White Sui-Getsu, who sails the moonlit waters in her rosy boat made of a
single lotus-petal; and in the triple-headed Shaka I discern and revere
the mighty power of that Truth, whereby, as by a conjunction of suns,
the Three Worlds have been illuminated.

But vain to seek to memorise the names and attributes of all the gods;
they seem, self-multiplying, to mock the seeker; Kwannon the Merciful is
revealed as the Hundred Kwannon; the Six Jizo become the Thousand. And
as they multiply before research, they vary and change: less multiform,
less complex, less elusive the moving of waters than the visions of this
Oriental faith. Into it, as into a fathomless sea, mythology after
mythology from India and China and the farther East has sunk and been
absorbed; and the stranger, peering into its deeps, finds himself, as in
the tale of Undine, contemplating a flood in whose every surge rises and
vanishes a Face--weird or beautiful or terrible--a most ancient shoreless
sea of forms incomprehensibly interchanging and intermingling, but
symbolising the protean magic of that infinite Unknown that shapes and
re-shapes for ever all cosmic being.

24

I wonder if I can buy a picture of Koshin. In most Japanese temples
little pictures of the tutelar deity are sold to pilgrims, cheap prints
on thin paper. But the temple guardian here tells me, with a gesture of
despair, that there are no pictures of Koshin for sale; there is only an
old kakemono on which the god is represented. If I would like to see it
he will go home and get it for me. I beg him to do me the favour; and he
hurries into the street.

While awaiting his return, I continue to examine the queer old statues,