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Lafcadio Hearn and
Japanese Buddhism
“In attempting a book upon a country so well trodden as Japan, I
could not hope — nor would I consider it prudent attempting — to discover
totally new things, but only to consider things in a totally new way. . . . The
studied aim would be to create, in the minds of the readers, a vivid impression of living
in Japan — not simply as an observer but as one taking part in the daily existence of
the common people, and thinking with their thoughts.”
So Lafcadio Hearn wrote to Harper’s Magazine in 1889 just prior to
leaving for Japan. He kept this promise so well that by his death in 1904 (as Koizumi
Yakumo, a Japanese citizen) he was acclaimed as one of America’s greatest prose
stylists and the most influential authority of his generation on Japanese culture. That
reputation has dimmed somewhat since then. Changing tastes in literary styles have made
Hearn’s work seem old-fashioned, and Japan’s astonishing absorption of Western
industrial methods and industrial values have made him for a time irrelevant.
Now interest in ancient Japanese culture and religion is again on the rise, and
Hearn’s work, devoted as it is to what he perceived as lasting and essential in
Japanese life, is experiencing a revival. From his essays and stories emerges a sensitive
and durable vision of how Buddhism was and still is lived in Japan — the ancient
Buddhist traditions, rituals, myths, and stories that are still preserved, and their
effects upon the beliefs and daily life of ordinary Japanese people.
Lafcadio Hearn was born on the Ionian island of Santa Maura in either June or August
1850 and died in Okubo, Japan in 1904. His father was an Irish surgeon major stationed in
Greece and his mother a Greek woman, famous for her beauty. It was she who named him
Lafcadio, after Leudakia, the ancient name of Santa Maura, one of the islands connected
with the legend of Sappho. In a relatively short lifespan of fifty-four years he managed
to live several different literary lives.
From Greece, at two years of age, he went to Ireland, where his father soon obtained a
dissolution of marriage from his mother. She was sent back to Greece. His father quickly
remarried and went off to India. That is the last Hearn saw of either of them.
His formal education consisted of one year at a Catholic school in France (he just
missed Guy de Maupassant, who entered the school a year later and who later became one of
his literary idols), and four years at St. Cuthbert’s in England, where he lost one
eye in a playing field accident. The disfigurement (the blinded eye was whitened, the good
eye protruded from overuse) helped to make Hearn a painfully sensitive and shy person for
the rest of his life. At seventeen, as a result of financial and personal misfortunes in
the family, he was withdrawn from school. A year later, his uncle gave him passage money
to America and advised him to look up a distant relative in Cincinnati. From then on Hearn
had to make his own way in the world.
After a year of homelessness and near-starvation in Cincinnati, Hearn got a job as an
editor for a trade journal and then as a reporter for the daily Enquirer. His
assignment was the night watch, his specialty sensational crimes and gory murders. He had
good contacts in the coroner’s office, and his small, shy figure and one-eyed face
did not arouse suspicion among the street people. His stories, with their ghastly
descriptions, were frequent features that titillated the Enquirer’s readers.
The editor reluctantly fired Hearn when rumors began to circulate that he was living with
a mulatto woman whom he insisted he had married. (He had, but Ohio law refused to
recognize mixed marriages.)
Another daily newspaper, the Cincinnati Commercial, hired him immediately.
Here Hearn was allowed to contribute brief scholarly essays, local color stories, and
prose poems, as well as the sensational stories that had got him his reputation. But he
was restless with this kind of newspaper work, and sick of Cincinnati. In 1877 he quit the
Commercial and left for New Orleans.
There he found work as a reporter for the struggling Item, though what he
reported was anything he fancied, most often sketches of Creole and Cajun life. His Item
essays were eccentric, flamboyant, and often self-indulgent, but they caught the eye of
New Orleans’ literary establishment. When the city’s two largest newspapers
merged to form the Times-Democrat, Hearn was invited to be its literary editor.
He translated and adapted French stories (principally Gautier, Maupassant, Flaubert, and
Loti — none of whom yet had a reputation in America); he wrote original stories in
the lavish prose style he was perfecting at that time; and he collected local legends and
factual narratives. His subjects ranged from Buddhism to Russian literature, from
popularizations of science to European anti-Semitism. Altogether he offered the people of
New Orleans such unpredictable and exotic fare that his reputation soon spread throughout
the South. By this time he had become a disciple of his contemporary, Robert Louis
Stevenson (or perhaps vice versa: they developed similarly mellifluous prose styles and
shared a fondness for fantastic and exotic subject matter). Hearn was enormously popular.
From these years in New Orleans date Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures, 1884,
Some Chinese Ghosts, 1887, and a novel, Chita, 1889.
In 1887 Hearn went to the West Indies for Harper’s Magazine and produced Two
Years in the French West Indies, 1890, and his last novel, Youma, 1890, an
unprecedented story about a slave rebellion.
In 1890 he went to Japan for Harper’s but soon became a school teacher in
Izumo, in a northern region then little influenced by Westernization. There he married
Koizumi Setsuko, the daughter of a Samurai. In 1891 he moved to Kumamoto Government
College.
Hearn was by now well known in America as an impressionistic prose painter of odd
peoples and places. For this he was at first celebrated and later deprecated. Yet much of
his Japanese work is of an entirely different quality and intention. He wrote to his
friend Chamberlin in 1893, “After for years studying poetical prose, I am forced now
to study simplicity. After attempting my utmost at ornamentation, I am converted by my own
mistakes. The great point is to touch with simple words.” The Atlantic Monthly
printed his articles on Japan and syndicated them to a number of newspapers. They were
enormously popular when they appeared and became even more so when they were published in
two volumes as Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894.
In 1895 Hearn became a Japanese citizen and took the name of Koizumi Yakumo. In 1896 he
became professor of literature at Tokyo Imperial University, a most prestigious academic
position in the most prestigious school in Japan. From then until his death he produced
his finest books: Exotics and Retrospectives, 1898, In Ghostly Japan,
1899, Shadowings, 1900, A Japanese Miscellany, 1901, Kwaidan,
1904, Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904. These were translated into
Japanese and became at least as popular in Japan as they did in America.
During the last two years of his life, failing health forced Hearn to give up his
position at Tokyo Imperial University. On September 26, 1904, he died of heart failure. He
had instructed his eldest son to put his ashes in an ordinary jar and to bury it on a
forested hillside. Instead, he was given a Buddhist funeral with full ceremony, and his
grave is to this day a place of pilgrimage perpetually decorated with flowers.
At the turn of the century, Hearn was considered one of the finest, if not the finest,
of American prose stylists. He was certainly one of the masters of the Stevensonian style.
As literary tastes changed, he was thought of more as a writer of pretty but dated essays
about Japanese tame crickets and of sentimental ghost stories. After his death, his
literary reputation was further damaged by the publication of several collections of his
florid earlier work. His all-but-final reputation was as a lush, frothy stylist whose
essays and stories were about as important as the pressed flowers likely to be found
between their pages.
In fact, Hearn’s Japanese writings demonstrate economy, concentration, and great
control of language, with little stylistic exhibitionism. Their attitude of uncritical
appreciation for the exotic and the mysterious is as unmistakably nineteenth century as
the fine prose idiom with which it is consistent.
In spite of the incredible changes that have taken place in Japan since Hearn’s
death in 1904, as an informant of Japanese life, literature, and religion he is still
amazingly reliable, because beneath the effects of industrialization, war, population
explosion, and prosperity much of Japanese life remains unchanged. For Hearn the old Japan
— the art, traditions, and myths that had persisted for centuries — was the only
Japan worth paying attention to. Two world wars and Japan’s astonishing emergence as
a modern nation temporarily extinguished the credibility of Hearn’s vision of
traditional Japanese culture. But both in the West and in Japan interest in the old forms
of Japanese culture is increasing. In Tokyo there are still thousands of people living the
old life by the traditional values alongside the most extreme effects of Westernization.
Pet crickets, for example, still command high prices, and more people apply their new
prosperity to learning tea ceremony, calligraphy, flower arrangement and sumi-e
painting than ever before. Ghost stories like those told by Hearn are popular on
television; three of his own were recently combined to make a successful movie that
preserves his title, Kwaidan.
One of the foreigners’ (and Westernized, secularized Japanese intellectuals’)
myths of Japan is that the Japanese are a fundamentally secular, irreligious people.
Nothing could be less true. The great temples swarm with pilgrims and are packed during
their major festivals. Buddhism is more popular than ever. Shinto and Shingon and Tendai
Buddhism perpetuate rites that began long before the dawn of Japanese history.
Although it is no longer true, if it ever was, that Japan is totally
“Westernized,” it is certainly the most Post-Modern of all the major nations
today. With an economy which has ceased to be based on the mechanical, industrial methods
of the nineteenth century (really because the old industrial capital structure was
destroyed and everything dates from 1946), Japan has moved into the electronic age more
completely than any other nation. Yet any Japanese who wishes can still make immediate
contact with the Stone Age.
Hearn foresaw the industrialization of Japan and her development of imperialist
ambitions. As much as possible he avoided the atmosphere of modernization, spending his
summers away from Tokyo at Yaizu, a small fishing village where today there is a Hearn
monument. His happiest period in Japan was the early years he spent as a country school
teacher in Matsue on the southwest coast. His house and garden there are still preserved,
and a Hearn museum is located next door. The essay “In a Japanese Garden” in his
book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan describes his home and Matsue.
Beginning with Charles Eliot’s Japanese Buddhism, there has grown up an
immense bibliography of Buddhological works in Western languages. Since World War II,
there is an ever greater store in the United States of books on Zen, which has become a
popular form of Existentialism. There is no interpreter of Japanese Buddhism quite like
Hearn, but he is not a Buddhologist. Far from it. Hearn was not a scholar, nor was he in
the Western sense a religious believer. What distinguishes him is an emotional
identification with the Buddhist way of life and with Buddhist cults. Hearn is as good as
anyone at providing an elementary grounding in Buddhist doctrine. But what he does
incomparably is to give his reader a feeling for how Buddhism is lived in Japan, its
persistent influence upon folklore, burial customs, children’s riddles, toys for sale
in the marketplace, and even upon the farmer’s ruminations in the field. For Hearn,
Buddhism is a way of life, and he is interested in the effects of its doctrine upon the
daily actions and common beliefs of ordinary people. Like the Japanese themselves, he
thinks of religion as something one does, not merely as something one believes, unlike the
orthodox Christian whose Athanasian Creed declares: “Whosoever would be saved, it is
necessary before all things that he believe . . .”
One of the things Hearn admires about Buddhism is its adaptability to the spiritual and
historic needs of a people. If they need a pantheon of gods, Buddhism makes room for them.
If they need to fix upon a savior, Buddhism provides one. But the Buddhist elite, the more
learned monks, never lose sight of the true doctrine. I will never forget a symposium in
which I once took part along with a number of Buddhist clergy. A Westerner asked the
leading Shinshu abbot, “Do you really believe in the existence of supernatural beings
like Amida and Kannon, and in a life after death in the True Land Paradise of Amida?”
The abbot answered very quietly, “These are conceptual entities.” In fact the
Diamond and Womb Mandalas with their hundreds of figures (sometimes represented by
quasi-Sanskrit letters) are tools for meditation. The monk moves from the guardian gods at
the outer edge, in to the central Buddha — the Vairocana — and at last beyond
him to the Adi Buddha — the Pure, unqualified Void.
Yet, popular rather than “higher” Buddhism is Hearn’s main subject, and
he always is careful to distinguish between the metaphysically complex Buddhism of the
educated monks and the simpler, more colorful Buddhism of the ordinary people.
The only peculiarity in Hearn’s Buddhism is his habit of equating it with the
philosophy of Herbert Spencer, now so out of date. However, this presents few difficulties
for the modern reader, as his Spencerianism can be said to resemble Buddhism more than his
Buddhism resembles Herbert Spencer. Also, it is not Spencer’s Darwinism, “red in
tooth and claw,” but Spencer’s metaphysical and spiritual speculations that have
influenced Hearn’s interpretation of Buddhism. We must not forget that Teilhard de
Chardin, who certainly is not out of date, is, in the philosophical sense, only Herbert
Spencer sprinkled with holy water. Philosophies and theologies come and go, but the group
experience of transcendence is embedded in human nature, and when it is abandoned,
theology, philosophy, and eventually culture, perish.
