Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 8 (Chinese and Japanese).djvu/358

278 perform the feat, but his assurance proved to be a delusion and he was killed. Yet these miracle-mongers are often revered by the common people and stories about them are in very frequent circulation.

The Men of the Mountain, self-sufficient as they were, had their own society. Their meetings were often pictorially represented. (Plates XX and XXI.) These were supposed to occur in an ideal region called Senkyo, the realm of the Sennins, a region among the mountains where pine-trees symbolic of longevity grow soaring to the heavens, and where terraces command wide views that correspond to the free and spacious minds of the Sennins. There they exchange opinions, compose poems, play music or engage in meditation. This ideal realm was the paradise of the Taoists, but unlike the Buddhist paradise, it is not a shining or resplendent world. It is only an ideally beautiful spot inhabited by those immortals, who form a community of their own, but are not so well organized and united as those who dwell in the Buddhist paradises.

The Senkyō was often depicted in pictures which in turn stimulated poetic imagination in the Japanese to dreams of ideal serenity and aloofness, of total emancipation from all worldly anxieties, of immortal felicity and of freedom from illness and death. Many Japanese Buddhists, who were much imbued with Taoist doctrines, attempted to copy the ideal life of the immortals. They imitated the gathering of the immortals in the tea-party of a peculiarly quiet and contemplative type, or in meetings for free conversation and rhyming competition, and they planned their abodes and gardens in imitation of the ideal Senkyō. In short, the conception of the Senkyō was a source of real inspiration to the folk-lore and the aestheticism of the Japanese.

It was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that the Chinese ideas of the Sennin and the SenkyŌ found widest circulation in Japan and became assimilated with the popular beliefs