Chapter 6

—The Fifth Month of the Eighteenth Year of Meiji, all the priests of this temple made and set up this pedestal-stone, bearing the likeness of the footprints of the Buddha, and placed the same within the main court of Dentsu-In, in order that the seed of holy enlightenment might be sown for future time, and for the sake of the advancement of Buddhism.

TAIJO, priest,—being the sixty-sixth chief-priest by succession of this temple,—has respectfully composed.

JUNYU, the minor priest, has reverentially inscribed.

II

Strange facts crowd into memory as one contemplates those graven footprints,—footprints giant-seeming, yet less so than the human personality of which they remain the symbol. Twenty-four hundred years ago, out of solitary meditation upon the pain and the mystery of being, the mind of an Indian pilgrim brought forth the highest truth ever taught to men, and in an era barren of science anticipated the uttermost knowledge of our present evolutional philosophy regarding the secret unity of life, the endless illusions of matter and of mind, and the birth and death of universes. He, by pure reason,—and he alone before our time,—found answers of worth to the questions of the Whence, the Whither, and the Why;—and he made with these answers another and a nobler faith than the creed of his fathers. He spoke, and returned to his dust; and the people worshipped the prints of his dead feet, because of the love that he had taught them. Thereafter waxed and waned the name of Alexander, and the power of Rome and the might of Islam;—nations arose and vanished;—cities grew and were not;—the children of another civilization, vaster than Romes, begirdled the earth with conquest, and founded far-off empires, and came at last to rule in the land of that pilgrim’s birth. And these, rich in the wisdom of four and twenty centuries, wondered at the beauty of his message, and caused all that he had said and done to be written down anew in languages unborn at the time when he lived and taught. Still burn his footprints in the East; and still the great West, marvelling, follows their gleam to seek the Supreme Enlightenment. Even thus, of old, Milinda the king followed the way to the house of Nagasena,—at first only to question, after the subtle method of the Greeks; yet, later, to accept with noble reverence the nobler method of the Master.

Ululation

She is lean as a wolf, and very old,—the white bitch that guards my gate at night. She played with most of the young men and women of the neighborhood when they were boys and girls. I found her in charge of my present dwelling on the day that I came to occupy it. She had guarded the place, I was told, for a long succession of prior tenants—apparently with no better reason than that she had been born in the woodshed at the back of the house. Whether well or ill treated she had served all occupants faultlessly as a watch. The question of food as wages had never seriously troubled her, because most of the families of the street daily contributed to her support.

She is gentle and silent,—silent at least by day; and in spite of her gaunt ugliness, her pointed ears, and her somewhat unpleasant eyes, everybody is fond of her. Children ride on her back, and tease her at will; but although she has been known to make strange men feel uncomfortable, she never growls at a child. The reward of her patient good-nature is the friendship of the community. When the dog-killers come on their bi-annual round, the neighbors look after her interests. Once she was on the very point of being officially executed when the wife of the smith ran to the rescue, and pleaded successfully with the policeman superintending the massacres. “Put somebody’s name on the dog,” said the latter: “then it will be safe. Whose dog is it?” That question proved hard to answer. The dog was everybody’s and nobody’s—welcome everywhere but owned nowhere. “But where does it stay?” asked the puzzled constable. “It stays,” said the smith’s wife, “in the house of the foreigner.” “Then let the foreigner’s name be put upon the dog,” suggested the policeman.

Accordingly I had my name painted on her back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbors did not think that she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobudera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for “eight-hundred,”—which represent the customary abbreviation of the word yaoya (vegetable-seller),—any yaoya being supposed to sell eight hundred or more different things. Consequently she is now a very curious-looking dog; but she is well protected by all that calligraphy.

I have only one fault to find with her: she howls at night. Howling is one of the few pathetic pleasures of her existence. At first I tried to frighten her out of the habit; but finding that she refused to take me seriously, I concluded to let her howl. It would have been monstrous to beat her.

Yet I detest her howl. It always gives me a feeling of vague disquiet, like the uneasiness that precedes the horror of nightmare. It makes me afraid,—indefinably, superstitiously afraid. Perhaps what I am writing will seem to you absurd; but you would not think it absurd if you once heard her howl. She does not howl like the common street-dogs. She belongs to some ruder Northern breed, much more wolfish, and retaining wild traits of a very peculiar kind.

