Buddhism; Folklore -- Japan; Japan -- Social life and customs
Anyhow the faith of the Far East meets that problem better than the
faith of the West. To the Buddhist the Cosmos is not divine at
all—quite the reverse. It is Karma;—it is the creation of thoughts and
acts of error;—it is not governed by any providence;—it is a
ghastliness, a nightmare. Likewise it is an illusion. It seems real
only for the same reason that the shapes and the pains of an evil dream
seem real to the dreamer. Our life upon earth is a state of sleep. Yet
we do not sleep utterly. There are gleams in our darkness,—faint
auroral wakenings of Love and Pity and Sympathy and Magnanimity: these
are selfless and true;—these are eternal and divine;—these are the Four
Infinite Feelings in whose after-glow all forms and illusions will
vanish, like mists in the light of the sun. But, except in so far as we
wake to these feelings, we are dreamers indeed,—moaning unaided in
darkness,—tortured by shadowy horror. All of us dream; none are fully
awake; and many, who pass for the wise of the world, know even less of
the truth than my dog that howls in the night.
Could she speak, my dog, I think that she might ask questions which no
philosopher would be able to answer. For I believe that she is
tormented by the pain of existence. Of course I do not mean that the
riddle presents itself to her as it does to us,—nor that she can have
reached any abstract conclusions by any mental processes like our own.
The external world to her is “a continuum of smells.” She thinks,
compares, remembers, reasons by smells. By smell she makes her
estimates of character: all her judgments are founded upon smells.
Smelling thousands of things which we cannot smell at all, she must
comprehend them in a way of which we can form no idea. Whatever she
knows has been learned through mental operations of an utterly
unimaginable kind. But we may be tolerably sure that she thinks about
most things in some odor-relation to the experience of eating or to the
intuitive dread of being eaten. Certainly she knows a great deal more
about the earth on which we tread than would be good for us to know;
and probably, if capable of speech, she could tell us the strangest
stories of air and water. Gifted, or afflicted, as she is with such
terribly penetrant power of sense, her notion of apparent realities
must be worse than sepulchral. Small wonder if she howl at the moon
that shines upon such a world!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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