Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/179

 a sermon. On set days, sometimes every day, one of the priests preaches. He kneels before a small lectern on a dais raised a little above the wide area of the matted nave, and talks to the people sitting around him on the floor. His sermon is generally of the simplest. It deals with the affairs of common life; with the small cares of Osandon, the maid of all work; with the troubles of Detchi, the shop-boy; with the woes of O-yuki, the danseuse, and with the perplexities of Tarobei, the rustic. Great ceremonies of worship may also be attended, but with these the ordinary individual has no intellectual sympathy. They are to him merely spectacular effects; solemn, splendid, and impressive, but incomprehensible. If the devout watches them with awed mien, the little belles of the parish are guilty of no irreverence when they patter up the steps leading to the lofty hall of worship, peep in smilingly at the tonsured chaunters of litanies and reciters of sutras, and patter away again with just such faces of sunny unconcern as they might wear on their way home from a dancing-lesson. Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, can never produce a Puritan or a Covenanter. It weaves no threads of solemnity or sanctimoniousness into the pattern of every-day life. Its worlds of hungry demons and infernal beings are too unsubstantial, too remote, to throw any lurid glare over the present. The festival, indeed, may be called the popular form of worship in Japan — such a festival as can be seen at the