dwellings of men. But every Shinto temple is necessarily rebuilt
at more or less brief intervals; and the holiest,--the shrine of
Ise,--in obedience to immemorial custom, must be demolished every
twenty years, and its timbers cut into thousands of tiny charms,
which are distributed to pilgrims.


From Aryan India, through China, came Buddhism, with its vast
doctrine of impermanency. The builders of the first Buddhist
temples in Japan--architects of another race--built well: witness
the Chinese structures at Kamakura that have survived so many
centuries, while of the great city which once surrounded them not
a trace remains. But the psychical influence of Buddhism could in
no land impel minds to the love of material stability. The
teaching that the universe is an illusion; that life is but one
momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all attachment to
persons, to places, or to things must be fraught with sorrow;
that only through suppression of every desire--even the desire of
Nirvana itself--can humanity reach the eternal peace, certainly
harmonized with the older racial feeling. Though the people never
much occupied themselves with the profounder philosophy of the
foreign faith, its doctrine of impermanency must, in course of
time, have profoundly influenced national character. It explained
and consoled; it imparted new capacity to bear all things
bravely; it strengthened that patience which is a trait of the
race. Even in Japanese art--developed, if not actually created,
under Buddhist influence--the doctrine of impermanency has left
its traces. Buddhism taught that nature was a dream, an illusion,
a phantasmagoria; but it also taught men how to seize the
fleeting impressions of that dream, and how to interpret them in