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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
"I hope so. They ought to be."
Then I fancied them immured somewhere in that vast necropolis of dead gods, under the gloom of a
pea-soup-fog, chambered with forgotten divinities of Egypt or Babylon, and trembling faintly at the roar
of London, - all to what end? Perhaps to aid another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another
vanished civilization; perhaps to assist the illustration of an English Dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to
inspire some future laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of the "oiled and curled
Assyrian bull." Assuredly they would not be preserved in vain. The thinkers of a less conventional and
selfish era would teach new reverence for them. Each eidolon shaped by human faith remains the shell of
a truth eternally divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft serenity, the
passionless tenderness, of these Buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds
transformed into conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, "I have the same
feeling for the high as for the low, for the moral as for the immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous,
for those holding sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good and true."
(1) A name given to fireproof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East. The word is derived from the
Malay gadong.
XII. THE IDEA OF PRE-EXISTENCE
"If A Bikkhu should desire, O brethren, to call to mind his various temporary states in days gone by -
such as one birth, two births, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred, or one thousand, or
one hundred thousand births,-in all their modes and all their details, let him be devoted to quietude of
heart, - let him look through things, let him be much alone." - Akankheyya Sutta.
I
Were I to ask any reflecting Occidental, who had passed some years in the real living atmosphere of
Buddhism, what fundamental idea especially differentiates Oriental modes of thinking from our own, I
am sure he would answer: "The Idea of Pre-existence." It is this idea, more than any other, which
permeates the whole mental being of the Far East. It is universal as the wash of air: it colors every
emotion; it influences, directly or indirectly, almost every act. Its symbols are perpetually visible, even in
details of artistic decoration; and hourly by day or night, some echoes of its language float uninvited to
the ear. The utterances of the people, - their household sayings, their proverbs, their pious or profane
exclamations, their confessions of sorrow, hope, joy, or despair, - are all informed with it. It qualifies
equally the expression of hate or the speech of affection; and the term ingwa, or innen, -
meaning karma as inevitable retribution, - comes naturally to every lip as an interpretation, as a
consolation, or as a reproach. The peasant toiling up some steep road, and feeling the weight of his
handcart straining every muscle, murmurs patiently: "Since this is ingwa, it must be suffered." Servants
disputing, ask each other, "By reason of what ingwa must I now dwell with such a one as you?" The
incapable or vicious man is reproached with his ingwa; and the misfortunes of the wise or the virtuous
are explained by the same Buddhist word. The law-breaker confesses his crime, saying: "That which I
did I knew to be wicked when doing; but my ingwa was stronger than my heart." Separated lovers seek
death under the belief that their union in this life is banned by the results of their sins in a former one;
and, the victim of an injustice tries to allay his natural anger by the self-assurance that he is expiating
some forgotten fault which had to, be expiated in the eternal order of things.... So likewise even the
commonest references to a spiritual future imply the general creed of a spiritual past. The mother warns
her little ones at play about the effect of wrong-doing upon their future births, as the children of other
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