Chapter VII: Act IV: Scene: Interior of Ichirō's house. Three persons kneeling in (1)

the guest-room: Ichirō, his wife, and an aged woman, who is weeping._

Ichirō. "And now, mother, to leave you alone in this world, though you have no other son, is indeed an evil thing. I can only pray your forgiveness. But my uncle will always care for you, and to his house you must go at once, since it is time we two should die. No common, vulgar death shall we have, but an elegant, splendid death,--_Rippana!_ And you must not see it. Now go."

She passes away, with a wail. The doors are solidly barred behind her. All is ready.

O-Noto thrusts the point of the sword into her throat. But she still struggles. With a last kind word Ichiro ends her pain by a stroke that severs the head.

And then?

Then he takes his writing-box, prepares the inkstone, grinds some ink, chooses a good brush, and, on carefully selected paper, composes five poems, of which this is the last:--

"Meido yori
Yu dempō ga
Aru naraba,
Hay aha an chaku
Mōshi okuran."[2]

Then he cuts his own throat perfectly well.

Now, it was clearly shown, during the official investigation of these facts, that Ichirō and his wife had been universally liked, and had been from their childhood noted for amiability.

The scientific problem of the origin of the Japanese has never yet been solved. But sometimes it seems to me that those who argue in favor of a partly Malay origin have some psychological evidence in their favor. Under the submissive sweetness of the gentlest Japanese woman--a sweetness of which the Occidental can scarcely form any idea--there exist possibilities of hardness absolutely inconceivable without ocular evidence. A thousand times she can forgive, can sacrifice herself in a thousand ways unutterably touching: but let one particular soul-nerve be stung, and fire shall forgive sooner than she. Then there may suddenly appear in that frail-seeming woman an incredible courage, an appalling, measured, tireless purpose of honest vengeance. Under all the amazing self-control and patience of the man there exists an adamantine something very dangerous to reach. Touch it wantonly, and there can be no pardon. But resentment is seldom likely to be excited by mere hazard. Motives are keenly judged. An error can be forgiven; deliberate malice never.

In the house of any rich family the guest is likely to be shown some of the heirlooms. Among these are almost sure to be certain articles belonging to those elaborate tea ceremonies peculiar to Japan. A pretty little box, perhaps, will be set before you. Opening it, you see only a beautiful silk bag, closed with a silk running-cord decked with tiny tassels. Very soft and choice the silk is, and elaborately figured. What marvel can be hidden under such a covering? You open the bag, and see within another bag, of a different quality of silk, but very fine. Open that, and lo! a third, which contains a fourth, which contains a fifth, which contains a sixth, which contains a seventh bag, which contains the strangest, roughest, hardest vessel of Chinese clay that you ever beheld. Yet it is not only curious but precious: it may be more than a thousand years old.

Even thus have centuries of the highest social culture wrapped the Japanese character about with many priceless soft coverings of courtesy, of delicacy, of patience, of sweetness, of moral sentiment. But underneath these charming multiple coverings there remains the primitive clay, hard as iron;--kneaded perhaps with all the mettle of the Mongol,--all the dangerous suppleness of the Malay.

[1] The meaning is, "Give to the beloved one a little more [wine]." The "_Ya-ton-ton_" is only a burden, without exact meaning, like our own "_With a hey! and a ho!_" etc.

[2] The meaning is about as follows: "If from the Meido it be possible to send letters or telegrams, I shall write and forward news of our speedy safe arrival there."

VII

_December_ 28. Beyond the high fence inclosing my garden in the rear rise the thatched roofs of some very small houses occupied by families of the poorest class. From one of these little dwellings there continually issues a sound of groaning,--the deep groaning of a man in pain. I have heard it for more than a week, both night and day, but latterly the sounds have been growing longer and louder, as if every breath were an agony. "Somebody there is very sick," says Manyemon, my old interpreter, with an expression of extreme sympathy.

The sounds have begun to make me nervous. I reply, rather brutally, "I think it would be better for all concerned if that somebody were dead."

Manyemon makes three times a quick, sudden gesture with both hands, as if to throw off the influence of my wicked words, mutters a little Buddhist prayer, and leaves me with a look of reproach. Then, conscience-stricken, I send a servant to inquire if the sick person has a doctor, and whether any aid can be given. Presently the servant returns with the information that a doctor is regularly attending the sufferer, and that nothing else can be done.

I notice, however, that, in spite of his cobwebby gestures, Manyemon's patient nerves have also become affected by those sounds. He has even confessed that he wants to stay in the little front room, near the street, so as to be away from them as far as possible. I can neither write nor read. My study being in the extreme rear, the groaning is there almost as audible as if the sick man were in the room itself. There is always in such utterances of suffering a certain ghastly timbre by which the intensity of the suffering can be estimated; and I keep asking myself, How can it be possible for the human being making those sounds by which I am tortured, to endure much longer?

It is a positive relief, later in the morning, to hear the moaning drowned by the beating of a little Buddhist drum in the sick man's room, and the chanting of the _Namu myō ho renge kyō_ by a multitude of voices. Evidently there is a gathering of priests and relatives in the house. "Somebody is going to die," Manyemon says. And he also repeats the holy words of praise to the Lotus of the Good Law.