It is difficult to think of a better guide to Japanese Buddhism for the completely
uninformed than Hearn, though there are others who may be his equals. Certainly the
popularizers of Zen are not. Zen, after all, is a very special sect, in many ways more
Vedantist or Taoist than Buddhist. And of course as the religion of the Japanese officer
caste and of the great rich it plays in Japan a decidedly reactionary role. Hearn’s
Buddhism is far less specialized than Zen. It is the Buddhism of the ordinary Japanese
Buddhist of whatever sect.
The first distinction to be made in any consideration of Buddhism itself is that
Christianity is the only major religion whose adherents live lives and hold beliefs
diametrically opposed to those of its founder. Nothing could be less like the life of
Jesus than that of the typical Christian, clerical or lay. Imagine thirteen men with long
beards, matted hair, and probably lice, in ragged clothes and dusty bare feet, taking over
the high altar at St. Peter’s in Rome or the pulpit of a fashionable Fifth Avenue
sanctuary. The Apostolic life survives in only odd branches of Christianity: the
Hutterites, some Quakers, even Jehovah’s Witnesses, but not, as everyone knows, in
official and orthodox denominations. Catholicism carefully quarantines such people in
monasteries and nunneries where a life patterned on that of the historic Jesus is not
wholly impossible to achieve. The opposite is true of Buddhism. No matter how far the sect
— Lamaism, Zen, or Shingon — may have moved from the Buddhologically postulated
original Buddhist Order, all sects of Buddhism are pervaded by the personality of the
historic Siddhartha Gautama.
The historicity of almost all the details of what are generally considered to be the
earliest Buddhist documents is subject to dispute and in many instances is improbable. The
earliest surviving Life of Buddha was written hundreds of years after his death. The
prevailing form of Buddhism in Japan, Mahayana, seems to Westerners more like a group of
competing, highly speculative philosophies than a religion. The complete collection of
Hinayana, Mahayana and Tantric Buddhist texts makes up a very large library. In addition,
there are many thousands of pages of noncanonical commentary and speculation. Yet out of
it all emerges, with extraordinary clarity, a man, a personality, a way of life and a
basic moral code.
Buddha was born in Kapilavastu, now Rummimdei, Nepal, sometime around 563 BC and died
about 483 BC in Kusimara, now Kasia, India. His personal name was Siddhartha Gautama.
Buddha, The Enlightened One, is a title, not a name, as is Shakyamuni, the saint of the
Shaka clan. In Japan, the historic Buddha is commonly known as Shakya. He was a member of
the Kshatriya warrior caste, the son of the ruler of a small principality.
For six years Buddha lived with five other ascetics in a grove at Uruvela practicing
the most extreme forms of self-mortification and the most advanced techniques of Hatha
Yoga, until he almost died of starvation. He gave up ascetic life, left his companions,
and traveled on. At Bodh Gaya he seated himself under a Bo tree (ficus religiosa)
and resolved not to get up until he had achieved true enlightenment. Maya, the
personification of the world’s illusion, with his daughters and all the attendant
incarnate sins and illusions, attacked him without success. Gautama Siddhartha achieved
final illumination, entered Nirvana and arose a Buddha: an Enlightened One. He returned to
his five companions at Uruvela and preached to them the Middle Way between self-indulgence
and extreme asceticism. They were shocked and repudiated him, but after he had preached to
them the Noble Eightfold Way and the Four Truths, they became the first Buddhist monks.
The first Truth is the Truth of suffering: birth is pain, old age is pain, sickness is
pain, death is pain, the endless round of rebirths is pain, the five aggregates of
grasping are pain. The second Truth is the cause of pain: the craving that holds the human
being to endless rebirth, the craving of the passions, the craving for continued
existence, the craving for nonexistence. The third Noble Truth is the ending of pain: the
extirpation of craving. The fourth Noble Truth is the means of arriving at the cessation
of pain: the Noble Eightfold Path, which is right views, right intentions, right speech,
right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration (or
contemplation). This doctrine is the essence of Buddhism, common to all of its otherwise
divergent sects. It is always there, underlying the most extreme forms of Tantrism or
Amidism. It produces in the personality of the devout Buddhist what the Japanese would
call the iro, the essential color of the Buddha-life.
