[14] The reference here to Ontaké Sama has a particular interest, but will need some considerable explanation.
Ontaké, or Mitaké, is the name of a celebrated holy peak in the province of Shinano—a great resort for pilgrims. During the Tokugawa Shōgunate, a priest called Isshin, of the Risshū Buddhists, made a pilgrimage to that mountain. Returning to his native place (Sakamoto-chō, Shitaya, Yedo), he began to preach certain new doctrines, and to make for himself a reputation as a miracle-worker, by virtue of powers said to have been gained during his pilgrimage to Ontaké. The Shōgunate considered him a dangerous person, and banished him to the island of Hachijō, where he remained for some years. Afterwards he was allowed to return to Yedo, and there to preach his new faith,—to which he gave the name of Azuma-Kyō. It was Buddhist teaching in a Shintō disguise,—the deities especially adored by its followers being Okuni-nushi and Sukuna-hi-kona as Buddhist avatars. In the prayer of the sect called Kaibyaku-Norito it is said:—"The divine nature is immovable (fudō); yet it moves. It is formless, yet manifests itself in forms. This is the Incomprehensible Divine Body. In Heaven and Earth it is called Kami; in all things it is called Spirit; in Man it is called Mind.... From this only reality came the heavens, the four oceans, the great whole of the three thousand universes;—from the One Mind emanate three thousands of great thousands of forms." ...
In the eleventh year of Bunkwa (1814) a man called Shi moyama Osuké, originally an oil-merchant in Heiyemon-chō, Asakusa, Yedo, organized, on the basis of Isshin's teaching, a religious association named Tomoyé-Ko. It flourished until the overthrow of the Shōgunate, when a law was issued forbidding the teaching of mixed doctrines, and the blending of Shintō with Buddhist religion. Shimo-yama Osuké then applied for permission to establish a new Shinto sect, under the name of Mitaké-Kyō,—popularly called Ontaké-Kyō; and the permission was given in the sixth year of Meiji (1873). Osuké then remodeled the Buddhist sutra Fudō Kyō into a Shinto prayer-book, under the title, Shintō-Fudō-Norito. The sect still flourishes; and one of its chief temples is situated about a mile from my present residence in Tōkyō.
"Ontaké San" (or "Sama") is a popular name given to the deities adored by this sect. It really means the Deity dwelling on the peak Mitaké, or Ontaké. But the name is also sometimes applied to the high-priest of the sect, who is supposed to be oracularly inspired by the deity of Ontaké, and to make revelations of truth through the power of the divinity. In the mouth of the boy Katsugoro "Ontaké Sama" means the high-priest of that time (1823), almost certainly Osuké himself,—then chief of the Tomoyé-Kyō.
[15] Kozō is the name given to a Buddhist acolyte, or a youth studying for the priesthood. But it is also given to errand-boys and little boy-servants sometimes,—perhaps because in former days the heads of little boys were shaved. I think that the meaning in this text is "acolyte."
[16] In that time the name of the smallest of coins = 1/10 of 1 cent. It was about the same as that now called rin, a copper with a square hole in the middle and bearing Chinese characters.
[XI]
WITHIN THE CIRCLE
Neither personal pain nor personal pleasure can be really expressed in words. It is never possible to communicate them in their original form. It is only possible, by vivid portrayal of the circumstances or conditions causing them, to awaken in sympathetic minds some kindred qualities of feeling. But if the circumstances causing the pain or the pleasure be totally foreign to common human experience, then no representation of them can make fully known the sensations which they evoked. Hopeless, therefore, any attempt to tell the real pain of seeing my former births. I can say only that no combination of suffering possible to individual being could be likened to such pain,—the pain of countless lives interwoven. It seemed as if every nerve of me had been prolonged into some monstrous web of sentiency spun back through a million years,—and as if the whole of that measureless woof and warp, over all its shivering threads, were pouring into my consciousness, out of the abysmal past, some ghastliness without name,—some horror too vast for human brain to hold. For, as I looked backward, I became double, quadruple, octuple;—I multiplied by arithmetical progression;—I became hundreds and thousands,—and feared with the terror of thousands,—and despaired with the anguish of thousands,—and shuddered with the agony of thousands; yet knew the pleasure of none. All joys, all delights appeared but mists or mockeries: only the pain and the fear were real,—and always, always growing. Then in the moment when sentiency itself seemed bursting into dissolution, one divine touch ended the frightful vision, and brought again to me the simple consciousness of the single present. Oh! how unspeakably delicious that sudden shrinking back out of multiplicity into unity!—that immense, immeasurable collapse of Self into the blind oblivious numbness of individuality!