The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East/Volume 13/Introduction
SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE
OF
JAPAN
INTRODUCTION
THE YOUNGEST CIVILIZED RACE AND ITS REVELATIONS OF
PRIMITIVE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
AMID all the wonderment expressed by our generation over Japan's sudden acceptance of modern conditions and her enormous stride into the foremost place among Asiatic nations, it has been seldom noted that this is the second time the Japanese have thus seized upon an advanced civilization, recognized its worth, and forcefully made it their own. Exactly what they are doing now, they did some thirteen hundred years ago with the Chinese civilization.
Before that time the Japanese could neither read nor write. They are thus the youngest among modern great nations. The Americans and Australians were colonists, the vigorous heirs of an older civilization; the Japanese have grown from the childhood—almost from the infancy—of barbarism within the sight, within reach of the study, of our older races.
It is this fact which makes the examination of Japan's literature and her religious thought so specially interesting. It is due to this fact that, while her literature is the youngest, her books are the oldest among eastern Asiatic nations. The Japanese treasured their early books with an almost superstitious reverence. As a matter of actual manuscripts, there is no Chinese book so old, no book among any of the yellow or Turanian races so old, as the volumes now treasured in the shrines of Japan. Here then, if anywhere, we may watch literature as it is first born.
This primitive character of the early Japanese books must be insisted on, lest the reader feel himself disappointed when he compares the sacred books of Japan with those we have previously examined. Not even the "Pyramid Texts" of Egypt, not even the first Babylonian legends of the Flood, show man in such a primitive state of physical life and spiritual culture as is revealed in the ancient rituals of "Shinto," the original religion of Japan.
Even the legends of the Japanese only date back the earthly origin of the race to some six hundred years before Christ. At about that date, the old books say, the Sun-goddess Amaterasu sent down her grandchildren from Heaven to invade and occupy Japan. Their leader was the god, or chief grandchild of the goddess, now known as the first Mikado of Japan. Both as god and man he is highly honored under the Chinese name, given him many centuries after his death, of Jimmu or Jimmu Tenno.
We do not really know if the mighty Jimmu ever existed, and the date of his conquest of Japan has no authority that European chronology would accept for a moment. All that we positively know is that a thousand years later the Japanese race were in control of the land, and then, in the fifth or sixth century A.D., there came to them Chinese scholars bringing the Chinese civilization and the Chinese writing. The Japanese welcomed these things; they absorbed their value as completely as they have absorbed modern civilization to-day. Almost immediately they began writing books of their own; and the earliest of these books to be preserved were the now celebrated "Kojiki" and "Nihongi," which thus present to us the statements of the first civilized Japanese as to the traditions of their past.
THE "KOJIKI" AND "NIHONGI"
The "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" are the books which tell us of the invading god-emperor Jimmu. They even preserve the songs, the crudest of barbaric chants, which he and his followers are supposed to have sung. They also give a legendary account of the gods who had preceded Jimmu, and of the Mikados who succeeded him down to the time of the coming of the Chinamen.
Of these two ancient and highly honored books, the "Kojiki" is slightly the elder—it was finished in A.D. 712—and is much the more Japanese. It devotes itself mainly to the gods, and tells of men only as they are god-men, related to the deities or inspired by them to compose poetry. For already the art of poetry, a peculiarly Japanese art quite unlike our Western ideas of poetry, was highly honored among the Mikado's followers. From the "Kojiki" therefore, Japan's oldest book, we get our clearest vision of the earlier barbaric ages and the earliest spirit of the Japanese.
The "Nihongi," on the contrary, while almost as old as the "Kojiki," is a wholly Chinese work. It reviews the same traditions as the "Kojiki," but polishes them all, revises them to fit the newly acquired Chinese ideas. In short, it gives such an amazing Chinese twist to everything the "Kojiki" had told, that no student of human nature is likely to neglect the opportunity of comparing these two books. More clearly here than in any other works of Japan's present transformation, more clearly perhaps than anywhere else in the world, can we see an entire nation changing not only its outer garments, but its views, its ways of thought, almost its very soul. Carlyle's great vision in "Sartor Resartus" is here made actual, with its picture of man, the eternal spirit, clothing his invisible and incorporeal self in ever-shifting shadows of new bodies, new beliefs, new habits, and so outward to mere physical adornments of constantly changing fashion.
SHINTOISM
Only incidentally do the "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" refer to religion. They are, or regard themselves as, histories, "records of ancient matters." The religion under which the Japanese had emerged from barbarism was the unquestionably very ancient faith of Shintoism. This held its own not only against the first sweep of Chinese civilization with its teaching of Confucianism, but also against all the highly spiritual preaching of Buddhism. Buddhism entered the land with the Chinese invasion and became gradually adopted by most of the Japanese; but it had to make allowances for the primeval faith, to incorporate the ideas of Shinto. So that to-day Buddhism and Shintoism exist side by side, coordinate parts of a single religious system.
Shintoism is a sort of ancestor-worship, which both seeks the favor of the good spirits from the past and dreads the attacks of evil spirits. The chief single shrine in Japan to-day, recently highly honored by the new Mikado, is that of the Sun-goddess at Ise, who is revered as the great ancestress of all the Mikados and, in some sense, of all the Japanese.
