Kakemono

Buddhism is not one but many; the same faith and the same nation which produces the squalor, dirt and commercial profanity of Asak’sa can create the peace and purity of Rinzaki, while Shiba’s riot of impossible colouring is born of the same religion and the same people as the stern beauty of the Hongwanji; for the temples of the Shin sect are severe as a Protestant cathedral, as a Presbyterian church, only they are built by a race of artists.

Kannon of Asak’sa is popular, but the beautiful Hongwanji at Kyoto, finished a few years ago, at a cost of eight million yen, was built mainly by the peasants, who contributed not only in money but in kind, sending their most beautiful trees to be cut into beams, offering themselves to hew and to build, giving always of their best. And each beam was raised to its place by long hawsers made of women’s hair, the soft black hair of youth or womanhood, with here and there the shrivelled grey hairs of age. And the hawsers are suspended in the temple for men and missionaries to ponder on.

Buddhism is not dead but living. The old, the weary, and the poorest poor creep into the Hongwanji in Japan, and the pale matting of these temples is covered with the square-holed copper coins worth a quarter of a farthing, which they roll over the matting towards the altar from the corners where they kneel and pray.

Nagoya’s Hongwanji is the glory of the town. It stands in the thick of the city, in a great wide courtyard of stamped earth set round with trees. Its sculptured gates of bronze are always open, and once inside them the busy town with its factories and its workshops, its quarter of a million of inhabitants, is gone, for the wide courtyard sets a lavish space of stillness between the city and the shrine. A space so wide and ample that the temple’s curves stand out clear and sharp as a solitary tower on an empty plain.

Built all of wood, unpainted, unstained; and so faded by the sunshine, so worn with age, and weather beaten with the wind and rain, that in the glow of the summer’s sun the temple stands against the brilliant light faded and grey, a beauty of pathos, not of joy.

Under the eaves the saints and sacred animals are carved in tender lines of love. Age has touched and left them colourless, and the infinite pity of the Buddha which enwraps creation, enfolding man and his brother the beast, looks from their eyes.

Inside there is peace and sober quiet. A wide low space suggestively divided into three with slender square pillars of wood, and behind, along the whole width of the temple a blaze of gold, sombre and rich. No riot of impossible colouring here, no profusion of design and decoration; sober, almost stern in its beauty, the centre and the two side altars shine in the dim light.

A bronze figure of Buddha, dead black against the gold, stands on his lotus-leaf with uplifted hands. It is Buddha as the God of Mercy, the living, loving god, Amida Butsu—Eternal Buddha.

Dull gold and black, alive in the altar, shadowly repeated in the pale yellow matting and in the grey age-stained wood, are all the decoration of the temple, save perfect purity and peace, and an atmosphere of quiet, enduring charity. For the Shin sect teaches that the law cannot be altered, that the eternal chain of cause and effect goes always and for ever on, that the wages and more than the wages of sin is death, that an act and its consequences roll ever onward through the world, and neither man nor time can stay them; it teaches that a man’s sorrows are made by his sins, but that Buddha is merciful and just, that he who is love gives love; love knows no sin, nor sin’s child, sorrow; without sin and sorrow is the world at rest.

Outside, the city labours, toils. Within, the workers kneel on the pure pale matting, and praying, roll their square-holed coins towards the image of Eternal Buddha, whose hand is raised to bless.