KoYASAN, THE JAPANESE VaLHALLA 



665 



granite base, on which their names are 

 inscribed. 



The Russian War brought pilgrims 

 and visitors to Koyasan in great num- 

 bers, and the tablets mounted to unusual 

 thousands in the first year. Regimental 

 groups united in sending tablets to 

 Koyasan, and it must have comforted 

 many, who died in agony on the field, 

 to know that in death their spirits would 

 be free to seek the cool green forest 

 aisles and the golden temple rooms on 

 Koyasan; to rest there with saints, 

 priests, and princes ; to be tended and 

 remembered each night and earliest 

 morning; to have reverend priests inter- 

 ceding for them in deep-voiced chants 

 amid clouds of incense as dense as battle 

 smoke and Manchurian dust. 



Ri;CEPTION' BY THE LORD ABBOT 



One morning the feeble old Lord Ab- 

 bot received us in his Golden Audi- 

 ence Hall in the Kongobuji, and his was 

 an ideal presence. He was of such vener- 

 able and saintly mien that it was not all 

 etiquette that made us slip from the 

 foreign chairs to our knees and prostrate 

 our foreheads to the mats in the pres- 

 ence of that noble prelate in his splen- 

 did ceremonial robes. The delicate face, 

 blanched with illness, refined by suflier- 

 ing and the religious life, the splendid 

 purple garments and small red brocade 

 kesa, like the begging sack of earlier 

 priests, made a picture in that room 

 paneled with severely plain gold screens. 

 The ceremonial cakes and tea were 

 brought, the venerable abbot made the 

 sign of serving us, and a young priest 

 put nearer to us the lacquer trays, with 

 their exquisite arrangement of impres- 

 sionist shells, sea waves, octopus, and 

 red tai fish. The abbot told us of the 

 50 years of his life spent on high Koya- 

 san ; how he came as an acolyte at seven- 

 teen years of age, and for sixteen years 

 past had been the Lord Abbot, the suc- 

 cessor of Kobo Daishi. A few more 

 minutes seemed to exhaust his strength, 

 for he had been carried in from a sick 

 bed to do honors to the friends of a 

 court official and of a brother priest. 



Two priests lifted the invalid to his feet 

 and assisted him out through the golden 

 fusuma, and we knew that we had been 

 in the presence of a living god. 



HONORING THE DEAD SOLDIERS 



All the Kongobuji and its treasures 

 were thrown wide to us, and we were 

 conducted past gold screens on which 

 Sesshiu and the greatest of the Kanos 

 had drawn their brushes, to a corner 

 apartment, the room where Hidetsugu 

 committed hara-kiri and where a Kake- 

 mono by Sesshu was temporarily hung 

 across four gold fusuma panels painted 

 with white herons on snow-laden willow- 

 trees by Kano Motonobu. After that 

 artistic climax, that Pelion of Sesshiu 

 heaped on the Ossa of Kano, words 

 failed, and we went on in dreams to see 

 bamboos in the snow, as painted on long 

 series of screen panels by Motonobu, and 

 blossoming plum trees by Tanyu. After 

 that came the inner sanctuary and chapel 

 of the monastery — the imperial chapel, 

 as it were — where the ihai of the last 

 Emperor and Empress and of members 

 of the imperial family are ranged at 

 either side of the reliquary containing 

 the tablet of Kobo Daishi. A plain white 

 pine board erected in the midst of this 

 golden splendor amidst the ranks of 

 gilded lacquer tablets, is inscribed in 

 black "to the souls of those who died 

 in the war of 1894-95 ;" and to the com- 

 mon people it is inexpressibly comfort- 

 ing to see the tablet of the soldiers en- 

 throned with the ihai of the imperial 

 ancestors, worshiped and tended as they 

 are tended for all time. During the 

 Russian war a most conspicuous object 

 on the altar of the Golden Hall was 

 another plain pine tablet inscribed "to 

 those who are dying daily in Man- 

 churia," and the same tablet was set up 

 in nearly every Buddhist temple in 

 Japan, which also celebrated monthly 

 Scgaki services, or "feasts of hungry 

 souls," while the war endured. The head 

 priest of our monastery at Koyasan 

 showed a book, into which he had 

 pasted all the official lists of the dead 

 soldiers and sailors, and holding this 



