"No; I mean for the man himself, the husband."
"And how? Of what use can a son be to a dead man?"
"The son inherits. The son maintains the family name. The son makes the offerings."
"The offerings to the dead?"
"Yes. Do you now understand?"
"I understand the fact, not the feeling. Do military men still hold these beliefs?"
"Certainly. Are there no such beliefs in the West?"
"Not now. The ancient Greeks and Romans had such beliefs. They thought that the ancestral spirits dwelt in the home, received the offerings, watched over the family. Why they thought so, we partly know; but we cannot know exactly how they felt, because we cannot understand feelings which we have never experienced, or which we have not inherited. For the same reason, I cannot know the real feeling of a Japanese in relation to the dead."
"Then you think that death is the end of everything?"
"That is not the explanation of my difficulty. Some feelings are inherited,—perhaps also some ideas. Your feelings and your thoughts about the dead, and the duty of the living to the dead, are totally different from those of an Occidental. To us the idea of death is that of a total separation, not only from the living, but from the world. Does not Buddhism also tell of a long dark journey that the dead must make?"