As Hinduism was taking form in the Upanishads, it began to teach the doctrine of the
identity of the individual self, the Atman, and of the universal self, Brahman as Atman.
Buddha attacked the Atman doctrine head-on, denying the existence of the individual or
absolute self. He taught that the self is simply a bundle of skandhas, the five
aggregates of grasping: body, feeling, perception, mental elements, and consciousness. The
skandhas that comprise the self are momentary and illusory in the flux of Being — but
they do cause and accumulate karma, the moral residue of their acts in this life
and in past lives. It is karma which holds the aggregates embedded in the bonds of craving
and consequence until the skandhas disintegrate in the face of Ultimate Enlightenment. In
the most philosophical teaching of Buddhism, it is the karma and the skandhas which
reincarnate. The individual consciousness or soul, as we think of it, disappears. But the
universal belief in the reincarnation of the individual person has always overridden this
notion. The ordinary Buddhist in fact believes in the rebirth of the self, the atman.
It is these doctrines which distinguish Buddhism. Many ideas which we think of as
especially Buddhist are actually shared by Hinduism, by Jainism, and in fact by many
completely secular modern Indians — transmigration, Yogic practices (some modern
Buddhologists have held that Buddhism is only a special form of Yoga, anticipating its
final synthesis in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali). Vedic gods appear at all the crucial
moments in Buddha’s life, from his conception to his entry into final Nirvana. Some
time after its inception, Buddhism developed the practice of bhakti, personal
devotion to a Savior, parallel to that of Hinduism. But always what distinguishes Buddhism
is the Buddha Way, the Buddha-life, the all-pervasive personality of its founder, as the
personality of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita does not.
The fifty years after his illumination Buddha spent traveling and preaching, usually
with a large entourage of monks. In his eightieth year he stopped at the home of Cunda the
smith, where he and his followers were given a meal of something to do with pigs. The
language is obscure — pork, pigs’ food, or something that had been trampled by
pigs. Buddha became ill and later stopped in the gardens of Ambhapala, where he announced
to his monks that he was about to enter Parinirvana, the final bliss. He lay down under
the flowering trees and died, mourned by all creation, monks, laymen, gods, and the lowest
animals. His last words were, “The combinations of the world are unstable by nature.
Monks, strive without ceasing.”
This is the account preserved by the Pali texts, the sacred books of the Theravada
Buddhists, of the religion of Ceylon, Burma, and the countries of the Indo-Chinese
peninsula. Pali is a dialect of a small principality in Northern India, now forgotten in
its homeland. The Pali texts are earlier than all but fragments of Buddhist Sanskrit
documents, but this does not necessarily mean that the Hinayana (“The Lesser
Vehicle”) Buddhism which they embody is the most primitive form of the religion.
Theirs is simply the religion of the Theravada, “The religion of the Elders,”
one of the early sects. However, up until the reign of Ashoka, the saintly Buddhist
emperor who ruled more of the Indian subcontinent than anyone before him, Buddhism seems
to have been a more or less unified religion resembling the later Hinayana. From the reign
of Ashoka to the beginning of the Christian era two currents in Buddhism began to draw
more and more apart until Mahayana, “The Greater Vehicle,” became dominant in
the North and in Java. All the forms of Japanese Buddhism with which Hearn came into
contact are rooted in the Mahayana tradition.
