Rare days in Japan

by George Trumbull Ladd

The intervening farce represented the exploits of three blind men who had stolen a Biwa, and of a friend of the owner who tried to get it back. Then followed a slightly different version of the drama called “Hana-ga-Tami,” or “The Flower Token,” which we had already seen at the other theatre. And this was followed, in turn, by a farce which made fun of the attempted frauds of three sellers of patent medicines.

The last Nō performance of the day bore the tide of “Akogi,” the name of a sea-side place near Ise. A fisherman has committed the awful crime of fishing in forbidden waters,—in fact, in waters no less sacred than those of the fish-pond of the Imperial shrines at Ise. For this unpardonable sin he has been executed. But he has not stopped at the crime of poaching on the preserves of the most inviolable of all the temples. He has killed the fish which he caught, and has thus sinned against one of the most sacred of the tenets of Buddhism. When, then, his ghost expresses the utmost contrition and begs a travelling priest to intercede for its salvation, he begs in vain. For he is told that his sin is against both Heaven and the Heaven-descended Emperor, and is therefore beyond all possible forgiveness. At this the lost spirit goes through a wild dance, which gives a pantomimic representation of his secret crime, and of the throwing of his headless body into the sea; where “the waves of water are changed for him into waves of fire.” Any severe foreign criticism of the astonishing disproportion between this poor fellow’s crime and the punishment it brought upon him, might easily be modified by reminder of the old-time game-laws in England and other European countries; as well as of the comparatively trivial causes which have led certain Christian sects to consign their fellow men to hopeless perdition.

The most painstaking observation and subsequent reflection did not enable me to decide in my own mind between these rival schools of Nō, on the ground of their relative æsthetical merits. I had valid reasons, therefore, besides, the reasonable caution of politeness, for declining to render any decision. It was not difficult to see, however, that the Ho-sho-kwai, or more “militant” of the two schools, dealt with more discretion,—not to say timorousness,—with the religious value of the Bushidō, and with the future fate of those who, without the faith of Buddhism, are governed by its moral code. With regard to influence, in general, of this form of the art of dramatic representation, upon the æsthetical and moral development of the Japanese people, on the whole, I have no doubt of its salutary character. Like the old Greek drama, but unlike anything which we have, or at present seem likely to have, in this country, the Nō has both expressed and cultivated much of what has been artistically and ethically best of the life characteristic of the national development.

CHAPTER IX
IKEGAMI AND JAPANESE BUDDHISM

It is nearly seven hundred years since the man, known to us of to-day as Nichiren or “Sun Lotus,” was born in the obscure and small village of Kominato, Japan. While his doctrine and his death have served to render celebrated the two monasteries which are head-quarters of the sect he founded, his birth and boyhood there have not rescued this village from its obscurity or greatly increased the number of its inhabitants. Kominato lies on the ocean side of the peninsula which encloses Tokyo Bay,—the body of water with the capital city at its head and Yokohama, the principal port of the country, on its western shore. The railroad now runs part way down the peninsula, but does not as yet consider it worth while to extend itself into a region which, although its coast is interesting and picturesque, is occupied almost exclusively by fishermen and petty tillers of the soil. The case is by no means the same, however, with Minobu and Ikegami, the two monasteries which divide between them the welcome task of cherishing the bones of their saintly founder. These monasteries are much visited, not only by the members of the sect, but also by other Japanese engaged in going upon religious pilgrimages and more purely secular sight-seeing excursions. At the chief annual festivals the grounds of these monasteries, and the surrounding villages, are densely thronged with both sightseers and devotees; and indeed with all sorts of visitors. A few of these visitors, occasionally, are foreigners. I think, however, that no other foreigner has visited either of the monasteries in the same way in which it was my privilege twice to visit Ikegami, during the Autumn of 1906.

But before giving an account of this visit I wish to say a few words as to Nichiren and the Buddhist communion which has borne his name during all these centuries. As is the right of all great saints and religious reformers in the days when science had not yet claimed to have made impossible any credit given to such stories, the entire career of Nichiren was enveloped in the supernatural; it was even frequently punctuated by the miraculous. His very name, “Sun-Lotus,” is derived from a dream by his mother, in which she saw the sun on a lotus-flower and in consequence of which she became pregnant. From the first her offspring was endued with supernatural power, so that he acquired the most perfect knowledge of the entire Buddhist canon while yet in his youth. And later, when his zealous and uncompromising denunciation of the existing government made it possible for his enemies to persuade the Regent Tokimuné that the doctrines of Nichiren tended to subvert the state, the executioner sent to behead him could not compel his sword to act upon the neck of so holy a man. What wonder that the relics of so invulnerable a saint should be thought to have value for purposes of both protection and cure, even after the lapse of centuries of time!