The chanting and the tapping of the drum continue for several hours. As they cease, the groaning is heard again. Every breath a groan! Toward evening it grows worse--horrible. Then it suddenly stops. There is a dead silence of minutes. And then we hear a passionate burst of weeping,--the weeping of a woman,--and voices calling a name. "Ah! somebody is dead!" Manyemon says.

We hold council. Manyemon has found out that the people are miserably poor; and I, because my conscience smites me, propose to send them the amount of the funeral expenses, a very small sum. Manyemon thinks I wish to do this out of pure benevolence, and says pretty things. We send the servant with a kind message, and instructions to learn if possible the history of the dead man. I cannot help suspecting some sort of tragedy; and a Japanese tragedy is generally interesting.

_December_ 29. As I had surmised, the story of the dead man was worth learning. The family consisted of four,--the father and mother, both very old and feeble, and two sons. It was the eldest son, a man of thirty-four, who had died. He had been sick for seven years. The younger brother, a kurumaya, had been the sole support of the whole family. He had no vehicle of his own, but hired one, paying five sen a day for the use of it. Though strong and a swift runner, he could earn little: there is in these days too much competition for the business to be profitable. It taxed all his powers to support his parents and his ailing brother; nor could he have done it without unfailing self-denial. He never indulged himself even to the extent of a cup of saké; he remained unmarried; he lived only for his filial and fraternal duty.

This was the story of the dead brother: When about twenty years of age, and following the occupation of a fish-seller, he had fallen in love with a pretty servant at an inn. The girl returned his affection. They pledged themselves to each other. But difficulties arose in the way of their marriage.

The girl was pretty enough to have attracted the attention of a man of some means, who demanded her hand in the customary way. She disliked him; but the conditions he was able to offer decided her parents in his favor. Despairing of union, the two lovers resolved to perform jōshi. Somewhere or other they met at night, renewed their pledge in wine, and bade farewell to the world. The young man then killed his sweetheart with one blow of a sword, and immediately afterward cut his own throat with the same weapon. But people rushed into the room before he had expired, took away the sword, sent for the police, and summoned a military surgeon from the garrison. The would-be suicide was removed to the hospital, skillfully nursed back to health, and after some months of convalescence was put on trial for murder.

What sentence was passed I could not fully learn. In those days, Japanese judges used a good deal of personal discretion when dealing with emotional crime; and their exercise of pity had not yet been restricted by codes framed upon Western models. Perhaps in this case they thought that to have survived a jōshi was in itself a severe punishment. Public opinion is less merciful, in such instances, than law. After a term of imprisonment the miserable man was allowed to return to his family, but was placed under perpetual police surveillance. The people shrank from him. He made the mistake of living on. Only his parents and brother remained to him. And soon he became a victim of unspeakable physical suffering; yet he clung to life.

The old wound in his throat, although treated at the time as skillfully as circumstances permitted, began to cause terrible pain. After its apparent healing, some slow cancerous growth commenced to spread from it, reaching into the breathing-passages above and below where the sword-blade had passed. The surgeon's knife, the torture of the cautery, could only delay the end. But the man lingered through seven years of continually increasing agony. There are dark beliefs about the results of betraying the dead,--of breaking the mutual promise to travel together to the Meido. Men said that the hand of the murdered girl always reopened the wound,--undid by night all that the surgeon could accomplish by day. For at night the pain invariably increased, becoming most terrible at the precise hour of the attempted shinjū!

Meanwhile, through abstemiousness and extraordinary self-denial, the family found means to pay for medicines, for attendance, and for more nourishing food than they themselves ever indulged in. They prolonged by all possible means the life that was their shame, their poverty, their burden. And now that death has taken away that burden, they weep!

Perhaps all of us learn to love that which we train ourselves to make sacrifices for, whatever pain it may cause. Indeed, the question might be asked whether we do not love most that which causes us most pain.

VI

THE STONE BUDDHA

I

On the ridge of the hill behind the Government College,--above a succession of tiny farm fields ascending the slope by terraces,--there is an ancient village cemetery. It is no longer used: the people of Kurogamimura now bury their dead in a more secluded spot; and I think their fields are beginning already to encroach upon the limits of the old graveyard.

Having an idle hour to pass between two classes, I resolve to pay the ridge a visit. Harmless thin black snakes wiggle across the way as I climb; and immense grasshoppers, exactly the color of parched leaves, whirr away from my shadow. The little field path vanishes altogether under coarse grass before reaching the broken steps at the cemetery gate; and in the cemetery itself there is no path at all--only weeds and stones. But there is a fine view from the ridge: the vast green Plain of Higo, and beyond it bright blue hills in a half-ring against the horizon light, and even beyond them the cone of Aso smoking forever.

