Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: First Series — Ch 4: A Pilgrimage to Enoshima, Part 3

Akira smiles a sweet smile, and answers: 'There was a man who promised to build a torii of good metal if his prayers were granted.

And he obtained all that he desired.

And then he built a torii with three exceedingly small needles.'

Sec.

17 Ascending the steps, we reach a terrace, overlooking all the city roofs.

There are Buddhist lions of stone and stone lanterns, mossed and chipped, on either side the torii; and the background of the terrace is the sacred hill, covered with foliage.

To the left is a balustrade of stone, old and green, surrounding a shallow pool covered with scum of water-weed.

And on the farther bank above it, out of the bushes, protrudes a strangely shaped stone slab, poised on edge, and covered with Chinese characters.

It is a sacred stone, and is believed to have the form of a great frog, gama; wherefore it is called Gama-ishi, the Frog-stone.

Here and there along the edge of the terrace are other graven monuments, one of which is the offering of certain pilgrims who visited the shrine of the sea-goddess one hundred times.

On the right other flights of steps lead to loftier terraces; and an old man, who sits at the foot of them, making bird-cages of bamboo, offers himself as guide.

We follow him to the next terrace, where there is a school for the children of Enoshima, and another sacred stone, huge and shapeless: Fuku-ishi, the Stone of Good Fortune.

In old times pilgrims who rubbed their hands upon it believed they would thereby gain riches; and the stone is polished and worn by the touch of innumerable palms.

More steps and more green-mossed lions and lanterns, and another terrace with a little temple in its midst, the first shrine of Benten.

Before it a few stunted palm-trees are growing.

There is nothing in the shrine of interest, only Shinto emblems.

But there is another well beside it with other votive towels, and there is another mysterious monument, a stone shrine brought from China six hundred years ago.

Perhaps it contained some far-famed statue before this place of pilgrimage was given over to the priests of Shinto.

There is nothing in it now; the monolith slab forming the back of it has been fractured by the falling of rocks from the cliff above; and the inscription cut therein has been almost effaced by some kind of scum.

Akira reads 'Dai-Nippongoku-Enoshima-no-reiseki-ken .

.

.'

; the rest is undecipherable.

He says there is a statue in the neighbouring temple, but it is exhibited only once a year, on the fifteenth day of the seventh month.

Leaving the court by a rising path to the left, we proceed along the verge of a cliff overlooking the sea.

Perched upon this verge are pretty tea-houses, all widely open to the sea wind, so that, looking through them, over their matted floors and lacquered balconies one sees the ocean as in a picture-frame, and the pale clear horizon specked with snowy sails, and a faint blue-peaked shape also, like a phantom island, the far vapoury silhouette of Oshima.

Then we find another torii, and other steps leading to a terrace almost black with shade of enormous evergreen trees, and surrounded on the sea side by another stone balustrade, velveted with moss.

On the right more steps, another torii, another terrace; and more mossed green lions and stone lamps; and a monument inscribed with the record of the change whereby Enoshima passed away from Buddhism to become Shino.

Beyond, in the centre of another plateau, the second shrine of Benten.

But there is no Benten!

Benten has been hidden away by Shinto hands.

The second shrine is void as the first.

Nevertheless, in a building to the left of the temple, strange relics are exhibited.

Feudal armour; suits of plate and chain-mail; helmets with visors which are demoniac masks of iron; helmets crested with dragons of gold; two-handed swords worthy of giants; and enormous arrows, more than five feet long, with shafts nearly an inch in diameter.

One has a crescent head about nine inches from horn to horn, the interior edge of the crescent being sharp as a knife.

Such a missile would take off a man's head; and I can scarcely believe Akira's assurance that such ponderous arrows were shot from a bow by hand only.

There is a specimen of the writing of Nichiren, the great Buddhist priest--gold characters on a blue ground; and there is, in a lacquered shrine, a gilded dragon said to have been made by that still greater priest and writer and master-wizard, Kobodaishi.

A path shaded by overarching trees leads from this plateau to the third shrine.

We pass a torii and beyond it come to a stone monument covered with figures of monkeys chiselled in relief.

What the signification of this monument is, even our guide cannot explain.

Then another torii.

It is of wood; but I am told it replaces one of metal, stolen in the night by thieves.

