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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
Perhaps Japan will remember her foreign teachers more kindly in the twentieth century. But she will
never feel toward the Occident, as she felt toward China before the Meiji era, the reverential respect due
by ancient custom to a beloved, instructor; for the wisdom of China was voluntarily sought, while that of
the West was thrust upon her by violence. She will have some Christian sects of her own; but she will not
remember our American and English missionaries as she remembers even now those great Chinese
priests who once educated her youth. And she will not preserve relics of our sojourn, carefully wrapped
in septuple coverings of silk, and packed way in dainty whitewood boxes, because we had no new lesson
of beauty to teach her, - nothing by which to appeal to her emotions.
(1) The statement has been made that there is no word for chastity in the Japanese language. This is tree
in the same sense only that we might say there is no word for chastity in the English language, - became
such words as honor, virtue, purity, chastity have been adopted into English from other languages. Open
any good Japanese-English dictionary and you will find many words for chastity. Just as it would be
ridiculous to deny that the word "chastity" is modern English, because it came to us through the French
from the Latin, so it is ridiculous to deny that Chinese moral terms, adopted into the Japanese tongue
more than a thousand years ago are Japanese to-day. The statement, like a majority of missionary
statements on these subjects, is otherwise misleading; for the reader is left to infer the absence of an
adjective as well as a noun, - and the purely Japanese adjectives signifying chaste are numerous. The
word most commonly used applies to both sexes, - and has the old Japanese sense of firm, strict,
resisting, honorable. The deficiency of abstract terms in a language by no means implies the deficiency
of concrete moral ideas, - a fact which has been vainly pointed out to missionaries more than once.
IX. BY FORCE OF KARMA
"The face of the beloved and the face of the risen sun cannot be looked at."-Japanese Proverb.
I
Modern science assures us that the passion of first love, so far as the individual may be concerned, is
"absolutely antecedent to all relative experience whatever(1)." In other words, that which might well
seem to be the most strictly personal of all feelings, is not an individual matter at all. Philosophy
discovered the same fact long ago, and never theorized more attractively than when trying to explain the
mystery of the passion. Science, so far, has severely limited itself to a few suggestions on the subject.
This seems a pity, because the metaphysicians could at no time give properly detailed explanations, -
whether teaching that the first sight of the beloved quickens in the soul of the lover some dormant
prenatal remembrance of divine truth, or that the illusion is made by spirits unborn seeking incarnation.
But science and philosophy both agree as to one all-important fact, that the lovers themselves have no
choice, that they are merely the subjects of an influence. Science is even the more positive on this point:
it states quite plainly that the dead, not the living, are responsible. There would seem to be some sort of
ghostly remembrance in first loves. It is true that science, unlike Buddhism, does not declare that under
particular conditions we may begin to recollect our former lives. That psychology which is based upon
physiology even denies the possibility of memory-inheritance in this individual sense. But it allows that
something more powerful, though more indefinite, is inherited, - the sum of ancestral memories
incalculable, - the sum of countless billions of trillions of experiences. Thus can it interpret our most
enigmatical sensations, - our conflicting impulses,-our strangest intuitions; all those seemingly irrational
attractions or repulsions, - all those vague sadnesses or joys, never to be accounted for by individual
experience. But it has not yet found leisure to discourse much to us about first love, - although first love,
in its relation to the world invisible, is the very weirdest of all human feelings, and the most mysterious.
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