Below me, as in a bird's-eye view, appears the college, like a miniature modern town, with its long ranges of many windowed buildings, all of the year 1887. They represent the purely utilitarian architecture of the nineteenth century: they might be situated equally well in Kent or in Auckland or in New Hampshire without appearing in the least out of tone with the age. But the terraced fields above and the figures toiling in them might be of the fifth century. The language cut upon the haka whereon I lean is transliterated Sanscrit. And there is a Buddha beside me, sitting upon his lotus of stone just as he sat in the days of Kato Kiyomasa. His meditative gaze slants down between his half-closed eyelids upon the Government College and its tumultuous life; and he smiles the smile of one who has received an injury not to be resented. This is not the expression wrought by the sculptor: moss and scurf have distorted it. I also observe that his hands are broken. I am sorry, and try to scrape the moss away from the little symbolic protuberance on his forehead, remembering the ancient text of the "Lotus of the Good Law:"--

"_There issued a ray of light from the circle of hair between the brows of the Lord. It extended over eighteen hundred thousand Buddha fields, so that all those Buddha fields appeared wholly illuminated by its radiance, down to the great hell Aviki, and up to the limit of existence. And all the beings in each of the Six States of existence became visible,--all without exception. Even the Lord Buddhas in those Buddha fields who had reached final Nirvana, all became visible._"

II

The sun is high behind me; the landscape before me as in an old Japanese picture-book. In old Japanese color-prints there are, as a rule, no shadows. And the Plain of Higo, all shadowless, broadens greenly to the horizon, where the blue spectres of the peaks seem to float in the enormous glow. But the vast level presents no uniform hue: it is banded and seamed by all tones of green, intercrossed as if laid on by long strokes of a brush. In this again the vision resembles some scene from a Japanese picture-book.

Open such a book for the first time, and you receive a peculiarly startling impression, a sensation of surprise, which causes you to think: "How strangely, how curiously, these people feel and see Nature!" The wonder of it grows upon you, and you ask: "Can it be possible their senses are so utterly different from ours?" Yes, it is quite possible; but look a little more. You do so, and there defines a third and ultimate idea, confirming the previous two. You feel the picture is more true to Nature than any Western painting of the same scene would be,--that it produces sensations of Nature no Western picture could give. And indeed there are contained within it whole ranges of discoveries for you to make. Before making them, however, you will ask yourself another riddle, somewhat thus: "All this is magically vivid; the inexplicable color is Nature's own. _But why does the thing seem so ghostly?_"

Well, chiefly because of the absence of shadows. What prevents you from missing them at once is the astounding skill in the recognition and use of color-values. The scene, however, is not depicted as if illumined from one side, but as if throughout suffused with light. Now there are really moments when landscapes do wear this aspect; but our artists rarely study them.

Be it nevertheless observed that the old Japanese loved shadows made by the moon, and painted the same, because these were weird and did not interfere with color. But they had no admiration for shadows that blacken and break the charm of the world under the sun. When their noon-day landscapes are flecked by shadows at all,'tis by very thin ones only,--mere deepenings of tone, like those fugitive half-glooms which run before a summer cloud. And the inner as well as the outer world was luminous for them. Psychologically also they saw life without shadows.

Then the West burst into their Buddhist peace, and saw their art, and bought it up till an Imperial law was issued to preserve the best of what was left. And when there was nothing more to be bought, and it seemed possible that fresh creation might reduce the market price of what had been bought already, then the West said: "Oh, come now! you must n't go on drawing and seeing things that way, you know! It is n't Art! You, must really learn to see shadows, you know,--and pay me to teach you."

So Japan paid to learn how to see shadows in Nature, in life, and in thought. And the West taught her that the sole business of the divine sun was the making of the cheaper kind of shadows. And the West taught her that the higher-priced shadows were the sole product of Western civilization, and bade her admire and adopt. Then Japan wondered at the shadows of machinery and chimneys and telegraph-poles; and at the shadows of mines and of factories, and the shadows in the hearts of those who worked there; and at the shadows of houses twenty stories high, and of hunger begging under them; and shadows of enormous charities that multiplied poverty; and shadows of social reforms that multiplied vice; and shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for the purpose of an _auto-da-fé_. Whereat Japan became rather serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes. Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still clung to her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did before.

III

Just beyond the cemetery, in a tiny patch of hedged-in land, a farmer and his ox are plowing the black soil with a plow of the Period of the Gods; and the wife helps the work with a hoe more ancient than even the Empire of Japan. All the three are toiling with a strange earnestness, as though goaded without mercy by the knowledge that labor is the price of life.

That man I have often seen before in the colored prints of another century. I have seen him in kakemono of much more ancient date. I have seen him on painted screens of still greater antiquity. Exactly the same! Other fashions beyond counting have passed: the peasant's straw hat, straw coat, and sandals of straw remain. He himself is older, incomparably older, than his attire. The earth he tills has indeed swallowed him up a thousand times a thousand times; but each time it has given back to him his life with force renewed. And with this perpetual renewal he is content: he asks no more. The mountains change their shapes; the rivers shift their courses; the stars change their places in the sky: he changes never. Yet, though unchanging, is he a maker of change. Out of the sum of his toil are wrought the ships of iron, the roads of steel, the palaces of stone; his are the hands that pay for the universities and the new learning, for the telegraphs and the electric lights and the repeating-rifles, for the machinery of science and the machinery of commerce and the machinery of war. He is the giver of all; he is given in return--the right to labor forever. Wherefore he plows the centuries under, to plant new lives of men. And he will thus toil on till the work of the world shall have been done,--till the time of the end of man.

