Page:Love in Hindu Literature.djvu/97

 LOVE IN HINDU LITERATURE. 8^

Yet for the love I bear to thee, these to unite I dare for thee."

Such passages may be quoted also from Jamij Rumi, Sadi, Abul Ala and other Persian mystics.

The Jodo Buddhist of Japan, also, like the Vedan- tist, the Christian and the Sufi, realizes spiritual love through the medium of the sensuous or secular. We g-et the following account of Jodoism or Japanese Bhakti^ cult in Okakura!s Ideals of the East : " A wave of religious emotion passed over Japan in the Fujiwara epoch (A.D. 900-1200), and intoxicated with frantic love, men and women deserted the cities and villages in crowds to follow Kuya or Ipen, dancing and singing the name of Amida as. they went. Masquerades came into vogue, representing angels descending from heaven with lotus dais, inorder to welcome and bear upward the departing soul. Ladies would spend a life time in weaving, or embroidering the image of Divine Mercy, out of threads extracted from the lotus stem. Such was the new movement, which closely paralleled in China in the beginning of the Tang dynasty (618-905) has: never died, and to this day two thirds of the people belong to the Jodp sect, which corresponds to the Vaishnavism of India. Both Genshin,'the formulator of the creed, and Genku, who carried it to its culmina- tion, pleaded that human nature was weak, and try as it might, could not accomplish entire self-conquest and direct attainment of the Divine in this life." The Jodo and Vaishnava expressions of spiritual life and thought are thus preeminently human.

We have seen Vivek-ananda's use of the sensuous to describe the super-sensuous. Kablr, the fifteenth