Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
THE KONTO TEMPLES AND THE DAIMONJI
As an evidence of the vitality of their faith the Monto Buddhists point to their great new temple in the southern part of the city. This Higashi Hohgwanji (Eastern Temple) was eight years in building, at an enormous cost, and is the largest temple in Japan. The squared trunks of keyaki-trees that support floor and roof are of a fine, close grain, that lasts for centuries without paint or preserving process. A collection of thick black ropes hangs from the beams, all of them made from the hair of pious women too poor to offer other contributions. The largest rope is five inches in diameter and two hundred and fifty feet long, the hair, wound in a dozen separate strands around a slender core of hemp, having been given by three thousand five hundred of the pious maids and matrons of the province of Echizen. Here and there in this giant cable are pathetic threads of white hair, the rest being deep black. Each summer pious men came to give their days’ labor to the temple when they had no money. The best workers in wood from several provinces, craftsmen descended from generations of wood-carvers, were brought together to labor for several years on the decorative panels, carving from solid blocks of hard keyaki wonderful birds and flowers, curling waves and dashing spray—designs full of movement and life.
This Shin, or Monto sect of Buddhists, is one of the richest and largest. Its temples are always built in the heart of cities, and always in pairs, a Nishi Hongwanji (Western Temple) and a Higashi Hongwanji (Eastern Temple) being found in Tokio, Kioto, and Osaka. At the Nishi Hongwanji of Kioto the vast interior discloses masses of carving, gilding, lacquer, damascening, and paintings on golden groundwork, and Monto altars are more splendid than those of any other sect. This Hongwanji is very rich, having been endowed with lands and mines in the days of Hideyoshi, its special protector, and the temple enclosure holds many relics of the Taiko. Connected with the temple is a great yashiki, or abbot’s residence, and the wall-screens and superb ceilings, brought from Hideyoshi’s castle at Fushimi, south of Kioto, to adorn the suites of reception-rooms, are finer than any in the imperial palace. The carved, gilded, and lacquered ceilings, the wonderful paintings on gold-leaf surfaces, the damascened mountings of the screens, the vast audience hall, the private rooms, the No pavilion, and the court where the enemies’ heads were displayed, are all magnificent. In a corner of the grounds is the pleasure-garden of Hideyoshi, a leafy, lake-centred paradise, and a marvel of artistic arrangement, with its winding water overhung with wistaria arbors, crossed by picturesque bridges, reflecting its stone lanterns, thickets of oleander, bamboo, pine, palm, and banana trees, and the two beautiful miniature palaces within the maze. On a pine-covered knoll is the thatched summer-house, where the fierce yet poetic warrior sat in his armor to watch the moon rise over the trees and turn the lake to a silver shield at his feet.
The Hongwanji services are splendid and impressive ceremonies; the companies of gorgeously-clad priests, the chanting, the incense, the lighted tapers, the bells, the opening of the doors of the golden shrine to display the image of Buddha, all bearing a strange resemblance to the worship of Romish churches. The faithful kneel, touch themselves, and use the rosary in prayer; and high mass at the Hongwanji might almost be high mass at St. Mark’s. Mass is celebrated at five o’clock on every morning of the year, and all day worshippers may come to kneel and pray before the altars. On the first and fifteenth days of each month special services are held at two o’clock in the afternoon, and every January recurs a week of prayer in honor of the founder of the Shin sect, when priests come from all parts of the empire to the mother-temple. The fortnightly afternoon services consist of readings from the sacred scriptures, and the chanting of Japanese and Chinese sacred poems by some twenty priests in black gauze stoles; a larger chorus, hidden behind the central shrine and altar, joining in and responding. The high-priest, in a cardinal and gold brocade kesa, sits directly facing the shrine, and at intervals touches the swinging plate of bronze used as a gong in the order of worship. The golden shrine, in a great gilded alcove, or chancel, bears countless gilded lotus flowers and candelabra, and slender columns of incense rise from the priests’ low reading-desk. At the conclusion of the chanted service the doors of the shrine are opened, and the sacred image displayed in a silence broken only by low strokes on the gong. Then the priests file away, and the faithful, flocking into the vacant place behind the rail, and kneeling where the priests have knelt, prostrate themselves, rub their rosaries in their palms, and repeat with ecstatic fervor the invocation: “Namu Amida Butsu” (Hail, Great Lord Buddha).