And what will be that end? Will it be ill or well? Or must it for all of us remain a mystery insolvable?

Out of the wisdom of the West is answer given: "Man's evolution is a progress into perfection and beatitude. The goal of evolution is Equilibration. Evils will vanish, one by one, till only that which is good survive. Then shall knowledge obtain its uttermost expansion; then shall mind put forth its most wondrous blossoms; then shall cease all struggle and all bitterness of soul, and all the wrongs and all the follies of life. Men shall become as gods, in all save immortality; and each existence shall be prolonged through centuries; and all the joys of life shall be made common in many a paradise terrestrial, fairer than poet's dream. And there shall be neither riders nor ruled, neither governments nor laws; for the order of all things shall be resolved by love."

But thereafter?

"Thereafter? Oh, thereafter by reason of the persistence of Force and other cosmic laws, dissolution must come: all integration must yield to disintegration. This is the testimony of science."

Then all that may have been won, must be lost; all that shall have been wrought, utterly undone. Then all that shall have been overcome, must overcome; all that may have been suffered for good, must be suffered again for no purpose interpretable. Even as out of the Unknown was born the immeasurable pain of the Past, so into the Unknown must expire the immeasurable pain of the Future. What, therefore, the worth of our evolution? what, therefore, the meaning of life--of this phantom-flash between darknesses? Is your evolution only a passing out of absolute mystery into universal death? In the hour when that man in the hat of straw shall have crumbled back, for the last mundane time, into the clay he tills, of what avail shall have been all the labor of a million years?

"Nay!" answers the West. "There is not any universal death in such a sense. Death signifies only change. Thereafter will appear another universal life. All that assures us of dissolution, not less certainly assures us of renewal. The Cosmos, resolved into a nebula, must recondense to form another swarm of worlds. And then, perhaps, your peasant may reappear with his patient ox, to till some soil illumined by purple or violet suns." Yes, but after that resurrection? "Why, then another evolution, another equilibration, another dissolution. This is the teaching of science. This is the infinite law."

But then that resurrected life, can it be ever new? Will it not rather be infinitely old? For so surely as that which is must eternally be, so must that which will be have eternally been. As there can be no end, so there can have been no beginning; and even Time is an illusion, and there is nothing new beneath a hundred million suns. Death is not death, not a rest, not an end of pain, but the most appalling of mockeries. And out of this infinite whirl of pain you can tell us no way of escape. Have you then made us any wiser than that straw-sandaled peasant is? He knows all this. He learned, while yet a child, from the priests who taught him to write in the Buddhist temple school, something of his own innumerable births, and of the apparition and disparition of universes, and of the unity of life. That which you have mathematically discovered was known to the East long before the coming of the Buddha. How known, who may say? Perhaps there have been memories that survived the wrecks of universes. But be that as it may, your annunciation is enormously old: your methods only are new, and serve merely to confirm ancient theories of the Cosmos, and to recomplicate the complications of the everlasting Riddle.

Unto which the West makes answer:--"Not so! I have discerned the rhythm of that eternal action whereby worlds are shapen or dissipated; I have divined the Laws of Pain evolving all sentient existence, the Laws of Pain evolving thought; I have discovered and proclaimed the means by which sorrow may be lessened; I have taught the necessity of effort, and the highest duty of life. And surely the knowledge of the duty of life is the knowledge of largest worth to man."

Perhaps. But the knowledge of the necessity and of the duty, as you have proclaimed them, is a knowledge very, very much older than you. Probably that peasant knew it fifty thousand years ago, on this planet. Possibly also upon other long--vanished planets, in cycles forgotten by the gods. If this be the Omega of Western wisdom, then is he of the straw sandals our equal in knowledge, even though he be classed by the Buddha among the ignorant ones only,--they who "people the cemeteries again and again."

"He cannot know," makes answer Science; "at the very most he only believes, or thinks that he believes. Not even his wisest priests can prove. I alone have proven; I alone have given proof absolute. And I have proved for ethical renovation, though accused of proving for destruction. I have defined the uttermost impassable limit of human knowledge; but I have also established for all time the immovable foundations of that highest doubt which is wholesome, since it is the substance of hope. I have shown that even the least of human thoughts, of human acts, may have perpetual record,--making self-registration through tremulosities invisible that pass to the eternities. And I have fixed the basis of a new morality upon everlasting truth, even though I may have left of ancient creeds only their empty shell."

