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Glory seemed pleased to have a little brother, and Take promised that she should wear him on her back whenever she wanted to. Take bought a little doll for Bot'Chan, too, with her own money. It was a funny little doll without any legs. He was fat, and when any one knocked him over, he sat up again right away. She called him a "Daruma." Bot'Chan seemed to like the Daruma.
Dharma cut off his own eyelids, because he could not keep awake. Throwing the offending flesh upon the ground, he saw the tea-plant arise to help holy men to keep vigil. Daruma, as the Japanese spell his name, has a temple in central Japan. Next day the beggar died, and the prince charitably had him buried on the spot.
After twenty-eight patriarchs had taught the doctrine of contemplation, the last came into China in A.D. 520, and tried to teach the Emperor the secret key of Buddha's thought. This missionary Bodhidharma was the third son of a king of the Kashis, in Southern India, and the historic original of the tobacconist's shop-sign in Japan, who is known as Daruma.
Yet, alas, to-day Daruma the Hindoo and foreigner, despite his avatar, his humility, his vigils and his self-mutilation, has been degraded to be the shop-sign of the tobacconists. Besides being ruthlessly caricatured, he is usually pictured with a scowl, his lidless eyes as wide open as those upon a Chinese junk-prow or an Egyptian coffin-lid.
So here we have images of the gods and saints for toys Tenjin, the Deity of Beautiful Writing and Uzume, the laughter-loving -and Fukusuke, like a happy schoolboy and the Seven Divinities of Good Luck, in a group and Fukurojin, the God of Longevity, with head so elongated that only by the aid of a ladder can his barber shave the top of it and Hotei, with a belly round and huge as a balloon and Ebisu, the Deity of Markets and of fishermen, with a tai-fish under his arm and Daruma, ancient disciple of Buddha, whose legs were worn off by uninterrupted meditation.
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