Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
There are no stones piled at the feet of these images, as before the images of Jizo; they seem like things forgotten, crusted over by the neglect of generations archaic gods who have lost their worshippers. But my guide tells me, 'The Temple of Koshin is near, in the village of Fujisawa. Assuredly I must visit it.
Akira tells me that in the book called Jizo-kyo-Kosui, this legend is related of the great statue of Jizo in this same ancient temple of Ken- cho-ji. Formerly there lived at Kamakura the wife of a Ronin named Soga Sadayoshi. She lived by feeding silkworms and gathering the silk.
A gray stone Buddha on his lotos pedestal, or the long graceful lines of a standing Jizo, only served to emphasize the uniformity. This was a place most dear to Kano, and had been made so to his child. He even loved the look of the tombs.
The Sai-no-Kawara is beneath us, below the ground. 'And Jizo has long sleeves to his robe; and they pull him by the sleeves in their play; and they pile up little stones before him to amuse themselves. And those stones you see heaped about the statues are put there by people for the sake of the little ones, most often by mothers of dead children who pray to Jizo.
But vain to seek to memorise the names and attributes of all the gods; they seem, self-multiplying, to mock the seeker; Kwannon the Merciful is revealed as the Hundred Kwannon; the Six Jizo become the Thousand. And as they multiply before research, they vary and change: less multiform, less complex, less elusive the moving of waters than the visions of this Oriental faith.
Only family names the names of the dead and their relatives and a sculptured crest, usually a flower. On the sotoba, only Sanscrit words. Farther on, I find other figures of Jizo, single reliefs, sculptured upon tombs. But one of these is a work of art so charming that I feel a pain at being obliged to pass it by.
What we learned about the famous Jizo was this: The name Agonashi-Jizo was only a popular corruption of the true name, Agonaoshi-Jizo, or 'Jizo-the-Healer-of-jaws. The little temple in which the statue stood had been burned, and the statue along with it, except a fragment of the lower part of the figure, now piously preserved by some old peasant woman.
While passing through some wonderfully thronged and illuminated street, of which I cannot remember the name, I had turned aside to look at a statue of Jizo, before the entrance of a very small temple. The figure was that of a kozo, an acolyte a beautiful boy; and its smile was a bit of divine realism.
Far within the dusk I see the face of a Jizo, smiling in pale stone, and before him, and all about him, a weird congregation of grey shapes without shape a host of fantasticalities that strangely suggest the wreck of a cemetery.
This last curious fact reminded me of the little torii I had seen erected before the images of Jizo in the Cave of the Children's Ghosts. Shinto, in these remote districts of the west, now appropriates the popular divinities of Buddhism, just as of old Buddhism used to absorb the divinities of Shinto in other parts of Japan.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking