A steep flight of steps is suspended like a cascade from the crest of the hill. Up and down these steps, the wooden clogs of the Japanese people patter incessantly like water-drops. At the top of the steps stands the towered gateway, painted with red ochre, which leads to the precincts. The guardians of the gate, _Ni-O_, the two gigantic Deva kings, who have passed from India into Japanese mythology, are encaged in the gateway building. Their cage and their persons are littered with nasty morsels of chewed paper, wherever their worshippers have literally spat their prayers at them.
Within the enclosure are the various temple buildings, the bell-tower, the library, the washing-trough, the hall of votive offerings, the sacred bath-house, the stone lanterns and the lodgings for the pilgrims; also the two main halls for the temple services, which are raised on low piles and are linked together by a covered bridge, so that they look like twin arks of safety, floating just five feet above the troubles of this life. These buildings are most of them painted red; and there is fine carving on panels, friezes and pediments, and also much tawdry gaudiness. Behind these two sanctuaries is the mortuary chapel where repose the memories of many of the greatest in the land. Behind this again are the priests' dormitories, with a lovely hidden garden hanging on the slopes of a sudden ravine; its presiding genius is an old pine-tree, beneath which Nichiren himself, a contemporary and a counterpart of Saint Dominic, used to meditate on his project for a Universal Church, founded on the life of Buddha, and led by the apostolate of Japan.
For the inside of a week the Fujinami dwelt in one of a row of stalls, like loose-boxes, within the temple precincts. The festival might have some affinity with the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, when the devout left their city dwellings to live in booths outside the walls.
(Adoration to the Wonderful Law of the Lotus Scriptures!)
The famous formula of the priests of the Nichiren sect was being repeated over and over again to the accompaniment of drums; for in the sacred text itself lies the only authentic Way of Salvation. With exemplary insistence Mr. Fujinami Gennosuké was beating out the rhythm of the prayer with a wooden clapper on the _mokugy[=o]_, a wooden drum, shaped like a fish's head.