{"collection":"Buddhism","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/bud/gbf/gbf05.htm","path":"bud/gbf/gbf05.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/bud/gbf/gbf05.htm","text":"Gleaings in Buddha-Fields, by Lafcadio Hearn, [1897]\n\"Let the Bodhisattva look upon all things as having the nature of space,\u2014as permanently equal to space; without essence, without substantiality.\"\u2014SADDHARIMA-PUNDAR\u00ceKA.\nI HAVE wandered to the verge of the town; and the street I followed has roughened into a country road, and begins to curve away through rice-fields toward a hamlet at the foot of the hills. Between town and rice-fields a vague unoccupied stretch of land makes a favorite playground for children. There are trees, and spaces of grass to roll on, and many butterflies, and plenty of little stones. I stop to look at the children.\nBy the roadside some are amusing themselves with wet clay, making tiny models of mountains and rivers and rice-fields; tiny mud villages, also,\u2014imitations of peasants' huts,\u2014and little mud temples, and mud gardens with\nponds and humped bridges and imitations of stone-lanterns (t\u00f4r\u00f4); likewise miniature cemeteries, with bits of broken stone for monuments. And they play at funerals,\u2014burying corpses of butterflies and semi (cicad\u00e6), and pretending to repeat Buddhist sutras over the grave. To-morrow they will not dare to do this; for to-morrow will be the first day of the festival of the Dead. During that festival it is strictly forbidden to molest insects, especially semi, some of which have on their heads little red characters said to be names of Souls.\nChildren in all countries play at death. Before the sense of personal identity comes, death cannot be seriously considered; and childhood thinks in this regard more correctly, perhaps, than self-conscious maturity. Of course, if these little ones were told, some bright morning, that a playfellow had gone away forever,\u2014gone away to be reborn elsewhere,\u2014there would be a very real though vague sense of loss, and much wiping of eyes with many-colored sleeves; but presently the loss would be forgotten and the playing resumed. The idea of ceasing to exist could not possibly enter\na child-mind: the butterflies and birds, the flowers, the foliage, the sweet summer itself, only play at dying;\u2014they seem to go, but they all come back again after the snow is gone. The real sorrow and fear of death arise in us only through slow accumulation of experience with doubt and pain; and these little boys and girls, being Japanese and Buddhists, will never, in any event, feel about death just as you or I do. They will find reason to fear it for somebody else's sake, but not for their own, because they will learn that they have died millions of times already, and have forgotten the trouble of it, much as one forgets the pain of successive toothaches. In the strangely penetrant light of their creed, teaching the ghostliness of all substance, granite or gossamer,\u2014just as those lately found X-rays make visible the ghostliness of flesh,\u2014this their present world, with its bigger mountains and rivers and rice-fields, will not appear to them much more real than the mud. landscapes which they made in childhood. And much more real it probably is not.\nAt which thought I am conscious of a sudden soft shock, a familiar shock, and know\nmyself seized by the idea of Substance as Non-Reality.\nThis sense of the voidness of things comes only when the temperature of the air is so equably related to the temperature of life that I can forget having a body. Cold compels painful notions of solidity; cold sharpens the delusion of personality; cold quickens egotism; cold numbs thought, and shrivels up the little wings of dreams.\nTo-day is one of those warm, hushed days when it is possible to think of things as they are,\u2014when ocean, peak, and plain seem no more real than the arching of blue emptiness above them. All is mirage,\u2014my physical self, and the sunlit road, and the slow rippling of the grain under a sleepy wind, and the thatched roofs beyond the haze of the rice-fields, and the blue crumpling of the naked hills behind everything. I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost and of being haunted,\u2014haunted by the prodigious luminous Spectre of the World.\nThere are men and women working in those\nfields. Colored moving shadows they are; and the earth under them\u2014out of which they rose, and back to which they will go -is equally shadow. Only the Forces behind the shadow, that make and unmake, are real,\u2014therefore viewless.\nSomewhat as Night devours all lesser shadow will this phantasmal earth swallow us at last, and itself thereafter vanish away. But the little shadows and the Shadow-Eater must as certainly reappear,\u2014must rematerialize somewhere and somehow. This ground beneath me is old as the Milky Way. Call it what you please,\u2014clay, soil, dust: its names are but symbols of human sensations having nothing in common with it. Really it is nameless and unnamable, being a mass of energies, tendencies, infinite possibilities; for it was made by the beating of that shoreless Sea of Birth and Death whose surges billow unseen out of eternal Night to burst in foam of stars. Lifeless it is not: it feeds upon life, and visible life grows out of it. Dust it is of Karma, waiting to enter into novel combinations,\u2014dust of elder Being in that state between birth and birth which the Buddhist calls Ch\u00fb-U.\nIt is made of forces, and of nothing else; and those forces are not of this planet only, but of vanished spheres innumerable.\nIs there aught visible, tangible, measurable, that has never been mixed with sentiency?\u2014atom that has never vibrated to pleasure or to pain?\u2014air that has never been cry or speech?\u2014drop that has never been a tear? Assuredly this dust has felt. It has been everything we know; also much that we cannot know. It has been nebula and star, planet and moon, times unspeakable. Deity also it has been,\u2014the Sun-God of worlds that circled and worshiped in other \u00e6ons. \"Remember, Man, thou art but dust!\"\u2014a saying profound only as materialism, which stops short at surfaces. For what is dust? \"Remember, Dust, thou hast been Sun, and Sun thou shalt become again! . . . Thou hast been Light, Life, Love;\u2014and into all these, by ceaseless cosmic magic, thou shalt many times be turned again!\"\nFor this Cosmic Apparition is more than evolution alternating with dissolution: it is\ninfinite metempsychosis; it is perpetual palingenesis. Those old predictions of a bodily resurrection were not falsehoods; they were rather foreshadowings of a truth vaster than all myths and deeper than all religions.