CHAPTER X.

Shinnyo Hosho.

( section section 47, 48, 49, 50, 51)

I read some months ago, in the Guardian, a short review of a small treatise on God by an author hitherto unknown to me. The author's argument was that God may, for practical purposes, be divided into two, the God whom we know, and the God whom we do not know. The God we know is God as we observe Him in the works of Nature, and as we learn of Him in the Revelation which He has been pleased to make to us. Rut when we have searched all the realms of scientific and metaphysical investigation, when we have mastered all theological Truth, when we have seen God reflected in the Face of Christ Jesus and have learned that he is a Trinity, there still remains, behind all, an immense area (if we may so call it) of the Godhead, about which we have no knowledge, and never can have. It is a region into which we have no means of entering and about which we can predicate nothing.

Had the author of the treatise in question had the advantage of an education in Japanese Buddhist thought, he would have called the "Unknown Area" of God Shinnyo Hosho (#), a term which I will now proceed to explain.

Shinnyo Hosho is the Real Substance (hontai) of the Universe, the acme (gokuchi) of the Truth. It is the one true Substance (ichinyo) which permeates

the two Essences (ni-sha) of Matter and Mind in such a manner that Matter and Mind may be said to be the two forms or modes of its Being, if this terminology does not savour too strongly of Spinoza. It is unbounded in space, infinite in time. It is the warp and woof that form the texture of the Universe: as the one, it runs like a thread through Past, Present, and Future, as the other, under innumerable combinations and metamorphoses, it permeates the whole of Creation and is to be found in everything great and small. As an abstract Reality it is one, but it has two aspects. There is matter (butsu) and there is Mind (shin): there is no Third Thing such as the Reason (Ri) which some systems postulate. There is nothing But Matter and Mind, joined together in one primordial, everlasting, Substance, about which we are not in a position to predicate any thing whatever.

Hut Mind means movement (the very character by which the Japanese denote Mind, #, signifies and symbolizes movement), and the primordial movement of the primordial Mind in the primordial Substance of Shinnyo or Ichi-nyo, produces, from the very beginning, a distinction between the one and the other. Without losing its immanent character, Mind gradually distinguishes itself from Matter and assumes a personal form, which is, roughly speaking, what we should call God. In Japanese it is Hoshin (#), the Dharmakaya, or 'spiritual body,' assumed by the Mind of the Universe in the process of distinguishing itself from Matter. It is called the Body (# shin) of the Law (ho); the Law