Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 13.djvu/43

it instantly turned into grapes. While she picked them up and ate them, he fled on; but as she still pursued him, he took and broke the multitudinous and close-toothed comb in the right bunch of his hair and cast it down, and it instantly turned into bamboo-sprouts. While she pulled them up and ate them, he fled on. Again, later, his younger sister sent the eight Thunder-deities with a thousand and five hundred warriors of Hades to pursue him. So he, drawing the ten-grasp saber that was augustly girded on him, fled forward brandishing it in his back hand;^[1] and as they still pursued, he took, on reaching the base of the Even-Pass-of-Hades,^[2] three peaches that were growing at its base, and waited and smote his pursuers therewith, so that they all fled back. Then His Augustness the Male-Who-Invites announced to the peaches: "Like as ye have helped me, so must ye help all living people in the Central Land of Reed-Plains^[3] when they shall fall into troublous circumstances and be harassed!"—and he gave to the peaches the designation of Their Augustnesses Great-Divine-Fruit.^[4] Last of all, his younger sister, Her Augustness the Princess-Who-Invites, came out herself in pursuit. So he

for "head-dress" and "creeper" are homonymous, and indeed the former is probably but a specialized acceptation of the latter.

1. I.e., brandishing it behind him.
2. Or Flat Hill of Hades, Yomo-tsu-hira-saka, said by Motowori to form the frontier-line between Hades and the World of the Living.
3. Ashi-hara-no-naka-tsu-kuni, a common periphrastic designation of Japan. It is better to translate the name thus than to render it by "the Land in the Middle of the Reed-Plains," a forced interpretation which Motowori and Hirata would only seem to adopt in order to veil the fact that one of the most ancient and revered names of their native land was imitated from that of China—everything Chinese being an abomination in the sight of these ardent Shintoists. Yamazaki Suiga, as quoted by Tanigaha Shisei, is more sensible when he remarks that each country naturally considers itself central and foreign countries barbarous, and that Japan is not peculiar in being looked on by its inhabitants as the center of the universe. This is also the view taken by the other earlier scholars.
4. Oho-kamu-deumi-no-mikoto. The difference between singular and plural is not often present to the Japanese mind, and though there were three peaches, we might just as well render their name by the words "His Augustness," etc., considering the three as forming together but one divinity. The interpretation of the name here adopted is the simple and natural one which Motowori borrowed from Tanigaha Shisei.