In order to find concrete examples to show his ethical views more
positively, he wrote a history of his native state Loò from 722 to 484
B.C., in which, while faithfully recording events, he took every
opportunity to jot down his moral judgment upon them in the terse words
and phrases he knew so well how to wield. As abstract reasoning had
little charm for his practical mind, he systematically avoided indulging
in discussions of a metaphysical nature. 'How can we know anything of an
After-life, when we are so ignorant even of the Living,' was his answer
when asked by one of his disciples about Death. Ancestor-worship he
sanctioned, as might naturally be expected from his enthusiastic
advocacy of things ancient, and also from the importance he attached to
filial piety, which strikes the keynote of his ethical ideas. But here
too his indifference to the spiritual side of the question is very
remarkable. Perhaps he found the holy altar of his day so much
encumbered by the presence of innumerable fetishes and demons, that he
felt little inclination to approach and sweep them away. 'To give
oneself,' he said on one occasion, 'to the duties due to men, and while
respecting spiritual things to keep aloof from them, may be called
wisdom.'


[7] Legge's _The Religion of China_, p. 137.

The main features which he advocated are found well reflected in the
first twelve out of sixteen articles of the so-called sacred Edict,
published by the famous K'ang Hsi (1654-1722), the second emperor of the
present Manchu dynasty, in 1670 A.D., which embody the essential points
of Confucianism, as adapted to the requirements of modern everyday
Chinese life.

1. Esteem most highly filial piety and brotherly submission, in order to
give due prominence to the social relations.

2. Behave with generosity to the branches of your kindred, in order to
illustrate harmony and benignity.

3. Cultivate peace and concord in your neighbourhood, in order to
prevent quarrels and litigation.

4. Recognise the importance of husbandry and the culture of the
mulberry-tree, in order to ensure sufficiency of food and clothing.

5. Show that you prize moderation and economy, in order to prevent the
lavish waste of your means.

6. Make much of the colleges and seminaries, in order to make correct
the practice of the scholars.

7. Discountenance and banish strange doctrines, in order to exalt
correct doctrines.

8. Describe and explain the laws, in order to warn the ignorant and
obstinate.

9. Exhibit clearly propriety and gentle courtesy, in order to improve
manners and customs.

10. Labour diligently at your proper callings, in order to give
well-defined aims to the people.

11. Instruct sons and younger brothers, in order to prevent them doing
what is wrong.

12. Put a stop to false accusations, in order to protect the honest and
the good.

Here too you see what an important place filial piety occupies, which
Confucius himself prized so highly. The Hsiao King, or the 'Sacred Book
of Filial Piety,' which is supposed to record conversations held between
Confucius and his disciple Tsang Ts'an on that weighty subject, has the
following passage: 'He who (properly) serves his parents in a high
situation will be free from haughtiness; in a low situation he will be
free from insubordination; whilst among his equals he will not be
quarrelsome. In a high position haughtiness leads to ruin; among the
lowly insubordination means punishment; among equals quarrelsomeness
tends to the wielding of weapons.' These words, naïve as they are,
express the exalted position filial affection occupies in the eyes of
Confucianism. 'Dutiful subjects are to be found in the persons of filial
sons,' and again, 'Filial piety is the source whence all other good
actions take their rise,' are other sayings expressing its importance.

Along with this virtue, other forms of moral force, such as mercy,
uprightness, courage, politeness, fidelity, and loyalty, have been duly
considered and commended by the great teacher himself and his disciples.
Among these, Mencius (373-289 B.C.) is most enterprising and attractive,
digesting and systematising with a great deal of philosophic talent the
rather fragmentary ideas of his great master. It is he who, among other
things, informs us, on the assumed authority of a passage in the
Shu-King, how the sage Shun made it a subject of his anxious solicitude
to teach the five constituent relationships of society, viz., affection
between father and son; relations of righteousness between ruler and
subject; the assigning of their proper spheres to husband and wife;
distinction of precedence between old and young; and fidelity between
friend and friend--an idea which has played such an important part in
the history of the development of the Oriental mind.

Such were the main features of Confucianism when it first reached Japan,
some centuries after the Christian era. But it was not until some time
after the introduction of Buddhism from Corea during the reign of the
Emperor Kimmei, in 552 A.D., that Confucianism and Chinese learning
began to take firm root and make their influence felt among us.
Paradoxical as it looks, it is Buddhism that so greatly helped the
teaching of the Chinese sage to establish itself as a ruling factor in
Japanese society. This curious state of things came about in this way.
The gospel of Shâkya-muni has, ever since its introduction into our
country, been made accessible only through the Chinese translation,
which demanded a considerable knowledge of the written language of the
Middle Kingdom. The keen and far-reaching spiritual interest aroused by
Buddhism gave a fresh and vigorous impulse to the study of Chinese
literature, already increasingly cultivated for some centuries. Now, the
knowledge of Chinese in its written form has, until quite recently,
always been imparted by a painful perusal of the Chinese classics and
Chinese books deeply imbued with Confucianism. It was only after a
considerable amount of knowledge of this difficult language had been
obtained in this unnatural way, that one came in contact with the works
of authors not strictly orthodox. This way of teaching Chinese through
Confucian texts, which we adopted from China's faithful agent, Corea,
necessarily led from the very beginning to an intimate acquaintance with
the main aspects of the Confucian morals in our upper classes, among
whom alone the study was at first pursued with any seriousness. Although
skilled in warlike arts, gentle and loyal in domestic life, our
forefathers were simple in manners and thought in those olden days when
book-learned reasons of duty had not yet superseded the naïve observance
of the dictates of the heart and of responsibility to the ancestral
spirits. They possessed no letters of their own, and consequently no
literature, except in unwritten songs and legendary lore sung from mouth
to mouth, telling of the gods and men who formed the glorious past of
the Yamato race. So it is not difficult to imagine the dazzling effect
which the Chinese learning, with its richness and its pedantry, with its
elaborate system of civil government and its philosophy, produced upon
our untrained eyes. Gradually but steadfastly it had been gaining
ground, and making its slow way from the topmost rung to the bottom of
the social ladder, when the introduction of Buddhism quickened the now
resistless progress. The would-be priests and advocates of the Indian
creed felt a fresh impulse and spiritual need to learn the Chinese
language, for which they had long entertained a high estimation. Owing
to the extremely secular character of the Confucian ethics on the one
hand, and on the other, to the fact that Buddhists deny the existence of
a personal god, and are eager to minister salvation through any adequate
means so long as it does not contradict the Law of the Universe upon
which the whole doctrine is based, Buddhism found in the teaching of the
Chinese sage and his followers not only no enemy, but, on the contrary,
a helpful friend. It found that the sacred books of Confucian doctrine
contained only in a slightly different form the five commandments laid
down by Shâkya-muni himself for the regulation of the conduct of a
layman, viz.:--

1. Not to destroy life nor to cause its destruction.

2. Not to steal.

3. Not to commit adultery.

4. Not to tell lies.

5. Not to indulge in intoxicating drinks; or the Buddhist warning
against the ten sins; three of the body--taking life, theft, adultery;
four of speech--lying, slander, abuse, and vain conversation; three of
the mind--covetousness, malice, and scepticism.

It saw also that Confucian writings embraced its fifty precepts[8]
detailed under the five different secular relationships of

1. Parents and children.

2. Pupils and teachers.

3. Husbands and wives.

4. Friends and companions.

5. Masters and servants.

Our early Buddhists therefore did not see why they should try to
suppress the existing Confucian moral code and supplant it with their
own which breathed the same spirit, only because it had not grown on
Indian soil.


[8] Cp. Rhys Davids' _Buddhism_, p. 144.

Thus encouraged by the now influential advocates of the teaching of
Buddha, themselves admirers of the Chinese learning, Confucianism began
with renewed vigour to exercise a great influence on the future of the
Japanese. This took place during the seventh century, when the
reorganisation of the Japanese government after the model of that of the
Celestial Empire made our educational system quite Chinese. In addition
to a university, there were many provincial schools where candidates for
the government service were instructed. Medicine, mathematics, including
astronomy and law, taught through Chinese books, along with the
all-important teaching in the Confucian ethics and in Chinese literature
generally, were the branches of study cultivated under the guidance of
professors whose calling had become hereditary among a certain number of
learned families. In the course of the next two centuries we see several
private institutions founded by great nobles of the court, with an
endowment in land for their support. The native system of writing which
had gradually emerged out of the phonetic use of Chinese ideographs made
it possible for Japanese thought, hitherto expressed only in an
uncongenial foreign garb, to appear in purely Japanese attire. Thus we
find the dawn of Japanese civilisation appearing at the beginning of the
tenth century after Christ. The air was replete with the Buddhist
thought of after-life and the Confucian ideas of broad-day morality. The
sonorous reading of the Book of Filial Piety was heard all over the
country, echoing with the loud recital of the _Myôhô-renge-kyô_ (or
_Saddharma Pundarika Sûtra_).