The many Mahayana texts are differentiated from the postulated Buddha Word as it
appears in Pali by several radically different, indeed contradictory, beliefs and
practices. In Hinayana man achieves Nirvana, or advances towards it in a future life,
solely by his own efforts to overcome the accumulated evil karma of thousands of
incarnations. There is devotion to the Founder as the Leader of the Way, but no worship,
because there is nothing to worship. The difference is the same as that which the Roman
Catholic Church calls dulia, adoration of the saints, and latria,
adoration of God. Mahayana introduced the idea of saviors, Bodhisattvas, who have
achieved Buddhahood but who have taken a vow not to enter Nirvana until they can take all
sentient creatures with them. As saviors they are worshipped with a kind of hyper-dulia,
as is the Blessed Virgin in Roman Catholicism. Buddhism was influenced by the great wave
of personal worship that swept through India, bhakti, the adoration of Krishna,
the incarnation of Vishnu, or of Kali, the female embodiment of the power of Shiva. At
least theoretically above the Bodhisattvas arose a pantheon of Buddhas of whom Vairocana
was primary. Later, an Adi-Buddha was added above him. It is disputable if either properly
can be called the Absolute. If there is any absolute in Buddhism, it is Nirvana, which in
fact means the religious experience itself. From Vairocana emanate the four Dhyana
Buddhas, the Buddhas of Contemplation, of whom Amida is the best known, and of whom the
historic Shakyamuni is only one of four, although in his most transcendental form he can
be equated with Vairocana or the Adi Buddha.
The story of the development of Mahayana as it spread from what is now Afghanistan and
Russian Turkestan to Mongolia and Indonesia to Tibet, China and Japan, while it died out
in India, would take many thousands of words to tell. There are traces of Buddhism in
China two hundred years or more before the Christian era. Its official introduction is
supposed to have occurred in the first century AD. From then until the Muslim conquest of
India, Chinese pilgrims visited India and brought back caravan loads of statuaries and sutras
(sacred texts) which were translated into Chinese.
Indian missionaries emigrated to China and taught and translated. Buddhism was
introduced into Korea in the fourth century and had thoroughly established itself in the
three countries of the peninsula by the seventh. From there it passed to Japan in the
sixth century.
The first missionaries converted the Soga Clan, which was then the power behind the
Japanese throne. For the greater part of a century Buddhism was almost exclusively the
religion of a faction of the nobility, and its fortune varied with the factional struggles
of the court. In 593 AD Prince Shôtoku became the effective head of state. His knowledge
of Buddhism and of the more profound meanings of Mahayana was extraordinary. He not only
saved Buddhism from rapidly becoming a cult of magic and superstition, but like Ashoka in
India before him, he went far to make it a religion of the people. He copied sutras in
characters of gold on purple paper. He preached the doctrines of Mahayana to the common
people as well as to the court. He established hundreds of monasteries, nunneries and
temples. Not least, he promulgated a kind of charter which modern Japanese called The
Seventeen Article Constitution, in which Buddhist ethics and, to a lesser degree,
Confucianism were established as the moral foundations of Japan. To this day he is
regarded by many as an avatar of Avalokiteshvara, Kuan Yin in Chinese and Kannon
or Kwannon in Japanese — the so-called Goddess of Mercy and the most popular
of all Bodhisattvas.
By the eighth century Buddhism had become Japan’s official state religion, a feat
Hearn credits to Buddhism’s absorption and expansion of the older Shinto worship of
many gods, ghosts, and goblins (the gods, Buddhas or Bodhisattvas, the ghosts beings in
transit from one incarnation to another, and the goblins, gakis, beings suffering
in a lower state of existence). By the thirteenth century most of the major forms of
Japanese Buddhism — a religion quite distinct from Buddhism elsewhere in the world
— had been established, though minor sects continued to proliferate.
Ten large sects dominate Japanese Buddhism. The oldest of these are Tendai and Shingon.
First was Tendai, established by the monk Saichô in 804 on Mt. Hiei northeast of Kyoto (Heian
kyo), facing the most inauspicious direction. Not long afterwards the monk Kukai
returned from China and introduced Shingon, which became the Japanese form of Tantric
Buddhism. In China, Tendai attempted a synthesis of the various schools and cults in the
great complex of monasteries on Mt. T’ien Tai. The similar monastic city on Mt. Hiei
sheltered a wide variety of cults, doctrines, and philosophies. Basically, however,
Japanese Tendai modified what in India was known as “right-handed” Tantrism,
which we see today in the Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Lamaism in exile. All the great
Buddhist sutras were studied, the doctrine of the Void, the doctrine of Mind Only, the
vision of reality as the interpenetration of compound infinitives of Buddha natures of the
Avatamsaka Sutra, and the complex panpsychism of the Lankavatara Sutra. Most popular,
however, was the Lotus Sutra (Hokkekyo in Japanese), the Saddharma Pundarika
Sutra, the only major Buddhist document a Japanese lay person is at all likely to have
read. Tendai is a ceremonial religion, and only in recent years has it done much for the
laity except to permit them to participate in pilgrimages and to watch public ceremonies.