And her howl is also peculiar. It is incomparably weirder than the howl of any European dog; and I fancy that it is incomparably older. It may represent the original primitive cry of her species,—totally unmodified by centuries of domestication. It begins with a stifled moan, like the moan of a bad dream,—mounts into a long, long wail, like a wailing of wind,—sinks quavering into a chuckle,—rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before,—breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter,—and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a little child. The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly—though not entirely—in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you think of madness. And I imagine a corresponding incongruity in the soul of the creature. I know that she loves me,—that she would throw away her poor life for me at an instant’s notice. I am sure that she would grieve if I were to die. But she would not think about the matter like other dogs,—like a dog with hanging ears, for example. She is too savagely close to Nature for that. Were she to find herself alone with my corpse in some desolate place, she would first mourn wildly for her friend; but, this duty performed, she would proceed to ease her sorrow in the simplest way possible,—by eating him,—by cracking his bones between those long wolf’s-teeth of hers. And thereafter, with spotless conscience, she would sit down and utter to the moon the funeral cry of her ancestors.

It fills me, that cry, with a strange curiosity not less than with a strange horror,—because of certain extraordinary vowellings in it which always recur in the same order of sequence, and must represent particular forms of animal speech,—particular ideas. The whole thing is a song,—a song of emotions and thoughts not human, and therefore humanly unimaginable. But other dogs know what it means, and make answer over the miles of the night,—sometimes from so far away that only by straining my hearing to the uttermost can I detect the faint response. The words—(if I may call them words)—are very few; yet, to judge by their emotional effect, they must signify a great deal. Possibly they mean things myriads of years old,—things relating to odors, to exhalations, to influences and effluences inapprehensible by duller human sense,—impulses also, impulses without name, bestirred in ghosts of dogs by the light of great moons.

Could we know the sensations of a dog,—the emotions and the ideas of a dog, we might discover some strange correspondence between their character and the character of that peculiar disquiet which the howl of the creature evokes. But since the senses of a dog are totally unlike those of a man, we shall never really know. And we can only surmise, in the vaguest way, the meaning of the uneasiness in ourselves. Some notes in the long cry,—and the weirdest of them,—oddly resemble those tones of the human voice that tell of agony and terror. Again, we have reason to believe that the sound of the cry itself became associated in human imagination, at some period enormously remote, with particular impressions of fear. It is a remarkable fact that in almost all countries (including Japan) the howling of dogs has been attributed to their perception of things viewless to man, and awful,—especially gods and ghosts;—and this unanimity of superstitious belief suggests that one element of the disquiet inspired by the cry is the dread of the supernatural. To-day we have ceased to be consciously afraid of the unseen;—knowing that we ourselves are supernatural,—that even the physical man, with all his life of sense, is more ghostly than any ghost of old imagining: but some dim inheritance of the primitive fear still slumbers in our being, and wakens perhaps, like an echo, to the sound of that wail in the night.

Whatever thing invisible to human eyes the senses of a dog may at times perceive, it can be nothing resembling our idea of a ghost. Most probably the mysterious cause of start and whine is not anything _seen_. There is no anatomical reason for supposing a dog to possess exceptional powers of vision. But a dog’s organs of scent proclaim a faculty immeasurably superior to the sense of smell in man. The old universal belief in the superhuman perceptivities of the creature was a belief justified by fact; but the perceptivities are not visual. Were the howl of a dog really—as once supposed—an outcry of ghostly terror, the meaning might possibly be, “_I smell Them!_”—but not, “_I see Them!_” No evidence exists to support the fancy that a dog can see any forms of being which a man cannot see.

But the night-howl of the white creature in my close forces me to wonder whether she does not _mentally_ see something really terrible,—something which we vainly try to keep out of moral consciousness: the ghoulish law of life. Nay, there are times when her cry seems to me not the mere cry of a dog, but the voice of the law itself,—the very speech of that Nature so inexplicably called by poets the loving, the merciful, the divine! Divine, perhaps, in some unknowable ultimate way,—but certainly not merciful, and still more certainly not loving. Only by eating each other do beings exist! Beautiful to the poet’s vision our world may seem,—with its loves, its hopes, its memories, its aspirations; but there is nothing beautiful in the fact that life is fed by continual murder,—that the tenderest affection, the noblest enthusiasm, the purest idealism, must be nourished by the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood. All life, to sustain itself, must devour life. You may imagine yourself divine if you please,—but you have to obey that law. Be, if you will, a vegetarian: none the less you must eat forms that have feeling and desire. Sterilize your food; and digestion stops. You cannot even drink without swallowing life. Loathe the name as we may, we are cannibals;—all being essentially is One; and whether we eat the flesh of a plant, a fish, a reptile, a bird, a mammal, or a man, the ultimate fact is the same. And for all life the end is the same: every creature, whether buried or burnt, is devoured,—and not only once or twice,—nor a hundred, nor a thousand, nor a myriad times! Consider the ground upon which we move, the soil out of which we came;—think of the vanished billions that have risen from it and crumbled back into its latency to feed what becomes our food! Perpetually we eat the dust of our race,—_the substance of our ancient selves_.