During the dark and dreary Middle Ages which followed this golden
period, and which were brought about by the degeneration of the ruling
nobles and by the gradually rising power of the military class, Chinese
learning fled to the protecting hands of Buddhist priests; and in its
quiet refuge within the monastery walls it continued to breathe its
humble existence, until it found at the beginning of the sixteenth
century a powerful patron in the great founder of the Tokugawa
Shogunate. The education of the common people, too, seems to have been
kept up by the monks--a fact still preserved in the word _tera-koya_,
'church seminary,' a term used, until forty years ago, to express the
tiny private schools for children. It must be remembered that the
education thus given was always of an exclusively secular character,
basing itself on the Confucian morals.

Before passing on to the consideration of Laoism, let me say something
about the so-called orthodox form of the teaching of Confucius, which is
one of the latest developments of that doctrine. Orthodox Confucianism,
as represented by the famous Chinese philosopher and commentator of the
Confucian canon, Chu-Hsi (1130-1200), found its admirer in a Japanese
scholar, Fujiwara-no-Seigwa (1560-1619), who in his youth had joined the
priesthood, which however he afterwards renounced. He gave lectures on
the Chinese classics at Kyôto. He was held in great esteem by Tokugawa
Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa line of Shoguns, who embraced the
Chinese system of ethics as preached by Chu-Hsi. During the two hundred
and fifty years of the Tokugawa rule, this system, under the hereditary
direction of the descendants of Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), one of the
most distinguished disciples of Seigwa, was recognised as the
established doctrine.

According to the somewhat hazy ideas of Chu-Hsi's philosophy, which I
ask your permission to sketch here on account of the high public esteem
in which we have held them for the last three centuries, the ultimate
basis of the universe is Infinity, or _Tai Kieh_, which, though
containing within itself all the germs of all forms of existence and
excellence, is utterly void of form or sensible qualities. It consists
of two qualities, _li_ and _chi_, which may be roughly rendered into
'force-element' and 'matter-element.' These are self-existences, are
present in all things, and are found in their formation. The
'force-element,' or _li_, we are told, is the perfection of heavenly
virtue. It is in inanimate things as well as in man and other animate
beings, and pervades all space. The 'matter-element,' or _chi_, is
endowed with the male and the female principles, or positive and
negative polarities, as we might call them. It is, moreover,
characterised by the five constituent qualities of _wood_, _fire_,
_earth_, _metal_, and _water_. Hence its other name, _Wu-hsieng_, or
'Five Qualities.'

Things and animals, except human beings, get only portions of the
force-element, but man receives it in full, and this becomes in his
person _sing_, or real human nature. He has thus within him the perfect
mirror of the heavenly virtue and complete power of understanding. There
is no difference in this respect between a sage and an ordinary man. To
both the force-element is uniformly given. But the matter-element, from
which is derived his form and material existence, and which constitutes
the basis of his mental disposition, is different in quality in
different men.

Man's real nature, or _sing_, although originally perfect, becomes
affected on entering into him, or is modified by his mental disposition,
which differs according to the different state of the matter-element.
Thus a second nature is formed out of the original. It is through this
second and tainted human nature that man acts well or ill. When a man
does evil, that is the result of his mental disposition covering or
interfering with his original perfect nature. Wipe this vapour of
corrupted thought from the surface of your mental mirror and it will
shine out as brightly as if it had never been covered by a temporary
mist.[9]


[9] Cp. T. Haga's _Note on Japanese Schools of Philosophy. T.A.S.J._,
vol. xx. pt. i. p. 134.

Synoptically expressed and applied to the microcosm Chu-Hsi's system
will be as follows:--

                             MAN
         {Force-Element=_Original Nature of Man_.
                         Different Human Characters.
Infinity
                        {Male-Principle  }Wood-quality.
                                         }Fire- "
         {Matter-Element                 }Earth-"
                                         }Metal-"
                        {Female-Principle}Water-"
                       _Dispositions latent in Matter._

Such is, in its outline, Chu-Hsi's view, which received the sanction of
the ruling Tokugawa family. But it was not without its opponents in
Japan as well as in China. Already in his own time, Lu-Shang-Shan (b.
1140 A.D.) maintained, in opposition to the high-sounding erudition of
Chu-Hsi, that the purification of the heart was the first and main point
of study.[10] The same protest was more systematically urged against it
by his great follower, Wang Yang-ming (1472-1528 A.D.), who found warm
and able admirers in Japan in such scholars as Nakae Tôju (1603-1678),
Kumazawa Hanzan (1619-1691), and Oshio Chûsai (1794-1837). Among other
great opponents of the orthodox philosophy, such names as Itô Jinsai
(1625-1706) and his son Tôgai (1670-1736), Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714),
Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728), are to be mentioned. These scholars, getting
their fundamental ideas from other Chinese thinkers, and eager to remain
faithful to the true spirit of Confucianism itself, pointed out many
inconsistencies in Chu-Hsi's theory, and were of the opinion that more
real good was to be achieved in proceeding straight to action under the
guidance of conscience which was heaven and all, than in indulging in
idle talk about the subtlety of human nature.


[10] Faber's _Doctrines of Confucius_, p. 33.

The philosophy of Chu-Hsi, although he calls himself the true exponent
of Confucianism, is not at all Confucian. It is greatly indebted to
Buddhism and Taoism, or better, Laoism, that is to say, to the
philosophy originated by Lao-tze (b. 604 B.C.), one of the greatest
thinkers that China has ever produced. Since Laoism, through the
wonderful _Tao-teh-king_, a small book by Lao-tze himself, but
especially through _Chwang-tze_, a work in ten books by his famous
follower Chwang-chow, has exercised considerable influence on our
thought for twelve centuries, a word about it may not be out of place
before we go on to consider the doctrine of Shâkya-muni.

In Lao-tze we find the perfect opposite of Confucius, both in the turn
of his mind and in his views and methods of saving the world. Lao-tze
endeavoured to reform humanity by warning them to cast off all human
artifice and to return to nature. This may be taken as the whole tenor
of his doctrine: Do not try to do anything with your petty will, because
it is the way to hinder and spoil the spontaneous growth of the true
virtue that permeates the universe. To follow Nature's dictates, while
helping it to develop itself, is the very course sanctioned and followed
by all the sages worthy of the name. Make away with your 'Ego' and learn
to value simplicity and humiliation; for in total 'altruism' exists the
completion of self, and in humble contentment and yielding pliancy are
to be found real grandeur and true strength. Under the title 'Dimming
Radiance' he says:[11]--

     'Heaven endures and earth is lasting. And why can heaven and earth
     endure and be lasting? Because they do not live for themselves. On
     that account can they endure.

     'Therefore the True Man puts his person behind and his person comes
     to the front. He surrenders his person and his person is preserved.
     Is it not because he seeks not his own? For that reason he
     accomplishes his own.'

Again we hear him 'Discoursing on Virtue':--

     'Superior virtue is non-virtue. Therefore it has Virtue. Inferior
     virtue never loses sight of virtue. Therefore it has no virtue.
     Superior virtue is non-assertive and without pretension. Inferior
     virtue asserts and makes pretensions.'


[11] Cp. Dr. P. Carus's _Lao-tze Tao-teh-king_.

He talks about 'Returning to Simplicity':

     'Quit the so-called saintliness; leave the so-called wisdom alone;
     and the people's gain will be increased by a hundredfold.

     `Abandon the so-called mercy; put away the so-called righteousness;
     and the people will return to filial devotion and paternal love.

     `Abandon your scheming; put away your devices; and thieves and
     robbers will no longer exist.'

Such is the general purport of the doctrine expounded by Lao-tze. It is
well to remember that this doctrine, which we may call for distinction's
sake Laoism, has intrinsically very little to do with that form of
belief now so prevalent among the Chinese, and which is known under the
name of Taoism. Although this name itself is derived from Lao-tze's own
word _Tao_, meaning Reason or True Path, and although the followers of
Taoism see in the great philosopher its first revealer, it is in all
probability nothing more than a new aspect and new appellation assumed
by that aboriginal Chinese cult which was based on nature- and
ancestor-worship. Ever since their appearance in history the Chinese
have had their belief in Shang-ti, in spirits, and in natural agencies.
This cult found, at an early date, in the mystic interpretation and
solution of life as expressed by Lao-tze and his followers, the means of
fresh development. The philosophical ideas of these thinkers were not
properly understood, and words and phrases mostly metaphorical were
construed in such a manner that they came to mean something quite
different from what the original writers wished to suggest. Such an
idea, for instance, as the deathlessness of a True Man by virtue of his
incorporation with the grand Truth _Tao_ that pervades Heaven and Earth,
breathing in the eternity of the universe, was easily misinterpreted in
a very matter-of-fact manner, _e.g._, anybody who realised _Tao_ could
then enjoy the much-wished-for freedom from actual death. You see how
easy it is for an ordinary mind to pass from one to the other when it
hears Chwang-tze say:--

     'Fire cannot burn him who is perfect in virtue, nor water drown
     him; neither cold nor heat can affect him injuriously; neither bird
     nor beast can hurt him.'[12]

Or again:--

     'Though heaven and earth were to be overturned and fall, they would
     occasion him no loss. His judgment is fixed on that in which there
     is no element of falsehood, and while other things change, he
     changes not.'[13]


[12] Cp. _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xxix.

