Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 13.djvu/30

12 were, how often they had previously been recorded, no man can say; but in 712, the date of the finishing of the "Kojiki," Chinese learning had been for more than a century knocking at Japan's door. The first official Chinese visit was by an ambassador in 608; but Buddhism had entered the land at least half a century before ( 553) from Chinese sources. Hence it seems clear that the "Kojiki" was by no means Japan's first book; it is only the first to survive from among generations of carefully prepared and treasured court records.

As between the "Kojiki" and the "Nihongi," the "Kojiki" is much more valuable in its account of the early gods; but when we turn to what purports to be the history of the Mikados, especially the later ones, the "Nihongi" is very much fuller, though perhaps not equally reliable. The "Kojiki" begins with raw and crude accounts of the births of many gods, whose many-syllabled compound names have each, to Japanese eyes, a special value. These are the gods of Shinto, that is, the ancestors of the Japanese. Hence, in a way, they are scarcely gods at all. Indeed we only thus translate the Chinese character for these old figures because we scarcely know how else to tell their story unless we call them deities. These crude, barbaric figures are not gods in the sense of being all-powerful, or even of ruling earth, or of being immortal. They are just "ancestors," barbaric men and women magnified by time.

Hence the tales of the "Kojiki" soon begin to center on Ama-terasu the Sun-goddess and her children; because these were the special ancestors of the Japanese; and hence, too, the tales drift readily aside into beast-fables. These beast-stories are quite unlike those of the Buddhist and Hindu books, in that they have no moral significance. They appear merely as historic incidents, actual happenings which have somehow become queerly distorted. So too we have culled from the "Kojiki" its story of the great Yamato-take, "Champion of Japan," because this is obviously an old