Shingon is even more esoteric than Tendai and is in fact Japanese Lamaism. Its
doctrines are occult, its mysteries are not divulged to the people, and many of its rites
are kept secret. The worship of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as sexual dualities or as
terrifying wrathful figures is not as common in Japan as in Tibet, though in both cultures
the emphasis on magic formulas, gestures, spells and special methods of inducing trance
remains essential. It is not known how many Tantric shastras (scriptures
secondary to sutras) survive and are studied in Shingon monasteries, but recent
discoveries and paintings of this literature are read by the more learned Japanese monks.
“Left-handed” Tantrism, with its cult of erotic mysticism, survives underground
in Tachigawa Shingon.
The worship of Amida which began in India around the advent of the Christian era,
almost certainly under the influence of Persian religion, effected a complete revolution
in Japanese Buddhism when it was introduced in the ninth century. Originally sheltered
within the Tendai sect, Amidism grew to be the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan
— and the one with which Hearn was most familiar. Amida is the Buddha of Endless
Light whose paradise, The Pure Land, is in the west. He has promised that any who believe
in him and call on his name will be saved and at death will be reborn in his Pure Land.
Buddha, of course, insisted that by oneself one is saved and thus achieves, not paradise,
but Nirvana, which far transcends any imaginable paradise. Hearn, however, observed that
few Japanese even knew of the concept of Nirvana. For them Amida’s Pure Land was the
highest heaven imaginable. Buddha also forbade worship of himself or others and considered
the gods inferior to human beings because they could not escape the round of rebirths and
enter Nirvana. Amidism, as a gesture to orthodoxy, teaches that the older Buddhism is too
hard for this corrupt age and that the Pure Land, unlike other paradises, provides a
direct stepping stone to Nirvana. As the Amidist sects developed in Japan, the doctrine of
salvation by faith became more and more extreme. At first, it was necessary to invoke the
name of Amida many times a day and especially with one’s last words, but finally one
had only to invoke it once in a lifetime. This was enough to erase the karma, the
consequences, of a life of ignorance and sin.
The Japanese monk Nichiren, who played a role not unlike that of the Hebrew Prophets,
taught that salvation could be won by reciting the words “Namu Myohorengekyo,”
“Hail to the Lotus Sutra!” The Lotus Sutra is a sort of compendium of Mahayana
Buddhism, lavishly embroidered with miraculous visions, with thousands upon thousands of
Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, gods, demigods and lesser supernatural beings. But its important
chapter is the Kannon (Avalokiteshvara), which raises the Bodhisattva to a
position similar to that of Amida, The Savior of the World, “He Who Hears The
World’s Cry.” The earliest Kannon statues and paintings seem to have reached
Japan from the oasis cities of Central Asia. Their peculiar sexlessness led the Japanese,
as it did the Chinese, to think of the Bodhisattva as a woman. Not just Westerners, but
most Japanese, refer to him as the Goddess of Mercy, and cheap modern statues which depict
him holding a baby bear a striking resemblance to popular representations of the Virgin
Mary.
The secret of the tremendous success of Amidism and Nichirenism is that they are
congregational religions. The largest of all Buddhist sects, the Amidist Jodo-Shinshu, is
in this sense much like a modern Christian denomination. But in other respects, and
despite its tremendous pilgrimages, Buddhism seems inaccessible to the common Japanese.
Very few people know anything about the profound and complex metaphysics of the Mahayana
speculation. A surprising number do know the life of Buddha as it is told in Hinayana,
which scarcely exists in Japan, and do try to model their lives on the Buddha-life —
with remarkable success. But for most secular Japanese, a Buddhist monk is just a kind of
undertaker, to be called upon only when somebody dies.