[13] Cp. _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xxix.

We want no great flight of imagination therefore to follow the traces of
development of the present form of Taoism with its occult aspects. The
eternity attributed to a True Man in its Laoist sense begot the idea of
a deathless man in flesh and blood endowed with all kinds of
supernatural powers. This in turn produced the notion that these
superhuman beings knew some secret means to preserve their life and
could work other wonders. Herbalism, alchemy, geomancy, and other magic
arts owe their origin to this fountain-head of primitive superstition.

There is little room for reasonable doubt that in this way Taoism,
although the name itself was of later development, has been in its main
features the religion of China _par excellence_ from the very dawn of
its history. It has from the beginning found a congenial soil in the
heart of the Chinese people, who still continue to embrace the cult with
great enthusiasm, and in whose helpless credulity the Taoist priests of
to-day, borrowing much help from the occult sides of Buddhism and
Hinduism, still find an easy prey for their necromantic arts.

Not so with Laoism. One may well wonder how such an uncongenial doctrine
ever came to spring from the soil of materialistic China. Some suggest
that Lao-tze was a Brahman, and not a Chinese at all. Another
explanation of this anomaly is to be found in the attempted division of
the whole Chinese civilisation into two geographically distinct groups,
the rigid Northern and the more romantic Southern types: Laoism
belonging to the latter, while Confucianism belongs to the former. In
any case, the resemblance in many respects between the doctrine
introduced by Lao-tze and the higher form of Buddhism is very striking.
Let me take this opportunity of saying something about the religion of
Shâkya-muni, which has occupied our mind and heart for the past fifteen
centuries.

But, first of all, let me say that I am not unaware of the absurdity of
trying to give you anything like a fair idea of a many-sided and
extremely complicated system of human belief such as Buddhism in the
short space which is at my disposal. Very far from it. Even a brief
summary of its main features would take an able speaker at least a
couple of hours. So I humbly confine myself to giving you some hints on
the belief, about which most of you, I presume, have already had
occasion to hear something, the religion which took its origin among the
people who claim their descent from the same Aryan stock to which you
yourselves belong. Those who would care to read about it will find an
excellent supply of knowledge in two little books called _Buddhism_ and
_Buddhism in China_, written respectively by Dr. Rhys Davids and the
late Rev. S. Beal, not to mention the late Sir Monier Williams' standard
work. A perusal of the Rev. A. Lloyd's paper read before the Asiatic
Society of Japan in 1894, entitled 'Developments of Japanese Buddhism,'
is very desirable. There are also two chapters devoted to this doctrine
in Lafcadio Hearn's last work, _Japan_. This enumeration might almost
exempt me from making any attempt to describe it myself.

Buddhism has, to begin with, two distinct forms, philosophical and
popular, which may practically be taken as two different religions.
Philosophical Buddhism--or at least the truest form of it--is a system
based upon the recognition of the utter impermanency of the phenomenal
world in all its forms and states. It believes in no God or gods
whatever as a personal motive power. The only thing eternal is matter,
or essence of matter, with the Karma, or Law of cause and effect,
dwelling incorporated in it. Through the never-ceasing working of this
law innumerable forms of existence develop, which, notwithstanding the
appearance of stability they temporarily assume, are, in consequence of
the action and reaction of the very law to which they owe their
existence, constantly subject to everlasting changes. Constancy is
nowhere to be found in this universe of phenomena. It is therefore an
act of unspeakable ignorance on the part of human beings, themselves a
product of the immutable Karma, to attach a constant value to this
dreamy world and allow themselves to lose their mental harmony in the
quest of shadowy desires and of their shadowy satisfaction, thus
plunging themselves into the boundless sea of misery. True salvation is
to be sought in the complete negation of egoism and in the unconditional
absorption of ourselves in the fundamental law of the universe.
Shâkya-muni was no more than one of a series of teachers whose mission
it is to show us how to get rid of our fatal ignorance of this grand
truth, an ignorance which is at the root of all the discontent and
misery of our selfish existence.

Very different from this is the aspect assumed by the popular form of
Buddhism. This is a system built up on the blind worship of personified
psychic phenomena, originally meant merely as convenient symbols for
their better contemplation, and in the transformation of the human
teachers of truth into so many personal gods. This is the reason why
Buddhism, so essentially atheistic, has come to be regarded by the
ordinary Christian mind as polytheism, or as a degraded form of
idolatry.

Now, in all the many sects of Buddhism which have been planted in the
soil of Japan since the middle of the seventh century, some of which
soon withered, while others took deep root and grew new branches, these
two phases have always been recognised and utilised in their proper
sphere as means of salvation. For the populace there was the lower
Buddhism, while the more elevated classes found satisfaction in the
higher form and in an explanation of that True Path which lies hidden
beneath the complicated symbolic system.

Of the sects which have exercised great influence on Japanese mentality,
the following are specially to be mentioned: the Tendai, the Shingon,
the Zen, the Hokke, and the Jodo, with its offspring the Ikkô sect. Each
of these chose its own means of reaching enlightenment from among those
indicated by Shâkya-muni, but did not on that account entirely reject
the means of salvation preferred by the others. Some give long lists of
categories and antitheses, and seek to define the truth with a more than
Aristotelian precision of detail, while others think it advisable to
realise it by dint of faith alone. But among these means of salvation
the practice advocated by the Zen sect is worthy of special
consideration in this place, as it has exercised great influence in the
formation of the Japanese spirit. _Zen_ means 'abstraction,' standing
for the Sanskrit Dhyâna. It is one of the six means of arriving at
Nirvâna, namely, (1) charity; (2) morality; (3) patience; (4) energy;
(5) contemplation; and (6) wisdom. This practice, which dates from a
time anterior to Shâkya himself, consists of an 'abstract
contemplation,' intended to destroy all attachment to existence in
thought and wish. From the earliest time Buddhists taught four different
degrees of abstract contemplation by which the mind frees itself from
all subjective and objective trammels, until it reaches a state of
absolute indifference or self-annihilation of thought, perception, and
will.[14]


[14] E. J. Eitel's _Handbook of Chinese Buddhism_, p. 49.

You might perhaps wonder how a method so utterly unpractical and
speculative as that of trying to arrive at final enlightenment by pure
contemplation could ever have taken root in Japan, among a people who,
generally speaking, have never troubled themselves much about things
apart from their actual and immediate use. An explanation of this is not
far to seek. Eisai, the founder of the Rinzai school, the branch of the
Contemplative sect first established on our soil, came back to Japan
from his second visit to China in 1192 A.D.[15] This was the time when
the short-lived rule of the Minamoto clan (1186-1219) was nearing the
end of its real supremacy. Only fifteen years before that the world had
seen the downfall of another mighty clan. The battle of Dannoura put an
end to the Heike ascendancy after an incessant series of desperate
battles extending over a century, giving our soldier-like qualities
enough occasion for an excellent schooling. The whole country during
this period had been under the raging sway of Mars, who swept with his
fiery breath the blossoms of human prosperity, and the people high and
low were obliged to recognise the folly of clinging to shadowy desires
and to learn the urgent necessity for facing every emergency with
something akin to indifference. To pass from glowing life into the cold
grasp of death with a smile, to meet the hardest decrees of fate with
the resolute calm of stoic fortitude, was the quality demanded of every
man and woman in that stormy age. In the meanwhile, different military
clans had been forming themselves in different parts of Japan and
preparing to wage an endless series of furious battles against one
another. In half a century too came the one solitary invasion of our
whole history when a foreign power dared to threaten us with
destruction. The mighty Kublei, grandson of the great Genghis Khan,
haughty with his resistless army, whose devastating intrepidity taught
even Europe to tremble at the mention of his name, despatched an embassy
to the Japanese court to demand the subjection of the country. The
message was referred to Kamakura, then the seat of the Hôjô regency, and
was of course indignantly dismissed. Enraged at this, Kublei equipped a
large number of vessels with the choicest soldiers China could furnish.
The invading force was successful at first, and committed massacres in
Iki and Tsushima, islands lying between Corea and Japan. The position
was menacing; even the steel nerves of the trained Samurai felt that
strange thrill a patriot knows. Shinto priests and Buddhist monks were
equally busy at their prayers. A new embassy came from the threatening
Mongol leader. The imperious ambassadors were taken to Kamakura, to be
put to death as an unmistakable sign of contemptuous refusal. A
tremendous Chinese fleet gathered in the boisterous bay of Genkai in the
summer of 1281. At last the evening came with the ominous glow on the
horizon that foretells an approaching storm. It was the plan of the
conquering army victoriously to land the next morning on the holy soil
of Kyûshû. But during this critical night a fearful typhoon, known to
this day as the 'Divine Storm,' arose, breaking the jet-black sky with
its tremendous roar of thunder and bathing the glittering armour of our
soldiers guarding the coastline in white flashes of dazzling light. The
very heaven and earth shook before the mighty anger of nature. The
result was that the dawn of the next morning saw the whole fleet of the
proud Yuan, that had darkened the water for miles, swept completely away
into the bottomless sea of Genkai, to the great relief of the
horror-stricken populace, and to the unspeakable disappointment of our
determined soldiers. Out of the hundred thousand warriors who manned the
invading ships, only three are recorded to have survived the destruction
to tell the dismal tale to their crestfallen great Khan!