Creeds of the West--yes! But not of the creed of this older East. Not yet have you even measured it. What matter that this peasant cannot prove, since thus much of his belief is that which you have proved for all of us? And he holds still another belief that reaches beyond yours. He too has been taught that acts and thoughts outlive the lives of men. But he has been taught more than this. He has been taught that the thoughts and acts of each being, projected beyond the individual existence, shape other lives unborn; he has been taught to control his most secret wishes, because of their immeasurable inherent potentialities. And he has been taught all this in words as plain and thoughts as simply woven as the straw of his rain-coat. What if he cannot prove his premises? you have proved them, for him and for the world. He has only a theory of the future, indeed; but you have furnished irrefutable evidence that it is not founded upon dreams. And since all your past labors have only served to confirm a few of the beliefs stored up in his simple mind, is it any folly to presume that your future labors also may serve to prove the truth of other beliefs of his, which you have not yet taken the trouble to examine?

"For instance, that earthquakes are caused by a big fish?"

Do not sneer! Our Western notions about such things were just as crude only a few generations back. No! I mean the ancient teaching that acts and thoughts are not merely the incidents of life, but its creators. Even as it has been written, "_All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts._"

IV

And there comes to me the memory of a queer story.

The common faith of the common people, that the misfortunes of the present are results of the follies committed in a former state of existence, and that the errors of this life will influence the future birth, is curiously reinforced by various superstitions probably much older than Buddhism, but not at variance with its faultless doctrine of conduct. Among these, perhaps the most remarkable is the belief that even our most secret thoughts of evil may have ghostly consequences upon _other people's lives._

The house now occupied by one of my friends used to be haunted. You could never imagine it to have been haunted, because it is unusually luminous, extremely pretty, and comparatively new. It has no dark nooks or corners. It is surrounded with a large bright garden,--a Kyūshū landscape garden without any big trees for ghosts to hide behind. Yet haunted it was, and in broad day.

First you must learn that in this Orient there are two sorts of haunters: the Shi-ryō and the Iki-ryō. The Shi-ryō are merely the ghosts of the dead; and here, as in most lands, they follow their ancient habit of coming at night only. But the Iki-ryō, which are the ghosts of the living, may come at all hours; and they are much more to be feared, because they have power to kill.

Now the house of which I speak was haunted by an Iki-ryō.

The man who built it was an official, wealthy and esteemed. He designed it as a home for his old age; and when it was finished he filled it with beautiful things, and hung tinkling wind bells along its eaves. Artists of skill painted the naked precious wood of its panels with blossoming sprays of cherry and plum tree, and figures of gold-eyed falcons poised on crests of pine, and slim fawns feeding under maple shadows, and wild ducks in snow, and herons flying, and iris flowers blooming, and long-armed monkeys clutching at the face of the moon in water: all the symbols of the seasons and of good fortune.

Fortunate the owner was; yet he knew one sorrow--he had no heir. Therefore, with his wife's consent, and according to antique custom, he took a strange woman into his home that she might give him a child,--a young woman from the country, to whom large promises were made. When she had borne him a son, she was sent away; and a nurse was hired for the boy, that he might not regret his real mother. All this had been agreed to beforehand; and there were ancient usages to justify it. But all the promises made to the mother of the boy had not been fulfilled when she was sent away.

And after a little time the rich man fell sick; and he grew worse thereafter day by day; and his people said there was an Iki-ryō in the house. Skilled physicians did all they could for him; but he only became weaker and weaker; and the physicians at last confessed they had no more hope. And the wife made offerings at the Ujigami, and prayed to the Gods; but the Gods gave answer: "He must die unless he obtain forgiveness from one whom he wronged, and undo the wrong by making just amend. For there is an Iki-ryō in your house."

Then the sick man remembered, and was conscience-smitten, and sent out servants to bring the woman back to his home. But she was gone,--somewhere lost among the forty millions of the Empire. And the sickness ever grew worse; and search was made in vain; and the weeks passed. At last there came to the gate a peasant who said that he knew the place to which the woman had gone, and that he would journey to find her if supplied with means of travel. But the sick man, hearing, cried out: "No! she would never forgive me in her heart, because she could not. It is too late!" And he died.

After which the widow and the relatives and the little boy abandoned the new house; and strangers entered thereinto.

Curiously enough, the people spoke harshly concerning the mother of the boy--holding her to blame for the haunting.

I thought it very strange at first, not because I had formed any positive judgment as to the rights and wrongs of the case. Indeed I could not form such a judgment; for I could not learn the full details of the story. I thought the criticism of the people very strange, notwithstanding.

Why? Simply because there is nothing voluntary about the sending of an Iki-ryō. It is not witchcraft at all. The Iki-ryō goes forth without the knowledge of the person whose emanation it is. (There is a kind of witchcraft which is believed to send Things,--but not Iki-ryō.) You will now understand why I thought the condemnation of the young woman very strange.

