Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (53 page)

He told me that after the tsunami, many priests—including Yanagi—had wanted to volunteer to help with clean-up efforts, but many of the men he knew had been discouraged by the experience. Priests were not welcomed. People thought they were harbingers of death. While the Christians had allied themselves with the Red Cross and were able to go right away to volunteer, the Buddhists had no such system. Many monks had left T
hoku, discouraged.

But, he said philosophically, the priests had only themselves to blame for things turning out like this. They had not been treating their profession properly for many years—and now people were uncomfortable around them.

“We are too much at peace in Japan. We live in a bubble.” The human heart, he said, had to have something to strive for or against in order for it to maintain a straight path. Without any friction, people simply wandered. “Shingon came from China. When K
kai went to China, he was greeted by the master Hui-kuo, who said that Shingon would die out in China. And it did forty years later. We have
managed to keep Shingon alive in Japan for twelve hundred years. If you think about it, the next stop eastward for Shingon would be . . . your country.”

C
RITICS OF
S
HINGON
complain that it is an elitist religion. To attempt to understand Shingon is to immerse yourself in an aesthetically rich world, and to be taught by one teacher in an intimate relationship. Most people don’t have the time or resources to commit themselves to a lifetime of this kind of intense and impractical study. It’s no surprise that the Japanese aristocrats loved Shingon; nor is it a surprise that Pure Land Buddhism, with its populist message, supplanted Shingon in the hearts of commoners.

Yet I was deeply moved by my experiences on K
yasan in a way that I was not with any other form of Buddhism. After my visit to Sh
j
shinin, Buddhist sculptures and paintings looked completely different to me. Prior to going to K
yasan, I’d looked at statues of many-armed Buddhas and just seen a human form with too many arms. They might as well have been identical to those unfortunates featured in a supermarket tabloid who required an operation from an expert medical team to remove extra arms. Now the many-armed Buddhas reminded me of twentieth-century statues by Giacometti or the Cubist pieces by Picasso, in which a human body seems to be everywhere all at once. This is what medieval Japanese artists had been trying to convey—nothing in life is static. These statues are physical expressions of all a body’s desires, and the fact that one can’t actually predict at any moment where a body, let alone an electron, will go next.

ELEVEN

W
HERE THE
D
EAD
G
O

A
CCORDING TO THE
J
APANESE,
when children die, their souls gather on a riverbank called Sai no Kawara. In the Pure Land sect of Buddhism, it’s believed that children are sent to Sai no Kawara as punishment for causing their parents the deepest possible grief. Other schools teach that the souls of the dead children are unable to cross the river to the other side, where they can be reborn, because they haven’t accrued enough karma in their short lives for anyone to judge what their next turn on the wheel of fate should be. While stranded, the children build little pyramids out of rock and stone; this Sisyphean task is supposed to help them either accrue a little bit of karma or build a scalable ladder they can climb to get out of the underworld. But there are demons lurking nearby, and these malevolent beings are always knocking over the rock piles so the children have to start all over again. Overseeing this never-ending drama is a cruel old hag known as Shozoku no Baba.

Fortunately, there is one particular bodhisattva who is dedicated to helping these children, and his name is Jiz
. Unlike other bodhisattvas, Jiz
wears simple robes and no jewelry. He often carries a staff. Sometimes you will see a small boy and girl hiding just inside his robes. On temple grounds and in cemeteries, such as the one on Mount K
ya, you may see dozens of Jiz
statues made out of stone
but dressed with a red bib and a red hat; red has long been associated with the power to ward off evil in East Asia. The extra fabric also helps give Jiz
more hiding places for the lost children, because when he can, Jiz
sneaks across Sai no Kawara and gathers children into his robes. Before Shozoku no Baba can figure out what is going on, Jiz
brings these little children back over to the other side of the river, so their souls can go through the necessary process to be reincarnated.