Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/179



followers of Buddhism in the imperishable raiment of silence sit before the inextinguishable lamp of Faith, by whose light (indeed, the light older than life and the world) they seek the road of emancipation. The house east of the forests and west of the hills is dark without, and luminous within with the symbols of all beauty of ghosts and heavens. It is the most wonderful place where the imagination, at least the religious imagination, has for a thousand years never been changed; I like here, because it is the only place where criticism vainly attempts to enter for arguing and denying. The silence is whole and perfect, and makes your wizard life powerless; your true friendship with the ghosts sad and beautiful will soon be established. You have to abandon yourself to imagination only to create the absolute beauty and grandeur that make this our human world look so trifling, hardly worth troubling with; it is the magical house of Faith where the real echo of the oldest song still vibrates with the newest wonder, and even a Rh