“Nammiyo, nammiyo!” from an impure and very miserable sinner, under ten years of age.

“The lot of man is uncertain, and for ever running out of the beaten track.  Why go to look at the flowers, and take delight in their beauty?  When you return home, you will see the vanity of your pleasure.  Why purchase fleeting joys of loose women?  How long do you retain the delicious taste of the dainties you feast upon?  For ever wishing to do this, wishing to see that, wishing to eat rare dishes, wishing to wear fine clothes, you pass a lifetime in fanning the flames which consume you.  What terrible matter for thought is this!  In the poems of the priest Saigiyo it is written, ’Verily I have been familiar with the flowers; yet are they withered and scattered, and we are parted.  How sad!’ The beauty of the convolvulus, how bright it is!—­and yet in one short morning it closes its petals and fades.  In the book called Rin Jo Bo Satsu[86] we are told how a certain king once went to take his pleasure in his garden, and gladden his eyes with the beauty of his flowers.  After a while he fell asleep; and as he slumbered, the women of his train began pulling the flowers to pieces.  When the king awoke, of all the glory of his flowers there remained but a few torn and faded petals.  Seeing this, the king said, ’The flowers pass away and die; so is it with mankind:  we are born, we grow old, we sicken and die; we are as fleeting as the lightning’s flash, as evanescent as the morning dew.’  I know not whether any of you here present ever fix your thoughts upon death; yet it is a rare thing for a man to live for a hundred years.  How piteous a thing it is that in this short and transient life men should consume themselves in a fire of lust! and if we think to escape from this fire, how shall we succeed save only by the teaching of the divine Buddha?”

[Footnote 86:  One of the Buddhist classics.]

“Nammiyo! nammiyo!” meekly and entreatingly.

“Since Buddha himself escaped from the burning flames of the lusts of the flesh, his only thought has been for the salvation of mankind.  Once upon a time there was a certain heretic, called Rokutsuponji, a reader of auguries, cunning in astrology and in the healing art.  It happened, one day, that this heretic, being in company with Buddha, entered a forest, which was full of dead men’s skulls.  Buddha, taking up one of the skulls and tapping it thus” (here the preacher tapped the reading-desk with his fan), “said, ’What manner of man was this bone when alive?—­and, now that he is dead, in what part of the world has he been born again?’ The heretic, auguring from the sound which the skull, when struck, gave forth, began to tell its past history, and to prophesy the future.  Then Buddha, tapping another skull, again asked the same question.  The heretic answered—­

“’Verily, as to this skull, whether it belonged to a man or a woman, whence its owner came or whither he has gone, I know not.  What think you of it?”