Kokoro | Page 6

the archipelago.
The gods, indeed, remain,--haunt their homes upon the hills, diffuse a
soft religious awe through the twilight of their groves, perhaps because
they are without form and substance. Their shrines seldom pass utterly
into oblivion, like the dwellings of men. But every Shinto temple is
necessarily rebuilt at more or less brief intervals; and the holiest,--the
shrine of Ise,--in obedience to immemorial custom, must be demolished
every twenty years, and its timbers cut into thousands of tiny charms,
which are distributed to pilgrims.
From Aryan India, through China, came Buddhism, with its vast
doctrine of impermanency. The builders of the first Buddhist temples in
Japan--architects of another race--built well: witness the Chinese
structures at Kamakura that have survived so many centuries, while of
the great city which once surrounded them not a trace remains. But the
psychical influence of Buddhism could in no land impel minds to the
love of material stability. The teaching that the universe is an illusion;
that life is but one momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all
attachment to persons, to places, or to things must be fraught with
sorrow; that only through suppression of every desire--even the desire
of Nirvana itself--can humanity reach the eternal peace, certainly
harmonized with the older racial feeling. Though the people never
much occupied themselves with the profounder philosophy of the
foreign faith, its doctrine of impermanency must, in course of time,
have profoundly influenced national character. It explained and
consoled; it imparted new capacity to bear all things bravely; it
strengthened that patience which is a trait of the race. Even in Japanese
art--developed, if not actually created, under Buddhist influence--the
doctrine of impermanency has left its traces. Buddhism taught that
nature was a dream, an illusion, a phantasmagoria; but it also taught
men how to seize the fleeting impressions of that dream, and how to
interpret them in relation to the highest truth. And they learned well. In
the flushed splendor of the blossom-bursts of spring, in the coming and
the going of the cicada, in the dying crimson of autumn foliage, in the
ghostly beauty of snow, in the delusive motion of wave or cloud, they

saw old parables of perpetual meaning. Even their calamities--fire,
flood, earthquake, pestilence-- interpreted to them unceasingly the
doctrine of the eternal Vanishing.
All things which exist in Time must perish. The forests, the
mountains,--all things thus exist. In Time are born all things having
desire.
The Sun and Moon, Sakra himself with all the multitude of his
attendants, will all, without exception, perish; there is not one that will
endure.
In the beginning things were fixed; in the end again they separate:
different combinations cause other substance; for in nature there is no
uniform and constant principle.
All component things must grow old; impermanent are all component
things. Even unto a grain of sesamum seed there is no such thing as a
compound which is permanent. All are transient; all have the inherent
quality of dissolution.
All component things, without exception, are impermanent, unstable,
despicable, sure to depart, disintegrating; all are temporary as a
mirage, as a phantom, or as foam.... Even as all earthen vessels made
by the potter end in being broken, so end the lives of men.
And a belief in matter itself is unmentionable and inexpressible,--it is
neither a thing nor no-thing: and this is known even by children and
ignorant persons.

IV
Now it is worth while to inquire if there be not some compensatory
value attaching to this impermanency and this smallness in the national
life.
Nothing is more characteristic of that life than its extreme fluidity. The

Japanese population represents a medium whose particles are in
perpetual circulation. The motion is in itself peculiar. It is larger and
more eccentric than the motion of Occidental populations, though
feebler between points. It is also much more natural,--so natural that it
could not exist in Western civilization. The relative mobility of a
European population and the Japanese population might be expressed
by a comparison between certain high velocities of vibration and
certain low ones. But the high velocities would represent, in such a
comparison, the consequence of artificial force applied; the slower
vibrations would not. And this difference of kind would mean more
than surface indications could announce. In one sense, Americans may
be right in thinking themselves great travelers. In another, they are
certainly wrong; the man of the people in America cannot compare, as
a traveler, with the man of the people in Japan And of course, in
considering relative mobility of populations, one must consider chiefly
the great masses, the workers,--not merely the small class of wealth. In
their own country, the Japanese are the greatest travelers of any
civilized people. They are the greatest travelers because, even in a