Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (5 page)

Then Kobodaishi asked the boy: 'Who are you?' And the boy made answer:
'I am he whom men worship on the mountain Gotai; I am the Lord of
Wisdom,—Monju Bosatsu!' And even as he spoke the boy became changed;
and his beauty became luminous like the beauty of gods; and his limbs
became radiant, shedding soft light about. And, smiling, he rose to
heaven and vanished beyond the clouds.

But Kobodaishi himself once forgot to put the ten beside the character O
on the tablet which he painted with the name of the Gate O-Te-mon of the
Emperor's palace. And the Emperor at Kyoto having asked him why he had
not put the ten beside the character, Kobodaishi answered: 'I forgot;
but I will put it on now.' Then the Emperor bade ladders be brought; for
the tablet was already in place, high above the gate. But Kobodaishi,
standing on the pavement before the gate, simply threw his brush at the
tablet; and the brush, so thrown, made the ten there most admirably, and
fell back into his hand.

Kobodaishi also painted the tablet of the gate called Ko-kamon of the
Emperor's palace at Kyoto. Now there was a man, dwelling near that gate,
whose name was Kino Momoye; and he ridiculed the characters which
Kobodaishi had made, and pointed to one of them, saying: 'Why, it looks
like a swaggering wrestler!' But the same night Momoye dreamed that a
wrestler had come to his bedside and leaped upon him, and was beating
him with his fists. And, crying out with the pain of the blows, he
awoke, and saw the wrestler rise in air, and change into the written
character he had laughed at, and go back to the tablet over the gate.

And there was another writer, famed greatly for his skill, named Onomo
Toku, who laughed at some characters on the tablet of the Gate Shukaku-
mon, written by Kobodaishi; and he said, pointing to the character Shu:
'Verily shu looks like the character "rice".' And that night he dreamed
that the character he had mocked at became a man; and that the man fell
upon him and beat him, and jumped up and down upon his face many times—
even as a kometsuki, a rice-cleaner, leaps up and down to move the
hammers that beat the rice—saying the while: 'Lo! I am the messenger
of Kobodaishi!' And, waking, he found himself bruised and bleeding as
one that had been grievously trampled.

And long after Kobodaishi's death it was found that the names written by
him on the two gates of the Emperor's palace Bi-fuku-mon, the Gate of
Beautiful Fortune; and Ko-ka-mon, the Gate of Excellent Greatness—were
well-nigh effaced by time. And the Emperor ordered a Dainagon
[7]
, whose
name was Yukinari, to restore the tablets. But Yukinari was afraid to
perform the command of the Emperor, by reason of what had befallen other
men; and, fearing the divine anger of Kobodaishi, he made offerings, and
prayed for some token of permission. And the same night, in a dream,
Kobodaishi appeared to him, smiling gently, and said: 'Do the work even
as the Emperor desires, and have no fear.' So he restored the tablets in
the first month of the fourth year of Kwanko, as is recorded in the
book, Hon-cho-bun-sui.

And all these things have been related to me by my friend Akira.

I HAVE passed another day in wandering among the temples, both Shinto
and Buddhist. I have seen many curious things; but I have not yet seen
the face of the Buddha.

Repeatedly, after long wearisome climbing of stone steps, and passing
under gates full of gargoyles—heads of elephants and heads of lions—
and entering shoeless into scented twilight, into enchanted gardens of
golden lotus-flowers of paper, and there waiting for my eyes to become
habituated to the dimness, I have looked in vain for images. Only an
opulent glimmering confusion of things half-seen—vague altar-
splendours created by gilded bronzes twisted into riddles, by vessels of
indescribable shape, by enigmatic texts of gold, by mysterious
glittering pendent things—all framing in only a shrine with doors fast
closed.

What has most impressed me is the seeming joyousness of popular faith. I
have seen nothing grim, austere, or self-repressive. I have not even
noted anything approaching the solemn. The bright temple courts and even
the temple steps are thronged with laughing children, playing curious
games; arid mothers, entering the sanctuary to pray, suffer their little
ones to creep about the matting and crow. The people take their religion
lightly and cheerfully: they drop their cash in the great alms-box, clap
their hands, murmur a very brief prayer, then turn to laugh and talk and
smoke their little pipes before the temple entrance. Into some shrines,
I have noticed the worshippers do not enter at all; they merely stand
before the doors and pray for a few seconds, and make their small
offerings. Blessed are they who do not too much fear the gods which they
have made!

