Hearn - Gleanings In Buddha-Fields

LAFCADIO HEARNS GLEANINGS IN THE BUDDHA-FIELDS

The third book of Lafcadio Hearns Japanese period, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields is a volume of philosophical essays and sketches inspired by the teachings of Buddha. Through a series of loosely connected essays, the author offers readers a wealth of insights into Japanese life, art and religion. When the book was first published in 1897, it attracted the attention of the New York Times: it is only Mr. Hearn who has made us understand something of the Japanese way of looking at life and things, something of that religion which is the very soul and substance of Japanese existence, thought, and action. Todays readers are sure to recognize the elegance and depth of thought which have made the work a classic.

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LAFCADIO HEARNS GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS

LAFCADIO HEARN

First published in 2005 by
Kegan Paul Limited

Published 2013 by Routledge

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Kegan Paul, 2005

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ISBN 13: 978-0-710-31122-1 (hbk)

GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS

A LIVING GOD

I

OF whatever dimension, the temples or shrines of pure Shint are all built in the same archaic style. The typical shrine is a windowless oblong building of unpainted timber, with a very steep overhanging roof; the front is the gable end; and the upper part of the perpetually closed doors is wooden latticework, usually a grating of bars closely set and crossing each other at right angles. In most cases the structure is raised slightly above the ground on wooden pillars; and the queer peaked faade, with its visor-like apertures and the fantastic projections of beam-work above its gable-angle, might remind the European traveler of certain old Gothic forms of dormer. There is no artificial color. The plain wood 1 soon turns, under the action of rain and sun, to a natural grey, varying according to surface exposure from the silvery tone of birch bark to the sombre grey of basalt. So shaped and so tinted, the isolated country yashiro may seem less like a work of joinery than a feature of the scenery, a rural form related to nature as closely as rocks and trees, a something that came into existence only as a manifestation of Ohotsuchi-no-Kami, the Earth-god, the primeval divinity of the land.

Why certain architectural forms produce in the beholder a feeling of weirdness is a question about which I should like to theorize some day: at present I shall venture only to say that Shint shrines evoke such a feeling. It grows with familiarity instead of weakening; and a knowledge of popular beliefs is apt to intensify it. We have no English words by which these queer shapes can be sufficiently described, much less any language able to communicate the peculiar impression which they make. Those Shint terms which we loosely render by the words temple and shrine are really untranslatable;I mean that the Japanese ideas attaching to them cannot be conveyed by translation. The so-called august house of the Kami is not so much a temple, in the classic meaning of the term, as it is a haunted room, a spirit-chamber, a ghost-house; many of the lesser divinities being veritably ghosts, ghosts of great warriors and heroes and rulers and teachers, who lived and loved and died hundreds or thousands of years ago. I fancy that to the Western mind the word ghost-house will convey, better than such terms as shrine and temple, some vague notion of the strange character of the Shint miya or yashiro, containing in its perpetual dusk nothing more substantial than symbols or tokens, the latter probably of paper. Now the emptiness behind the visored front is more suggestive than anything material could possibly be; and when you remember that millions of people during thousands of years have worshiped their great dead before such yashiro, that a whole race still believes those buildings tenanted by viewless conscious personalities, you are apt also to reflect how difficult it would be to prove the faith absurd. Nay! in spite of Occidental reluctances, in spite of whatever you may think it expedient to say or not to say at a later time about the experience, you may very likely find yourself for a moment forced into the attitude of respect toward possibilities. Mere cold reasoning will not help you far in the opposite direction. The evidence of the senses counts for little: you know there are ever so many realities which can neither be seen nor heard nor felt, but which exist as forces, tremendous forces. Then again you cannot mock the conviction of forty millions of people while that conviction thrills all about you like the air, while conscious that it is pressing upon your psychical being just as the atmosphere presses upon your physical being. As for myself, whenever I am alone in the presence of a Shint shrine, I have the sensation of being haunted; and I cannot help thinking about the possible apperceptions of the haunter. And this tempts me to fancy how I should feel if I myself were a god, dwelling in some old Izumo shrine on the summit of a hill, guarded by stone lions and shadowed by a holy grove.