But even so-called inanimate matter is self-devouring. Substance preys upon substance. As in the droplet monad swallows monad, so in the vast of Space do spheres consume each other. Stars give being to worlds and devour them; planets assimilate their own moons. All is a ravening that never ends but to recommence. And unto whomsoever thinks about these matters, the story of a divine universe, made and ruled by paternal love, sounds less persuasive than the Polynesian tale that the souls of the dead are devoured by the gods.

Monstrous the law seems, because we have developed ideas and sentiments which are opposed to this demoniac Nature,—much as voluntary movement is opposed to the blind power of gravitation. But the possession of such ideas and sentiments does but aggravate the atrocity of our situation, without lessening in the least the gloom of the final problem.

Anyhow the faith of the Far East meets that problem better than the faith of the West. To the Buddhist the Cosmos is not divine at all—quite the reverse. It is Karma;—it is the creation of thoughts and acts of error;—it is not governed by any providence;—it is a ghastliness, a nightmare. Likewise it is an illusion. It seems real only for the same reason that the shapes and the pains of an evil dream seem real to the dreamer. Our life upon earth is a state of sleep. Yet we do not sleep utterly. There are gleams in our darkness,—faint auroral wakenings of Love and Pity and Sympathy and Magnanimity: these are selfless and true;—these are eternal and divine;—these are the Four Infinite Feelings in whose after-glow all forms and illusions will vanish, like mists in the light of the sun. But, except in so far as we wake to these feelings, we are dreamers indeed,—moaning unaided in darkness,—tortured by shadowy horror. All of us dream; none are fully awake; and many, who pass for the wise of the world, know even less of the truth than my dog that howls in the night.

Could she speak, my dog, I think that she might ask questions which no philosopher would be able to answer. For I believe that she is tormented by the pain of existence. Of course I do not mean that the riddle presents itself to her as it does to us,—nor that she can have reached any abstract conclusions by any mental processes like our own. The external world to her is “a continuum of smells.” She thinks, compares, remembers, reasons by smells. By smell she makes her estimates of character: all her judgments are founded upon smells. Smelling thousands of things which we cannot smell at all, she must comprehend them in a way of which we can form no idea. Whatever she knows has been learned through mental operations of an utterly unimaginable kind. But we may be tolerably sure that she thinks about most things in some odor-relation to the experience of eating or to the intuitive dread of being eaten. Certainly she knows a great deal more about the earth on which we tread than would be good for us to know; and probably, if capable of speech, she could tell us the strangest stories of air and water. Gifted, or afflicted, as she is with such terribly penetrant power of sense, her notion of apparent realities must be worse than sepulchral. Small wonder if she howl at the moon that shines upon such a world!

And yet she is more awake, in the Buddhist meaning, than many of us. She possesses a rude moral code—inculcating loyalty, submission, gentleness, gratitude, and maternal love; together with various minor rules of conduct;—and this simple code she has always observed. By priests her state is termed a state of darkness of mind, because she cannot learn all that men should learn; but according to her light she has done well enough to merit some better condition in her next rebirth. So think the people who know her. When she dies they will give her an humble funeral, and have a sutra recited on behalf of her spirit. The priest will let a grave be made for her somewhere in the temple-garden, and will place over it a little sotoba bearing the text,—_Nyo-zé chikushō hotsu Bodai-shin_:[1] “Even within such as this animal, the Knowledge Supreme will unfold at last.”

[1] Lit., “the Bodhi-mind;”—that is to say, the Supreme Enlightenment, the intelligence of Buddhahood itself.

Bits of Poetry

I

Among a people with whom poetry has been for centuries a universal fashion of emotional utterance, we should naturally suppose the common ideal of life to be a noble one. However poorly the upper classes of such a people might compare with those of other nations, we could scarcely doubt that its lower classes were morally and otherwise in advance of our own lower classes. And the Japanese actually present us with such a social phenomenon.

Poetry in Japan is universal as the air. It is felt by everybody. It is read by everybody. It is composed by almost everybody,—irrespective of class and condition. Nor is it thus ubiquitous in the mental atmosphere only: it is everywhere to be heard by the ear, and _seen by the eye!_

