Page:Kojiki by Chamberlain.djvu/70

lx be called to the fact that there is no tradition of a deluge, no testimony to any effect produced on the imagination by the earthquakes from which the Japanese islanders suffer such constant alarms, no trace of star-worship, no notion of incarnation or of transmigration. This last remark goes to show that the Japanese mythology had assumed its present shape before the first echo of Buddhism reverberated on these shores. But the absence of any tradition of a deluge or inundation is still more remakableremarkable [sic], both because such catastrophes are likely to occur occasionally in all lands, and because the imagination of most nations seems to have been greatly impressed by their occurrence. Moreover what is specifically known to us as the Deluge has been lately claimed as an ancient Altaïc myth. Yet here we have the oldest of the undoubtedly Altaïc nations without any legend of the kind. As for the neglect of the stars, round whose names the imagination of other races has twined such fanciful conceits, it is as characteristic of Modern as of Archaic Japan. The Chinese designations of the constellations, and some few Chinese legends relating to them, have been borrowed in historic times; but no Japanese writer has ever thought of looking in the stars for “the poetry of heaven.” Another detail worthy of mention is that the number seven, which in so many countries has been considered sacred, is here not prominent in any way, its place being taken by eight. Thus we have Eight Great Islands, an Eight-forked Serpent, a beard Eighty Hand-breaths long, a God named “Eight-Thousand Spears,” Eighty or Eight Hundred Myriads of Deities, etc., etc. The commentators think it necessary to tell us that all these eights and eighties need not be taken literally, as they simply mean a great number. The fact remains that the number eight had, for some unknown reason, a special significance attached to it; and as the documents which mention eight also mention nine and ten, besides higher numbers, and as in some test cases, such as that of the Eight Great Islands, each of the eight is separately enumerated, it is plain that when the Early Japanese said eight they meant eight, though they may doubtless have used that number in a vague manner, as we do a dozen, a hundred, and a thousand.

How glaringly different all this is from the fanciful accounts of Shintō that have been given by some recent popular writers calls for