There are very many quotations in the Bible about the words “weighed in the balance;” the most famous being that in the story of Belshazzar, in the book of Daniel. The first poetical use of the phrase is in the book of Job—supposed, you know, to have been written by an Arab, not a Jew.
Now I hope and pray that you will take good care of yourself, and not allow your Samurai-spirit of self-denial to urge you into taking any risks on bitterly cold days. Many, many happy new years to you and yours.
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Kumamoto, November, 1891.
Dear Professor,—Your welcome postal to hand. One must travel out of Izumo after a long residence to find out how utterly different the place is from other places,—for instance, this country. Matsue is incomparably prettier and better built and in every way more interesting than Kumamoto. What Kumamoto is religiously, I have not yet been able to find out. There are no shops here full of household shrines of hinoki-wood for sale, no display of shimenawa over doors, no charms in the fields, no o fuda pasted upon house-doors, no profusion of Shintō emblems, no certainty of seeing a kamidana or a butsudan in every house, and a strange scarcity of temples and images. Religiously, the place seems to be uninteresting; and to-day it is infernally cold. Everything is atrociously dear, and the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here exist. My own people—four came with me—feel like fish out of water. My little wife said the other morning, with an amusing wonder in her eyes, that there was a mezurashii kedamono in the next yard. We looked out, and the extraordinary animal was a goat. Some geese were also a subject of wonder, and a pig. None of these creatures are to be seen in Izumo.
About Inari. I may enquire again, but I think that the representation of Inari as a man with a beard, riding upon a white fox, in the pictures of Toyokuni, for instance, and in the sacred kakemono is tolerably good evidence. Also the relief carving I have seen representing him as a man. Also the general popular idea concerning him, about which there is no mistake. Also the letter of Hideyoshi to Inari Daimyōjin cited in Walter Dening’s Readers, under the heading: “Hideyoshi’s Letter to Gods.”
As to Kwannon, it is true that in Buddhist history she figures both as a man and woman (as also does the daughter of the Serpent-King in the astounding sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law),—she is identified with the Sanscrit Avalokitesvara,— about whose sex there may be some doubt. I have a translation of her Japanese sutra, in which she is female, however;—and in China and in Japan she has come to be considered the ideal of all that is sweet in womanliness, and her statues and the representations of her in the numerous pictures of the Buddhist pantheon are of a woman,—maiden. And after all, the people, not the scholars, make the gods, and the gods they make are the best.
I cannot help thinking that the identification of the Japanese Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with those of India is not sufficiently specified by Eitel and others as an identification of origin only. They have become totally transformed here,—they have undergone perfect avatars, and are not now the same. Shaka, Amida, Yakushi, Fudō, Dainichi, etc., may have been in India distinct personalities: in Japan they are but forms of the One,—as indeed are the innumerable Buddhas of the Lotus of the True Law. All are one. And Kshitigarbha is not our Japanese Jizō,—and Kwannon is not Avalokitesvara, and the Ni-ō are not the figures of Indra, and Emma-O is not Yama. “They were and are not.” Don’t you agree with me that the popular idea of a divinity is an element of weight in such questions of doubt as we are chatting about?
With every wish that you may enjoy your journey in Shikoku, I remain, most truly ever,