highway, but better preserved. One figure of Koshin, however, is
different from the others I have seen--apparently made after some
Hindoo model, judging by the Indian coiffure, mitre-shaped and lofty.
The god has three eyes; one in the centre of his forehead, opening
perpendicularly instead of horizontally. He has six arms. With one hand
he supports a monkey; with another he grasps a serpent; and the other
hands hold out symbolic things--a wheel, a sword, a rosary, a sceptre.
And serpents are coiled about his wrists and about his ankles; and under
his feet is a monstrous head, the head of a demon, Amanjako, sometimes
called Utatesa ('Sadness'). Upon the pedestal below the Three Apes are
carven; and the face of an ape appears also upon the front of the god's
tiara.

I see also tablets of stone, graven only with the god's name,--votive
offerings. And near by, in a tiny wooden shrine, is the figure of the
Earth-god, Ken-ro-ji-jin, grey, primeval, vaguely wrought, holding in
one hand a spear, in the other a vessel containing something
indistinguishable.

23

Perhaps to uninitiated eyes these many-headed, many-handed gods at first
may seem--as they seem always in the sight of Christian bigotry--only
monstrous. But when the knowledge of their meaning comes to one who
feels the divine in all religions, then they will be found to make
appeal to the higher aestheticism, to the sense of moral beauty, with a
force never to be divined by minds knowing nothing of the Orient and its
thought. To me the image of Kwannon of the Thousand Hands is not less
admirable than any other representation of human loveliness idealised
bearing her name--the Peerless, the Majestic, the Peace-Giving, or even