Akira is bowing and smiling at the door. He slips off his sandals,
enters in his white digitated stockings, and, with another smile and
bow, sinks gently into the proffered chair. Akira is an interesting boy.
With his smooth beardless face and clear bronze skin and blue-black hair
trimmed into a shock that shadows his forehead to the eyes, he has
almost the appearance, in his long wide-sleeved robe and snowy
stockings, of a young Japanese girl.

I clap my hands for tea, hotel tea, which he calls 'Chinese tea.' I
offer him a cigar, which he declines; but with my permission, he will
smoke his pipe. Thereupon he draws from his girdle a Japanese pipe-case
and tobacco-pouch combined; pulls out of the pipe-case a little brass
pipe with a bowl scarcely large enough to hold a pea; pulls out of the
pouch some tobacco so finely cut that it looks like hair, stuffs a tiny
pellet of this preparation in the pipe, and begins to smoke. He draws
the smoke into his lungs, and blows it out again through his nostrils.
Three little whiffs, at intervals of about half a minute, and the pipe,
emptied, is replaced in its case.

Meanwhile I have related to Akira the story of my disappointments.

'Oh, you can see him to-day,' responds Akira, 'if you will take a walk
with me to the Temple of Zotokuin. For this is the Busshoe, the festival
of the Birthday of Buddha. But he is very small, only a few inches high.
If you want to see a great Buddha, you must go to Kamakura. There is a
Buddha in that place, sitting upon a lotus; and he is fifty feet high.'

So I go forth under the guidance of Akira. He says he may be able to
show me 'some curious things.'

There is a sound of happy voices from the temple, and the steps are
crowded with smiling mothers and laughing children. Entering, I find
women and babies pressing about a lacquered table in front of the
doorway. Upon it is a little tub-shaped vessel of sweet tea—amacha;
and standing in the tea is a tiny figure of Buddha, one hand pointing
upward and one downward. The women, having made the customary offering,
take up some of the tea with a wooden ladle of curious shape, and pour
it over the statue, and then, filling the ladle a second time, drink a
little, and give a sip to their babies. This is the ceremony of washing
the statue of Buddha.

Near the lacquered stand on which the vessel of sweet tea rests is
another and lower stand supporting a temple bell shaped like a great
bowl. A priest approaches with a padded mallet in his hand and strikes
the bell. But the bell does not sound properly: he starts, looks into
it, and stoops to lift out of it a smiling Japanese baby. The mother,
laughing, runs to relieve him of his burden; and priest, mother, and
baby all look at us with a frankness of mirth in which we join.

Akira leaves me a moment to speak with one of the temple attendants, and
presently returns with a curious lacquered box, about a foot in length,
and four inches wide on each of its four sides. There is only a small
hole in one end of it; no appearance of a lid of any sort.

'Now,' says Akira, 'if you wish to pay two sen, we shall learn our
future lot according to the will of the gods.'

I pay the two sen, and Akira shakes the box. Out comes a narrow slip of
bamboo, with Chinese characters written thereon.

'Kitsu!' cries Akira. 'Good-fortune. The number is fifty-and-one.'

Again he shakes the box; a second bamboo slip issues from the slit.

'Dai kitsu! great good-fortune. The number is ninety-and-nine.

Once more the box is shaken; once more the oracular bamboo protrudes.

'Kyo!' laughs Akira. 'Evil will befall us. The number is sixty-and-
four.'

He returns the box to a priest, and receives three mysterious papers,
numbered with numbers corresponding to the numbers of the bamboo slips.
These little bamboo slips, or divining-sticks, are called mikuji.

This, as translated by Akira, is the substance of the text of the paper
numbered fifty-and-one:

'He who draweth forth this mikuji, let him live according to the
heavenly law and worship Kwannon. If his trouble be a sickness, it shall
pass from him. If he have lost aught, it shall be found. If he have a
suit at law, he shall gain. If he love a woman, he shall surely win her
-though he should have to wait. And many happinesses will come to him.'