[15] Four years later the first temple of this school was opened in
Hakata under the patronship of the Emperor Gotoba.

Then after a short interval of a score of peaceful years, Japan was
plunged again into another series of internal disturbances, from which
she can hardly be said to have emerged until the beginning of the
seventeenth century, when order and rest were brought back by the able
hand of Tokugawa Iyeyasu. During all these troublous days, the original
Contemplative sect, paralleled soon after its establishment in Japan by
a new school called _Sôtô_, as it was again supplemented by another, the
_Ôbaku_ school, five centuries afterwards, found ample material to
propagate its special method of enlightenment. This sect, which drew its
patrons from the ruling classes of Japan, was unanimously looked up to
as best calculated to impart the secret power of perfect self-control
and undisturbable peace of mind. It must be remembered that the ultimate
riddance in the Buddhist sense, the entrance into cold Nirvâna, was not
what our practical mind wanted to realise. It was the stoic
indifference, enabling man to meet after a moment's thought, or almost
instinctively, any hardships that human life might impose, that had
brought about its otherwise strange popularity.

Another charm it offered to the people of the illiterate Middle Ages,
when they had to attend to other things than a leisurely pursuit of
literature, was its systematic neglect of book-learning. Truth was to be
directly read from heart to heart. The intervention of words and writing
was regarded as a hindrance to its true understanding. A rudimentary
symbolism expressed by gestures was all that a Zen priest really relied
upon for the communication of the doctrine. Everybody with a heart to
feel and a mind to understand needed nothing further to begin and finish
his quest of the desired freedom from life's everlasting torments.

The self-control that enables us not to betray our inner feeling through
a change in our expression, the measured steps with which we are taught
to walk into the hideous jaws of death--in short, all those qualities
which make a present Japanese of truly Japanese type look strange, if
not queer, to your eyes, are in a most marked degree a product of that
direct or indirect influence on our past mentality which was exercised
by the Buddhist doctrine of Dhyâna taught by the Zen priests.

Another benefit which the Zen sect conferred on us is the healthy
influence it exercised on our taste. The love of nature and the desire
of purity that we had shown from the earliest days of our history, took,
under the leading idea of the Contemplative sect, a new development, and
began to show that serene dislike of loudness of form and colour. That
apparent simplicity with a fulness of meaning behind it, like a Dhyâna
symbol itself, which we find so pervadingly manifested in our works of
art, especially in those of the Ashikaga period (1400-1600 A.D.), is
certainly to be counted among the most valuable results which the Zen
doctrine quickened us to produce.

In short, so far-reaching is the influence of the Contemplative sect on
the formation of the Japanese spirit as you find it at present, that an
adequate interpretation of its manifestations would be out of the
question unless based on a careful study of this branch of Buddhism. So
long as the Zen sect is not duly considered, the whole set of phenomena
peculiar to Japan--from the all-pervading laconism to the
hara-kiri--will remain a sealed book.

This fact is my excuse for having detained you for so long on the
subject.

I now pass on to the consideration of our own native cult.

Shinto, or the 'Path of the Gods,' is the name by which we distinguish
the body of our national belief from Buddhism, Christianity, or any
other form of religion. It is remarkable that this appellation, like
Nippon (which corresponds to your word Japan), is no purely Japanese
term. Buddhism is called Buppô (from _Butsu_, Buddha, and _hô_,
doctrine) or Bukkyô (_kyô_, teaching); Confucianism is known as Jukyô
(_Ju_, literati); and both terms are taken from the Chinese. In keeping
with these we have Shinto (_Shin_, deity, and _to_, way). This state of
things in some measure explains the rather unstable condition in which
Buddhism on its first arrival found our national cult. It has ever since
remained in its main aspects nothing more than a form of
ancestor-worship based on the central belief in the divine origin of the
imperial line. A systematised creed it never was and has never become,
even if we take into consideration the attempts at its consolidation
made by such scholars as Yamazaki-Ansai (1618-1682), who in the middle
of the seventeenth century tried to formalise it in accordance with
Chu-Hsi's philosophy, or, later still, by such eager revivalists as
Hirata-Atsutane (1776-1843), etc. At the time when Shintoism had to meet
its mighty foe from India, its whole mechanism was very simple. It
consisted in a number of primitive rites, such as the recital of the
liturgy, the offering of eatables to the departed spirits of deified
ancestors, patriarchal, tribal, or national. This naïve cult was as
innocent of the cunning ideas and subtle formalisms of the rival creed
as its shrines were free from the decorations and equipments of an
Indian temple. So, although at the start Buddhism met with some
obstinate resistance at the hand of the Shintoists, who attributed the
visitations of pestilence that followed the introduction of the foreign
belief to the anger of the native gods, its superiority in organisation
soon overcame these difficulties; especially from the time when the
great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835 A.D.) hit upon the ingenious but
mischievous idea of solving the dilemma by the establishment of what is
generally known in our history as Ryôbu-Shinto, or double-faced Shinto.
According to this doctrine, a Shinto god was to be regarded as an
incarnation of a corresponding Indian deity, who made his appearance in
Japan through metamorphosis for Japan's better salvation--a doctrine
which is no more than a clever application of the notion known in India
as Nirmanakâya. This incarnation theory opened a new era in the history
of the expansion of Buddhism in Japan, extending over a period of eleven
centuries, during which Shintoism was placed in a very awkward position.
It was at last restored to its original purity at the beginning of the
present Meiji period, and that only after a century of determined
endeavour on the part of native Shintoist scholars.

From these words you might perhaps conclude that Buddhism succeeded in
supplanting the native cult, at least for more than a thousand years.
But, strange to say, if we judge the case not by outward appearances,
but by the religious conviction that lurks in the depth of the heart, we
cannot but recognise the undeniable fact that no real conversion has
ever been achieved during the past eleven centuries by the doctrine of
Buddha. Our actual self, notwithstanding the different clothes we have
put on has ever remained true in its spirit to our native cult. Speaking
generally, we are still Shintoists to this day--Buddhists, Christians,
and all--so long as we are born Japanese. This might sound to you
somewhat paradoxical. Here is the explanation:--

For an average Japanese mind in present Japan, thanks to the
ancestor-worship practised consciously or unconsciously from time
immemorial, it is not altogether easy to imagine the spirit of the
deceased, if it believes in one at all, to be something different and
distant from our actual living self. The departed, although invisible,
are thought to be leading their ethereal life in the same world in much
the same state as that to which they had been accustomed while on earth.
Like the little child so touchingly described by Wordsworth, we cannot
see why we should not count the so-called dead still among the existing.
The difference between the two is that of tangibility or visibility, but
nothing more.

The _raison d'être_ of this illusive notion is, of course, not far to
seek. Any book on anthropology or ethnology would tell you how sleep,
trance, dream, hallucination, reflection in still water, etc., help to
build up the spirit-world in the untaught mind of primitive man. Yet it
must be remembered that these origins have led to something far higher,
to something of real value to our nation, and to something which is a
moral force in our daily lives that may well be compared to what is
efficacious in other creeds. Notice the fact that Buddhism from the
moment of its introduction in the sixth century after Christ to this
very day has on the whole remained the religion, so to say, of night and
gloomy death, while Shintoism has always retained its firm hold on the
popular mind as the cult, if I might so express it, of daylight and the
living dead. From the very dawn of our history we read of patriarchs,
chieftains, and national heroes deified and worshipped as so many
guardian spirits of families, of clans, or of the country. Nor has this
process of deification come to an end yet, even in this age of airship
and submarine boat. We continue to erect shrines to men of merit. This
may look very strange to you, but is not your poet Swinburne right when
he sings--

    'Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own
         lays down,
    He, dying so, lives.'