The early rituals recited by the Shinto priests, some of them doubtless of an antiquity far exceeding the "Kojiki," are preserved to us by the "Yengishiki." This is a book in which the rituals were copied down a thousand years ago (A.D. 927). Yet these chants have in the "Yengishiki" the same form in which they are often repeated to-day. In other words, Shintoism does not change; it clings to the recital of old formulas. So that these Shinto rituals of the "Yengishiki" may well vie in age with the barbaric chants incorporated in the "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" and attributed to the very earliest Mikados.
THE COURT POETRY
Having presented these three primitive religious and historical works, our volume turns next to what may be called the "pure poetry" of the ancient Japanese. The early inclination of the race toward the rhythm and the beauty of poetry has been already suggested. Under the impulse of the Chinese culture, the Japanese court of the seventh and eighth centuries seems to have made poetic composition its favorite employment. Our earliest surviving collection of these poems was made as early as A.D. 760. It is called the "Man-yoshu," or "Collection of the Myriad Leaves," nor is the title inaccurate, for the "Man-yoshu" consists of some twenty volumes containing many hundreds of poems. Moreover, these are mostly very short, mere scattered leaves from the forest of thought and music in which these early, suddenly inspired artists of Japan were joyously dwelling. The culture of the Japanese court, as shown in these thoughtful little poems, is in most striking contrast to the barbarism of the "Kojiki" composed only half a century before.
The Japanese critic, however, would tell you that the "Myriad Leaves" by no means represents the best form of Japanese poetry. He would rather reserve his praise for the "Kokinshu," which is quoted next in our volume. It is a collection of court odes gathered in the year A.D. 905. Japanese poets have been possessed by what we might almost call a mania for brevity, for extreme condensation of form and thought. The "Myriad Leaves" had contained poems sometimes of several stanzas; the "odes" of the "Kokinshu" are none of them more than a single stanza, a stanza of five lines. These are still accepted as models by the modern Japanese. From among them was recently selected the national anthem. The Japanese Emperor, deciding that as part of the modernizing of his country she should have, like European countries, a national hymn, turned naturally to select one from the admired "Kokinshu."
THE STORY OF GENJI
From this same tenth century of the "Kokinshu," the most polished age of Japan, we give also a prose work. Story-telling had become the fashion, and Japanese narratives, or monogatari, were as lengthy as Japanese poems were brief. Several such monogatari have come down to us, among which the one generally most admired both for style and thought is the one here given, the "Genji Monogatari," or "Story of Genji." It is so nearly akin to our modern novels that we must note, with some reduction of Western self-satisfaction, that a literary form which Europe did not invent until the fifteenth century and which did not reach its full development among us until the nineteenth, was carried by the Japanese to such a height as the "Genji Monogatari" in their first swift upward growth between the years A.D. 700 and 1000.
MEDIEVAL JAPAN
Beyond the year 1159 we come to a period of Japanese disaster. Civil wars rent the poetic little court circle asunder, and repeatedly devastated the entire land until civilization almost disappeared. No literature worth naming was composed for nearly five hundred years. What little continued to exist was preserved by the Buddhist monks in the partial shelter of their monasteries. Religion indeed flourished; many sects sprang up; and under the monks' fostering, there did appear about A.D. 1400 a form of drama which has been perpetuated even to our own day, and is now occasionally acted at the Japanese court.
This was the lyric drama or "No." These No consisted of short, chanted plays, two of the most noted of which our volume gives. But apart from this religiously protected drama, medieval Japan possessed no national literature. Even the older works of what might well be called the Golden Period were forgotten, locked in Buddhist shrines, and written in a Chinese-Japanese tongue no longer readable even by the superstitious possessors of the manuscripts.
From this state of constant warfare and intellectual desolation, Japan was finally rescued by Iyeyasu, who, in the year 1600, crushed his rivals in the great battle of Sekigahara, and became what we would call a "benevolent tyrant." With all power in his hands, he used it wisely and well for his people. Europeans had now begun trading with the Japanese; but the successor of Iyeyasu drove them from the country and exterminated all the followers of the Christian faith, which had been spreading rapidly through Japan. After this last terrific massacre, the court rulers completely barred Japan to foreigners, so as to prevent any further danger from foreign religions, foreign ideas, or foreign intrigues. In this secluded, hermit position, Japan remained for over two hundred years.
During these last centuries of what may be called the pre-European days of Japan, her art and literature revived. Both, however, were of a peculiarly narrow character. To this period belonged the most honored poet of Japan, Basho. Yet no work of Basho's consists of over three lines of poetry, seventeen syllables. The Japanese had become composers solely of epigrams. Of these, the most celebrated by Basho and others are given here.
In religion the Japanese of these seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the "seclusion" period, followed both the old Shinto rituals and the newer Buddhist doctrines which had developed. The most treasured of Buddhist Scriptures in Japan is the beautiful "Gospel of the White Lotus," part of which our volume presents. It then closes with a brief glance at Japanese folklore, the tales of unknown age, which may well be classed with those of the "Kojiki" for their primitive simplicity, and with the "Gospel of the White Lotus" for their earnest faith in righteousness. Not all the awful warfare of Japan has destroyed the childlike beauty of character of the masses of her people.