🧚 Names of Incense Used., part 7 · page 2

But even so-called inanimate matter is self-devouring.57 Substance preys upon substance.58 As in the droplet monad swallows monad, so in the vast of Space do spheres consume each other.59 Stars give being to worlds and devour them; planets assimilate their own moons.60 All is a ravening that never ends but to recommence.61 And unto whomsoever thinks about these matters, the story of a divine universe, made and ruled by paternal love, sounds less persuasive than the Polynesian tale that the souls of the dead are devoured by the gods.62

Monstrous the law seems, because we have developed ideas and sentiments which are opposed to this demoniac Nature,—much as voluntary movement is opposed to the blind power of gravitation.63 But the possession of such ideas and sentiments does but aggravate the atrocity of our situation, without lessening in the least the gloom of the final problem.64

Anyhow the faith of the Far East meets that problem better than the faith of the West.65 To the Buddhist the Cosmos is not divine at all—quite the reverse.66 It is Karma;—it is the creation of thoughts and acts of error;—it is not governed by any providence;—it is a ghastliness, a nightmare.67 Likewise it is an illusion.68 It seems real only for the same reason that the shapes and the pains of an evil dream seem real to the dreamer.69 Our life upon earth is a state of sleep.70 Yet we do not sleep utterly.71 There are gleams in our darkness,—faint auroral wakenings of Love and Pity and Sympathy and Magnanimity: these are selfless and true;—these are eternal and divine;—these are the Four Infinite Feelings in whose after-glow all forms and illusions will vanish, like mists in the light of the sun. But, except in so far as we wake to these feelings, we are dreamers indeed,—moaning unaided in darkness,—tortured by shadowy horror.72 All of us dream; none are fully awake; and many, who pass for the wise of the world, know even less of the truth than my dog that howls in the night.73

Could she speak, my dog, I think that she might ask questions which no philosopher would be able to answer.74 For I believe that she is tormented by the pain of existence.75 Of course I do not mean that the riddle presents itself to her as it does to us,—nor that she can have reached any abstract conclusions by any mental processes like our own.76 The external world to her is “a continuum of smells.”77 She thinks, compares, remembers, reasons by smells.78 By smell she makes her estimates of character: all her judgments are founded upon smells.79 Smelling thousands of things which we cannot smell at all, she must comprehend them in a way of which we can form no idea.80 Whatever she knows has been learned through mental operations of an utterly unimaginable kind.81 But we may be tolerably sure that she thinks about most things in some odor-relation to the experience of eating or to the intuitive dread of being eaten.82 Certainly she knows a great deal more about the earth on which we tread than would be good for us to know; and probably, if capable of speech, she could tell us the strangest stories of air and water.83 Gifted, or afflicted, as she is with such terribly penetrant power of sense, her notion of apparent realities must be worse than sepulchral.84 Small wonder if she howl at the moon that shines upon such a world!85

And yet she is more awake, in the Buddhist meaning, than many of us.86 She possesses a rude moral code—inculcating loyalty, submission, gentleness, gratitude, and maternal love; together with various minor rules of conduct;—and this simple code she has always observed.87 By priests her state is termed a state of darkness of mind, because she cannot learn all that men should learn; but according to her light she has done well enough to merit some better condition in her next rebirth.88 So think the people who know her.89 When she dies they will give her an humble funeral, and have a sutra recited on behalf of her spirit.90 The priest will let a grave be made for her somewhere in the temple-garden, and will place over it a little sotoba bearing the text,—_Nyo-zé chikushō hotsu Bodai-shin_:[1] “Even within such as this animal, the Knowledge Supreme will unfold at last.”91

[1] Lit., “the Bodhi-mind;”—that is to say, the Supreme Enlightenment, the intelligence of Buddhahood itself.92

Bits of Poetry93

I94

Among a people with whom poetry has been for centuries a universal fashion of emotional utterance, we should naturally suppose the common ideal of life to be a noble one.95 However poorly the upper classes of such a people might compare with those of other nations, we could scarcely doubt that its lower classes were morally and otherwise in advance of our own lower classes.96 And the Japanese actually present us with such a social phenomenon.97

Poetry in Japan is universal as the air.98 It is felt by everybody.99 It is read by everybody.100 It is composed by almost everybody,—irrespective of class and condition.101 Nor is it thus ubiquitous in the mental atmosphere only: it is everywhere to be heard by the ear, and _seen by the eye!102

As for audible poetry, wherever there is working there is singing.103 The toil of the fields and the labor of the streets are performed to the rhythm of chanted verse; and song would seem to be an expression of the life of the people in about the same sense that it is an expression of the life of cicadæ….104 As for visible poetry, it appears everywhere, written or graven,—in Chinese or in Japanese characters,—as a form of decoration.105 In thousands and thousands of dwellings, you might observe that the sliding-screens, separating rooms or closing alcoves, have Chinese or Japanese decorative texts upon them;—and these texts are poems.106 In houses of the better class there are usually a number of _gaku_, or suspended tablets to be seen,—each bearing, for all design, a beautifully written verse.107 But poems can be found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil,—for example upon braziers, iron kettles, vases, wooden trays, lacquer ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,—even toothpicks!108 Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans.109 Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk-linings, and women’s crêpe-silk underwear.110 Poems are stamped or worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases, travelling-bags.111 Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco-pouches.112 It were a hopeless effort to enumerate a tithe of the articles decorated with poetical texts.113 Probably my readers know of those social gatherings at which it is the custom to compose verses, and to suspend the compositions to blossoming trees,—also of the Tanabata festival in honor of certain astral gods, when poems inscribed on strips of colored paper, and attached to thin bamboos, are to be seen even by the roadside,—all fluttering in the wind like so many tiny flags….114 Perhaps you might find your way to some Japanese hamlet in which there are neither trees nor flowers, but never to any hamlet in which there is no visible poetry.115 You might wander,—as I have done,—into a settlement so poor that you could not obtain there, for love or money, even a cup of real tea; but I do not believe that you could discover a settlement in which there is nobody capable of making a poem.116