Note (return) — Chapter X · - JAPANESE BUDDHISM IN ITS MISSIONARY DEVELOPMENT

Yet, while all this care is lavished on animals, the human being suffers.50 Buddhism is kind to the brute, and cruel to man. Until the influx of western ideas in recent years, the hospital and the orphanage did not exist in Japan, despite the gentleness and tenderness of Shaka, who, with all his merits, deserted his wife and babe in order to enlighten mankind.51 If Buddhism is not directly responsible for the existence of that class of Japanese pariahs called hi-nin, or not-human, the name and the idea are borrowed from the sutras; while the execration of all who prepare or sell the flesh of animals is persistently taught in the sacred books. These unfortunate bearers of the human image, during twelve hundred years and until the fiat of the present illustrious emperor made them citizens, were not reckoned in the census, nor was the land on which they dwelt measured. The imperial edict which finally elevated the Eta to citizenship, was suggested by one whose life, though known to men as that of a Confucian, was probably hid with Christ, Yokoi Héishiro.52 The emperor Mutsuhito, 123d of the line of Japan, born on the day when Perry was on the Mississippi and ready to sail, placed over these outcast people in 1871, the protecting aegis of the law.53 Until that time, the people in this unfortunate class, numbering probably a million, or, as some say, three millions, were compelled to live outside of the limits of human habitation, having no lights which society or the law was bound to respect. They were given food or drink only when benevolence might be roused; but the donor would never again touch the vessel in which the offering was made. The Eta,54 though in individual cases becoming measurably rich, rotted and starved, and were made the filth, and off-scouring of the earth, because they were the butchers, the skinners, the leather workers, and thus handled dead animals, being made also the executioners and buriers of the dead. After a quarter of a century the citizens, whose ancestry is not forgotten, suffer social ostracism even more than do the freed slaves of our country, though between them and the other Japanese there is no color line, but only the streak of difference which Buddhism created and has maintained. Nevertheless, let it be said to the eternal honor of Shin Shu and of some of the minor sects, that they were always kind and helpful to the Eta.