Zen Buddhism cultivated a special sensibility that many Japanese people think of as
Japanese. The tea ceremony, sumi-e ink painting, the martial arts (archery, sword
play, jiu-jitsu, judo, aikido, wrestling), flower arrangement,
pottery, and haiku survive as creative expressions of the Zen sensibility in
pursuit of perfection. But this sensibility has weakened in most modern Japanese.
Zen is often translated as Enlightenment (Ch’an or Dhyana), but
it means something like illumination, specifically illumination achieved by systematic
religious meditation of the kind we identify as yoga. It is supposed to have been
introduced to China by a missionary Indian monk, Bodhidharma, probably in the sixth
century. It spread to Japan in the thirteenth as the long civil wars were beginning,
became popular with the military castes and the great rich, and for a long time dominated
the intellectual and artistic life of the country. Zen owed its powerful influence to the
fact that it began as a revolt against the Buddhist cults of its time and reverted to what
the nineteenth century was to call “Primitive” Buddhism. It rejected the
salvation by faith and the devotional worship of Amidism, the cults of Kannon and the
Lotus Sutra (“By yourself alone shall you be saved,” says Gautama). It
reinstated yogic meditation with a view to final enlightenment as the central and
essential practice of the Buddhist religious life. Finally, it reinstated Shakyamuni
himself, Shaka, as he is known in Japanese: its special interpretation of the Buddha-life
is modeled on his.
Since World War II, Zen Buddhism has become enormously popular in the West, and largely
in response to its reception here it has seen an intellectual revival in Japan. Although
Hearn was familiar with Zen theories and practices, and had Zen Buddhist friends, he wrote
little about the sect that was to become the most influential in the West. Neither Zen as
a manifestation of aristocratic traditions nor Zen as a popular fad interested him.
Instead, he kept his eye on what had persisted in Japanese Buddhism through the centuries
among the farmers, fishermen, and other poor folk. Many of their beliefs inform their
stories, and many of their customs in turn have stories behind them. It was the survival
of Buddhism in such forms that above all else engaged Hearn.
Hearn’s role in the spread of Buddhism to the West was a preparatory one. He was
the first important American writer to live in Japan and to commit his imagination and
considerable literary powers to what he found there. Like the “popular”
expressions of Buddhist faith that were his favorite subject, Hearn popularized the
Buddhist way of life for his Western readers. And he was widely read, both in his articles
for Harper’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly, and in his numerous
books on Japan. Hearn’s essays, with their rich descriptions and queer details,
almost never generalizing but staying with a particular subject, always backed by the
likeable and enthusiastic personality of Hearn himself, and always factually reliable,
satisfied the vague and growing curiosity of his American readers about the mysterious
East.
At St. Cuthbert’s school, at age fifteen, Hearn had discovered that he was a
pantheist. That is not unusual for a fifteen-year-old, and the fact that pantheism is
unaccepted in Christian doctrine or in Western philosophical thought normally suffices to
extinguish the common adolescent philosophy or to transmute it to something less
vulnerable. But the idea stuck with Hearn, and when finally, at forty, he arrived in
Japan, he was delighted to find that he could now exercise and explore his intuition of
God-in-All. If Hearn entered Japanese culture and achieved understanding of Japanese
Buddhist (and Shinto) thought with unprecedented rapidity for a Westerner, it is because
his own spirit had always longed for an atmosphere in which his belief in the sentience
and blessedness of all Nature could flourish.
Hearn never became a Buddhist, and he remained skeptical about certain of
Buddhism’s key doctrines — such as the relationship of karma and rebirth —
but he passionately believed that Buddhism promoted a far better attitude toward daily
life than did Christianity. It would be up to more scholarly and less imaginative writers
to begin to translate and preach specific Buddhist doctrines, but Hearn has done much to
translate the spirit of Japanese Buddhism and to prepare Western society for it.
KENNETH REXROTH
1977
This essay was originally published as the Introduction to The Buddhist Writings of
Lafcadio Hearn (1977). It was reprinted in World Outside the Window: Selected
Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (1987). The Buddhist Writings collection is out of
print, but dozens of other Hearn books are still available.
Copyright 1987 Kenneth Rexroth Trust. Reproduced by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.
[Other Rexroth Essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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