GATE-WAY OF THE IYEYASU TEMPLE
A green and mossy staircase, a greener and mossier balustraded walk, leads up and along the crest of the hill to the final knoll, atop of which stands the simple bronze urn containing the great Shogun’s body. A more still and solemn, a more peaceful and beautiful resting-place could not be imagined, and the peculiar green twilight reigning under the closely-set cryptomerias, with those long stretches of stone balustrades and embankments, which the forest has claimed for its own and clothed in a concealing mantle of the greenest moss, subdue the most frivolous beholder to silence and seriousness.
On that velvety-green stair-way leading to Iyeyasu’s tomb I met, one day, a scholar of fine taste and great culture, a man of distinction in his native West. “I am overwhelmed with the beauty and magnificence of all this,” he said. “I must concede the greatness of any religion that could provide and preserve this, and teach its followers to appreciate it.”
Afterwards, almost on the same step, a dear missionary friend stopped me, with eyes full of tears. “Oh!” she sighed, “this fills me with sadness and sorrow. These emblems and monuments of heathenism! I see nothing beautiful or admirable in those wicked temples. They show me how hard it will be to uproot such heathen creeds. I wish I had not come.”
A woodland path leads around the foot of the great hill on which the Shoguns’ tombs are built, a path laid with large fiat stones and set with a rough curbing of loose rocks and bowlders, covered—by the drip and damp and shade of centuries—with a thick green moss. This silent footway leads past many small temples, stone-fenced enclosures, moss-covered tombs and tablets, tiny shrines behind tiny torii, and battered, broken-nosed, and headless Buddhas. Half-hidden tracks, in that gloomy and silent cryptomeria forest, rough-set staircases, roads plunging into the deep shadow of the woods entice the explorer to ever-new surprises. At deserted and silent shrines heaps of pebbles, bits of paper, or strips of wood painted with a sacred character attest the presence of prayerful pilgrims, who have sought them out to register a vow or petition. Tiny red shrines gleam jewel-like in the far shadows, and fallen cryptomerias make mounds and ridges of entangled vines among the red-barked giants still standing. Above a water-fall, all thin ribbons and jets of foam, are more old temples, where pilgrims come to pray and tourists to admire, but where no one ever despoils the unguarded sanctuaries. In one of these buildings are life-size images of the gods of thunder and the winds. Raiden, the thunder-god, is a bright-red divinity with a circle of drums surrounding his head like a halo, a fierce countenance, and two goaty horns on his forehead. Futen, the god of winds, has a grass-green skin, two horny toes to each foot, and a big bag over his shoulders. A fine heavy-roofed red gate-way and bell-tower distinguish another cluster of temples in this still forest nook, their altars covered with gilded images. One open shrine, which should be the resort of jinrikisha men, is dedicated to a muscular red deity, to whom votaries offer up a pair of sandals, beseeching him for vigorous legs. The whole place is hung over with wooden, straw, and tin sandals, minute or colossal. Then down through the wood, past a hoary graveyard, where abbots and monks of Nikko monasteries were buried for centuries before the Shoguns came, one returns to the Futa-ara temple and Iyemitsu’s first gate-way.
In our wanderings we once happened upon an old and crowded graveyard, with splendid trees shading the mossy tombs and monuments. The stone lanterns, Buddhas, and images were past counting, and one granite deity, under a big sun-hat, had a kerchief of red cotton tied under his chin. His benevolent face and flaming robes were stuck all over with tiny bits of paper, on which the faithful had written their petitions, and the lanterns beside him were heaped with prayer-stones. A Hindoo-looking deity near by sat with uplifted knee, on which he rested one arm and supported his bent and thoughtful head.
A hundred stone representatives of Buddha sit in mossy meditation under the shadow of the river bank, long branches trailing over them and vines clambering about their ancient brows. Time has rolled some from their lotus pedestals, beheaded others, and covered them all with white lichens and green moss, and Gamman, as this row of Buddhas is named, is the strangest sight among the many strange sights of the river bank. Custom ordains that one should count them, and no two persons are believed to have ever recorded the same number of images between the bridge and Kobo Daishi’s open shrine.
There is an eta village just below Nikko, peopled by these outcasts, who follow their despised calling of handling the carcasses of animals and dressing leather and furs. Their degradation seems to result not more from that Buddhist law which forbids the taking of animal life, than from the legendary belief that they are the descendants of Korean prisoners, long kept as executioners and purveyors for the imperial falcons. Colonies of etas lived for centuries without part or lot in the lives of their high-caste neighbors. After the Restoration, the power of the great nobles was curtailed, and with the gradual freeing of the lower classes from the tyranny of caste the eta became a citizen, protected by law. Prejudice still confines him to his own villages, but when he leaves them salt is no longer sprinkled on the spot where he stands to purify it.