A History of Japanese Literature/Book 6/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (Continued)
Wagakusha (Students of Japanese Antiquity)
The Kangakusha's extravagant admiration for everything Chinese, and their persistent and largely successful endeavours to mould the thoughts and institutions of Japan upon Chinese models, were followed by an inevitable reaction in favour of a more genuinely national development. This movement, which has been fully described by Sir E. Satow in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (1875), forms one of the most interesting features of recent Japanese literature.
It began with the renewed study of the old literary monuments of Japan, which for centuries had been so much neglected that the very language in which they are written was no longer understood. Iyeyasu's patronage of literature, and his measures for the preservation of old books, have been already referred to. One of his grandsons, the famous Mitsukuni (1622–1700), Daimio of Mito, inherited his great ancestor's love of learning. He appropriated a considerable part of his revenue to the cost of collecting a vast library of books of all kinds, and to the maintenance of scholars whom he employed in the compilation of works of research. The chief outcome of their labours was the well-known Dai Nihonshi, a history of Japan in the Chinese language, which is recognised at the present day as the standard work of its class.
One of Mitsukuni's services to literature was the publication in 1678 of an anthology of masterpieces in the Wabun or pure Japanese style, under the title Fusō-jiu-yo-shiu given to it by the reigning Mikado, to whom it was dedicated. It is a fine specimen of the block-printing of the time.
A priest named Keichiu (1640–1701) was the chief pioneer of the revived study of the old literature. He was by birth a Samurai, but out of a love for learning abandoned the world for the quiet of a Buddhist monastery. His fame as a scholar reached the ears of Mitsukuni, who invited him in the most courteous manner to come to Yedo and be enrolled in his company of learned men. Keichiu declined this offer, upon which the Prince sent one of his staff to prosecute his studies under Keichiu's guidance. The latter, not to be outdone in courtesy, compiled and dedicated to Mitsukuni a treatise on the Manyōshiu, in twenty volumes, entitled Manyō Daishōki. The task of preparing a similar work had already been vainly assigned to another of the Prince's protégés, a learned but lazy Wagakusha called Shimōkawabe Chōriu. The Daishōki is now superseded, but it was in its day a work of the highest importance for the study of the old Japanese. Mitsukuni evinced his satisfaction by sending the author a present of one thousand ounces of silver and thirty rolls of silk.
Another book of Keichiu's was the Kokon Yozaishō which means literally "A Selection of Spare Timber, Old and New." It is a miscellaneous collection of material prepared by him in the course of his researches for the Daishōki, but not used in that work. He also contributed to the interpretation of the Ise Monogatari and the Genji Monogatari, and wrote a number of other erudite treatises which are still valued by scholars. Like most of the Wagakusha, he was a poet, and has left both Tanka and Naga-uta, which in metre, diction, and sentiment are little more than echoes of the Manyōshiu. They are adorned with the same devices of pillow and pivot words and are in short the old wine in the old bottles. The following simple effusion is in its way not unpleasing:—
The First Day of Spring
"Bending its magic bow,[1]
The spring hath come:
The eternal heavens,
Likewise the ore-yielding earth,
Are dim with haze;
The snow begins to melt
On the mountain's rim,
And the ice dissolves
From the surface of the pond;
The nightingale's tender note
Sounds (oh! how lovely!)
From amid the first blossoms
Of the plum branch.
Now from the memory fade
Our regrets for the bygone year.
How many days must pass
Before we can go forth into the meadows
And pluck the young pot-herbs?[2]
When will the willow
Flame into bud?
When will the cherry-flowers open?
Such are the expectant thoughts
That on this day
Crowd into all men's minds."
About the same time Kitamura Kigin, a scholar employed by the Shōgun's Government, performed a useful service by editing and annotating most of the classical works of the Heian period. His editions of the Genji Monogatari and Makura Zōshi are still much esteemed by students. Kigin also wrote Tanka and Haikai.
Kada Adzuma-maro (1669–1736), the son of the guardian of a Shinto shrine, was Keichiu's successor as a student of Japanese antiquity and the old classical literature. He presented to the Government a memorial, in which he protested vigorously against the exclusive study of Chinese, and urged the establishment of a school for the cultivation of the Japanese language and literature at Kiōto. This project received the approval of the Shōgun's Government, but was never carried out. Kada was succeeded by his nephew and adopted son, Kada Arima-maro (1706–1751). Arima-maro took up his residence in Yedo, where he continued his uncle's teachings with some success.
