Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/223

Rh The shrines are of plain white wood, of the sort else used only in Shintō temples; the paths, scrupulously kept, are strewn with small white pebbles and wind spirally up mound after mound into the shadow of thick pines. Six centuries of royalty are buried in that white city with no other token of their rank than strict seclusion and austere simplicity. Each group of tombs is enclosed by a high wall, and on every gate is the sixteen-petalled chrysanthemum. There is no glitter of marble or gold, as in so many burial-grounds of monarchy, no fulsome eulogy on staring tablet, but, shrouded in the same mysterious obscurity as had enveloped for the nation their half-monastic lives, the Tenshi, sons of heaven, seem fittingly interred in that precise maze of ordered tranquillity half-way between the sky and their dearly-loved Kyōtō.

I could not bring myself to pass Ōsaka on the way to Kōbe without visiting the temple of Tennōji, where Mr. Lafcadio Hearn gathered some of his happiest "Gleanings in Buddhist Fields." Though the children's chapel has been so touchingly described by him that any other writer may well shrink from following in his footsteps, a rapid impression of a fugitive glimpse will be pardoned and more than justified if it should induce the reader to re-read his more elaborate account. An enormous temple, Tennōji lies on the very outskirts of the town, and, after traversing innumerable canals, one is still a little puzzled to locate the indo-no-kane among wide courts grouped about the central colonnade. After some searching we discerned a man and woman kneeling on the threshold of a shrine, in which a wrinkled priest in shabby brown vestments was reciting a