Wonderful thieves!

that torii must have weighed at least a ton!

More stone lanterns; then an immense count, on the very summit of the mountain, and there, in its midst, the third and chief temple of Benten.

And before the temple is a large vacant space surrounded by a fence in such manner as to render the shrine totally inaccessible.

Vanity and vexation of spirit!

There is, however, a little haiden, or place of prayer, with nothing in it but a money-box and a bell, before the fence, and facing the temple steps.

Here the pilgrims make their offerings and pray.

Only a small raised platform covered with a Chinese roof supported upon four plain posts, the back of the structure being closed by a lattice about breast high.

From this praying-station we can look into the temple of Benten, and see that Benten is not there.

But I perceive that the ceiling is arranged in caissons; and in a central caisson I discover a very curious painting--a foreshortened Tortoise, gazing down at me.

And while I am looking at it I hear Akira and the guide laughing; and the latter exclaims, 'Benten-Sama!'

A beautiful little damask snake is undulating up the lattice-work, poking its head through betimes to look at us.

It does not seem in the least afraid, nor has it much reason to be, seeing that its kind are deemed the servants and confidants of Benten.

Sometimes the great goddess herself assumes the serpent form; perhaps she has come to see us.

Near by is a singular stone, set on a pedestal in the court.

It has the form of the body of a tortoise, and markings like those of the creature's shell; and it is held a sacred thing, and is called the Tortoise-stone.

But I fear exceedingly that in all this place we shall find nothing save stones and serpents!

Sec.

18 Now we are going to visit the Dragon cavern, not so called, Akira says, because the Dragon of Benten ever dwelt therein, but because the shape of the cavern is the shape of a dragon.

The path descends toward the opposite side of the island, and suddenly breaks into a flight of steps cut out of the pale hard rock--exceedingly steep, and worn, and slippery, and perilous--overlooking the sea.

A vision of low pale rocks, and surf bursting among them, and a toro or votive stone lamp in the centre of them--all seen as in a bird's-eye view, over the verge of an awful precipice.

I see also deep, round holes in one of the rocks.

There used to be a tea-house below; and the wooden pillars supporting it were fitted into those holes.

I descend with caution; the Japanese seldom slip in their straw sandals, but I can only proceed with the aid of the guide.

At almost every step I slip.

Surely these steps could never have been thus worn away by the straw sandals of pilgrims who came to see only stones and serpents!

At last we reach a plank gallery carried along the face of the cliff above the rocks and pools, and following it round a projection of the cliff enter the sacred cave.

The light dims as we advance; and the sea-waves, running after us into the gloom, make a stupefying roar, multiplied by the extraordinary echo.

Looking back, I see the mouth of the cavern like a prodigious sharply angled rent in blackness, showing a fragment of azure sky.

We reach a shrine with no deity in it, pay a fee; and lamps being lighted and given to each of us, we proceed to explore a series of underground passages.

So black they are that even with the light of three lamps, I can at first see nothing.

In a while, however, I can distinguish stone figures in relief--chiselled on slabs like those I saw in the Buddhist graveyard.

These are placed at regular intervals along the rock walls.

The guide approaches his light to the face of each one, and utters a name, 'Daikoku-Sama,' 'Fudo-Sama,' 'Kwannon-Sama.'

Sometimes in lieu of a statue there is an empty shrine only, with a money-box before it; and these void shrines have names of Shinto gods, 'Daijingu,' 'Hachiman,' 'Inari-Sama.'

All the statues are black, or seem black in the yellow lamplight, and sparkle as if frosted.

I feel as if I were in some mortuary pit, some subterranean burial-place of dead gods.

Interminable the corridor appears; yet there is at last an end--an end with a shrine in it--where the rocky ceiling descends so low that to reach the shrine one must go down on hands and knees.

And there is nothing in the shrine.

This is the Tail of the Dragon.

We do not return to the light at once, but enter into other lateral black corridors--the Wings of the Dragon.

More sable effigies of dispossessed gods; more empty shrines; more stone faces covered with saltpetre; and more money-boxes, possible only to reach by stooping, where more offerings should be made.

And there is no Benten, either of wood or stone.

I am glad to return to the light.

Here our guide strips naked, and suddenly leaps head foremost into a black deep swirling current between rocks.