Might not these lines explain, when duly extended, the subtle feeling
that lurks behind our apparently incomprehensible custom of speaking
with the departed over the altar? The present deification, is, like your
custom of erecting monuments to men of merit, a way of making the best
part of a man's career legible to the coming generations. The numberless
shrines you now find scattered all over Japan are only so many chapters
written in unmistakable characters of the lessons our beloved and
revered heroes and good men have left us for our edification and
amelioration. It is in the sunny space within the simple railing of
these Shinto shrines, where the smiling presence of the patron spirit of
a deified forefather or a great man is so clearly felt, that our
childhood has played for tens of centuries its games of innocent joy.
Monthly and yearly festivals are observed within the divine enclosure of
a guardian god, when a whole community under his protection let
themselves go in good-natured laughter and gleeful mirth before the
favouring eyes of their divine patron. How different is this jovial
feeling from that gloomy sensation with which we approach a Buddhist
temple, recalling death and the misery of life from every corner of its
mysterious interior. Such seriousness has never been congenial to the
gay Japanese mind with its strong love of openness and light. Until
death stares us right in the face, we do not care to be religious in the
ordinary sense of the term. True, we say and think that we believe in
death, but all the while this so-called death is nothing else than a new
life in this present world of ours led in a supernatural way. For
instance, when the father of a Japanese family begins a journey of any
length, the raised part of his room will be made sacred to his memory
during his temporary absence; his family will gather in front of it and
think of him, expressing their devotion and love in words and gifts in
kind. In the hundreds of thousands of families that have some one or
other of their members fighting for the nation in this dreadful war with
Russia, there will not be even one solitary house where the mother,
wife, or sister is not practising this simple rite of endearment for the
beloved and absent member of the family. And if he die on the field, the
mental attitude of the poor bereaved towards the never-returning does
not show any substantial difference. The temporarily departed will now
be regarded as the forever departed, but not as lost or passed away. His
essential self is ever present, only not visible. Daily offerings and
salutations continue in exactly the same way as when he was absent for a
time. Even in the mind of the modern Japanese with its extremely
agnostic tendencies, there is still one corner sacred to this inherited
feeling. You could sooner convince an ordinary European of the
non-existence of a personal God. When it gets dusk every bird knows
whither to wing its way home. Even so with us all when the night of
Death spreads its dark folds over our mortal mind!

But ask a modern Japanese of ordinary education in the broad daylight of
life, if he believes in a God in the Christian sense; or in Buddha as
the creator; or in the Shinto deities; or else in any other personal
agency or agencies, as originating and presiding over the universe; and
you would immediately get an answer in the negative in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred. Do you ask why? First, because our school education
throughout its whole course has, ever since its re-establishment
thirty-five years ago, been altogether free from any teaching of a
denominational nature. The ethical foundations necessary for the
building up of character are imparted through an adequate commentary on
the moral sayings and maxims derived mostly from Chinese classics.
Secondly, because the little knowledge about natural science which we
obtain at school seems to make it impossible to anchor our rational
selves on anything other than an impersonal law. Thirdly, because we do
not see any convincing reason why morals should be based on the teaching
of a special denomination, in face of the fact that we can be upright
and brave without the help of a creed with a God or deities at its other
end. So, for the average mind of the educated Japanese something like
modern scientific agnosticism, with a strong tendency towards the
materialistic monism of recent times, is just what pleases and satisfies
it most.

If not so definitely thought out, and if expressed with much less
learned terminology, the thought among our educated classes as regards
supernatural agencies has during the past three centuries been much the
same. The Confucian warning against meddling with things supernatural,
the atheistic views and hermit-like conduct of the adherents of Laoism,
and the higher Buddhism, all contributed towards the consolidation of
this mental attitude with a conscious or unconscious belief in the
existing spirit-world. Except for the philosophy which they knew how to
utilise for their practical purposes, the educated felt no charm in
religion. The lower form of Buddhism with its pantheon has been held as
something only for the aged and the weak. For the execution of the
religious rites, at funerals or on other occasions (except in the rare
instances when some families for a special reason of their own preferred
the Shintoist form), we have unanimously drawn on the Buddhist
priesthood, just in the same way as you go to your family doctor or
attorney in case of a bodily or legal complication, knowing well that
religion as we have understood it is something as much outside the pale
of the layman as medicine and law.

For the proper conduct of our daily life as members of society, the body
of Confucian morality resting on the tripod of loyalty, filial piety,
and honesty, has been the only standard which high and low have alike
recognised. These ethical ideals, when embraced by that formidable
warrior caste who played such an important part in feudal Japan, form
the code of unwritten morality known among us as Bushido, which means
the Path of the Samurai. This last word, which has found its way into
your language, is the substantival derivative from the verb _samurau_
(to serve), and, like its English counterpart 'knight' (Old English
_cniht_), has raised itself from its original sense of a retainer (cp.
German _Knecht_) to the meaning in which it is now used. To be a Samurai
in the true sense of the word has been the highest aspiration of a
Japanese. Your term 'gentleman,' when understood in its best sense,
would convey to you an approximate idea if you added a dash of soldier
blood to it. Rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, veracity,
loyalty, and a predominating sense of honour--these are the chief
colours with which a novelist in the days of yore used to paint an ideal
Samurai; and his list of desirable qualities was not considered complete
without a well-developed body and an expression of the face that was
manly but in no way brutal. No special stress was at first laid on the
cultivation of thinking power and book-learning, though they were not
altogether discouraged; it was thought that these accomplishments might
develop other qualities detrimental to the principal character, such as
sophistry or pedantry. To have good sense enough to keep his name
honourable, and to act instead of talking cleverly, was the chief
ambition of a Samurai.

But this view gradually became obscured. It lost its fearful rigidity in
course of time, as the world became more and more sure of a lasting
peace. Literature and music have gradually added softening touches to
its somewhat brusque features.

It must, however, be always remembered that the keynote of Bushido was
from the very beginning an indomitable sense of honour. This was all in
all to the mind of the Samurai, whose sword at his side reminded him at
every movement of the importance of his good name. The care with which
he preserved it reached in some cases to a pathetic extreme; he
preferred, for example, an instant suicide to a reputation on which
doubt had been cast, however falsely. The very custom of seppuku (better
known as hara-kiri), a form of suicide not known in early Japan,[16] is
an outcome of this love of an unstained name, originating, in my
opinion, in the metaphorical use of the word _hara_ (abdomen), which was
the supposed organ for the begetting of ideas. In consequence of this
curious localisation of the thinking faculty, the word _hara_ came to
denote at the same time intention or idea. Therefore, in cutting open
(_kiru_) his abdomen, a person whose motives had come to be suspected
meant to show that his inside was free from any trace of ideas not
worthy of a Samurai. This explanation is, I think, amply sustained by
the constant use to this very day of the word _hara_ in the sense of
one's ideas.


[16] The first mention in books of a similar mode of death dates from
the latter part of the twelfth century. But it does not seem that the
custom became universal until a considerably later period.

So Bushido, as you will now see, was itself but a manifestation of those
same forces already at work in the formation of Japanese thought, like
Buddhism, Confucianism, etc. But as it has played a most important part
in the development of modern Japan, I thought it more proper to consider
it as an independent factor in the history of our civilisation. Had it
not been for this all-daring spirit of Bushido, Japan would never have
been able to make the gigantic progress which she has been achieving in
these last forty years. As soon as our ports were flung open to the
reception of Western culture, Samurai, now deeply conscious of their new
mission, took leave of those stern but faithful friends, their beloved
swords, not without much reluctance, even as did Sir Bedivere, in order
to take up the more peaceful pen, which they were determined to wield
with the same knightly spirit. It is, in short, Bushido that has urged
our Japan on for the last three centuries, and will continue to urge her
on, on forever, onward to her ideals of the true, the good, and the
beautiful. Look to the spot where every Japanese sabre and every
Japanese bayonet is at present pointing with its icy edge of determined
patriotism in the dreary fields of Manchuria, or think of the intrepid
heroes on our men-of-war and our torpedo-boats amid blinding snowstorms
and the glare of hostile searchlights, and your eyes will invariably end
at the magic Path of the Samurai.

Having thus far followed my enumeration of the various factors in the
formation of the present thought in Japan, some of you might perhaps be
curious to know what Christianity has contributed towards the general
stock of modern Japanese mentality.

It must surely have exercised a very healthy influence on our mind since
its re-introduction at the beginning of the present Meiji period. Some
have indeed gone so far as to say that we owe the whole success we have
up to now achieved in this remarkable war to the holy inspiration we
drew from the teaching of Jesus Christ.

I indorse this opinion to its full extent, but only if we are to
understand by His teaching that whole body of truth and love which are
of the essence of Christianity, and which we used in former days to call
by other names, such as Bushido, Confucianism, etc. But if you insist on
having it understood in a narrow sectarian sense, with a personal God
and rigid formalities as its main features, then I should say that I
cannot agree with you, for this Christianity occupies rather an awkward
place in our Japanese mind, finding itself somewhere between the
national worship of the living dead, and modern agnosticism, or
scientific monism. In our earlier fishery for new knowledge in the
Western seas, fish other than those fit for our table were caught and
dressed along with some really nourishing; the result was disastrous,
and we gradually came to learn more caution than at first. The Roman
Catholics, more enthusiastic than discreet, committed wholesale outrages
on our harmless ways of faith in the early days of the seventeenth
century, which did much to leave in bad repute the creed of Jesus
Christ. And since the prohibition against Christianity was removed, many
a missionary has been so particular about the plate in which the truth
is served as to make us doubt, with reason, if that be the spirit of the
immortal Teacher. The truth and poetry that breathe in your Gospels have
been too often paraphrased in the senseless prose of mere formalism.
Otherwise Christianity would have rendered us better help in our eternal
march towards the ideal emancipation.

