Chapter XV

The monastery and temple to which my self-appointed host was attached did not differ greatly in appearance from any large and high-class Japanese dwelling, dull and time-worn without, to be sure, but spacious, pleasing, and comfortable within. Word of the unexpected “distinguished guest” had evidently gone ahead, for as we turned into the grassless courtyard six or seven members of this particular group—in other words, half of it—lined up along the groove of the open sliding wall to bow me welcome. One of them wore the modern hair-cut and ordinary kimono of the Japanese layman, and was, as his appearance suggested, no priest or priest-to-be, but a temporal business manager—“bookkeeper,” my guide, with his limited English vocabulary, called him—such as attends to the worldly affairs of each temple. Besides him there were a dozen inmates, ranging from the head bonze, whose rank made him invisible to casual visitors, down to my cicerone, latest and therefore lowest in rank of the several youthful novices. When he had exchanged our shoes for slippers, these in turn to be abandoned in the polished wooden hallways at the entrance to the mat-carpeted rooms, and had washed from bamboo dippers at a sort of sanctified water-trough filled with glass-clear water from a spring up the hillside, the group from Osaka, three women among them, and I were shown to cushions in a matted room. The paper walls of this were decorated with painted bamboo branches, peacocks, and various species of birds that were no mean examples of the best Japanese art. Later on, when the other guests had departed, I was assigned to an adjoining suite of two rooms such as no Japanese inn I have ever inhabited can boast, and distinctly superior in decoration, size, and specklessness to the quarters reserved for the royal family in another monastery, which I was shown later in the day.

In short, there was nothing about the establishment, except the close-cropped heads, black robe-like kimonos, and rosaries of the inmates, to distinguish it from a sumptuous private residence accustomed to receive frequent guests. The three women, with that indifference to public exposure characteristic of the Japanese, changed from their road-worn kimonos to more decorative ones from their bags, merely turning their backs on us during the process. Boys as wooden-faced as the serving-lads of any layman inn, and hired in the same way for the same purpose, brought us the noonday meal with all the requisite kneeling and bowing of such service. I know not how often Caucasian visitors come to Koya-san, except that I saw no other foreigners than a group of Koreans during my whole pilgrimage, but certainly I was the sight of the town, with inmates of other monasteries constantly calling on one pretext or another to see this queer fellow and hear his giggle-producing speech. But there were evidences, too, of real culture, and certainly hints of European influence had crept in at some time, for though all the novices escorted me to the bath-room, they did not come inside to help me into the big square wooden tub of scalding water, or to pour it over me with the little wooden buckets scattered about the flooded floor. In fact, they even permitted me, almost without argument, to bathe before, instead of immediately after, the evening meal, sure proof of something un-Japanese.

But I am getting ahead of the story. Koya-san is strictly vegetarian in diet, as befits true Buddhists, though visitors often surreptitiously break this rule by fishing in their knapsacks. I felt no such inclination, however, by the time we had finished an excellent Japanese luncheon. Long experience had evidently taught the monks how to live well in spite of the injunction not to kill any living creature. While we—ladies and all, of course, though not the inmates—were topping off the meal with ephemeral native cigarettes, I noticed the men from Osaka were conferring in undertones with the temple “bookkeeper” and slipping into his hands a considerable sum of money. Not wishing to shirk my share, I called one of them aside and asked if this were a “donation” to cover the meal. No, it was merely for the purchase of a brace of prayers for their dead fathers and mothers; any donations to the temple in return for its hospitality could be made when I left. For a moment there seemed something strangely incongruous in this buying of priestly mummeries by doctors, lawyers, and merchants from a great city smudged by belching factory chimneys, some of whom read, and to a limited degree spoke, English. But do not millions of our own fellow-countrymen also purchase priestly prayers for their dead fathers and mothers?

I am writing no guide-book; hence I shall not tell in detail of the great monasteries, temples, “ancestral” and “golden” halls, and what not that I visited during the afternoon under the guidance of another “bookkeeper,” eager to improve his scanty and halting English. What stands out most clearly in memory is the taking of tea in plain but priceless Satsuma ware with the urbane head priests of several monasteries, and the private view of a large, newly constructed, yet strictly old-Buddhist building filled with the chief treasures of all the temples on the mountain-top,—tapestries, paintings, illuminated texts, statues, carvings by the famous Unkei, a whole résumé of the heyday of Japanese art. Then there was the long stroll through the great cemetery, more than a mile beneath towering _hinoki_ and massive evergreens of venerable age, in the shaded stillness of which are the myriad tombs, stone monuments of every size and age, blackened by time and in some cases decrepit with neglect, of the great men of bygone Japan,—mikados, _shoguns_, _daimyos_, _samurai_, monks, priests, and famous heroes. Not that they are all buried here, but it was, and is, the custom even of the strictest Shintoists among them to provide for a monument, with perhaps a lock of hair or one of their stray ribs under it, in the most sanctified Buddhist spot in the island empire.

There is no gain in running the risk of choosing wrong between two rival faiths; besides, who can say where Shintoism leaves off and Buddhism begins in Japanese mysticism? Perhaps the intermingling may be best expressed in the words of one of my traveled friends of Nippon, that “all Japanese _must_ be Shintoists”—for what is Shintoism, after all, but an almost chauvinistic patriotism?—but that “there is no reason in the world why they shall not be Buddhists also, or Christians, or even Christian Scientists for that matter.” If Christianity can overlook a certain amount of ancestor-worship among its disciples, as at least one branch of it seems able to do in the Orient, the statement is hardly an exaggeration. There is certainly no lack of the outward manifestations of their religion, be it single or multiple, among the Japanese, yet one looks almost in vain for any indication of what is referred to in the West as the “spiritual life.”

