Chapter Chapter 11 · IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

. IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

"Do you know anything about josses?"

"Josses?"

"Yes; idols, Japanese idols,--josses."

"Something," I answered, "but not very much."

"Well, come, and look at my collection, won't you? I've been

collecting josses for twenty years, and I've got some worth

seeing. They're not for sale, though,--except to the British

Museum."

I followed the curio dealer through the bric-a-brac of his shop,

and across a paved yard into an unusually large go-down(1). Like

all go-downs it was dark: I could barely discern a stairway

sloping up through gloom. He paused at the foot.

"You'll be able to see better in a moment," he said. "I had this

place built expressly for them; but now it is scarcely big

enough. They're all in the second story. Go right up; only be

careful,--the steps are bad."

I climbed, and reached a sort of gloaming, under a very high

roof, and found myself face to face with the gods.

In the dusk of the great go-down the spectacle was more than

weird: it was apparitional. Arhats and Buddhas and Bodhisattvas,

and the shapes of a mythology older than they, filled all the

shadowy space; not ranked by hierarchies, as in a temple, but

mingled without order, as in a silent panic. Out of the

wilderness of multiple heads and broken aureoles and hands

uplifted in menace or in prayer,--a shimmering confusion of dusty

gold half lighted by cobwebbed air-holes in the heavy walls,--I

could at first discern little; then, as the dimness cleared, I

began to distinguish personalities. I saw Kwannon, of many forms;

Jizo, of many names; Shaka, Yakushi, Amida, the Buddhas and their

disciples. They were very old; and their art was not all of

Japan, nor of any one place or time: there were shapes from

Korea, China, India,--treasures brought over sea in the rich days

of the early Buddhist missions. Some were seated upon

lotos-flowers, the lotos-flowers of the Apparitional Birth. Some

rode leopards, tigers, lions, or monsters mystical,--typifying

lightning, typifying death. One, triple-headed and many-handed,

sinister and splendid, seemed moving through the gloom on a

throne of gold, uplifted by a phalanx of elephants. Fudo I saw,

shrouded and shrined in fire, and Maya-Fujin, riding her

celestial peacock; and strangely mingling with these Buddhist

visions, as in the anachronism of a Limbo, armored effigies of

Daimyo and images of the Chinese sages. There were huge forms of

wrath, grasping thunderbolts, and rising to the roof: the

Deva-kings, like impersonations of hurricane power; the Ni-O,

guardians of long-vanished temple gates. Also there were forms

voluptuously feminine: the light grace of the limbs folded within

their lotos-cups, the suppleness of the fingers numbering the

numbers of the Good Law, were ideals possibly inspired in some

forgotten tune by the charm of an Indian dancing-girl. Shelved

against the naked brickwork above, I could perceive multitudes of

lesser shapes: demon figures with eyes that burned through the

dark like the eyes of a black cat, and figures half man, half

bird, winged and beaked like eagles,--the _Tengu_ of Japanese

fancy.

"Well?" queried the curio dealer, with a chuckle of satisfaction

at my evident surprise.

"It is a very great collection," I responded.

He clapped his hand on my shoulder, and exclaimed triumphantly in

my ear, "Cost me fifty thousand dollars."

But the images themselves told me how much more was their cost to

forgotten piety, notwithstanding the cheapness of artistic labor

in the East. Also they told me of the dead millions whose pilgrim

feet had worn hollow the steps leading to their shrines, of the

buried mothers who used to suspend little baby-dresses before

their altars, of the generations of children taught to murmur

prayers to them, of the countless sorrows and hopes confided to

them. Ghosts of the worship of centuries had followed them into

exile; a thin, sweet odor of incense haunted the dusty place.

"What would you call that?" asked the voice of the curio dealer.

"I've been told it's the best of the lot."

He pointed to a figure resting upon a triple golden

lotos,--Avalokitesvara: she "_who looketh down above the sound of

prayer."... Storms and hate give way to her name. Fire

is quenched by her name. Demons vanish at the sound of her name.

By her name one may stand firm in the sky, like a sun...._

The delicacy of the limbs, the tenderness of the smile, were

dreams of the Indian paradise.

"It is a Kwannon," I made reply, "and very beautiful."

"Somebody will have to pay me a very beautiful price for it," he

said, with a shrewd wink. "It cost me enough! As a rule, though,

I get these things pretty cheap. There are few people who care to

buy them, and they have to be sold privately, you know: that

gives me an advantage. See that Jizo in the corner,--the big

black fellow? What is it?"

"Emmei-Jizo," I answered,--"Jizo, the giver of long life. It must

be very old."

"Well," he said, again taking me by the shoulder, "the man from

whom I got that piece was put in prison for selling it to me."

Then he burst into a hearty laugh,--whether at the recollection

of his own cleverness in the transaction, or at the unfortunate

simplicity of the person who had sold the statue contrary to law,

I could not decide.