Among the elder Kada's pupils the most distinguished was Mabuchi (1697–1769). Like his master, Mabuchi came of a family of guardians of Shinto shrines. In 1738 he removed to Yedo, where he spent the remainder of his life. He formed there a school which produced many famous men, and soon rivalled the Kangakusha in popularity and influence. Motoöri, who was one of his pupils, describes him as "the parent of the study of antiquity."
"It was he," he adds, "with whom began that style of learning which consists in devoting oneself to the examination of the ancient language and thought with a mind wholly detached from Chinese prepossessions. Before the time of this master the study of poetry was confined to the Kokinshiu and later collections. The Manyōshiu was thought obscure and incomprehensible. Nobody dreamed of judging between the good and bad, of distinguishing the old from the more recent poems, or of mastering their language so as to use it as his own. But now, thanks to the teachings of this master, we have appropriated the ancient language. It has become possible to compose poetry in the style of the Manyōshiu, and even to write prose after the manner of antiquity. The men of this day fancy that this is due to their own exertions, but in reality they owe everything to Mabuchi. It is now universally acknowledged that in studying ancient books like the Kojiki and Nihongi, it is necessary to avoid being misled by Chinese notions, and having first thoroughly mastered the old language, to guide ourselves by its meaning. This is the very spirit of Mabuchi's teaching of the Manyōshiu."
Mabuchi was a purist in style, and aimed at the exclusion from his writings of words of Chinese derivation as far as this was possible. He has left numerous commentaries and other works of research, indispensable even now to the student of the older Japanese language. Among them may be mentioned treatises on pillow-words (Kanjikō), on poetry, and on prose composition, and commentaries on the Manyōshiu, on the Norito (Norito Kō), the Genji Monogatari, and other classical books. He was also a writer of Tanka and Naga-uta.
The greatest of the Wagakusha, and one of the most remarkable men whom Japan has produced, was Motoöri Norinaga. He belonged to a family which had been originally Samurai, and was born in 1730 at Matsuzaka, in the province of Ise. There can be no doubt that the proximity of his native place to the famous shrines sacred from antiquity to the worship of the Sun Goddess and the Goddess of Food, had a considerable influence on his career. Stories are told of his youth, of his omnivorous appetite for knowledge, his precocious talent, and his boyish ambitions, which it is needless to repeat here. At the age of twenty-one he was sent to Kiōto by his widowed mother to study medicine. There he became acquainted with the works of Keichiu, which he read with avidity. In 1757 he returned to Matsuzaka and set up in practice as a physician. Soon afterwards his attention was drawn to Mabuchi's writings. In 1761 he had a personal meeting with that great scholar. This, their only interview, was followed by a long-continued and voluminous correspondence.
Motoöri's life was from this time forward a very busy one. In addition to his medical practice, which was in a flourishing condition, he was engaged in collecting material for his great commentary on the Kojiki, and in giving instructions to hundreds of pupils whom the fame of his learning had attracted to him. Eventually he was taken into the service of the Daimio of Kishiu, who was a great admirer of his writings. Late in life Motoöri resigned his official position and removed to Kiōto, where he gave lectures which were attended by audiences drawn from the highest classes of society in that city. He died there in 1801, in the seventy-second year of his age. By his own desire he was buried at his native place on a hill over the temple of Miōrakuji, a fir and cherry tree were planted by his grave, and a stone set up inscribed simply with his name.
Motoöri was a prolific writer. He brought out fifty-five distinct works in over one hundred and eighty volumes. His fame as a scholar and writer rests chiefly on his Kojiki-den, a commentary on the Kojiki, the sacred book of the Shinto religion.[3] Before his time the study of the Kojiki had been much neglected, the very language in which it is written being well-nigh unintelligible even to educated Japanese. In this monumental work, which fills no fewer than forty-four good-sized volumes, he brought to bear on the elucidation of a very difficult text a vast store of erudite knowledge, derived from a long study of the Manyōshiu and other books of the old literature. It occupied him for many years. Begun in 1764, it was not completed until 1796, and the final volumes were not issued from the press till long after his death.