Every year, on the temple steps, the contributions of rice from distant provinces are stacked high in their cylindrical straw bales, themselves emblems of abundance. This rice is sent as an annual tribute from different parts of the empire to the head-temple of the sect at Kioto, to be used for offerings in the sanctuaries, for the priests’ food, and for alms to the poor.
The present high-priest has a longer genealogy than the Emperor, and is the seventy-third of his family, in direct succession, to live in the same Kioto yashiki. Besides his ecclesiastical rank, he is a nobleman of the first order, and moves in the imperial circle, his modern brougham with liveried men being often seen driving in and out of the palace enclosures in the western end of the city. Besides his temple services, he directs the large college which the Hongwanji maintains for the education of young men for the priesthood and for advanced philosophical studies for lay students. In its library is a vast literature of Buddhism, the scrolls of silk and paper in boxes of priceless gold lacquer facing the neatly-bound volumes of Sinnett, Sir Edwin Arnold, and other foreign writers. The college employs teachers of all European languages, and intends to send missionary workers to European countries. One of the priestly instructors, Mr. Akamatsu, spent several years in England, and has made comparative religions his great study. This admirable scholar is an admirable talker as well, and every student of Buddhism in Japan is referred to his vast stores of information. The breadth and liberality of Mr. Akamatsu’s views are shown in his belief in the brotherhood of all religions, their likeness, and their convergence towards “that far-off, divine event, towards which the whole creation moves.” It was he who drew up and translated that new canon of his faith, which introduced passages from the Sermon on the Mount, and who explained that these contained exactly the Buddhist tenets. The Shin Buddhists are called the Protestants of that faith. The priests may marry, and are not required to fast, to do penance, make pilgrimages, or abstain from animal food. They believe in salvation by faith in Buddha, and in those over-higher transmigrations of the soul which finally attain Nirvana. Their priests maintain that the presence of Christian missionaries has made no difference with their people, the scholarly and intelligent seeing that the two faiths differ only in a few articles and practices. For the lower orders, these spiritual shepherds declare Buddhism to be the better religion, its practice for centuries having made the masses the gentle, kindly, patient, and contented souls that they are. One priest, sent to Europe to study the effects of Christianity, reported that vice, crime, and misery were greater there than in Japan, and that the belief of the west seemed less able to repress those evils than the belief of the east. These Monto priests, too, express broad views about the reciprocity of nations and the fair exchange of missionaries. Now that English clergymen and thinkers study Buddhism in the monasteries of Ceylon, avowing their acceptance of the articles with much sacred ceremony, Monto apostles may yet preach to the people of England and America. However this may be, the priests do not fear the proselyting labors of the Doshisha teachers in Kioto, and speak warmly of its good works, and particularly of its hospital and training-school for nurses.
In 1885 the first American missionaries came to Kioto, and as the sacred city is beyond the treaty limits, the college and hospital are maintained under the name of the Doshisha company, and the foreigners engaged in the work are ostensibly in Japanese employ. Back of the Christian Japanese, who stands as president of this company, are the rich Mission Boards, which furnish the money, and direct its expenditure and the method of work. Each teacher in the Doshisha school is really a missionary, and outside the class-room carries on active evangelical work. School buildings, hospital, and residences for the foreign teachers all front on the high yellow walls of the imperial palace grounds, significant testimony to the changes that have come, the barriers and prejudices that have given way. The school is crowded to its furthest capacity, the hospital is besieged, and physicians overworked. The teachers claim that all the students are Christians, that the new religion is spreading, and that the people are most anxious to know about it. While they do not affirm that Buddhism and the old religions are dying, the success of their work sustains their conviction. They have erected substantial brick buildings and comfortable dwellings, and have a general air of permanency. The choice of Dr. J. C. Berry as one of the pioneers in this enterprise was most fortunate; his tact and urbanity having availed as much in dealing with the Japanese authorities as his zeal and ability in planning and promoting the work, and an exceptional staff has been gathered around him.
Of foreign missions in Japan there are the French Catholic, Russian-Greek, English and Canadian workers belonging to both Established Church and dissenting sects, while the foreign Mission Boards of the United States have more than three hundred agents and teachers in Japan, nearly all of whom have families. Meanwhile, 191,968 Shinto temples, 14,849 Shinto priests, and the whole influence of the Government encourages this state religion, of which the Emperor is the visible head. There are 72,039 Buddhist temples, and 56,266 Buddhist priests and consecrated nuns proclaim that faith, while pilgrims to the thirty-three famous Kwannons of the empire do not lessen in number. A large fraction of the people profess no religion whatever, among whom are many of the younger generation of nobles, who, having studied and lived abroad, have adopted materialism, atheism, or agnosticism, like other foreign fashions. When an American devotee of theosophy expounded his occult science in a round of temple addresses he aroused a polite interest, but caused no excitement and attracted no body of followers. A Unitarian agent enjoyed greatest favor among the highest circles of the capital, his system of higher philosophy appealing strongly to those cultivated thinkers and men of letters.
