But Keijin will especially show itself in our behaviour under sorrow and bereavement. The separation from those we love is the most painful ordeal we have to face. If we have Keijin, we shall not affront the deity by vain regrets and idle reproaches. We shall turn our eye to the Paradise of Bliss, and show our respect for the Higher Powers by a resignation of ourselves to their decrees.

I may add that most of the contents of this chapter of Shinshu Seikun are taken from the writings of Rennyo Shonin, and date, therefore, from a period anterior to the advent of Christian missionaries in Japan.

Footnotes

^124:* This is true as a general rule. I have noticed one exception in Shinshu practice. At a Shinshu funeral, of which I shall give an account later on, there is an invocation of "all the Buddhas," an invocation which, according to the strict interpretation of the Shinshu doctrine, must be unnecessary.

^124:+ It was doubtless Keijin that prompted a Buddhist priest to offer hospitality to the newly landed Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century, with permission to use his temple for the preaching of Christianity. When the Jesuits later on developed iconoclastic tendencies, and encouraged their converts to tear down Buddhist temples, it was a painful breach of the law of Keijin. It must be said, however, in justification of the Jesuits, that the destruction of Buddhist temples was not their work but that of their daimyo converts, and that Hideyoshi and other non-Christian Japanese were very ruthless iconoclasts when it suited their purpose. There is reason to believe that, in the 7th and 8th centuries, Christianity was looked upon merely as a variant form of Buddhism.

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