Five minutes later he reappears, and clambering out lays at my feet a living, squirming sea-snail and an enormous shrimp.

Then he resumes his robe, and we re-ascend the mountain.

Sec.

19 'And this,' the reader may say,--'this is all that you went forth to see: a torii, some shells, a small damask snake, some stones?'

It is true.

And nevertheless I know that I am bewitched.

There is a charm indefinable about the place--that sort of charm which comes with a little ghostly thrill never to be forgotten.

Not of strange sights alone is this charm made, but of numberless subtle sensations and ideas interwoven and inter-blended: the sweet sharp scents of grove and sea; the blood-brightening, vivifying touch of the free wind; the dumb appeal of ancient mystic mossy things; vague reverence evoked by knowledge of treading soil called holy for a thousand years; and a sense of sympathy, as a human duty, compelled by the vision of steps of rock worn down into shapelessness by the pilgrim feet of vanished generations.

And other memories ineffaceable: the first sight of the sea-girt City of Pearl through a fairy veil of haze; the windy approach to the lovely island over the velvety soundless brown stretch of sand; the weird majesty of the giant gate of bronze; the queer, high-sloping, fantastic, quaintly gabled street, flinging down sharp shadows of aerial balconies;

the flutter of coloured draperies in the sea wind, and of flags with their riddles of lettering; the pearly glimmering of the astonishing shops.

And impressions of the enormous day--the day of the Land of the Gods--a loftier day than ever our summers know; and the glory of the view from those green sacred silent heights between sea and sun; and the remembrance of the sky, a sky spiritual as holiness, a sky with clouds ghost-pure and white as the light itself--seeming, indeed, not clouds but dreams, or souls of Bodhisattvas about to melt for ever into some blue Nirvana.

And the romance of Benten, too,--the Deity of Beauty, the Divinity of Love, the Goddess of Eloquence.

Rightly is she likewise named Goddess of the Sea.

For is not the Sea most ancient and most excellent of Speakers--the eternal Poet, chanter of that mystic hymn whose rhythm shakes the world, whose mighty syllables no man may learn?

Sec.

20 We return by another route.

For a while the way winds through a long narrow winding valley between wooded hills: the whole extent of bottom-land is occupied by rice-farms;

the air has a humid coolness, and one hears only the chanting of frogs, like a clattering of countless castanets, as the jinricksha jolts over the rugged elevated paths separating the flooded rice-fields.

As we skirt the foot of a wooded hill upon the right, my Japanese comrade signals to our runners to halt, and himself dismounting, points to the blue peaked roof of a little temple high-perched on the green slope.

'Is it really worth while to climb up there in the sun?'

I ask.

'Oh, yes!'

he answers: 'it is the temple of Kishibojin--Kishibojin, the Mother of Demons!'

We ascend a flight of broad stone steps, meet the Buddhist guardian lions at the summit, and enter the little court in which the temple stands.

An elderly woman, with a child clinging to her robe, comes from the adjoining building to open the screens for us; and taking off our footgear we enter the temple.

Without, the edifice looked old and dingy;

but within all is neat and pretty.

The June sun, pouring through the open shoji, illuminates an artistic confusion of brasses gracefully shaped and multi-coloured things--images, lanterns, paintings, gilded inscriptions, pendent scrolls.

There are three altars.

Above the central altar Amida Buddha sits enthroned on his mystic golden lotus in the attitude of the Teacher.

On the altar to the right gleams a shrine of five miniature golden steps, where little images stand in rows, tier above tier, some seated, some erect, male and female, attired like goddesses or like daimyo: the Sanjiubanjin, or Thirty Guardians.

Below, on the façade of the altar, is the figure of a hero slaying a monster.

On the altar to the left is the shrine of the Mother-of-Demons.

Her story is a legend of horror.

For some sin committed in a previous birth, she was born a demon, devouring her own children.

But being saved by the teaching of Buddha, she became a divine being, especially loving and protecting infants; and Japanese mothers pray to her for their little ones, and wives pray to her for beautiful boys.

The face of Kishibojin [7] is the face of a comely woman.

But her eyes are weird.

In her right hand she bears a lotus-blossom; with her left she supports in a fold of her robe, against her half-veiled breast, a naked baby.

