Kakemono

The great God Buddha sits peaceful and still, a line of dark bronze against the blue sky, and the length of the garden is flooded with light. Two tall pink cherry-trees drop blu...

Like David’s harping to Saul distraught, the stillness of the garden, the dim greyness of the temple, washed pure the heart. The sin-freed soul floated out unfettered, and thoug...

The thousand steps by which I climbed are hidden, and the _chaya_, in the width of the brown road that touches cliff and sea, is so beneath my feet that its roof seems resting o...

“In the beginning,” says the Scripture, “the waters below were separated from the waters above,” and out of the void came this world of two dimensions, so cold, blue and beautif...

Luckily there was more, enough for endless tea that night, and to-morrow fresh water could be fetched. But my wash came to an abrupt end. Of course what I ought to have done was...

We were to sleep in Yoshida that night, and for us too it was time to go. So leaving our money on the edge of the fire-pit we crawled out of the hut. The image sitting on its he...

Over the sleeping sea, blue and still, beyond the watching headlands, out into the liquid sky above, where in utter majesty great Fuji rises one sheer line of beauty in the blue...

I think I understood. Colour, as colour, in that luminous, shadowless room, whose beauty was its line and its proportion, would have been not colour but a blot. Outside the rice...

But windows, wall-papers and beer-glasses are new growths, only just engrafted on to the life of the people. They are still thought of as something foreign, whereas pipes and po...

Besides art exhibitions, Japanese workmen go to the theatre, but this is a taste they share with many other nations; what is all their own is their love of pilgrimages, not only...

The programme was delightful, perfect, it only remained to carry it out. So we started, on the sorry horses of the upland regions of Japan, and the full moon fitful behind thick...

With one last swift glide we are out of the grey shadow, out under the blue sky. The green hills rise on either side, the water dimples in the sun. Slowly the grey moths flutter...

They came, down the polished passage, under the flaming sword of light, out into the open space before the tea-house, where the little policeman waited to command them to be pac...

Then the comely landlady called us to our bath; “the honourable hot water was ready,” and the plain daughter assisted us out of our clothes into our _kimono_ with an attention w...

For two hours he knelt upon the matting opening the beautifully made boxes of white unpainted wood. And we looked at large divining-crystals without fleck or flaw, at the pale c...

The little round platform of stamped earth sprinkled with sand, set in the midst of a huge amphitheatre of faces, shows small as a raft on the sea, and slight despite its purple...

Slowly the familiar walls, the matted floor, the half-opened _shōji_ insisted that the house was yet unswept, the first duty of a housewife still undone; and with a painful effo...

Inside these miles of walls, in his artificial solitude, year in, year out, the Son of Heaven dwelt. The life of the city, surging through its streets, surged up in vain; he cou...

=Shintō=, _lit._ the way of the gods. This, the native religion of Japan, is a combination of ancestor-and nature-worship. Its priesthood is not a caste, nor even a separate pro...