Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn was a fascinating man. He went to Japan as a newspaper correspondent in 1890, and stayed there, teaching English and marrying a Japanese woman. He was the first ever, and for a long time the only, naturalized Japanese citizen. He was a good writer, evoking in a wonderful late-Victorian style the beauty and charm of a Japan that was fast modernizing but still had large amounts of the old Tokugawa Period manners and customs. His words paint colorful pictures of Japan that resonate with the period's woodblock prints and still resonate today in Japan, Inc. of the 21st century When I was in grad school, Lafcadio Hearn was a bad word around the Asian Languages Department at Stanford. I once mentioned that I was reading Hearn and a professor made a sour sort of face that cast doubt on my basic sanity as well as my ability to ever succeed at the Asian Scholar game; I quickly repented, at least in public, and began to speak of the inaccuracies in Hearn’s translations and how he allowed his own personal beliefs to alter what he wrote about Buddhism. I read him openly now and consider the world he portrays to be a place in time that everyone wishing to understand Japan should go. Most of his books are out of print, but there is much available online (For example here: Project Gutenberg )

Here is a small sampling:

"It is with the delicious surprise of the first journey through Japanese streets--unable to make one's kuruma-runner understand anything but gestures, frantic gestures to roll on anywhere, everywhere, since all is unspeakably pleasurable and new--that one first receives the real sensation of being in the Orient, in this Far East so much read of, so long dreamed of, yet, as the eyes bear witness, heretofore all unknown. There is a romance even in the first full consciousness of this rather commonplace fact; but for me this consciousness is transfigured inexpressibly by the divine beauty of the day. There is some charm unutterable in the morning air, cool with the coolness of Japanese spring and wind-waves from the snowy cone of Fuji; a charm perhaps due rather to softest lucidity than to any positive tone--an atmospheric limpidity extraordinary, with only a suggestion of blue in it, through which the most distant objects appear focused with amazing sharpness. The sun is only pleasantly warm; the jinricksha, or kuruma, is the most cosy little vehicle imaginable; and the street-vistas, as seen above the dancing white mushroom-shaped hat of my sandalled runner, have an allurement of which I fancy that I could never weary."

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan

"Buddhism . . . recognizing no permanency, no finite stabilities, no distinctions of character or class or race, except as passing phenomena,--nay, no difference even between gods and men,--has been essentially the religion of tolerance. Demon and angel are but varying manifestations of the same Karma;--hell and heaven mere temporary halting-places upon the journey to eternal peace. For all beings there is but one law,--immutable and divine: the law by which the lowest must rise to the place of the highest,--the law by which the worst must become the best,--the law by which the vilest must become a Buddha. In such a system there is no room for prejudice and for hatred. Ignorance alone is the source of wrong and pain; and all ignorance must finally be dissipated in infinite light through the decomposition of Self.

But in the case of the average seeker after truth, this refinement and ultimate decomposition of self can be effected only with lentor inexpressible. The phantom-individuality, though enduring only for the space of a single lifetime, shapes out of the sum of its innate qualities, and out of the sum of its own particular acts and thoughts, the new combination which succeeds it,--a fresh individuality,--another prison of illusion for the Self-without-selfishness. As name and form, the false self dissolves; but its impulses live on and recombine; and the final destruction of those impulses--the total extinction of their ghostly vitality,--may require a protraction of effort through billions of centuries. Perpetually from the ashes of burnt-out passions subtler passions are born,--perpetually from the graves of illusions new illusions arise. The most powerful of human passions is the last to yield: it persists far into superhuman conditions. Even when its grosser forms have passed away, its tendencies still lurk in those feelings originally derived from it or interwoven with it,--the sensation of beauty, for example, and the delight of the mind in graceful things. On earth these are classed among the higher feelings. But in a supramundane state their indulgence is fraught with peril: a touch or a look may cause the broken fetters of sensual bondage to reform. Beyond all worlds of sex there are strange zones in which thoughts and memories become tangible and visible objective facts,--in which emotional fancies are materialized,-- in which the least unworthy wish may prove creative."

Gleanings in the Buddha Fields

I also strongly recommend Kokoro which is often available in paperback. 今日、 朝から晩まで心よくして下さい。