will be well for us, when we smell the incense kindled before the
image of Amida, to imagine that its odor is the wonderful
fragrance of Paradise, and to repeat the Nembutsu in gratitude
for the mercy of the Buddha."

1 "Short [or Epitomized] History of Priests."
2 "The Praise of Pious Observances."
3 By sila is meant the observance of the rules of purity
in act and thought. Dhyana (called by Japanese Buddhists Zenjo)
is one of the higher forms of meditation.


IV

But the use of incense in Japan is not confined to religious
rites and ceremonies: indeed the costlier kinds of incense are
manufactured chiefly for social entertainments. Incense-burning
has been an amusement of the aristocracy ever since the
thirteenth century. Probably you have heard of the Japanese tea-
ceremonies, and their curious Buddhist history; and I suppose
that every foreign collector of Japanese bric-a'-brac knows
something about the luxury to which these ceremonies at one
period attained,--a luxury well attested by the quality of the
beautiful utensils formerly employed in them. But there were, and
still are, incense-ceremonies much more elaborate and costly than
the tea-ceremonies,--and also much more interesting. Besides
music, embroidery, poetical composition and other branches of the
old-fashioned female education, the young lady of pre-Meiji days
was expected to acquire three especially polite accomplishments,
--the art of arranging flowers, (ikebana), the art of ceremonial