Buddha at Kamakura (1892)
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
To Him the Way, the Law, apart,
For though He neither burns nor sees,
Yet spare us still the Western joke
The grey-robed, gay-sashed butterflies
And whoso will, from Pride released,
Yea, every tale Ananda heard,
Till drowsy eyelids seem to see
And down the loaded air there comes
A tourist-show, a legend told,
But when the morning prayer is prayed,
Kipling travelled in Japan in 1889 and 1892, and his writing of the country is collected in Kipling’s Japan, edited and with copious notes by Hugh Cortazzi and George Webb (London: Athlone, 1988). ‘Buddha at Kamakura’ first appeared appended to a prose ‘Letter’ published in the New York Sun and the Lahore Civil & Military News in July 1892. Three of its verses are used as chapter headings in Kim (1901), and it appears in its entirety in The Five Nations (1903). For the full text of the ‘Letter’ to which the poem was originally appended and knowledgable notes about the poem itself, see Cortazzi and Webb, pp. 195-209.
The best selling of several in-print editions of Kipling’s verse in the UK is The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling, available here, and in the US Rudyard Kipling: Complete Verse, available here. Kipling’s Japan remains in print and is available here and here.