There remains still one highly important thing to be considered as a
formative element of the Japanese spirit. I mean the landscape and the
physical aspects of Japan in general.

It is well known that an intimate connection exists between the mind and
the nature which surrounds it. A moment's consideration of the
development of Hellenic sculpture and of the Greek climate, or of the
Teutonic mythology and the physical condition of Northern Europe, will
bring conviction on that point. Is not the effect of the blue sky on
Italian painting, and the influence of the dusky heaven on the,
pictorial art of the Netherlands, clearly traceable in the productions
of the old masters? A study of London psychology at the present moment
will never be complete without special chapters on your open spaces and
your fogs.

In order to convey anything like an adequate idea of the physical
aspects of Japan from the geographical and meteorological points of
view, it would be necessary to furnish a detailed account of the
country, with a long list of statistical tables and the ample help of
lantern slides. But on this occasion I must be content with naming some
of the typical features of our surroundings.

Japan, as you know, is a long and narrow series of islands, stretching
from frigid Kamchatka in the north to half-tropical Formosa in the
south. The whole country is mountainous, with comparatively little flat
land, and is perforated with a great number of volcanoes, the active
ones alone numbering above fifty at present. With this is connected the
annoying frequency of earthquakes, and the agreeable abundance of
thermal springs--two phenomena that cannot remain without effect on the
people's character.

There are two other natural agencies to be mentioned in this connection.
One is the Kuro-shio, or Black Stream, so called on account of the deep
black colour which the ocean current displays in cloudy weather. This
warm ocean river, having a temperature of 27° centigrade in summer,
begins its course in the tropical regions near the Philippine Islands,
and on reaching the southern isles is divided by them into two unequal
parts. The greater portion of it skirts the Japanese islands on their
eastern coast, imparting to them that warm and moist atmosphere which is
one source of the fertility of the soil and the beauty of the
vegetation. The effect of the Kuro-shio upon the climate and productions
of the lands along which it flows may be fairly compared with that of
the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean, which in situation, direction,
and volume it resembles. To this most noticeable cause of the climatic
condition of the Japanese islands must be added another agency closely
related to it in its effect. Our archipelago lies in the region of the
northeast monsoon, which affects in a marked degree the climate of all
those parts over which the winds blow. Although the same monsoon blows
over the eastern countries of the Asiatic continent, the insular
character of Japan, and the proximity of the above-mentioned warm
current on both sides of the islands, give to the winds which prevail a
character they do not possess on the continent.

Although the effect of the chill and frost of the northern part of
Japan, with its heavy snowfall and covered sky, cannot be without its
depressing influence on human nature in that part of the island, this
has not played any serious role in the formation of the Japanese
character as a whole. It is only at a rather recent date that the
northern provinces began to contribute their share to the general
progress of the country. This can very easily be explained by the
gradual advance of Japanese civilisation from the southwest to the
northeast. Until comparatively lately the colder region of Japan north
of the 37th degree of latitude has remained very nearly inactive in our
history. It is almost exclusively in the more sunny south, extending
down to the 31st degree, that the main activity of the Japanese mind and
hand has been shown. And the effect is the sunniness of character and
rather hot temperament which we, as a whole, share in a marked degree
with the southern Europeans, as contrasted with the somewhat gloomy calm
and deliberation noticed both among oriental and occidental northerners.

Notwithstanding the comparatively high amount of rainfall, the fact
remains that as a nation we have spent most of our life under the serene
canopy of blue sky characteristic of a volcanic country. Mountains,
graceful rather than sublime, and fertile plains with rich verdure, its
beauties changing slowly from the white blossoms of spring to the
crimson leaves of autumn, have afforded us many welcome sights to rest
our eyes upon; while the azure stretch of water, broken agreeably by
scattered isles, washes to-day as it did in the days of the gods the
white shore, rendered conspicuous by the everlasting green of the pine
trees, which skirts the Land of the Rising Sun.

The winter, though it begins its dreary course with a short period of
warm days known as the Little Spring, is of course not without its bleak
mornings with cutting winds and icy wreaths. But the fact that even as
far north as Tôkyô no elaborate system of warming rooms is at all
developed, and that the occasional falling of snow is hailed even by
aged men of letters, and still more by the numerous poetasters, as a fit
occasion for a pedestrian excursion to some neighboring localities for a
better appreciation of the silvery world, serves to show how mild the
cold is in south Japan.

A people on whom the surrounding nature always smiles so indulgently can
be little expected to be driven to turn their thoughts in the direction
of their own self, and thus to develop such a strong sense of
individuality as characterises the rigid northerners; nor are the
nations panting under a scorching sun likely to share our friendly
feelings towards nature, for with them Father Sun is too rigorous to
allow a peaceful enjoyment of his works.

All through the four seasons, which are almost too varied even for a
Thomson's pen, eventful with the constant calls of one after another of
our flowery visitors--beginning with the noble plum that peeps with its
tiny yellowish-white eyes from under the spotless repose of fleecy snow,
and ending in the gay variety of the chrysanthemum--we have too many
allurements from outside not to leap into the widespread arms of Mother
Nature and dream away our simple, our contented life in her lap. True,
there also are in Japan many instances of broken hearts seeking their
final rest under the green turf of an untimely grave, or else in the
grey mantle of the Buddhist monkhood. But in them, again, we see the
characteristic determination and action of a Japanese at work. To
indulge in Hamlet-like musing, deep in the grand doubt and sublime
melancholy of the never-slumbering question 'To be, or not to be?' is
something, so to say, too damp to occur in the sunny thought of our
open-air life.

If asked to name the most conspicuous of those physical phenomena which
have exercised so great an influence on our mind, no Japanese will
hesitate to mention our most beloved Fuji-no-yama. This is the highest
and the most beautiful of all the great mountains in the main group of
the Japanese islands. Gracefully conical in shape, lifting its snowclad
head against a serene background 12,365 feet above the sea, it has from
the earliest time been the object of unceasing admiration for the
surrounding thirteen provinces, and where it stands out of the reach of
the naked eye, winged words from the poet's lyre, and flying leaves from
the artist's brush, have carried its never-tiring praise to all the
nooks and corners of the Land of the Gods.

Here is one of the earliest odes to Fujiyama, contained in a collection
of lyrical poems called Man-yô-shû, or 'Myriad Leaves,' by Prince Moroe
(died A.D. 757), somewhere in the first half of the eighth century:--

    There on the border, where the land of Kahi
    Doth touch the frontier of Suruga's land,
    A beauteous province stretched on either hand,
    See Fujiyama rear his head on high!

    The clouds of heav'n in rev'rent wonder pause,
    Nor may the birds those giddy heights essay,
    Where melt thy snows amid thy fires away,
    Or thy fierce fires lie quench'd beneath thy snows.

    What name might fitly tell, what accents sing,
    Thy awful, godlike grandeur? 'Tis thy breast
    That holdeth Narusaha's flood at rest,
    Thy side whence Fujikaha's waters spring.

    Great Fujiyama, tow'ring to the sky!
    A treasure art thou giv'n to mortal man,
    A god-protector, watching o'er Japan:
    On thee for ever let me feast mine eye!

This now extinct volcano, besides inspiring poetical efforts, has been
an inexhaustible subject for our pictorial art; it is enough to mention
the famous sets of colour prints, representing the thirty-six or the
hundred aspects of the favourite mountain, by Hiroshige, Hokusai, etc.
The groups of rural pilgrims that annually swarm from all parts of Japan
during the two hottest months of the year to pay their pious visit to
the Holy Mount Fuji, return to their respective villages deeply inspired
with a feeling of reverence and of love for the wonders and beauty of
the remarkable dawn they witnessed from its summit.

There is many another towering mountain with its set of pilgrims, but
none can vie with Fujiyama for majestic grace. More beautiful than
sublime, more serene than imposing, it has been from time immemorial a
silent influence on the Japanese character. Who would deny that it has
reflected in its serenity and grace as seen on a bright day all the
ideals of the Japanese mind?

