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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
parents. The pilgrim or the street-beggar accepts your alms with the prayer that your next birth may be
fortunate. The aged inkyo, whose sight and hearing begin to fail, talks cheerily of the impending
change that is to provide him with a fresh young body. And the expressions Yakusoku, signifying
the Buddhist idea of necessity; mae no yo, the last life; akirame, resignation, recur as
frequently in Japanese common parlance as do the words "right" and "wrong" in English popular speech.
After long dwelling in this psychological medium, you find that it has penetrated your own thought, and
has effected therein various changes. All concepts of life implied by the idea of preexistence, - all those
beliefs which, however sympathetically studied, must at first have seemed more than strange to you, -
finally lose that curious or fantastic character with which novelty once invested them, and present
themselves under a perfectly normal aspect. They explain so many things so well as even to look
rational; and quite rational some assuredly are when measured by the scientific thought of the nineteenth
century. But to judge them fairly, it is first necessary to sweep the mind clear of all Western ideas of
metempsychosis. For there is no resemblance between the old Occidental conceptions of soul - the
Pythagorean or the Platonic, for example - and the Buddhist conception; and it is precisely because of
this unlikeness that the Japanese beliefs prove themselves reasonable. The profound difference between
old-fashioned Western thought and Eastern thought in this regard is, that for the Buddhist the
conventional soul - the single, tenuous, tremulous, transparent inner man, or ghost - does not exist. The
Oriental Ego is not individual. Nor is it even a definitely numbered multiple like the Gnostic soul. It is an
aggregate or composite of inconceivable complexity, - the concentrated sum of the creative thinking of
previous lives beyond all reckoning.
II
The interpretative power of Buddhism, and the singular accord of its theories with the facts of modern
science, appear especially in that domain of psychology whereof Herbert Spencer has been the greatest of
all explorers. No small part of our psychological life is composed of feelings which Western theology
never could explain. Such are those which cause the still speechless infant to cry at the sight of certain
faces, or to smile at the sight of others. Such are those instantaneous likes or dislikes experienced on
meeting strangers, those repulsions or attractions called "first impressions," which intelligent children are
prone to announce with alarming frankness, despite all assurance that "people must not be judged by
appearances": a doctrine no child in his heart believes. To call these feelings instinctive or intuitive, in
the theological meaning of instinct or intuition, explains nothing at all - merely cuts off inquiry into the
mystery of life, just like the special creation hypothesis. The idea that a personal impulse or emotion
might be more than individual, except through demoniacal possession, still seems to old-fashioned
orthodoxy a monstrous heresy. Yet it is now certain that most of our deeper feelings are superindividual,
- both those which we classify as passional, and those which we call sublime. The individuality of the
amatory passion is absolutely denied by science; and what is true of love at first sight is also true of hate:
both are superindividual. So likewise are those vague impulses to wander which come and go with
spring, and those vague depressions experienced in autumn, - survivals, perhaps, from an epoch in which
human migration followed the course of the seasons, or even from an era preceding the apparition of
man. Superindividual also those emotions felt by one who, after having passed the greater part of a life
on plain or prairies, first looks upon a range of snow-capped peaks; or the sensations of some dweller in
the interior of a continent when he first beholds the ocean, and hears its eternal thunder. The delight,
always toned with awe, which the sight of a stupendous landscape evokes; Or that speechless admiration,
mingled with melancholy inexpressible, which the splendor of a tropical sunset creates, - never can be
interpreted by individual experience. Psychological analysis has indeed shown these emotions to be
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