Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 13.djvu/21

Rh followers are supposed to have sung. They also give a legendary account of the gods who had preceded Jimmu, and of the Mikados who succeeded him down to the time of the coming of the Chinamen.

Of these two ancient and highly honored books, the "Kojiki" is slightly the elderit was finished in 712and is much the more Japanese. It devotes itself mainly to the gods, and tells of men only as they are god-men, related to the deities or inspired by them to compose poetry. For already the art of poetry, a peculiarly Japanese art quite unlike our Western ideas of poetry, was highly honored among the Mikado's followers. From the "Kojiki" therefore, Japan's oldest book, we get our clearest vision of the earlier barbaric ages and the earliest spirit of the Japanese.

The "Nihongi," on the contrary, while almost as old as the "Kojiki," is a wholly Chinese work. It reviews the same traditions as the "Kojiki," but polishes them all, revises them to fit the newly acquired Chinese ideas. In short, it gives such an amazing Chinese twist to everything the "Kojiki" had told, that no student of human nature is likely to neglect the opportunity of comparing these two books. More clearly here than in any other works of Japan's present transformation, more clearly perhaps than anywhere else in the world, can we see an entire nation changing not only its outer garments, but its views, its ways of thought, almost its very soul. Carlyle's great vision in "Sartor Resartus" is here made actual, with its picture of man, the eternal spirit, clothing his invisible and incorporeal self in ever-shifting shadows of new bodies, new beliefs, new habits, and so outward to mere physical adornments of constantly changing fashion.

Only incidentally do the "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" refer to religion. They are, or regard themselves as, histories, "records of ancient matters." The religion under which the Japanese had emerged from barbarism was the unquestionably very ancient faith of Shintoism. This held its own not only against the first sweep of Chinese civilization with its