As for audible poetry, wherever there is working there is singing. The toil of the fields and the labor of the streets are performed to the rhythm of chanted verse; and song would seem to be an expression of the life of the people in about the same sense that it is an expression of the life of cicadæ…. As for visible poetry, it appears everywhere, written or graven,—in Chinese or in Japanese characters,—as a form of decoration. In thousands and thousands of dwellings, you might observe that the sliding-screens, separating rooms or closing alcoves, have Chinese or Japanese decorative texts upon them;—and these texts are poems. In houses of the better class there are usually a number of _gaku_, or suspended tablets to be seen,—each bearing, for all design, a beautifully written verse. But poems can be found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil,—for example upon braziers, iron kettles, vases, wooden trays, lacquer ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,—even toothpicks! Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans. Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk-linings, and women’s crêpe-silk underwear. Poems are stamped or worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases, travelling-bags. Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco-pouches. It were a hopeless effort to enumerate a tithe of the articles decorated with poetical texts. Probably my readers know of those social gatherings at which it is the custom to compose verses, and to suspend the compositions to blossoming trees,—also of the Tanabata festival in honor of certain astral gods, when poems inscribed on strips of colored paper, and attached to thin bamboos, are to be seen even by the roadside,—all fluttering in the wind like so many tiny flags…. Perhaps you might find your way to some Japanese hamlet in which there are neither trees nor flowers, but never to any hamlet in which there is no visible poetry. You might wander,—as I have done,—into a settlement so poor that you could not obtain there, for love or money, even a cup of real tea; but I do not believe that you could discover a settlement in which there is nobody capable of making a poem.

II

Recently while looking over a manuscript-collection of verses,—mostly short poems of an emotional or descriptive character,—it occurred to me that a selection from them might serve to illustrate certain Japanese qualities of sentiment, as well as some little-known Japanese theories of artistic expression,—and I ventured forthwith, upon this essay. The poems, which had been collected for me by different persons at many different times and places, were chiefly of the kind written on particular occasions, and cast into forms more serried, if not also actually briefer, than anything in Western prosody. Probably few of my readers are aware of two curious facts relating to this order of composition. Both facts are exemplified in the history and in the texts of my collection,—though I cannot hope, in my renderings, to reproduce the original effect, whether of imagery or of feeling.

The first curious fact is that, from very ancient times, the writing of short poems has been practised in Japan even more as a moral duty than as a mere literary art. The old ethical teaching was somewhat like this:—“Are you very angry?—do not say anything unkind, but compose a poem. Is your best-beloved dead?—do not yield to useless grief, but try to calm your mind by making a poem. Are you troubled because you are about to die, leaving so many things unfinished?—be brave, and write a poem on death! Whatever injustice or misfortune disturbs you, put aside your resentment or your sorrow as soon as possible, and write a few lines of sober and elegant verse for a moral exercise.” Accordingly, in the old days, every form of trouble was encountered with a poem. Bereavement, separation, disaster called forth verses in lieu of plaints. The lady who preferred death to loss of honor, composed a poem before piercing her throat The samurai sentenced to die by his own hand, wrote a poem before performing _hara-kiri_. Even in this less romantic era of Meiji, young people resolved upon suicide are wont to compose some verses before quitting the world. Also it is still the good custom to write a poem in time of ill-fortune. I have frequently known poems to be written under the most trying circumstances of misery or suffering,—nay even upon a bed of death;-and if the verses did not display any extraordinary talent, they at least afforded extraordinary proof of self-mastery under pain…. Surely this fact of composition as ethical practice has larger interest than all the treatises ever written about the rules of Japanese prosody.

The other curious fact is only a fact of aesthetic theory. The common art-principle of the class of poems under present consideration is identical with the common principle of Japanese pictorial illustration. By the use of a few chosen words the composer of a short poem endeavors to do exactly what the painter endeavors to do with a few strokes of the brush,—to evoke an image or a mood,—to revive a sensation or an emotion. And the accomplishment of this purpose,—by poet or by picture-maker,—depends altogether upon capacity to _suggest_, and only to suggest. A Japanese artist would be condemned for attempting elaboration of detail in a sketch intended to recreate the memory of some landscape seen through the blue haze of a spring morning, or under the great blond light of an autumn after-noon. Not only would he be false to the traditions of his art: he would necessarily defeat his own end thereby. In the same way a poet would be condemned for attempting any _completeness_ of utterance in a very short poem: his object should be only to stir imagination without satisfying it. So the term _ittakkiri_—meaning “all gone,” or “entirely vanished,” in the sense of “all told,”—is contemptuously applied to verses in which the verse-maker has uttered his whole thought;—praise being reserved for compositions that leave in the mind the thrilling of a something unsaid. Like the single stroke of a temple-bell, the perfect short poem should set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long duration.

III

But for the same reason that Japanese short poems may be said to resemble. Japanese pictures, a full comprehension of them requires an intimate knowledge of the life which they reflect. And this is especially true of the emotional class of such poems,—a literal translation of which, in the majority of cases, would signify almost nothing to the Western mind. Here, for example, is a little verse, pathetic enough to Japanese comprehension:—

Chōchō ni!.. Kyonen shishitaru Tsuma koishi!