The colourless matted room is wide and low. In front between the sombre pennants is the inner sanctuary. Gods on either side on lacquered tables set against the walls; at the end, beyond more lacquered tables, two brocaded masses rise like square coffins on a raised daïs; between stand figures of the gods, white-faced Benten and Kannon, Lady of Mercy. The red tables bear many-coloured sweets and biscuits heaped high on metal plates, in metal cups; offerings to the spirits of the dead _Shōgun_ whose tablets lie enshrined behind those masses of brocade. A bronze bowl on the floor filled with grey ash sends forth filmy clouds of incense. There is no sound. Behind the temple, through two open spaces of pebbled squares, each reached by a score of granite steps, is the tomb; a smooth, round mass of stone encircled with a breast-high parapet of bronze; all around a sweep of grey pebbles. That is all. And yet standing here I wonder whether the dead _Shōgun_ have not rightly chosen? Whether their resting-place is not more truly beautiful than the beauty of sombre ornament in the temple, than the riotous carving of the gateways. The porch was Beauty’s body, arrayed, adorned; here lies Beauty’s soul, naked and eternal. IX AMIDA BUTSU 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. * * * * *