Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/186

 define the much-talked-of Yamato damashii, — the spirit of Yamato, — he will do so in the words set down here.

As to the masses, the farmer, the artisan, the shopkeeper, and the proletariat, though it may be said that Buddhism is their creed, it must also be said that at sacred service as well as at festival time they do not take their faith very seriously. A visitor to a temple on the day of the sekkyo, the day of the sermon, which has been duly advertised on a species of sign-board at the entrance of the enclosure, cannot fail to note that nine-tenths of the congregation are white-haired, the remainder consisting of children with a sparse admixture of adults. Hodge may be there, driven by the dread that some unsettled account stands between him and the heaven which ought to have averted the typhoon from his rice-field or the insect plague from his mulberry plantation; and little O-setsu may be there, who last evening sat beside her brazier, her dimples banished and her sweet head bowed as she mused over the ingwa, the indissoluble chain of causation, that had linked her to love troubles and a throbbing heart. But these are the exceptions. Generally the worshipper carries with him wrinkles and snowy locks, and a hope that since the affairs of the "fleeting world" have become to him as "dust before the wind," he may by pious practices acquire a vested interest in the affairs of the world to come. He can follow the sermon. It