Religious Empiricism
One day when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I ran through the room in one of my mischievous moments and stepped on some papers which my brother was arranging on the floor. Suddenly he broke out in disgust:
"Stop, you dunce!"
Then he becan to speak solemnly. “Do you not see what is written here?” he said. “Is this not Okudaira Taizen-no Tayū—your lord’s name?”
“I did not know it,” I hastily apologized. “I am sorry.”
“You say you did not know,” he replied indignantly. “But if you have eyes, you should see. What do you think of trampling your lord’s name under foot? The sacred code of lord and vassal is . . ."
Here my brother was beginning to recite the samurai rules of duty. There was nothing for me to do but bow my head to the floor and plead: “I was very careless, please forgive me.ˈ
But in my heart there was no apology. All the time I was thinking: "Why scold about it? Did I step on my lord’s head? What is wrong with stepping on a piece of paper?"
Then I went on, reeisoning in my childish mind that if it was so wicked to step on a man’s name, it would be very much more wicked to step on a god’s name; and I determined to test the truth.
So I stole one of the charms, the thin paper slips, bearing sacred names, which are kept in many households for avoiding bad luck. And I deliberately trampled on it when nobody was looking. But no heavenly vengeance came.
"Very well," I thought to myself. "I will go a step further and try it in the worst place." I took it to the chōzu-ba (the privy) and put it in the filth. This time I was a little afraid, thinking I was going a little too far. But nothing happened.
"It is just as I thought!" I said to myself. "What right did my brother have to scold me?” I felt that I had made a great discovery! But this I could not tell anybody, not even my mother or sisters.
When I grew older by a few years, I became more reckless, and decided that all the talk about divine punishment which old men use in scolding children was a lie. Then I conceived the idea of finding out what the god of Inari really was.
There was an Inari shrine in the corner of my uncle's garden, as in many other households. I opened the shrine and found only a stone there. I threw it away and put in another stone which I picked up on the road. Then I went on to explore the Inari shrine of our neighbor, Shimomura. Here the token of the god was a wooden tablet. I threw it away too and waited for what might happen.
When the season of the Inari festival came, many people gathered to put up flags, beat drums, and make offerings of the sacred rice-wine. During all the round of festival services, I was chuckling to myself: ‘‘There they are worshipping my stones, the fools!”
Thus from childhood, I have never had any fear of gods or Buddha. Nor have I ever had any faith in augury and magic, or in the fox and badger which, people say, have power to deceive men. I was a happy child, and my mind was never clouded by unreasonable fears.
