To know the Ah-ness of things (mono no aware wo shiru) is a phrase which is constantly recurring in Japanese literature, especially during the classical period. The learned critic Motoöri discusses it at great length in his treatise on the nature of poetry entitled Iso no Kami Shi-shuku-gen. It means to have a sensitive, emotional nature, the cœur sensible of the French, and applies more particularly to a capacity for receiving the impressions produced on man by Nature in her various moods.
Kenkō would doubtless have spurned the idea that for an accomplished gentleman, scholar, and poet like himself paternity was necessary in order to awaken the emotional sensibilities, though in the case of "such persons" as the rude peasant of his story this might very well be the case.
The followers of the various forms of religion and ethics practised in Japan have all claimed Kenkō as a teacher of their own set of doctrines. It is true that although he is in the main a Buddhist, he had, with the liberal comprehensiveness characteristic of the Japanese nation, more than a mere tolerance for other faiths. He not only showed a reverence for the Shinto deities, but was a profound student of the Confucian moral philosophy, and even of Taoism, that mass of vague speculations attributed to Laotze and his disciple Chwangtze. But it is a mistake to regard him as a partisan of any particular creed, or as a moral teacher at all. He tells us himself in the opening sentences of the Tsure-dzure-gusa that it was written to while away the live-long days of tedium (tsure-dzure), sitting with his ink-slab before him, and jotting down all manner of trifles as they presented themselves to his mind. If one of his