The Kojiki-den is not only valuable for its prodigious learning; it was a vigorous blow aimed at the supremacy of the Chinese school of ethics and philosophy. No opportunity is lost of girding at everything Chinese, and of exalting the old Japanese customs, religion, and language, in a spirit of ardent and undiscriminating patriotism. The Kojiki-den had no small share in producing the reaction against Chinese ideas and institutions which has become so pronounced a characteristic of modern Japan.
The Reki-chō Shoshi-kai-in is an edition, with notes, of the speeches and proclamations of some of the early Mikados which have been preserved to us in a historical work entitled Shoku Nihongi.
Other works of Motoöri's are his edition of the Kokinshiu already noticed; the Iso no Kami Shishukugen, a treatise on poetry; the Gio-jin Gai-gen, an attack on the Chinese philosophy; the Tama no Ogushi, a valuable critical and exegetical work on the Genji Monogatari; the Kenkiōjin ("The Madman Fettered"), a controversial work written in reply to hostile criticisms of the sacred Shinto books; the Kuzuhana, composed in answer to a similar attack by a scholar named Ichikawa Tatsumaro; the Uiyama bumi, a treatise on methods of study, and the Tama-arare ("Hail of Pearls"), a lively and amusing critique of common errors in writing Japanese.
The Saki-take no ben is a refutation of various erroneous notions current with regard to the gods of Ise and their worship. The "abominable heresy" of some Kangakusha who would euhemerise the Sun Goddess into an ordinary mortal empress, and make the Takama no Hara (or Plain of High Heaven) the name of the place where her capital stood, is duly anathematised. "What doubt can there be that Amaterasu no Ohomi Kami [the Sun Goddess] is the great ancestress of the Mikados, and that she is no other than the Sun of Heaven which illumines this world? These things are in their nature infinite, not to be measured, and mysterious."
The Tamagatsuma (in fifteen volumes, published posthumously in 1812), may be called "Motoöri's Note-book." It is a collection of jottings of a very miscellaneous character, comprising notes on Shinto ceremonial, on the old literature, on grammar and spelling, on poetry, on ancient customs, on the iniquity of Chinese principles and institutions, &c., &c. It is a mine of instruction to all students of Japanese antiquity, but has little except perhaps a few autobiographical memoranda which will interest others.
Another miscellaneous work, the Suzunoya no Bunshiu, also contains some interesting personal reminiscences. I should like to transcribe from it a delicately drawn description of how the author spent a very hot day in the society of some congenial friends. It is unfortunately too long for quotation.
Before Motoōri's time there was no Japanese grammar, one or two dictionaries of the Teniwoha or particles being hardly an exception. Although he did not produce a systematic grammar of the Japanese language, Motoöri did much to throw light upon its structure. The Tama-arare, already referred to, contains many useful grammatical hints. In the Moji-goye no Kana-dzukai (1771) he enunciated the principles of the correct spelling of Japanese words, and in the Kanji Sanonkō (1785) he dealt with the various modes of spelling and pronouncing words of Chinese origin. His principal grammatical work, however, is the Kotoba no Tama no wo (1779), in which he set forth and illustrated at great length certain rules of Japanese syntax. Conciseness was not one of Motoöri's merits. The seven volumes of which this work consists have been compressed without material loss into seven pages of English. His grammatical researches were continued by his son, Haruniwa, in whose well-known work, the Kotoba no Yachimata, the inflexional system of the Japanese verb and adjective was for the first time formulated, and by his adopted son, Ōhira, who was the author of a treatise on causative and passive verbs. European writers on Japanese grammar owe much to the researches of Motoöri and his followers.
Carlyle's idea that the qualities which go to make a man of literary genius fit the same person for being a statesman is a favourite one with the Japanese. We have seen that Hakuseki and Kiusō were constantly consulted upon official matters by the Shōgun's Government. Motoöri was invited by the Daimio of Kishiu to place on record his views on the government of a Daimio's domain, and did so in a little work in two volumes entitled Tama Kushige ("The Precious Casket"). In this treatise he unbends from the severe purism of his other works, and sets an example of a simple, practical style well suited to the subjects discussed, and level to the meanest understanding. His position is that of a cautious reformer. He saw that one of the greatest abuses of the day was the excessive number of officials and retainers of all kinds, and urged earnestly that it should be diminished; gradually, however, so as to avoid injury to vested interests. The oppressed condition of the peasantry had his warmest sympathy. He thought that the ikki or agrarian risings, which had become common, were a disgrace to the Daimios in whose jurisdiction they occurred, rather than to the ignorant men who took part in them. The hara-kiri is another subject on which he had a strong opinion. In his view this form of suicide had become far too common. It was not for the public advantage, he considered, that honest and capable men should do away with themselves because they were responsible for some triffing official miscarriage, as was too often the case. He was in favour of prohibiting all hara-kiri without a formal order from the culprit's superior.
