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But of all the marvellous customs that I wot of in connection with Japanese religious exercises, none appears to me so strange as that of spitting at the images of the gods, more especially at the statues of the Ni-ô, the two huge red or red and green statues which, like Gog and Magog, emblems of strength, stand as guardians of the chief Buddhist temples.
The guardians of the gate, Ni-O, the two gigantic Deva kings, who have passed from India into Japanese mythology, are encaged in the gateway building. Their cage and their persons are littered with nasty morsels of chewed paper, wherever their worshippers have literally spat their prayers at them.
For, on either side of the entrance, stand two monster-figures, nude, blood-red, demoniac, fearfully muscled, with feet like lions, and hands brandishing gilded thunderbolts, and eyes of delirious fury; the guardians of holy things, the Ni-O, or "Two Kings."
It is Benzuru, the same personage whose famous image at Asakusa has been made featureless by the wearing touch of countless pilgrim-fingers. To left and right of the entrance are the Ni-O, enormously muscled, furious of aspect; their crimson bodies are speckled with a white scum of paper pellets spat at them by worshippers.
By art I do not mean painting and sculpture but every kind of decoration, and most kinds of pictorial representation the image of a boy's kite or a girl's battledore not less than the design upon a lacquered casquet or enameled vase, the figure upon a workman's trowel not less than the pattern of the girdle of a princess, the shape of the paper doll or wooden rattle bought for a baby, not less than the forms of those colossal Ni-O who guard the gateways of the Buddha's temples," etc.
By art I do not mean only painting and sculpture, but every kind of decoration, and most kinds of pictorial representation, the image on a boy's kite or a girl's battledore, not less than the design upon a lacquered casket or enamelled vase, the figures upon a workman's towel not less than the pattern of the girdle of a princess, the shape of the paper-dog or the wooden rattle bought for a baby, not less than the forms of those colossal Ni-O who guard the gateways of Buddhist temples .... And surely there can never be any just estimate made of Japanese literature, until a study of that literature shall have been made by some scholar, not only able to understand Japanese beliefs, but able also to sympathize with them to at least the same extent that our great humanists can sympathize with the religion of Euripides, of Pindar, and of Theocritus.
If it be argued that art which depicts the human emotions is properly speaking subjective, and therefore a proof of developed personality, will it be maintained that Japan is devoid of such art? How about the pictures and the statues of warriors? How about the passionate features of the Ni-o, the placid faces of the Buddhas and other religious imagery?
There were huge forms of wrath, grasping thunderbolts, and rising to the roof: the Deva-kings, like impersonations of hurricane power; the Ni-O, guardians of long-vanished temple gates.
By art I do not mean painting and sculpture but every kind of decoration, and most kinds of pictorial representation the image of a boy's kite or a girl's battledore not less than the design upon a lacquered casquet or enameled vase, the figure upon a work-man's trowel not less than the pattern of the girdle of a princess, the shape of the paper doll or wooden rattle bought for a baby, not less than the forms of those colossal Ni-O, who guard the gateways of the Buddha's temples," etc.
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