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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: grotesque figures of men and monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and
devils. Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which
the dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows.
The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery
and lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the
serious and the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it
almost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon
him in acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added
beauty that it lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world,
probably, is she lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy
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