K[=o]b[=o]'s Work Undone.
Buddhism calls itself the jewel in the lotus. Japanese poetry asks of
the dewdrop "why, having the heart of the lotus for its home, does it
pretend to be a gem?" For a thousand years Riy[=o]bu Buddhism was
received as a pure brilliant of the first water, and then the
scholarship of the Shint[=o] revivalists of the eighteenth century
exposed the fraudulent nature of the unrelated parts and declared that
the jewel called Riy[=o]bu was but a craftsman's doublet and should be
split apart. Only a splinter of diamond, they declared, crowned a mass
of paste. Indignation made learning hot, and in 1870 the cement was
liquefied in civil war. The doublet was rent asunder by imperial decree,
as when a lapidist melts the mastic that holds in deception adamant and
glass, while real diamond stands all fire short of the hydro-oxygen
flame. The Riy[=o]bu temples were purged of all Buddhist symbols,
furniture, equipment and personnel, and were made again to assume their
august and austere simplicity. In the eyes of the purely aesthetic
critic, this national purgation was Puritanical iconoclasm; in those of
the priests, cast out to earn rice elsewise and elsewhere, it was
outrage, which in individual instances called for reprisal in blood,
fire and assassination; to the Shint[=o]ist, it was an exhibition of the
righteous judgment of the long-insulted gods; in the ken of the critical
student, it seems very much like historic and poetic justice.
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