Another favourite emblem of our spirit is the cherry blossom. The cherry
tree, which we cultivate, not for its fruit, but for the annual tribute
of a branchful of its flowers, has done much, especially in the
development of the gay side of our character. Its blossoms are void of
that sweet depth of scent your rose possesses, or the calm repose that
characterizes China's emblematic peony. A sunny gaiety and a readiness
to scatter their heart-shaped petals with a Samurai's indifference to
death are what make them so dear to our simple and determined view of
life. There is an ode known to every Japanese by the great Motoori
Norinaga (1730-1801 A.D.) which runs as follows:--

    _Shikishima no_
      _Yamata-gokoro wo_
    _Hito toha ba,_
      _Asahi ni nihofu_
      _Jamazakura-bana._

(Should any one ask me what the spirit of Japan is like, I would point
to the blossoms of the wild cherry tree bathing in the beams of the
morning sun.)

These words, laconic as they are, represent, in my opinion, the
fundamental truth about the Japanese mentality--its weak places as well
as its strength. They give an incomparable key to the proper
understanding of the whole people, whose ideal it has ever been to live
and to die like the cherry blossoms, beneath which they have these tens
of centuries spent their happiest hours every spring.

The mention of a Japanese poem gives me an opportunity to say something
about Japanese poetry. Like other early people, our forefathers in
archaic time liked to express their thoughts in a measured form of
language. The whole structure of the tongue being naturally melodious,
on account of its consisting of open syllables with clear and sonorous
vowels and little of the harsh consonantal elements in them, the number
of syllables in a line has been almost the only feature that
distinguished our poetry from ordinary prose composition. The taste for
a lengthened form of poems had lost ground early, and already at the end
of the ninth century after Christ the epigrammatic form exemplified
above, consisting of thirty-one syllables, established itself as the
ordinary type of the Japanese odes.

This form subdivides itself into two parts, viz., the upper half
containing three lines of five, seven, and again five syllables, and the
lower half consisting of two lines of seven syllables each. This
simplicity has made it impossible to express in it anything more than a
pithy appeal to our lyrical nature; epic poetry in the strict sense of
the word has never been developed by us.

But it must be noticed that it is this simplicity of form of our
poetical expression that has put it within the reach of almost
everybody. To all of us without distinction of class and sex has been
accorded the sacred pleasure of satisfying and thus developing our
poetical nature, so long as we had a subject to sing and could count
syllables up to thirty-one. The language resorted to in such a
composition was at first the same as that in use in everyday life. But
afterwards as succeeding forms of the vernacular gradually deviated from
the classical type, a special grammar along with a special vocabulary
had to be studied by the would-be poet. This was avoided, however, by
the development in the sixteenth century of a popular and still shorter
form of ode called _Hokku_, with much less strict regulations about
syntax and phraseology. This ultra-short variety of Japanese poetry,
consisting only of seventeen syllables, is in form the upper half of the
regular poem. Here is an example:--

    _Asagaho ni_
      _Tsurube torarete_
    _Morai-midzu._

Sketchy as it is, this tells us that the composer Chiyo, 'having gone to
her well one morning to draw water, found that some tendrils of the
convolvulus had twined themselves around the rope. As a poetess and a
woman of taste, she could not bring herself to disturb the dainty
blossoms. So, leaving her own well to the convolvuli, she went and
begged water of a neighbor'--a pretty little vignette, surely, and
expressed in five words.

This new movement, which owes its real development to a remarkable man
called Bashô (1644-1649), a mystic of the Zen sect to the tip of his
fingers, had an aim that was strictly practical. 'He wished to turn
men's lives and thoughts in a better and a higher direction, and he
employed one branch of art, namely poetry, as the vehicle for the
ethical influence to whose exercise he devoted his life. The very word
poetry (or _haikai_) came in his mouth to stand for morality. Did any of
his followers transgress the code of poverty, simplicity, humility,
long-suffering, he would rebuke the offender with a "This is not
poetry," meaning "This is not right." His knowledge of nature and his
sympathy with nature were at least as intimate as Wordsworth's, and his
sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men was far more intimate; for
he never isolated himself from his kind, but lived cheerfully in the
world.'[17]

Now, this form of popular literature by virtue of its accessibility even
to the poorest amateurs from the lowest ranks of the people, was
markedly instrumental, as the now classical form of poetry had been
during the Middle Ages, in the cultivation of taste and good manners
among all classes of the Japanese nation. Even among the ricksha men of
to-day you find many such humble poets, taking snapshots as they run
along the stony path of their miserable life. I wonder if your hansom
drivers are equally aspiring in this respect.


[17] B.H. Chamberlain's _Bashô and the Japanese Epigram, T.A.S.J._, vol.
xxx. pt. ii.

In all these phases of the development of our poetry, we notice, as one
of its peculiarities, a strong inclination to the exercise of the witty
side of our nature. Even if we leave out of consideration the so-called
'pillow word' (_makura-kotoba_), so profusely resorted to in our ancient
poems, part of which were nothing but a naïve sort of _jeu de mots_, and
the abundant use of other plays on words of later development, known as
_kakekotoba_, _jo_, _shûku_, etc. (_haikai-no-uta_), it is noteworthy
that poems of a comic nature found a special place in the earliest
imperial collection of Japanese odes named Kokinshifu,' which was
compiled in the year A.D. 908. This species has flourished ever since
under the name of Kyôka, and also gave rise to a shortened form in
seventeen syllables, called _haikai-no-hokku_. When in the hand of Bashô
this latter form developed itself into something higher and more
serious, the witty and satirical Senryû, also in seventeen syllables,
came to take its place.

One thing to be specially noted in this connection is the introduction
from China of the idea of poetic tournaments, the beauty of which
consisted in the offhand and quick composition of one long series of
odes by several persons sitting together, each supplying in turn either
the upper half or the lower half as the case might be, the two in
combination giving a poetical sense. This usage of capping verses known
as _renga_ came to be very popular, from the Court downward, as early as
the thirteenth century. After a while the same practice was applied to
comic poetry, thus producing the so-called _haikai-no-renga_, or comic
linked verses. This coupling of verses gave plenty of occasion for
sharpening one's wit as well as one's skill in extemporising. It is to a
later attempt to express all these subtleties in the upper half of the
poem composed by one person that the present _kokku_ owed its origin.
You can easily imagine the effect such an exercise produced on the
popular mind. Besides the moral good which this literary pursuit has
brought to the populace, it has given a fresh opportunity for the
cultivation of our habit of attaching sense to apparently meaningless
groups of phenomena, and our fondness of laconic utterance and symbolic
representation, not to say anything about our love of nature and
simplicity.

All this tends in my view to show that we Japanese have a strong liking
for wit in the wider sense of the word. We try to solve a question, not
by that slower but surer way of calm deliberation and untiring labour
like the cool-headed Germans, but by an incandescent flash of
inspiration like the hot-blooded Frenchmen. This fact is singularly
preserved in the earlier sense of the now sacred word _Yamato-damashî_,
which had not its present meaning, viz., 'the spirit of Japan' in the
most elevated sense of that term, but signified 'the wit of the
Japanese' as contrasted with the 'learning of the Chinese' (_wakon_ as
opposed to _kansai_). The word _tamashî_, which now expresses the idea
of 'spirit,' corresponds in the compound in question to the French
_esprit_ in such combinations as _homme d'esprit_ or _jeu d'esprit_.

Turning now to the consideration of other sets of phenomena, as an
illustration of the Japanese character, let me tell you something about
the tea-ceremony and kindred rites.

To begin with the _Cha-no-e_ (or _Cha-no-yu_), or tea-meeting, this
much-spoken-of art originated among the Buddhist priests, who learned to
appreciate the beverage from the Chinese. Indeed, the tea-plant itself
was first introduced into Japan along with the name _Cha_ (Chinese
_Ch'a_) from the Celestial Empire, in the tenth century after Christ.
During the following centuries its cultivation and the preparation of
the drink was monopolised by the priesthood, if we except the cases of a
few well-to-do men of letters. This fact is gathered from the frequent
mention of tea-cups offered to the emperor on the occasion of an
imperial visit to a Buddhist monastery. During all this time a sense of
something precious and aristocratic was attached to this aromatic
beverage, which had been regarded as a kind of rare drug of strange
virtue in raising depressed spirits, and even of curing certain
diseases.

This high appreciation of the drink, as well as the need of ceremony in
offering it to exalted personages, gradually developed in the hands of
monks with plenty of leisure and a good knowledge of the high praise
accorded to its virtues by the Chinese savants, into a very complicated
rite as to the way of serving, and of being served with, a cup of tea. A
print representing a man clad as a Buddhist priest in the act of selling
the beverage in the street at a penny a cup is preserved from a date as
early as the fourteenth century, showing that the drink had then come to
find customers even among the common people. But the ceremony of
Cha-no-e, as such, never made its way among them until many centuries
after. It was at first fostered and elaborated only among the
aristocracy. Already in the fifteenth century, when the luxury and
extravagance of the Ashikaga Shogunate reached its zenith in the person
of Yoshimasa (1435-1490), the tea-ceremony was one of the favourite
pastimes of the highest classes. Yoshimasa himself was a great patron
and connoisseur of the complicated rite, as well as of other branches of
art, such as landscape gardening and the arrangement of flowers.