The dai-kitsu paper reads almost similarly, with the sole differences
that, instead of Kwannon, the deities of wealth and prosperity—
Daikoku, Bishamon, and Benten—are to be worshipped, and that the
fortunate man will not have to wait at all for the woman loved. But the
kyo paper reads thus:

'He who draweth forth this mikuji, it will be well for him to obey the
heavenly law and to worship Kwannon the Merciful. If he have any
sickness, even much more sick he shall become. If he have lost aught, it
shall never be found. If he have a suit at law, he shall never gain it.
If he love a woman, let him have no more expectation of winning her.
Only by the most diligent piety can he hope to escape the most frightful
calamities. And there shall be no felicity in his portion.'

'All the same, we are fortunate,' declares Akira. 'Twice out of three
times we have found luck. Now we will go to see another statue of
Buddha.' And he guides me, through many curious streets, to the
southern verge of the city.

Before us rises a hill, with a broad flight of stone steps sloping to
its summit, between foliage of cedars and maples. We climb; and I see
above me the Lions of Buddha waiting—the male yawning menace, the
female with mouth closed. Passing between them, we enter a large temple
court, at whose farther end rises another wooded eminence.

And here is the temple, with roof of blue-painted copper tiles, and
tilted eaves and gargoyles and dragons, all weather-stained to one
neutral tone. The paper screens are open, but a melancholy rhythmic
chant from within tells us that the noonday service is being held: the
priests are chanting the syllables of Sanscrit texts transliterated into
Chinese—intoning the Sutra called the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good
Law. One of those who chant keeps time by tapping with a mallet, cotton-
wrapped, some grotesque object shaped like a dolphin's head, all
lacquered in scarlet and gold, which gives forth a dull, booming tone—
a mokugyo.

To the right of the temple is a little shrine, filling the air with
fragrance of incense-burning. I peer in through the blue smoke that
curls up from half a dozen tiny rods planted in a small brazier full of
ashes; and far back in the shadow I see a swarthy Buddha, tiara-coiffed,
with head bowed and hands joined, just as I see the Japanese praying,
erect in the sun, before the thresholds of temples. The figure is of
wood, rudely wrought and rudely coloured: still the placid face has
beauty of suggestion.

Crossing the court to the left of the building, I find another flight of
steps before me, leading up a slope to something mysterious still
higher, among enormous trees. I ascend these steps also, reach the top,
guarded by two small symbolic lions, and suddenly find myself in cool
shadow, and startled by a spectacle totally unfamiliar.

Dark—almost black—soil and the shadowing of trees immemorially old,
through whose vaulted foliage the sunlight leaks thinly down in rare
flecks; a crepuscular light, tender and solemn, revealing the weirdest
host of unfamiliar shapes—a vast congregation of grey, columnar, mossy
things, stony, monumental, sculptured with Chinese ideographs. And about
them, behind them, rising high above them, thickly set as rushes in a
marsh-verge, tall slender wooden tablets, like laths, covered with
similar fantastic lettering, pierce the green gloom by thousands, by
tens of thousands.

And before I can note other details, I know that I am in a hakaba, a
cemetery—a very ancient Buddhist cemetery.

These laths are called in the Japanese tongue sotoba.
[8]
All have
notches cut upon their edges on both sides near the top-five notches;
and all are painted with Chinese characters on both faces. One
inscription is always the phrase 'To promote Buddhahood,' painted
immediately below the dead man's name; the inscription upon the other
surface is always a sentence in Sanscrit whose meaning has been
forgotten even by those priests who perform the funeral rites. One such
lath is planted behind the tomb as soon as the monument (haka) is set
up; then another every seven days for forty-nine days, then one after
the lapse of a hundred days; then one at the end of a year; then one
after the passing of three years; and at successively longer periods
others are erected during one hundred years.

And in almost every group I notice some quite new, or freshly planed
unpainted white wood, standing beside others grey or even black with
age; and there are many, still older from whose surface all the
characters have disappeared. Others are lying on the sombre clay.
Hundreds stand so loose in the soil that the least breeze jostles and
clatters them together.