"Afterwards," he resumed, "they wanted to get it back again, and

offered me more, than I had given for it. But I held on. I don't

know everything about josses, but I do know what they are worth.

There isn't another idol like that in the whole country. The

British Museum will be glad to get it."

"When do you intend to offer the collection to the British

Museum?" I presumed to ask.

"Well, I first want to get up a show," he replied. "There's money

to be made by a show of josses in London. London people never saw

anything like this in their lives. Then the church folks help

that sort of a show, if you manage them properly: it advertises

the missions. 'Heathen idols from Japan!'... How do you like the

baby?"

I was looking at a small gold-colored image of a naked child,

standing, one tiny hand pointing upward, and the other downward,

--representing the Buddha newly born. _Sparkling with light he

came from the womb, as when the Sun first rises in the east....

Upright he took deliberately seven steps; and the prints of his

feet upon the ground remained burning as seven stars. And he

spake with clearest utterance, saying, "This birth is a Buddha

birth. Re-birth is not for me. Only this last time am I born for

the salvation of all on earth and in heaven._"

"That is what they call a Tanjo-Shaka," I said. "It looks like

bronze."

"Bronze it is," he responded, tapping it with his knuckles to

make the metal ring. "The bronze alone is worth more than the

price I paid."

I looked at the four Devas whose heads almost touched the roof,

and thought of the story of their apparition told in the

Mahavagga. _On a beautiful night the Four Great Kings entered the

holy grove, filling all the place with light; and having

respectfully saluted the Blessed One, they stood in the four

directions, like four great firebrands_.

"How did you ever manage to get those big figures upstairs?" I

asked.

"Oh, hauled them up! We've got a hatchway. The real trouble was

getting them here by train. It was the first railroad trip they

ever made.... But look at these here: they will make the

sensation of the show!"

I looked, and saw two small wooden images, about three feet high.

"Why do you think they will make a sensation?" I inquired

innocently.

"Don't you see what they are? They date from the time of the

persecutions. _Japanese devils trampling on the Cross!_"

They were small temple guardians only; but their feet rested upon

X-shaped supports.

"Did any person tell you these were devils trampling on the

cross?" I made bold to ask.

"What else are they doing?" he answered evasively. "Look at the

crosses under their feet!"

"But they are not devils," I insisted; "and those cross-pieces

were put under their feet simply to give equilibrium."

He said nothing, but looked disappointed; and I felt a little

sorry for him. _Devils trampling on the Cross_, as a display line

in some London poster announcing the arrival of "josses from

Japan," might certainly have been relied on to catch the public

eye.

"This is more wonderful," I said, pointing to a beautiful group,

--Maya with the infant Buddha issuing from her side, according to

tradition. _Painlessly the Bodhisattva was born from her right

side. It was the eighth day of the fourth moon_.

"That's bronze, too," he remarked, tapping it. "Bronze josses are

getting rare. We used to buy them up and sell them for old metal.

Wish I'd kept some of them! You ought to have seen the bronzes,

in those days, coming in from the temples,--bells and vases and

josses! That was the time we tried to buy the Daibutsu at

Kamakura."

"For old bronze?" I queried.

"Yes. We calculated the weight of the metal, and formed a

syndicate. Our first offer was thirty thousand. We could have

made a big profit, for there's a good deal of gold and silver in

that work. The priests wanted to sell, but the people wouldn't

let them."

"It's one of the world's wonders," I said. "Would you really have

broken it up?"

"Certainly. Why not? What else could you do with it?... That one

there looks just like a Virgin Mary, doesn't it?"

He pointed to the gilded image of a female clasping a child to

her breast.

"Yes," I replied; "but it is Kishibojin, the goddess who loves

little children."

"People talk about idolatry," he went on musingly. "I've seen

things like many of these in Roman Catholic chapels. Seems to me

religion is pretty much the same the world over."

"I think you are right," I said.

"Why, the story of Buddha is like the story of Christ, isn't it?"

"To some degree," I assented.

"Only, he wasn't crucified."

I did not answer; thinking of the text, _In all the world there

is not one spot even so large as a mustard-seed where he has not

surrendered his body for the sake of creatures_. Then it suddenly

seemed to me that this was absolutely true. For the Buddha of the

deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor yet any one Tathagata, but

simply the divine in man. Chrysalides of the infinite we all are:

each contains a ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All

humanity is potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the

ages in Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the

world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice

brings nearer the hour of his awakening; and who may justly

doubt--remembering the myriads of the centuries of man--that even

now there does not remain one place on earth where life has not

been freely given for love or duty?

I felt the curio dealer's hand on my shoulder again.

"At all events," he cried in a cheery tone, "they'll be

appreciated in the British Museum--eh?"

"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.

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