There are two different phases of the tea-ceremony, the regular course
and the simplified course, known among us as the 'Great Tea' and the
'Small Tea.' In either case, it might be defined in its present form as
a system of cultivating good manners as applied to daily life, with the
serving and drinking of a cup of tea at its centre. The main stress is
laid on ensuring outwardly a graceful carriage, and inwardly presence of
mind. As with the national form of wrestling known as _ju-jitsu_, with
its careful analysis of every push and pull down to the minutest
details, so with the Cha-no-e, every move of body and limb in walking
and sitting during the whole ceremony has been fully studied and worked
out so as to give it the most graceful form conceivable. At the same
time the calm and self-control shown by the partaker in the rite is
regarded as an essential element in the performance, without which
ultimate success in it will be quite impossible. So it is more a
physical and moral training than a mere amusement or a simple quenching
of thirst. But this original sense has not always been kept in view even
by the so-called masters of the tea-ceremony, who, like your
dancing-masters, are generally considered to be the men to teach us
social etiquette. Thus, diverted from its original idea, the Cha-no-e is
generally found to degenerate into a body of conventional and
meaningless formalities, which, even in its most abbreviated form as the
'Small Tea,' is something very tiresome, if not worse. To sit _à la
japonaise_ (not _à la turque_, which is not considered polite) for an
hour, if not for hours together, on the matted floor to see the
celebration of the monotonous rite, daring to talk only little, and even
then not above a whisper, in the smallest imaginable tea-room, is not
what even a born Japanese of the present day can much appreciate, much
less so Europeans, who would prefer being put in the stocks, unless they
be themselves Cha-jin or tea-ceremonialists, that is to say, eccentrics.
How to open the sliding-door; how to shut it each time; how to bring and
arrange the several utensils, with their several prescribed ways of
being handled, into the tea-room; how to sit down noiselessly in front
of the boiling kettle which hangs over a brasier; how to open the lid of
the kettle; how to put tea-powder in the cup; how to pour hot water over
it; how to stir the now green water with a bamboo brush; how to give the
mixture a head of foam; how and where to place the cup ready for the
expecting drinker--this on the part of the person playing the host or
hostess; and now on the part of the guest--how to take a sweet from the
dish before him in preparation for the coming aromatic drink; how to
take up the cup now given him; how to hold it with both hands; how to
give it a gentle stir; how to drink it up in three sips and a half; how
to wipe off the trace of the sipping left on the edge of the cup; how to
turn the cup horizontally round; how to put it down within the reach of
his host or hostess, etc., etc., _ad infinitum_--these are some of the
essential items to be learned and practised. And for every one of them
there is a prescribed form even to the slightest move and curve in which
a finger should be bent or stretched, always in strict accordance with
the attitude of other bodies in direct connection with it. The whole
ceremony in its degenerated form is an aggregate of an immense number of
_comme il faut_'s, with practically no margin for personal taste. But
even behind its present frigidity we cannot fail to discern the true
idea and the good it has worked in past centuries. It has done a great
deal of good, especially in those rough days at the end of the sixteenth
century, when great warriors returning blood-stained from the field of
battle learned how to bow their haughty necks in admiration of the
curves of beauty, and how to listen to the silvery note of a boiling
tea-kettle. They could not help their stern faces melting into a naïve
smile in the serene simplicity of the tea-room, whose arrangement, true
to the Zen taste to the very last detail of its structure, showed a
studied avoidance of ostentation in form and colour. To this day it is
always this Zen taste that rules supreme in the decoration of a Japanese
house.

Visit a Japanese gentleman whose taste is not yet badly influenced by
the Western love of show and symmetry in his dwelling: you will find the
room and the whole arrangement free from anything of an ostentatious
nature. The colour of the walls and sliding-doors will be very subdued,
but not on that account gloomy. In the niche you will see one or a
single set of _kakemono_, or pictures, at the foot of which, just in the
middle of the slightly raised floor of the niche, we put some object of
decoration--a sculpture, a vase with flowers, etc. These are both
carefully changed in accordance with the season, or else in harmony with
the ruling idea of the day, when the room is decorated in celebration of
some event or guest. This rule applies to the other objects connected
with the room--utensils, cushions, screens, etc.

The European way of arranging a room is, generally speaking, rather
revolting to our taste. We take care not to show anything but what is
absolutely necessary to make a room look agreeable, keeping all other
things behind the scenes. Thus we secure to every object of art that we
allow in our presence a fair opportunity of being appreciated. This is
not usually the case in a European dwelling. I have very often felt less
crowded in a museum or in a bazaar than in your drawing-rooms. 'You know
so well how to expose to view what you have,' I have frequently had
occasion to say to myself, 'but you have still much to learn from us how
to hide, for exposition is, after all, a very poor means of showing.'

To return to the main point, we owe to the Cha-no-e much of the present
standard of our taste, which is, in its turn, nothing more than the Zen
ways of looking at things as applied to everyday life. This is no
wonder, when we remember that it was in the tasteful hands of the Zen
priests that the whole ceremony reached its perfection. Indeed, the word
_cha_ is a term which conveys to this day the main features of the
Contemplative sect to our mind.

In connection with the tea-ceremony, there are some sister arts which
have been equally effective in the proper cultivation of our taste.
Landscape gardening, in which our object is to make an idealised copy of
some natural scene, is an art that has been loved and practised among us
for more than a thousand years, although it was not indigenous like most
things Japanese. This practice of painting with tree and stone soon gave
rise to another art, the miniature reproduction of a favourite natural
scene on a piece of board, and this is the forerunner of the later
_bonkei_, or the tray-landscape, and its sister _bonsai_, or the art of
symbolising an abstract idea, such as courage, majesty, etc., by means
of the growth of a dwarf tree.

The same love that we feel for a symbolic representation is also to be
traced in the arrangement of flowers. The practice of preserving cut
branches, generally of flowering trees, in a vase filled with water is
often mentioned in our classical literature. But it was first in the
sixteenth century that it assumed its present aspect, when, in
conjunction with the Cha-no-e, it found a great patron in that most
influential dilettante Shogun Yoshimasa. Already in his time there were
a great many principles to be learned concerning the way to give the
longest life and the most graceful form to the branches put in a vase,
besides investing the whole composition with a symbolic meaning. Up to
this day we look upon this art as very helpful for the cultivation of
taste among the fair sex, who receive long courses of instruction by the
generally aged masters of floral arrangement, who, along with their
teaching in the treatment of plants, know how to instil ethics in their
young pupils, taking the finished vase of flowers as the subject of
conversation. The masters of the tea-ceremony are also well versed in
arranging flowers in that simple manner which is yet full of meaning
called _cha-bana_, or the 'Zen type of floral art.'

You see how much all these arts have contributed to the production of
our taste, whose ideals are the dislike of loudness and love of symbolic
representation, with a delicate feeling for the beauty of line as seen
in things moving or at rest. This last quality must have been immensely
augmented by the linear character of our drawing, and also by the great
importance we are accustomed to attach to the shape and the strokes of
the characters when we are learning to write.

All these qualities you will see exemplified in any Japanese work of
art--from a large picture down to a tiny wooden carving. Take up a
girl's silk dress and examine it carefully, and note how the lining is
dyed and embroidered with as great, if not greater care, in order to
make it harmonise in colour and design with the visible surface and add
some exquisite meaning. Do not forget to look at the back when you come
across a lacquered box, for it is not only the surface that receives our
careful attention. And above all, you must always keep in mind that our
artists think it a duty to be suggestive rather than explicit, and to
leave something of their meaning to be divined by those who contemplate
their works.

       *       *       *       *       *

The time is now come to conclude my essay at an exposition of the
Japanese spirit. I think I have given you occasion to see something of
both the strong and the weak sides of my countrymen; for it is just
where our favourable qualities lie that you will also find the
corresponding weaknesses. The usual charges brought against us, that we
are precocious, unpractical, frivolous, fickle, etc., are not worthy of
serious attention, because they are all of them easily explained as but
the attendant phenomena of the transitory age from which we are just
emerging. Even the more sound accusation of our want of originality must
be reconsidered in face of so many facts to the contrary, facts which
show us to be at least in small things very original, almost in the
French sense of that word. That we have always been ready to borrow
hints from other countries is in a great measure to be explained by the
consideration that we had from the very beginning the disadvantage and
the advantage of having as neighbours nations with a great start in the
race-course of civilisation. The cause of our being small in great
things, while great in small things, can be partly found in the
financial conditions of the country and in the non-individual nature of
the culture we have received. These delicate questions will have to be
raised again some centuries hence, when a healthy admixture of the
European civilisation has been tried--a civilisation the effect of which
has been, on the whole, so beneficial to our development, that we feel
it a most agreeable duty gratefully to acknowledge our immense
obligation to the nations of the West.


*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Japanese Spirit" ***

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