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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
daughter who unmurmuring sacrifices all the happiness of existence for the sake, perhaps, of an
undeserving or even cruel, parent; the partisan who gives up friends, family, and fortune, rather than
break the verbal promise made in other years to a now poverty-stricken master; the wife who
ceremoniously robes herself in white, utters a prayer, and thrusts a sword into her throat to atone for a
wrong done to strangers by her husband, - all these obey the will and hear the approval of invisible
witnesses. Even among the skeptical students of the new generation, this feeling survives many wrecks
of faith, and the old sentiments are still uttered: "Never must we cause shame to our ancestors;" "it is our
duty to give honor to our ancestors." During my former engagement as a teacher of English, it happened
more than once that ignorance of the real meaning behind such phrases prompted me to change them in
written composition. I would suggest, for example, that the expression, "to do honor to the memory of
our ancestors," was more correct than the phrase given. I remember one day even attempting to explain
why we ought not to speak of ancestors exactly as if they were living parents! Perhaps my pupils
suspected me of trying to meddle with their beliefs; for the Japanese never think of an ancestor as having
become "only a memory": their dead are alive.
Were there suddenly to arise within us the absolute certainty that our dead are still with us, - seeing every
act, knowing our every thought, hearing each word we utter, able to feel sympathy with us or anger
against us, able to help us and delighted to receive our help, able to love us and greatly needing our love,
- it is quite certain that our conceptions of life and duty would be vastly changed. We should have to
recognize our obligations to the past in a very solemn way. Now, with the man of the Far East, the
constant presence of the dead has been a matter of conviction for thousands of years: he speaks to them
daily; he tries to give them happiness; and, unless a professional criminal he never quite forgets his duty
towards them. No one, says Hirata, who constantly discharges that duty, will ever be disrespectful to the
gods or to his living parents. "Such a man will also be loyal to his friends, and kind and gentle with his
wife and children; for the essence of this devotion is in truth filial piety." And it is in this sentiment that
the secret of much strange feeling in Japanese character must be sought. Far more foreign to our world of
sentiment than the splendid courage with which death is faced, or the equanimity with which the most
trying sacrifices are made, is the simple deep emotion of the boy who, in the presence of a Shinto shrine
never seen before, suddenly feels the tears spring to his eyes. He is conscious in that moment of what we
never emotionally recognize, - the prodigious debt of the present to the past, and the duty of love to the
dead.
IV
If we think a little about our position as debtors, and our way of accepting that position, one striking
difference between Western and Far-Eastern moral sentiment will become manifest.
There is nothing more awful than the mere fact of life as mystery when that fact first rushes fully into
consciousness. Out of unknown darkness we rise a moment into sun-light, look about us, rejoice and
suffer, pass on the vibration of our being to other beings, and fall back again into darkness. So a wave
rises, catches the light, transmits its motion, and sinks back into sea. So a plant ascends from clay,
unfolds its leaves to light and air, flowers, seeds, and becomes clay again. Only, the wave has no
knowledge; the plant has no perceptions. Each human life seems no more than a parabolic curve of
motion out of earth and back to earth; but in that brief interval of change it perceives the universe. The
awfulness of the phenomenon is that nobody knows anything about it No mortal can explain this most
common, yet moat incomprehensible of all facts, - life in itself; yet every mortal who can think has been
obliged betimes, to think about it in relation to self.
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