en of nature.]

[Footnote 166: Literally, "turns his child into a dream."]

[Footnote 167: During the Middle Ages it was very usual for afflicted
persons to renounce secular life, the Buddhist tonsure being the
outward sign of the step thus taken.]

[Footnote 168: The Past World, the Present World, and the World to
Come. According to the Buddhist teaching, the relations subsisting
between parents and children are for one life only; those between
husband and wife are for two lives; while those uniting a servant to
his lord or a disciple to his master endure for the space of three
consecutive lives.]

[Footnote 169: This sentence, which so strangely reminds us of John
iii., 16, is, like all the prose passages of these dramas, a literal
rendering of the Japanese original.]

[Footnote 170: In Japan, as in England, it is usual to talk of going
"up" to the capital and "down" to the country.]

[Footnote 171: A form of mortification current in the Shingon sect of
Buddhists.]

[Footnote 172: Bodhidharma, the first Buddhist Patriarch of China,
whither he came from India in A.D. 520. He is said to have remained
seated in abstraction gazing at a wall for nine years, till his legs
rotted off. His name is, in Japan, generally associated with the
ludicrous. Thus certain legless and shapeless dolls are called after
him, and snow-figures are denominated Yuki-daruma (Snow Daruma).]

[Footnote 173: Needless to say that no such text exists.]

[Footnote 174: Used for carrying parcels, and for presenting anything
to, and receiving anything from, a superior. The touch of the
inferior's hand would be considered rude.]

[Footnote 175: The meaning is that, as one of the two must be under
the blanket in readiness for a possible visit from the wife, the
servant would doubtless feel it to be contrary to their respective
positions for him to take his ease outside while his master is sitting
cramped up inside--a peculiarly uncomfortable position, moreover, for
the teller of a long story.]

[Footnote 176: The lines are in reality a bad Japanese imitation of
some in a poem by Li Shang-Yin.]

[Footnote 177: Proverbial expressions.]

[Footnote 178: Properly, the Five Hundred "Arhan," or personal
disciples of Sakya. The island of Tsukushi forms the southwestern
extremity of Japan.]

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Japanese Literature, by Various

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