It is not by writing of this kind, however, that Motoöri's political influence is to be measured. His works helped materially to enfranchise the Japanese nation from their moral and intellectual servitude to China, and to produce a spirit of self-reliance and patriotism which at a subsequent period became translated into political action. Though he was himself loyal to the Shōgunate, he contributed indirectly, but most effectively, to the national movement which in 1867 brought about its downfall, and restored the descendant of the Sun Goddess to the sovereign position which was the logical result of the principles advocated in his works.
Motoöri's efforts on behalf of the Shinto religion produced little tangible result. It was too late to call back the deities of the old pantheon from the Hades to which the neglect of the nation had consigned them. In his own lifetime nothing was done, and although a half-hearted, perfunctory attempt to re-establish the ancient faith was made in 1868, the efforts of its supporters were soon relaxed. The Buddhist priests ceased to be the guardians of the Shinto shrines, and a so-called Shinto form of burial was introduced, but little more was effected that was not soon afterwards allowed to fall into abeyance. At the present day this religion is practically extinct.
All the Wagakusha considered themselves bound to compose poetry in the old style. Motoöri acquitted himself of this obligation more creditably than most of his fellows. The following Tanka is much admired:—
"If one should ask you
What is the heart
Of Island Yamato—
It is the mountain cherry blossom
Which exhales its perfume in the morning sun."
In other words, "The Japanese are instinctively and naturally noble and virtuous—not like the Chinese, who require a clumsy and artificial system of ethical philosophy for the cultivation of their moral natures."
Motoöri's anti-foreign and patriotic prejudices go far to explain his antipathy for the Kangakusha with their extravagant admiration for everything Chinese. But there was a deeper cause for his dislike to their philosophy. As already stated, the Chinese nation has a strong bias against the conception of the power which rules the universe as a personal being. The Ten (Heaven) of Confucius and Mencius, and the Tao (Way) of Laotze,[4] not to speak of the Taikhi and other metaphysical conceptions of the Sung schoolmen, all fall short of this idea. The main bent of the Japanese mind is in the same direction. But there is evidence in both countries of a contrary current of thought. Here, too, there are men born with a craving which refuses to be satisfied with abstractions in the place of a personal God (or gods) to whom they can look up as the Creator and Ruler of the universe, and as exercising a providential care over mankind. Motoöri was one of these. He professed not even to understand what the Sung schoolmen meant by their Taikhi and their Yin and Yang, and stoutly maintained that these were mere fictions. But whatever may be the case with philosophical notions, no man can evolve a God from his own inner consciousness. He must accept the God or gods which he finds already acknowledged, whether by his own or by other people's fathers. Motoöri's intensely patriotic temper compelled him to seek at home for the satisfaction of his inborn religious instincts. He turned naturally to Shinto. But in his time Shinto had fallen on evil days. It had suffered grievously from the encroachments of Buddhism. Buddhist priests had assumed the guardianship of the great majority of the shrines of the national cult, and had adulterated its ceremonies and doctrines with much that was alien. The native gods were not abolished—they had still some hold on the popular mind; but they were degraded to the position of temporary manifestations of Buddha. As one of Motoöri's pupils said, they were made domestics in the Buddhist household.
This state of things was a great grief to Motoöri. It drove him back from the present to the old unadulterated Shinto taught in the Kojiki, Nihongi, and Norito. Here he found the satisfaction to his mind and heart which he had failed to find elsewhere. Himself convinced of the excellence of the old national religion, he made it the business of his life to propagate it among his fellow-countrymen, and to denounce the abominable depravity of those who neglected it in favour of sophistical heresies imported from abroad.