The garden variety of Japanese mankind follows the lead of their haughty nobles and rulers, and those of the rank and file who can do so inter some portion of themselves in the mammoth cemetery of Koya-san. Behind the “Hall of Ten Thousand Lamps” at the end of the long, funereal, yet peaceful avenue is the “Innermost Temple,” containing the remains of Kobo-Daishi, the China-trained monk who founded this great sanctuary some eleven hundred years ago, and beside it is the _Kotsu-do_, or “Hall of Bones.” Through the slatted door of this paper-prayer plastered and gruesome circular edifice is tossed a bone or a wisp of hair of those who have not attained the dignity of a monument, or even of a grave, on the sacred mountain-top, yet who wish to improve their chances in the next existence by lying, even in part, beside the holy founder of Koya-san.

The great painting of a hell worthy of the imagination of the most savage of medieval Christians, with devils gleefully forking naked sinning souls into the bottomless brimstone pit, and all the rest of the ridiculous Dante-esque details, which decorates the wall of one of the smaller temples particularly popular with the rank and file, need not have caused any great surprise had I recalled how even widely separated religions are prone to steal their most effective thunder from one another. What was really more incongruous was to come upon a score of the younger monks and novices, stripped to slight garb that displayed their athletic forms to advantage, finishing off their day of university curriculum on the monasterial tennis-court. In fact, it transpired, the most modest and retiring of the young recluses in “our” temple was the tennis champion of all Koya-san. As I may have remarked before, there is no one like the Japanese to mix casually the old and the new, the prehistoric with the latest thing of the day.

One would scarcely have recognized these tennis-players, or the rather diffident youths who squatted about their foreign visitor all that evening, in the gorgeously attired and self-confident monks and novices who performed the impressive Buddhist service early next morning. I had asked permission to attend this, even though it meant being called at five. It was nearer six when all was ready, and in the meantime I was graciously granted an audience by the chief bonze of our temple. This yielded little beyond the giving and taking of politenesses through an interpreter, and the fact that the chief himself set the rest of the monastery a bad example in the matter of shaving. I was reminded that of all the miscellaneous information pumped out of me by the more youthful of my hosts during my stay what seemed to create the greatest wonder was the assertion that I, and millions of my fellow-countrymen like me, made it a practice to shave every day. Had a similar custom prevailed within the monastery, the faces of the solemn dozen who gathered at length about the altar in a dimly lighted interior room would have seemed less out of keeping with their rich and florid robes and their apocalyptical occupation.

The service lasted for an hour, but as I have no gift for proselyting I shall make no attempt to explain its inner mysticism. The “bookkeeper,” who knelt between me and the three other pilgrims who made up the congregation, mentioned that it was dedicated to the ancestors of all those present, and through them, I suppose, back to the Kami, the original gods of the Japanese people. For the first half-hour the dozen robe-wearers sat motionless on their feet about the four sides of the barbarically intricate and richly glittering altar, incessantly chanting responses to the singsong intonations of the head priest, occupying the central position. The author of these quatrains evidently had not strained his sinews of originality, for most of them consisted of the endless repetition of the same few meaningless words. Lest I yield unwittingly to the soporific effect of this incessant droning, I took to studying the countless details of the altar. My ecclesiastical learning is limited, however, and I could find no meaning in, nor even English words for, any of them, except half a dozen chickens cut out of paper. What in the name of religion have chickens to do with one’s ancestors? Reminders of their favorite dish, or their calling, or perhaps their chief vice, or....

But the dozen gorgeous figures, weary at last perhaps, even though they were Japanese, of sitting on their feet, rose and took to parading entirely around the altar. Their stockinged feet made not a sound on the soft matting, but their chanting never for a moment hesitated, while the ringing of bells and the striking of cymbals steadily increased, and more incense clouded the already dimly seen room. The youths, who had shown a tendency to giggle at the sound of English, or even less provocation, the day before, refused now to catch a hint of my amusement at their antics, and continued their march with the solemnity of ancient stone images. Now and again one or the other of them became for a brief space the soloist, while the rest of the group chanted the responses. Toward the end of the ceremony the names of the three Japanese pilgrims squatting beside me were chanted out one after the other, and they rose one by one to sprinkle a pinch of incense into a smoldering bowl, and to receive a package of tissue-paper prayers or indulgences. They were doing this, whispered my cicerone, in honor of their own individual ancestors.

Perhaps it is not a bad idea after all, this ancestor-worship, at least in Japan, where the bygone are cremated instead of robbing the living of badly needed acreage. Most of us owe the old fellows something, and at least such ceremonies serve to keep them in mind. Running back through as much of my own as was awake, I was startled to find that I could only remember, or at least vizualize into a real being, a single one of my own departed forebears—since female ancestors count for nothing whatever in the Orient—and while I felt sure that the old gentleman would keenly have enjoyed the incense of a good Habana cigar, I could not see what....

But about that moment, fortunately, the service came to an abrupt end, and a much more important one, contained in lacquered cups and rice-bowls, was announced. An hour later the “bookkeeper” pocketed my donation in so unworldly a spirit as not even to count it, while the younger of my hosts donned their every-day black robes preparatory to seeing me off on my journey to the world below.