\nSuns yield up their ghosts of flame; but out of their graves new suns rush into being. Corpses of worlds pass all to some solar funeral pyre; but out of their own ashes they are born again. This earth must die: her seas shall be Saharas. But those seas once existed in the sun; and their dead tides, revived by fire, will pour their thunder upon the coasts of another world. Transmigration\u2014transmutation: these are not fables! What is impossible? Not the dreams of alchemists and poets;\u2014dross may indeed be changed to gold, the jewel to the living eye, the flower into flesh. What is impossible? If seas can pass from world to sun, from sun to world again, what of the dust of dead selves,\u2014dust of memory and thought? Resurrection there is,\u2014but a resurrection more stupendous than any dreamed of by Western creeds. Dead emotions will revive as surely as dead suns and moons. Only, so far as we can just now\ndiscern, there will be no return of identical individualities. The reapparition will always be a recombination of the pre\u00ebxisting, a readjustment of affinities, a reintegration of being informed with the experience of anterior being. The Cosmos is a Karma.\nMerely by reason of illusion and folly do we shrink from the notion of self-instability. For what is our individuality? Most certainly it is not individuality at all: it is multiplicity incalculable. What is the human body? A form built up out of billions of living entities, an impermanent agglomeration of individuals called cells. And the human soul? A composite of quintillions of souls. We are, each and all, infinite compounds of fragments of anterior lives. And the universal process that continually dissolves and continually constructs personality has always been going on, and is even at this moment going on, in every one of us. What being ever had a totally new feeling an absolutely new idea? All our emotions and thoughts and wishes, however changing and growing through the varying seasons of life, are only compositions and recompositions\nof the sensations and ideas and desires of other folk, mostly of dead people,\u2014millions of billions of dead people. Cells and souls are themselves recombinations, present aggregations of past knittings of forces,\u2014forces about which nothing is known save that they belong to the Shadow-Makers of universes.\nWhether you (by you I mean any other agglomeration of souls) really wish for immortality as an agglomeration, I cannot tell. But I confess that \"my mind to me a kingdom is\"\u2014not! Rather it is a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America; and the nominal government, supposed to be rational, declares that an eternity of such anarchy is not desirable. I have souls wanting to soar in air, and souls wanting to swim in water (seawater, I think), and souls wanting to live in woods or on mountain tops. I have souls longing for the tumult of great cities, and souls longing to dwell in tropical solitude;\u2014souls, also, in various stages of naked savagery;\u2014souls demanding nomad freedom without tribute;\u2014souls conservative, delicate, loyal to empire and to feudal tradition, and\nsouls that are Nihilists, deserving Siberia;\u2014sleepless souls, hating inaction, and hermit souls, dwelling in such meditative isolation that only at intervals of years can I feel them moving about;\u2014souls that have faith in fetiches;\u2014polytheistic souls;\u2014souls proclaiming Islam;\u2014and souls medi\u00e6val, loving cloister shadow and incense and glimmer of tapers and the awful altitude of Gothic glooms. Co\u00f6peration among all these is not to be thought of: always there is trouble,\u2014revolt, confusion, civil war. The majority detest this state of things: multitudes would gladly emigrate. And the wiser minority feel that they need never hope for better conditions until after the total demolition of the existing social structure.\nI an individual,\u2014an individual soul! Nay, I am a population,\u2014a population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a thousand millions! Generations of generations I am, \u00e6ons of \u00e6ons! Countless times the concourse now making me has been scattered, and mixed with other scatterings. Of what concern, then, the next disintegration? Perhaps, after trillions\nof ages of burning in different dynasties of suns, the very best of me may come together again.\nIf one could only imagine some explanation of the Why! The questions of the Whence and the Whither are much less troublesome, since the Present assures us, even though vaguely, of Future and Past. But the Why!\nThe cooing voice of a little girl dissolves my reverie. She is trying to teach a child brother how to make the Chinese character for Man,\u2014I mean Man with a big M. First she draws in the dust a stroke sloping downwards from right to left, so:\n###\nthen she draws another curving downwards from left to right, thus:\u2014\njoining the two so as to form the perfect ji, or character, hito, meaning a person of either sex, or mankind:\u2014\nThen she tries to impress the idea of this shape on the baby memory by help of a practical illustration,\u2014probably learned at school. She breaks a slip of wood in two pieces, and manages to balance the pieces against each other at about the same angle as that made by the two strokes of the character. \"Now see,\" she says: \"each stands only by help of the other. One by itself cannot stand. Therefore the ji is like mankind. Without help one person cannot live in this world; but by getting help and giving help everybody can live. If nobody helped anybody, all people would fall down and die.\"\nThis explanation is not philologically exact; the two strokes evolutionally standing for a pair of legs,\u2014all that survives in the modern ideograph of the whole man figured in the primitive picture-writing. But the pretty moral fancy is much more important than the scientific fact. It is also one charming example of that old-fashioned method of teaching which invested every form and every incident with ethical signification. Besides, as a mere item of moral information, it contains the essence of all earthly religion, and the best\npart of all earthly philosophy. A world-priestess she is, this dear little maid, with her dove's voice and her innocent gospel of one letter! Verily in that gospel lies the only possible present answer to ultimate problems. Were its whole meaning universally felt,\u2014were its whole suggestion of the spiritual and material law of love and help universally obeyed,\u2014forthwith, according to the Idealists, this seemingly solid visible world would vanish away like smoke! For it has been written that in whatsoever time all human minds accord in thought and will with the mind of the Teacher, there shall not remain even one particle of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood.","title":"Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: IV. Dust","type":"page"}