Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life

"That," said the painter, "will be an easy thing to paint." And he made the picture in a very little time. It was much like Shuntoku-maru; and the woman rejoiced as she departed.

I went to another part of the garden where there were tame deer, and a "golden bear" in a cage, and peafowl in an aviary, and an ape. The people fed the deer and the bear with c...

They said in answer to the questions asked of them that the terrible weather was caused only by the anger of the male serpent, seeking vengeance for the loss of its mate,--which...

No. Ancestor-worship in its primitive form may be a symbol only of truth. It may be an index or foreshadowing only of the new moral duty which larger knowledge must force upon a...

Modern science assures us that the passion of first love, so far as the individual may be concerned, is "absolutely antecedent to all relative experience whatever(1)." In other...

There came to that home one morning, as if seeking alms, a traveling nun; and the child, hearing her Buddhist cry of "_Ha--i! ha--i!_" ran to the gate. And presently a house-ser...

All song, all melody, all music, means only some evolution of the primitive natural utterance of feeling,--of that untaught speech of sorrow, joy, or passion, whose words are to...

Meanwhile, the theatres were celebrating the war after a much more complete fashion. It is no exaggeration to say that almost every episode of the campaign was repeated upon the...

From Aryan India, through China, came Buddhism, with its vast doctrine of impermanency. The builders of the first Buddhist temples in Japan--architects of another race--built we...

Larger than all anticipation the West appeared to him,--a world of giants; and that which depresses even the boldest Occidental who finds himself, without means or friends, alon...

THE papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan,--for which reason they have been grouped under the title Kokoro (heart). Written with...

Foremost among the moral sentiments of Shinto is that of loving gratitude to the past,--a sentiment having no real correspondence in our own emotional life. We know our past bet...

In the beginning, of course, this mutual antagonism was racial, and therefore natural; and the irrational violence of prejudice and malignity developed at a later day was inevit...

I did not answer; thinking of the text, _In all the world there is not one spot even so large as a mustard-seed where he has not surrendered his body for the sake of creatures_....

The prodigious complexity of the methods by which Science has arrived at conclusions so strangely in harmony with the ancient thought of the East, may suggest the doubt whether...

It costs only forty-four sen to burn a child. The son of one of my neighbors was burned a few days ago. The little stones with which he used to play lie there in the sun just as...

It soon became evident that the foreign "barbarians" were not to be driven away. Hundreds had come, from the East as well as from the West; and all possible measures for their p...

Haru had cause for jealousy; but she was too much of a child to guess the cause at once; and her servants too fond of her to suggest it. Her husband had been accustomed to pass...

The far-famed Yugyo Shonin, of the temple of Fujisawa in Kagami, who traveled constantly in Japan to preach the law of Buddha in all the provinces, chanced to be passing over th...