Through
the
Torii 
Kyoto
Nikko
Tokyo
Houses of Sleep
Daibutsu
Spring
Willow Woman
East West
Hibachi
Decline of Taste
Fourteenth
Handkerchief
Morning-Glory
Plum-Blossom
Chrysanthemum
Cherry-Blossom
Rossetti
Whistler
Note on Yeats
Oscar Wilde
Hokku
Again on Hokku
On Poetry
Again on Poetry
Morning Fancy
Insularity
Flowers
Faith
Moods
Life
Happiness
Beauties
Truth
Ugliness
Netsukes
Ink Slab 
 

 

 

FAITH


THE 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 cast 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 [<165] simple little thought once under the touch of imagination, grows more splendrous than art, more beautiful than life. It is never a question of the size of your song and thought but the question of Faith. We shall be at once brought back, if we are once admitted into that wonderful house, to the age of emotion and true love, where we speak only one language that is that of adoration. As it is the world of imagination, the life poetical and important will be in our sure reach; let us be thankful that the reality of the external world has ceased to be a standard, and we will happily be our own god,, and Buddha. We will be a revelation, therefore a great art itself, of hope and passion, which will never fail.[<166]



Next: THE MOODS