Hence arose a controversy which is not without interest to ourselves as an episode in the unending conflict between science and religion. Both parties to the struggle fought under grievous difficulties. Not only could the Kangakusha offer nothing to satisfy the heart-need of a personal Deity, but they were sorely hampered by the imperfections of their philosophy, and by a belief in divination, ghosts, and spiritual beings, which they did not perceive to be inconsistent with it. Motoöri and his followers, on the other hand, were weighted by an antiquated mythology which presented many glaring absurdities even when viewed in the dim light of Chinese philosophy. The Wagakusha were also embarrassed by the absence from Shinto of anything like a code of morals. They were therefore driven either to deny the necessity of anything of the kind, or to put forward as derived from Shinto a system of ethical teaching which was really borrowed from China.
It may not be out of place here to describe in as few words as possible the old Shinto of the seventh and eighth centuries, which Motoöri aimed at restoring. It was essentially a nature-worship, upon which was grafted a cult of ancestors. It tells us nothing of a future state of rewards and punishments, and contains the merest traces of moral teaching. The Norito, quoted in an earlier chapter, in enumerating the offences from which the nation was purged twice a year by the Mikado or his representatives, makes no mention of any one of the sins of the decalogue. What then remains? A mythical history of the creation of the world, and of the doings of a number of gods and goddesses, the chief of whom, namely, the Sun Goddess, was the ancestress of the human rulers of Japan, while from the subordinate deities were sprung the principal noble families who formed their court. Add to this a ceremonial comprising liturgies in honour of these deities and we have the Shinto religion.
The mythological record begins with the bare names of a number of gods who seem to have been provided merely in order to form a genealogy for Izanagi and Izanami, the male and female creator deities of Japan. The creation is thus described:—
Izanagi and Izanami, at the bidding of the other deities, took into their hands the "Jewel-spear of Heaven," and standing on the "Floating-bridge of Heaven," stirred with it the chaotic mass below. The brine which dripped from its point curdled and became an island. The divine pair descended thither and proceeded to procreate the islands of Japan. They also became the parents of a multitude of other deities, such as the Mountain Gods, the Wind God, the Goddess of Food, the Gods of the Sea, Rivers, and Moors, with many others whose attributes are obscure and whose worship is forgotten. The last god to be produced was the Fire God, in giving birth to whom Izanami died. She went to the Land of Yomi or Hades, whither Izanagi followed her, but was obliged to retreat hastily to the upper world hotly pursued by the thunder gods and the Ugly Female of Hades. In his flight he made use of various expedients to delay his pursuers, which recall similar devices in European folk-lore. After his return to earth, Izanagi bathed in the sea in order to wash away the pollutions which he had contracted during his stay in Hades, and in doing so generated various deities, among which were the Sun Goddess, produced from his left eye, and the Moon God, produced from his right eye. A third deity, named Susa no wo, was at the same time born from his nose. Izanagi conferred on these three the dominion of the Plain of Heaven, of Night, and of the Sea respectively. Susa no wo was a boisterous and rowdy deity, whose mischievous and unseemly pranks so disgusted the Sun Goddess that she hid herself in the rock-cave of heaven and left the world to darkness. The other gods had much ado to persuade her to emerge from her seclusion, inventing for the purpose dances and other expedients which are evidently meant to represent the ceremonies in use at Shinto shrines in the times of the Kojiki and Nihongi. Susa no wo was then tried by a council of gods, and sentenced to a fine, and banishment to this lower world.
A grandson of the Sun Goddess became the first ruler of Japan. From him was descended, after a few generations, Jimmu Tennō, the first human sovereign of Japan, and the founder, according to tradition, of the present dynasty of Mikados.
There is food for reflection in the fact that it was possible for a man of high intelligence and vast learning like Motoöri, not unacquainted with the philosophy and religions of India and China, to accept these childish fables as the basis of his faith. Yet not only was he himself a sincere believer. He had a large and zealous body of followers, drawn from the highest and most enlightened classes of his fellow-countrymen. Truly it would almost seem as if, in the words of the Japanese proverb, "Iwashi no atama mo shinjin-gara," that is to say, "It is the quality of faith that is important, were its object only the head of a sardine."
