ese
home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a
brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a
wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and
fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production."

Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, Buddhist
and Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just here the difference
between these two faiths that were long merged into one, but have been
dissociated since the restoration of the Emperor to his old-time
powers forty years ago. Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of
ancestor-worship, with its doctrine of the divine descent of the
Mikado from the Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful
adherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's
ancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this life
it does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your own
instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as it may be
called a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a form
of patriotism and not a religion.

Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of theology
comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting upon much
ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it may have to do
with practical morals. "The fact is, we Japanese have never gotten our
morals from our religion," said one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me
in Tokyo. "What moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor
Buddhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics."

Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religious
theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly {50} degenerated
into a shameless mockery of its former self. To read Sir Edwin
Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism in his "Light of Asia,"
and then see practical Buddhism in Japan with all its superstitions
and idolatries, is very much like hearing bewitched Titania's praise
of her lover's beauty and then turning to see the long ears and hairy
features of the ass that he has become.

Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold himself coming to
Buddhist Japan dropped into open and flagrant immoralities such as a
Christian community would never have tolerated, while the foremost
American-bred apologists for Buddhism here have been but little
better. One of the greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more
notorious right now for the vi