IV
THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY
I
I used to linger around the spot at Kamakura marked by a stone commemorating the street preaching of Nichiren, that undaunted spirit of a Buddhist priest born to a fisher's family in the Awa province in 1222, whose belief in the mysterious law of the White Lotus made him proclaim himself a prophet. And I would call to my imagination the continuous scene of persecutions the priest encountered gibes, railings, and even stones; he exclaimed at the beginning of the establishment of his own Buddhism, the sect of the White Lotus: "Know that all the sects in existence are a way to Hell, or the teaching of infernal hosts, or a heresy to destroy the nation, or an enemy of the land. These are not my words, but I found them in the sutra. And I am the messenger sent by the Worshipful for the teaching of the Real Law." When he attempted with the fervent tongue of a propagandist, to destroy at one stroke the old formulae and conceptions (or, more true to say, superstitions), by emphasising the individualistic fire of Buddhistic inspiration
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