"The journey to the Meido,—yes. All must make that journey. But we do not think of death as a total separation. We think of the dead as still with us. We speak to them each day."
"I know that. What I do not know are the ideas behind the facts. If the dead go to the Meido, why should offerings be made to ancestors in the household shrines, and prayers be said to them as if they were really present? Do not the common people thus confuse Buddhist teachings and Shintō belief?"
"Perhaps many do. But even by those who are Buddhists only, the offerings and the prayers to the dead are made in different places at the same time,—in the parish temples, and also before the family butsudan."
"But how can souls be thought of as being in the Meido, and also in various other places at the same time? Even if the people believe the soul to be multiple, that would not explain away the contradiction. For the dead, according to Buddhist teaching, are judged."
"We think of the soul both as one and as many. We think of it as of one person, but not as of a substance. We think of it as something that may be in many places at once, like a moving of air."
"Or of electricity?" I suggested.
"Yes."
Evidently, to my young friend's mind the ideas of the Meido and of the home-worship of the dead had never seemed irreconcilable; and perhaps to any student of Buddhist philosophy the two faiths would not appear to involve any serious contradictions. The Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law teaches that the Buddha state "is endless and without limit,—immense as the element of ether." Of a Buddha who had long entered into Nirvana it declares, "Even after his complete extinction, he wanders through this whole world in all ten points of space." And the same Sutra, after recounting the simultaneous apparition of all the Buddhas who had ever been, makes the teacher proclaim, "All these you see are my proper bodies, by kotis of thousands, like the sands of the Ganges: they have appeared that the law may be fulfilled." But it seemed to me obvious that, in the artless imagination of the common people, no real accord could ever have been established between the primitive conceptions of Shintō and the much more definite Buddhist doctrine of a judgment of souls.
"Can you really think of death," I asked, "as life, as light?"
"Oh yes," was the smiling answer. "We think that after death we shall still be with our families. We shall see our parents, our friends. We shall remain in this world,—the light as now."