At the foot of her shrine stands Jizo-Sama, leaning upon his shakujo.

But the altar and its images do not form the startling feature of the temple-interior.

What impresses the visitor in a totally novel way are the votive offerings.

High before the shrine, suspended from strings stretched taut between tall poles of bamboo, are scores, no, hundreds, of pretty, tiny dresses--Japanese baby-dresses of many colours.

Most are made of poor material, for these are the thank-offerings of very poor simple women, poor country mothers, whose prayers to Kishibojin for the blessing of children have been heard.

And the sight of all those little dresses, each telling so naively its story of joy and pain--those tiny kimono shaped and sewn by docile patient fingers of humble mothers--touches irresistibly, like some unexpected revelation of the universal mother-love.

And the tenderness of all the simple hearts that have testified thus to faith and thankfulness seems to thrill all about me softly, like a caress of summer wind.

Outside the world appears to have suddenly grown beautiful; the light is sweeter; it seems to me there is a new charm even in the azure of the eternal day.

Sec.

21 Then, having traversed the valley, we reach a main road so level and so magnificently shaded by huge old trees that I could believe myself in an English lane--a lane in Kent or Surrey, perhaps--but for some exotic detail breaking the illusion at intervals; a torii, towering before temple-steps descending to the highway, or a signboard lettered with Chinese characters, or the wayside shrine of some unknown god.

All at once I observe by the roadside some unfamiliar sculptures in relief--a row of chiselled slabs protected by a little bamboo shed; and I dismount to look at them, supposing them to be funereal monuments.

They are so old that the lines of their sculpturing are half obliterated; their feet are covered with moss, and their visages are half effaced.

But I can discern that these are not haka, but six images of one divinity; and my guide knows him--Koshin, the God of Roads.

So chipped and covered with scurf he is, that the upper portion of his form has become indefinably vague; his attributes have been worn away.

But below his feet, on several slabs, chiselled cunningly, I can still distinguish the figures of the Three Apes, his messengers.

And some pious soul has left before one image a humble votive offering--the picture of a black cock and a white hen, painted upon a wooden shingle.

It must have been left here very long ago; the wood has become almost black, and the painting has been damaged by weather and by the droppings of birds.

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.

Sec.

22 The temple of Koshin is situated in the middle of the village, in a court opening upon the main street.

A very old wooden temple it is, unpainted, dilapidated, grey with the greyness of all forgotten and weather-beaten things.

It is some time before the guardian of the temple can be found, to open the doors.

For this temple has doors in lieu of shoji--old doors that moan sleepily at being turned upon their hinges.

And it is not necessary to remove one's shoes; the floor is matless, covered with dust, and squeaks under the unaccustomed weight of entering feet.

All within is crumbling, mouldering, worn; the shrine has no image, only Shinto emblems, some poor paper lanterns whose once bright colours have vanished under a coating of dust, some vague inscriptions.

I see the circular frame of a metal mirror; but the mirror itself is gone.

Whither?

The guardian says: 'No priest lives now in this temple;

and thieves might come in the night to steal the mirror; so we have hidden it away.'

I ask about the image of Koshin.

He answers it is exposed but once in every sixty-one years: so I cannot see it; but there are other statues of the god in the temple court.

I go to look at them: a row of images, much like those upon the public highway, but better preserved.

One figure of Koshin, however, is different from the others I have seen--apparently made after some Hindoo model, judging by the Indian coiffure, mitre-shaped and lofty.

The god has three eyes; one in the centre of his forehead, opening perpendicularly instead of horizontally.

He has six arms.

With one hand he supports a monkey; with another he grasps a serpent; and the other hands hold out symbolic things--a wheel, a sword, a rosary, a sceptre.

And serpents are coiled about his wrists and about his ankles; and under his feet is a monstrous head, the head of a demon, Amanjako, sometimes called Utatesa ('Sadness').

Upon the pedestal below the Three Apes are carven; and the face of an ape appears also upon the front of the god's tiara.

I see also tablets of stone, graven only with the god's name,--votive offerings.

And near by, in a tiny wooden shrine, is the figure of the Earth-god, Ken-ro-ji-jin, grey, primeval, vaguely wrought, holding in one hand a spear, in the other a vessel containing something indistinguishable.

Sec.