But you could scarcely guess the solution of the problem. It is a religious one, involving conceptions totally unknown to the West. She from whom the Iki-ryō proceeded was never blamed by the people as a witch. They never suggested that it might have been created with her knowledge. They even sympathized with what they deemed to be her just plaint. They blamed her only for having been too angry,--for not sufficiently controlling her unspoken resentment,--because she should have known _that anger, secretly indulged, can have ghostly consequences._

I ask nobody to take for granted the possibility of the Iki-ryō, except as a strong form of conscience. But as an influence upon conduct, the belief certainly has value. Besides, it is suggestive. Who is really able to assure us that secret evil desires, pent-up resentments, masked hates, do not exert any force outside of the will that conceives and nurses them? May there not be a deeper meaning than Western ethics recognize in those words of the Buddha,--"_Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule_"? It was very old then, even in his day. In ours it has been said, "Whensoever a wrong is done you, and you do not resent it, then so much evil dies in the world." But does it? Are we quite sure that not to resent it is enough? Can the motive tendency set loose in the mind by the sense of a wrong be nullified simply by non-action on the part of the wronged? Can any force die? The forces we know may be transformed only. So much also may be true of the forces we do not know; and of these are Life, Sensation, Will,--all that makes up the infinite mystery called "I."

V

"The duty of Science," answers Science, "is to systematize human experience, not to theorize about ghosts. And the judgment of the time, even in Japan, sustains this position taken by Science. What is now being taught below there,--my doctrines, or the doctrines of the Man in the Straw Sandals?"

Then the Stone Buddha and I look down upon the college together; and as we gaze, the smile of the Buddha--perhaps because of a change in the light--seems to me to have changed its expression, to have become an ironical smile. Nevertheless he is contemplating the fortress of a more than formidable enemy. In all that teaching of four hundred youths by thirty-three teachers, there is no teaching of faith, but only teaching of fact,--only teaching of the definite results of the systematization of human experience. And I am absolutely certain that if I were to question, concerning the things of the Buddha, any of those thirty-three instructors (saving one dear old man of seventy, the Professor of Chinese), I should receive no reply. For they belong unto the new generation, holding that such topics are fit for the consideration of Men-in-Straw-Rain--coats only, and that in this twenty-sixth year of Meiji, the scholar should occupy himself only with the results of the systematization of human experience. Yet the systematization of human experience in no wise enlightens us as to the Whence, the Whither, or, worst of all!--the Why.

"_The Laws of Existence which proceed from a cause,--the cause of these hath the Buddha explained, as also the destruction of the same. Even of such truths is the great Sramana the teacher._"

And I ask myself, Must the teaching of Science in this land efface at last the memory of the teaching of the Buddha?

"As for that," makes answer Science, "the test of the right of a faith to live must be sought in its power to accept and to utilize my revelations. Science neither affirms what it cannot prove, nor denies that which it cannot rationally disprove. Theorizing about the Unknowable, it recognizes and pities as a necessity of the human mind. You and the Man-in-the-Straw-Rain-coat may harmlessly continue to theorize for such time as your theories advance in lines parallel with my facts, but no longer."

And seeking inspiration from the deep irony of Buddha's smile, I theorize in parallel lines.

VI

The whole tendency of modern knowledge, the whole tendency of scientific teaching, is toward the ultimate conviction that the Unknowable, even as the Brahma of ancient Indian thought, is inaccessible to prayer. Not a few of us can feel that Western Faith must finally pass away forever, leaving us to our own resources when our mental manhood shall have been attained, even as the fondest of mothers must leave her children at last. In that far day her work will all have been done; she will have fully developed our recognition of certain eternal spiritual laws; she will have fully ripened our profounder human sympathies; she will have fully prepared us by her parables and fairy tales, by her gentler falsehoods, for the terrible truth of existence;--prepared us for the knowledge that there is no divine love save the love of man for man; that we have no All-Father, no Saviour, no angel guardians; that we have no possible refuge but in ourselves.

Yet even in that strange day we shall only have stumbled to the threshold of the revelation given by the Buddha so many ages ago: "Be ye lamps unto yourselves; be ye a refuge unto yourselves. Betake yourselves to no other refuge. The Buddhas are only teachers. Hold ye fast to the truth as to a lamp. Hold fast as a refuge to the truth. Look not for refuge to any beside yourselves."

Does the utterance shock? Yet the prospect of such a void awakening from our long fair dream of celestial aid and celestial love would never be the darkest prospect possible for man. There is a darker, also foreshadowed by Eastern thought. Science may hold in reserve for us discoveries infinitely more appalling than the realization of Richter's dream,--the dream of the dead children seeking vainly their father Jesus. In the negation of the materialist even, there was a faith of consolation--self-assurance of individual cessation, of oblivion eternal. But for the existing thinker there is no such faith. It may remain for us to learn, after having vanquished all difficulties possible to meet upon this tiny sphere, that there await us obstacles to overcome beyond it,--obstacles vaster than any system of worlds,--obstacles weightier than the whole inconceivable Cosmos with its centuries of millions of systems; that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking--that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;--that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;--and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.

VII

JIUJUTSU

Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm and strong. So is it with all things.... Firmness and strength are the concomitants of death; softness and weakness, the concomitants of life. Hence he who relies on his own strength shall not conquer. Tao-Te-King.