The common people, like the ignorant of other races, do not at all comprehend the religion they do profess, observing its forms as a habit or a matter of blind convention, and celebrating its events with ceremonies and decorations, festivals and anniversaries, whose significance they cannot explain. Japanese streets suddenly blossom out with flags and lanterns at every door-way and along miles of eaves, and if you ask a shopkeeper what this rejoicing means, he will reply, “Wakarimasen,” or “Shirimasen” (I do not know). Then some learned man tells you that it is the anniversary of the death of Jimmu Tenno, or the autumn festival, when the first rice of the garnered crop is offered to the gods by the Emperor in the palace chapel, by the priests at every Shinto shrine, and at every household altar in pious homes, or some other traditional occasion kept as a Government holiday. Closing the Government offices on Sunday, and making that a day of rest, was a matter of practical convenience merely, and the result of the adoption of a uniform calendar with the rest of the world, and a modern military establishment on foreign models.
One of the festivals of a religious character which is understood by the people, and is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all Kioto’s great summer illuminations, is that of the Daimonji, at the end of the Bon Matsuri, or Festival of the Dead. According to Buddhist belief, the spirits of the departed return to earth for three days in mid-August, visiting their families and earthly haunts, and flitting back to their graves on the night of the third day. During the continuance of the Bon Matsuri, lanterns and paper strips are hung in front of those houses in which a death has occurred during the year, and burning tapers and bowls of food are set before the little household shrines. Alike in the backs of shops, in the humblest abodes, and in villas and noble yashikis, lights, offerings, and fragrant incense welcome back the dead. In the cemeteries the bamboo sticks at each gravestone are daily filled with fresh flowers, and on the night of their return the spirits are guided to their resting-places by the light of lanterns and oil-tapers burning throughout these cities of their silent habitation. This beautiful custom, sanctified by the observance of many centuries, is tinged with little sadness, and the last night of the Festival of the Dead is the great Festival of Lanterns, the most brilliant of the long, gay, fantastic Kioto summer.
We were kindly invited by a Japanese gentleman to witness the illumination from the upper story of a pagoda-like school-house, that rose high above all the roofs in the heart of the city. Two hundred children were chirping and chattering in the open-sided class-rooms of the lower floors, all eager to see the Daimonji, the great signal-fires on the hills. All sat on their heels in orderly rows, and silently bobbed to the mats at sight of us, going on afterwards with their merry babble, which all through the summer evening floated up to us in happy chorus.
As dusk gave way to dark, we beheld a glimmer of light like a waving torch on the side of the mountain that stands like a tower beyond Maruyama. Another and another flash shone out against the dark face of Daimonji-yama’s long slope, until the flames joined and lines of fire ran upward, touched, crossed, and finally blazed out in the gigantic written character Dai, in outline not unlike a capital A. Next a junk appeared in fiery outlines on the slope north of the city; another mystic character glowed on the next hill; and to the north-west a smaller Dai showed, like the reflection of the first huge symbol. Full in the west gleamed a torii, a pillared gate-way of fire. From every house-top and from the bridges came the shouts of enthusiastic spectators, and the children in the rooms below us twittered like a box full of sparrows. For centuries the priests of mountain temples have taught their simple parishioners to lay their gathered firewood in the proper lines, and regular trenches mark the course of each device. The longer lines of the big Dai are each a half-mile in length, and the five miles’ distance of our point of view dwarfed them to perfect proportions. These fiery symbols burned for half an hour before they began to waver, and long after their images still danced and burned in our vision against the succeeding blackness.
Down in the city the crowds surged through the lanterned streets, each adding the illumination of his hand-lantern to the scene. The river-bed was all recrossing lines and arches of lights, and myriad points of uncovered flames were reflected in the waters. The hill-sides twinkled and glowed with the innumerable torches in the cemeteries, and thus, lighted back to their tombs by all the city and the hill-side, the Buddhist spirits rest until the next midsummer season recalls them to their joyous Kioto.