The important facts of the life of Nichiren can be briefly told. He was born, 1222 A. D. He entered upon study for the priesthood at the early age of twelve, and three or four years later became a tonsured priest. His authorised biographer of to-day, Wakita Gyoziun, himself a priest of the Nichiren sect, in deference to modern views omits all references to miraculous experiences in the life of his master. He makes Nichiren spend all his youth, until thirty-two years of age, in study and travel consisting of journeys undertaken in various directions, visiting many eminent sages and teachers of Buddhism, in quest of the “True Doctrine.” But everywhere the wanderer found errors, heresies, and corruptions, both of doctrine and of life. The consequence was that Nichiren determined to “discard the opinions of the sectaries altogether, and to search for the Truth in his own consciousness and in the sacred writings.” This resolve led to the discovery that this truth is to be found only in “The Holy Book of the Lotus of the Good Law”; and, besides, it produced a courage that became audacity in the denunciation of existing error and civil wrongs; and, as well, a zealous confidence which generated intolerance in the double attempt to impress his own convictions and to controvert the heresies of the other sects. Opposition and persecution followed as a matter of course. While these things succeeded in restricting his work, so that when Nichiren entered Nirvana he left behind only some forty recognised disciples, they did not prevent the permanency of his impression upon his country. Fifteen years ago the Nichiren sect in Japan had five thousand temples, seven thousand priests, and more than two million of adherents.

If I were capable of expounding credibly the theology, whether more popular or more philosophical, of this Buddhist sect, I fear that I could not make it understood. For it employs that manner of clothing its conceptions in figures of speech, and of couching its syllogisms in remotely related analogies and symbols, which characterises the philosophy and theology of the Orient in general. But there are two things about the Nichiren sect to which it is quite worth while to invite attention. These are rather permanent characteristics which were impressed upon it by the character of its founder. The first is the appeal which it makes to the authority of the written word. It was originally a Protestant or reforming sect; but it became almost at once a claim to give final form to the truth in a book written by men of old time; and this scripture must not be contested or even questioned as to its right to demand submission. This sect has, therefore, been more than any of the others a church militant; and, indeed, to-day it is said to have special attractions for those religiously inclined among the military classes. But more distinctive still of the Nichiren sect is the peculiar type of its patriotism. The one tenet—it has been called the “axiom”—which the founder laid down as the basis of his life-work, was the assertion that “the prosperity or decline of the state depends entirely upon the truth or perversion of its religion.” Nichiren, accordingly, boldly accused both rulers and ruled as wanderers in dangerous and fatal errors. The truth, he held, must somehow be substituted for falsehood, or the peace and prosperity of the country could not be attained. In this belief he launched defiance at the government of the time; in the same belief he had the prevision that the Mongols under Kublai Khan would invade Japan, and it was as influenced by this prophetic vision that he stirred up both rulers and people to resist them. In the opinion of the faithful it was the prayers of this saint which induced the gods to overthrow the invaders. All through its history his sect has cherished the same militant spirit—not only in its methods of extending its own adherents, but also in respect to the watch it has kept over the fidelity of its members to the sect as a matter of patriotic interest in the welfare of the country at large. Instead of “God and the Czar,” it is “Buddha and Nippon,” which may be said to have hitherto been the motto of the Nichiren-Shu.

The manifold and rapid changes which are being effected in all departments of the life of the Japanese people have seldom been more forcefully illustrated in my experience than they were by the two visits to Ikegami, to which reference has already been made. Beyond their local colouring, which is in itself enough to make them interesting, they have a wider significance as showing how the popular forms of religion which characterise the various sects of Buddhism in Japan are adapting themselves to the exigencies and expediences of the modern time.

The great annual festival in honor of Nichiren is held at Ikegami from the eleventh to the thirteenth of October. But the night of the twelfth is the culminating period of the entire celebration. On the afternoon of this date, at the close of my lecture to the teachers of the Imperial Educational Society, two of my former pupils were in waiting to conduct me to Shimbashi, the “Grand Central” railway station of Tokyo. Here two more former pupils were met, whose kindly office was to see that a dinner should be prepared, suitable to those expecting to spend the night upon their feet in a drizzle of rain rather than lying dry and warm in a comfortable bed. Of these Japanese friends, all four were teachers; but one was a priest of the Nichiren sect who, after several years of study of philosophy in this country, had returned to his native land to found a school for the training of “temple boys.” The trains, which were leaving every few minutes for Omori, the station nearest to the monastery, were all crowded to their utmost capacity—so far as the third-class cars were concerned. But there was abundant room for the comparatively few who chose the second-class. By the time we left the train at Omori, darkness had come on—a darkness made more dense and gloomy by the character of the sky overhead, and more disagreeable by the condition of the ground underfoot. The sights which followed, however, were not easily to be forgotten. The roadway for the entire two miles from Omori to Ikegami was lined with either the more permanent shops of the village through which we were passing or with booths extemporised for the occasion, all gaily lighted with lamps and coloured lanterns, and so thronged with surging crowds that independent progress was nearly or quite impossible. Indeed, when we reached the one hundred stone steps which ascend the hill on whose top the buildings of the monastery are standing, there was no other way than to allow ourselves to be slowly borne upward by the weight of the human mass. But even here, there was apparent no pushing or rudeness of other kind.