I

There is one building in the grounds of the Government College quite different in structure from the other edifices. Except that it is furnished with horizontally sliding glass windows instead of paper ones, it might be called a purely Japanese building. It is long, broad, and of one story; and it contains but a single huge room, of which the elevated floor is thickly cushioned with one hundred mats. It has a Japanese name, too,--Zuihōkwan,--signifying "The Hall of Our Holy Country;" and the Chinese characters which form that name were painted upon the small tablet above its entrance by the hand of a Prince of the Imperial blood. Within there is no furniture; nothing but another tablet and two pictures hanging upon the wall. One of the pictures represents the famous "White-Tiger Band" of seventeen brave boys who voluntarily sought death for loyalty's sake in the civil war. The other is a portrait in oil of the aged and much beloved Professor of Chinese, Akizuki of Aidzu, a noted warrior in his youth, when it required much more to make a soldier and a gentleman than it does to-day. And the tablet bears Chinese characters written by the hand of Count Katsu, which signify: "Profound knowledge is the best of possessions."

But what is the knowledge taught in this huge unfurnished apartment? It is something called jiujutsu. And what is jiujutsu?

Here I must premise that I know practically nothing of jiujutsu. One must begin to study it in early youth, and must continue the study a very long time in order to learn it even tolerably well. To become an expert requires seven years of constant practice, even presupposing natural aptitudes of an uncommon order. I can give no detailed account of jiujutsu, but merely venture some general remarks about its principle.

Jiujutsu is the old samurai art of fighting without weapons. To the uninitiated it looks like wrestling. Should you happen to enter the Zuihōkwan while jiujutsu is being practiced, you would see a crowd of students watching ten or twelve lithe young comrades, barefooted and barelimbed, throwing each other about on the matting. The dead silence might seem to you very strange. No word is spoken, no sign of approbation or of amusement is given, no face even smiles. Absolute impassiveness is rigidly exacted by the rules of the school of jiujutsu. But probably only this impassibility of all, this hush of numbers, would impress you as remarkable.

A professional wrestler would observe more. He would see that those' young men are very cautious about putting forth their strength, and that the grips, holds, and flings are both peculiar and risky. In spite of the care exercised, he would judge the whole performance to be dangerous play, and would be tempted, perhaps, to advise the adoption of Western "scientific" rules.

The real thing, however,--not the play,--is much more dangerous than a Western wrestler could guess at sight. The teacher there, slender and light as he seems, could probably disable an ordinary wrestler in two minutes. Jiujutsu is not an art of display at all: it is not a training for that sort of skill exhibited to public audiences; it is an art of self-defense in the most exact sense of the term; it is an art of war. The master of that art is able, in one moment, to put an untrained antagonist completely _hors de combat_. By some terrible legerdemain he suddenly dislocates a shoulder, unhinges a joint, bursts a tendon, or snaps a bone,--without any apparent effort. He is much more than an athlete: he is an anatomist. And he knows also touches that kill--as by lightning. But this fatal knowledge he is under oath never to communicate except under such conditions as would render its abuse almost impossible. Tradition exacts that it be given only to men of perfect self-command and of unimpeachable moral character.

The fact, however, to which I want to call attention is that the master of jiujutsu never relies upon his own strength. He scarcely uses his own strength in the greatest emergency. Then what does he use? Simply the strength of his antagonist. The force of the enemy is the only means by which that enemy is overcome. The art of jiujutsu teaches you to rely for victory solely upon the strength of your opponent; and the greater his strength, the worse for him and the better for you. I remember that I was not a little astonished when one of the greatest teachers of jiujutsu[1] told me that he found it extremely difficult to teach a certain very strong pupil, whom I had innocently imagined to be the best in the class. On asking why, I was answered: "Because he relies upon his enormous muscular strength, and uses it." The very name "jiujutsu" means _to conquer by yielding._

I fear I cannot explain at all; I can only suggest. Every one knows what a "counter" in boxing means. I cannot use it for an exact simile, because the boxer who counters opposes his whole force to the impetus of the other; while a jiujutsu expert does precisely the contrary. Still there remains this resemblance between a counter in boxing and a yielding in jiujutsu,--that the suffering is in both cases due to the uncontrollable forward impetus of the man who receives it. I may venture then to say, loosely, that in jiujutsu there is a sort of counter for every twist, wrench, pull, push, or bend: only, the jiujutsu expert does not oppose such movements at all. No: he yields to them. But he does much more than yield to them. He aids them with a wicked sleight that causes the assailant to put out his own shoulder, to fracture his own arm, or, in a desperate case, even to break his own neck or back.

[1] Kano Jigoro. Mr. Kano contributed some years ago to the _Transactions of the Asiatic Society_ a very interesting paper on the history of Jiujutsu.

II

With even this vaguest of explanations, you will already have been able to perceive that the real wonder of jiujutsu is not in the highest possible skill of its best professor, but in the uniquely Oriental idea which the whole art expresses. What Western brain could have elaborated this strange teaching,--never to oppose force to force, but only to direct and utilize the power of attack; to overthrow the enemy solely by his own strength,--to vanquish him solely by his own effort? Surely none! The Occidental mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful curves and circles. Yet how fine a symbolism of Intelligence as a means to foil brute force! Much more than a science of defense is this jiujutsu: it is a philosophical system; it is an economical system; it is an ethical system (indeed, I had forgotten to say that a very large part of jiujutsu-training is purely moral); and it is, above all, the expression of a racial genius as yet but faintly perceived by those Powers who dream of further aggrandizement in the East.

