[Footnote 33: _Tsuki-yo-garasu,_ lit.: "moon-night crows." Crows usually announce the dawn by their cawing; but sometimes on moonlight nights they caw at all hours from sunset to sunrise. The bell referred to is the bell of some Buddhist temple: the _aké-no-kane,_ or "dawn-bell," being, in all parts of Japan, sounded from every Buddhist _tera._ There is a pun in the original;--the expression _tsukenai,_ "cannot _tell_ (a lie)," might also be interpreted phonetically as "cannot _strike_ [a bell]."]
_This my desire: To kill the crows of three thousand worlds,_ _And then to repose in peace with the owner of my heart!_[34]
San-zen sékai no Karasu we koroshi Nushi to soi-né ga Shité mitai ]
I have cited this last only as a curiosity. For it has a strange history, and is not what it seems,--although the apparent motive was certainly suggested by some song like the one immediately preceding it. It is a song of loyalty, and was composed by Kido of Chō-shū, one of the leaders in that great movement which brought about the downfall of the Shōgunate, the restoration of the Imperial power, the reconstruction of Japanese society, and the introduction and adoption of Western civilization. Kido, Saigō, and Ōkubo are rightly termed the three heroes of the restoration. While preparing his plans at Kyōto, in company with his friend Saigō, Kido composed and sang this song as an intimation of his real sentiments. By the phrase, "ravens of the three thousand worlds," he designated the Tokugawa partisans; by the word _nushi_ (lord, or heart's-master) he signified the Emperor; and by the term _soiné_ (reposing together) he referred to the hoped-for condition of direct responsibility to the Throne, without further intervention of Shōgun and daimyō. It was not the first example in Japanese history of the use of popular song as a medium for the utterance of opinions which, expressed in plainer language, would have invited assassination.
While I was writing the preceding note upon Kido's song, the Buddhist phrase, _San-zen sékai_ (twice occurring, as the reader will have observed, in the present collection), suggested a few reflections with which this paper may fitly conclude. I remember that when I first attempted, years ago, to learn the outlines of Buddhist philosophy, one fact which particularly impressed me was the vastness of the Buddhist concept of the universe. Buddhism, as I read it, had not offered itself to humanity as a saving creed for one inhabited world, but as the religion of "innumerable hundreds of thousands of myriads of _kôtis_[35] of worlds." And the modern scientific revelation of stellar evolution and dissolution then seemed to me, and still seems, like a prodigious confirmation of certain Buddhist theories of cosmical law.