The following passage from the Tamagatsuma will help us to define more precisely Motoöri's attitude towards the Chinese school of thinkers. It is headed
"Chinese Opinion
"In China all good and bad fortune of men, all order and disorder in the State—everything, in short, which happens in this world—is ascribed to the action of Ten (Heaven). Using such terms as the Way of Ten, the Command of Ten, and the Principle of Ten, they regard it as a thing to be honoured and feared above all. China, however, is a country where the true way generally has not been handed down. There they do not know that all things are the doing of the gods, and therefore resort rashly to such inventions. Now Heaven is nothing more than the region where the gods of Heaven dwell. It is a thing destitute of sense, and it is unreasonable to talk of its 'command' and the like. To fear and honour Ten, and not fear and honour the gods, is like yielding an idle honour and awe to the Imperial Palace, and showing no reverence or honour to its sovereign. Foreign countries, however, not having attained to the knowledge that everything is the doing of the gods, may be pardoned for believing this Doctrine of the Way of Ten or the Principle of Ten. But what is to be thought of those who, in this imperial country, where a knowledge of the true way has been handed down, do not take the trouble to examine it, but, simply accepting the erroneous doctrines of foreign lands, imagine that that which they call Ten is a thing of peerless excellence, and in all matters can talk of nothing but its principle? Take again their pedantic and wearisome Taikhi [the Great Limit], Mu Ki [the Limitless], Yin and Yang [Positive and Negative Principles of Nature], Ch'ien and K'un [Celestial and Terrestrial Principles], Pakwa [Eight Diagrams of the Book of Changes], and Wu-hing [Five Elements], which are pure inventions of the Chinese, and for which there is in reality no sound reason. What consummate folly it is for those who would interpret our sacred books to rely implicitly on principles of this kind. In recent times even those who try to divest themselves of Chinese prejudices in their interpretations fail to understand the falseness of their doctrines of the Principle of Ten, and of the Positive and Negative Powers of Nature, and do not succeed in bursting the barrier because they do not put thoroughly away from them their Chinese notions, nor resolutely rouse themselves from their deluding dreams. Moreover, the refusal of some to identify Ama-terasu no Ohomi Kami [the Sun Goddess] as the Sun of Heaven is owing to their being steeped in Chinese narrow-minded reasonings, and so become blind to the wondrous and profound principle of the true way."
Towards Buddhism his antagonism is less pronounced. He acknowledges elements of good in it, and for Laotze he confesses to a certain measure of sympathy, prompted no doubt by the circumstance that the doctrines of this philosopher are irreconcilable with the teachings of the Sung schoolmen. On the question of the immortality of the soul he formally declines to give an opinion.
Motoöri's religion is frankly anthropomorphic, as indeed it could hardly fail to be if he attached any credence to the statements in the Kojiki. He says in so many words that the Shinto deities had hands and legs. When pressed with the obvious inconsistencies which are involved in this belief, Motoöri has nothing better to say than they are "a proof of the authenticity of the record, for who would have gone out of his way to invent a story so ridiculous and improbable, if it were not true. [Credo quia impossibile.] The acts of the gods are not to be explained by ordinary principles. Man's intelligence is limited, and there are many things which transcend it."
Not the least of Motoöri's achievements was his creation of a new literary dialect. It is true that his style was more or less modelled on that of his teacher Mabuchi. But the latter was content to use the pure Japanese language, or Wabun, as it is called, just as he found it. Stiff and antiquated, it was by no means an apt instrument for the expression of modern ideas. In Motoöri's hands it became flexible, picturesque, and expressive. All foreign students have felt the charm of his lucid and flowing style. But it is marred by one terrible fault, prolixity. This is partly inseparable from Motoöri's purism, which leads him to reject many useful and thoroughly naturalised Chinese words in favour of Japanese forms of expression, however circuitous, and is partly owing to an inveterate habit which he has of repeating himself, especially when an opportunity offers of denouncing Chinese proclivities or of magnifying the merits of Shinto.
Motoöri's Wabun has had many imitators, and it has exercised a perceptible influence on some departments of the more recent Japanese literature.
- ↑ Haru in Japanese means "to bend" and also "spring." Hence this conjunction. There is no intention of personifying spring as an archer. A small bow forms part of a magician's outfit in Japan.
- ↑ An old custom in early spring.
- ↑ See above, p. 18.
- ↑ The late General Alexander, in his work on Laotze, translates Tao by "God." He explains his reasons for doing so in the preface.