23 Perhaps to uninitiated eyes these many-headed, many-handed gods at first may seem--as they seem always in the sight of Christian bigotry--only monstrous.

But when the knowledge of their meaning comes to one who feels the divine in all religions, then they will be found to make appeal to the higher aestheticism, to the sense of moral beauty, with a force never to be divined by minds knowing nothing of the Orient and its thought.

To me the image of Kwannon of the Thousand Hands is not less admirable than any other representation of human loveliness idealised bearing her name--the Peerless, the Majestic, the Peace-Giving, or even White Sui-Getsu, who sails the moonlit waters in her rosy boat made of a single lotus-petal; and in the triple-headed Shaka I discern and revere the mighty power of that Truth, whereby, as by a conjunction of suns, the Three Worlds have been illuminated.

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.

Into it, as into a fathomless sea, mythology after mythology from India and China and the farther East has sunk and been absorbed; and the stranger, peering into its deeps, finds himself, as in the tale of Undine, contemplating a flood in whose every surge rises and vanishes a Face--weird or beautiful or terrible--a most ancient shoreless sea of forms incomprehensibly interchanging and intermingling, but symbolising the protean magic of that infinite Unknown that shapes and re-shapes for ever all cosmic being.

Sec.

24 I wonder if I can buy a picture of Koshin.

In most Japanese temples little pictures of the tutelar deity are sold to pilgrims, cheap prints on thin paper.

But the temple guardian here tells me, with a gesture of despair, that there are no pictures of Koshin for sale; there is only an old kakemono on which the god is represented.

If I would like to see it he will go home and get it for me.

I beg him to do me the favour; and he hurries into the street.

While awaiting his return, I continue to examine the queer old statues, with a feeling of mingled melancholy and pleasure.

To have studied and loved an ancient faith only through the labours of palaeographers and archaeologists, and as a something astronomically remote from one's own existence, and then suddenly in after years to find the same faith a part of one's human environment,--to feel that its mythology, though senescent, is alive all around you--is almost to realise the dream of the Romantics, to have the sensation of returning through twenty centuries into the life of a happier world.

For these quaint Gods of Roads and Gods of Earth are really living still, though so worn and mossed and feebly worshipped.

In this brief moment, at least, I am really in the Elder World--perhaps just at that epoch of it when the primal faith is growing a little old-fashioned, crumbling slowly before the corrosive influence of a new philosophy; and I know myself a pagan still, loving these simple old gods, these gods of a people's childhood.

And they need some human love, these naive, innocent, ugly gods.

The beautiful divinities will live for ever by that sweetness of womanhood idealised in the Buddhist art of them: eternal are Kwannon and Benten;

they need no help of man; they will compel reverence when the great temples shall all have become voiceless and priestless as this shrine of Koshin is.

But these kind, queer, artless, mouldering gods, who have given ease to so many troubled minds, who have gladdened so many simple hearts, who have heard so many innocent prayers--how gladly would I prolong their beneficent lives in spite of the so-called 'laws of progress' and the irrefutable philosophy of evolution!

The guardian returns, bringing with him a kakemono, very small, very dusty, and so yellow-stained by time that it might be a thousand years old.

But I am disappointed as I unroll it; there is only a very common print of the god within--all outline.

And while I am looking at it, I become for the first time conscious that a crowd has gathered about me,--tanned kindly-faced labourers from the fields, and mothers with their babies on their backs, and school children, and jinricksha men--all wondering that a stranger should be thus interested in their gods.

And although the pressure about me is very, very gentle, like a pressure of tepid water for gentleness, I feel a little embarrassed.

I

give back the old kakemono to the guardian, make my offering to the god, and take my leave of Koshin and his good servant.

All the kind oblique eyes follow me as I go.

And something like a feeling of remorse seizes me at thus abruptly abandoning the void, dusty, crumbling temple, with its mirrorless altar and its colourless lanterns, and the decaying sculptures of its neglected court, and its kindly guardian whom I see still watching my retreating steps, with the yellow kakemono in his hand.

The whistle of a locomotive warns me that I shall just have time to catch the train.

For Western civilisation has invaded all this primitive peace, with its webs of steel, with its ways of iron.

This is not of thy roads, O Koshin!

--the old gods are dying along its ash-strewn verge!

Chapter Five At the Market of the Dead