That Leads To Doing Things By Rule.
Still, By The Look Of Those Terraced Fields, Where The Water Is Led So
Cunningly From Level To Level, The Japanese Cultivator Must Enjoy At
Least One Excitement.
If the villages up the valley tamper with the
water supply, there must surely be excitement down the valley - argument,
protest, and the breaking of heads.
The days of romance, therefore, are not all dead.
* * * * *
This that follows happened on the coast twenty miles through the fields
from Yokohama, at Kamakura, that is to say, where the great bronze
Buddha sits facing the sea to hear the centuries go by. He has been
described again and again - his majesty, his aloofness, and every one of
his dimensions, the smoky little shrine within him, and the plumed hill
that makes the background to his throne. For that reason he remains, as
he remained from the beginning, beyond all hope of description - as it
might be, a visible god sitting in the garden of a world made new. They
sell photographs of him with tourists standing on his thumb nail, and,
apparently, any brute of any gender can scrawl his or its ignoble name
over the inside of the massive bronze plates that build him up. Think
for a moment of the indignity and the insult! Imagine the ancient,
orderly gardens with their clipped trees, shorn turf, and silent ponds
smoking in the mist that the hot sun soaks up after rain, and the
green-bronze image of the Teacher of the Law wavering there as it half
seems through incense clouds.
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