Twenty-five years ago,--and even more recently,---foreigners might have predicted, with every appearance of reason, that Japan would adopt not only the dress, but the manners of the Occident; not only our means of rapid transit and communication, but also our principles of architecture; not only our industries and our applied science, but likewise our metaphysics and our dogmas. Some really believed that the country would soon be thrown open to foreign settlement; that Western capital would be tempted by extraordinary privileges to aid in the development of various resources; and even that the nation would eventually proclaim, through Imperial Edict, its sudden conversion to what we call Christianity. But such beliefs were due to an unavoidable but absolute ignorance of the character of the race,--of its deeper capacities, of its foresight, of its immemorial spirit of independence. That Japan might only be practicing jiujutsu, nobody supposed for a moment: indeed at that time nobody in the West had ever heard of jiujutsu.

And, nevertheless, jiujutsu it all was. Japan adopted a military system founded upon the best experience of France and Germany, with the result that she can call into the field a disciplined force of 250,000 men, supported by a formidable artillery. She created a strong navy, comprising some of the finest cruisers in the world;--modeling her naval system upon the best English and French teaching. She made herself dockyards under French direction, and built or bought steamers to carry her products to Korea, China, Manilla, Mexico, India, and the tropics of the Pacific. She constructed, both for military and commercial purposes, nearly two thousand miles of railroad. With American and English help she established the cheapest and perhaps the most efficient telegraph and postal service in existence. She built lighthouses to such excellent purpose that her coast is said to be the best lighted in either hemisphere; and she put into operation a signal service not inferior to that of the United States. From America she obtained also a telephone system, and the best methods of electric lighting. She modeled her public-school system upon a thorough study of the best results obtained in Germany, France, and America, but regulated it so as to harmonize perfectly with her own institutions. She founded a police system upon a French model, but shaped it to absolute conformity with her own particular social requirements. At first she imported machinery for her mines, her mills, her gun-factories, her railways, and hired numbers of foreign experts: she is now dismissing all her teachers. But what she has done and is doing would require volumes even to mention. Suffice to say, in conclusion, that she has selected and adopted the best of everything represented by our industries, by our applied sciences, by our economical, financial, and legal experience; availing herself in every case of the highest results only, and invariably shaping her acquisitions to meet her own needs.

Now in all this she has adopted nothing for a merely imitative reason. On the contrary, she has approved and taken only what can help her to increase her strength. She has made herself able to dispense with nearly all foreign technical instruction; and she has kept firmly in her own hands, by the shrewdest legislation, all of her own resources. But she has _not_ adopted Western dress, Western habits of life, Western architecture, or Western religion; since the introduction of any of these, especially the last, would have diminished instead of augmenting her force. Despite her railroad and steamship lines, her telegraphs and telephones, her postal service and her express companies, her steel artillery and magazine-rifles, her universities and technical schools, she remains just as Oriental to-day as she was a thousand years ago. She has been able to remain herself, and to profit to the utmost possible limit by the strength of the enemy. She has been, and still is, defending herself by the most admirable system of intellectual self-defense ever heard of,--by a marvelous national jiujutsu.

III

Before me lies an album more than thirty years old. It is filled with photographs taken at the time when Japan was entering upon her experiments with foreign dress and with foreign institutions. All are photographs of samurai or daimyô; and many possess historical value as reflections of the earliest effects of foreign influence upon native fashions.

Naturally the military class were the earliest subjects of the new influence; and they seem to have attempted several curious compromises between the Western and the Eastern costume. More than a dozen photographs represent feudal leaders surrounded by their retainers,--all in a peculiar garb of their own composition. They have frock coats, waistcoats, and trousers of foreign style and material; but under the coat the long silk girdle or obi is still worn, simply for the purpose of holding the swords. (For the samurai were never in a literal sense _traîneurs de sabre_; and their formidable but exquisitely finished weapons were never made to be slung at the side,--besides being in most cases much too long to be carried in the Western way.) The cloth of the suits is broadcloth; but the samurai will not surrender his mon, or crest, and tries to adapt it to his novel attire by all manner of devices. One has faced the lappets of his coat with white silk; and his family device is either dyed or embroidered upon the silk six times--three mon to each lappet. All the men, or nearly all, wear European watches with showy guards; one is examining his timepiece curiously, probably a very recent acquisition. All wear Western shoes, too,--shoes with elastic sides. But none seem to have yet adopted the utterly abominable European hat--destined, unfortunately, to become popular at a later day. They still retain the jingasa,--a strong wooden headpiece, heavily lacquered in scarlet and gold. And the jingasa and the silken girdle remain the only satisfactory parts of their astounding uniform. The trousers and coats are ill fitting; the shoes are inflicting slow tortures; there is an indescribably constrained, slouchy, shabby look common to all thus attired. They have not only ceased to feel free: they are conscious of not looking their best. The incongruities are not grotesque enough to be amusing; they are merely ugly and painful. What foreigner in that time could have persuaded himself that the Japanese were not about to lose forever their beautiful taste in dress?