Behind my dwelling, but hidden from view by a very lofty curtain of trees, there is a Buddhist temple, with a cemetery attached to it. The cemetery itself is in a grove of pines, many centuries old; and the temple stands in a great quaint lonesome garden. Its religious name is Ji-shō-in; but the people call it Kobudera, which means the Gnarled, or Knobby Temple, because it is built of undressed timber,—great logs of hinoki, selected for their beauty or strangeness of shape, and simply prepared for the builder by the removal of limbs and bark. But such gnarled and knobby wood is precious: it is of the hardest and most enduring, and costs far more than common building-material,—as might be divined from the fact that the beautiful alcoves and the choicest parts of Japanese interiors are finished with wood of a similar kind. To build Kobudera was an undertaking worthy of a prince; and, as a matter of history, it was a prince who erected it, for a place of family worship. There is a doubtful tradition that two designs were submitted to him by the architect, and that he chose the more fantastic one under the innocent impression that undressed timber would prove cheap. But whether it owes its existence to a mistake or not, Kobudera remains one of the most interesting temples of Japan. The public have now almost forgotten its existence;—but it was famous in the time of Iyemitsu; and its appellation, Ji-shō-in, was taken from the kaimyō of one of the great Shogun’s ladies, whose superb tomb may be seen in its cemetery. Before Meiji, the temple was isolated among woods and fields; but the city has now swallowed up most of the green spaces that once secluded it, and has pushed out the ugliest of new streets directly in front of its gate.
Gate of Kobudera
This gate—a structure of gnarled logs, with a tiled and tilted Chinese roof—is a fitting preface to the queer style of the temple itself. From either gable-end of the gate-roof, a demon-head, grinning under triple horns, looks down upon the visitor.[16] Within, except at the hours of prayer, all is green silence. Children do not play in the court—perhaps because the temple is a private one. The ground is everywhere hidden by a fine thick moss of so warm a color, that the brightest foliage of the varied shrubbery above it looks sombre by contrast; and the bases of walls, the pedestals of monuments, the stonework of the bell-tower, the masonry of the ancient well, are muffled with the same luminous growth. Maples and pines and cryptomerias screen the façade of the temple; and, if your visit be in autumn, you may find the whole court filled with the sweet heavy perfume of the mokusei[17]-blossom. After having looked at the strange temple, you would find it worth while to enter the cemetery, by the black gate on the west side of the court.
I like to wander in that cemetery,—partly because in the twilight of its great trees, and in the silence of centuries which has gathered about them, one can forget the city and its turmoil, and dream out of space and time,—but much more because it is full of beauty, and of the poetry of great faith. Indeed of such poetry it possesses riches quite exceptional. Each Buddhist sect has its own tenets, rites, and forms; and the special character of these is reflected in the iconography and epigraphy of its burial-grounds,—so that for any experienced eye a Tendai graveyard is readily distinguishable from a Shingon graveyard, or a Zen graveyard from one belonging to a Nichiren congregation. But at Kobudera the inscriptions and the sculptures peculiar to several Buddhist sects can be studied side by side. Founded for the Hokké, or Nichiren rite, the temple nevertheless passed, in the course of generations, under the control of other sects—the last being the Tendai;—and thus its cemetery now offers a most interesting medley of the emblems and the epitaphic formularies of various persuasions. It was here that I first learned, under the patient teaching of an Oriental friend, something about the Buddhist literature of the dead.
No one able to feel beauty could refuse to confess the charm of the old Buddhist cemeteries,—with their immemorial trees, their evergreen mazes of shrubbery trimmed into quaintest shapes, the carpet-softness of their mossed paths, the weird but unquestionable art of their monuments. And no great knowledge of Buddhism is needed to enable you, even at first sight, to understand something of this art. You would recognize the lotos chiselled upon tombs or water-tanks, and would doubtless observe that the designs of the pedestals represent a lotos of eight petals,—though you might not know that these eight petals symbolize the Eight Intelligences. You would recognize the manji, or svastika, figuring the Wheel of the Law,—though ignorant of its relation to the Mahâyâna philosophy. You would perhaps be able to recognize also the images of certain Buddhas,—though not aware of the meaning of their attitudes or emblems in relation to mystical ecstasy or to the manifestation of the Six Supernatural Powers. And you would be touched by the simple pathos of the offerings,—the incense and the flowers before the tombs, the water poured out for the dead,—even though unable to divine the deeper pathos of the beliefs that make the cult. But unless an excellent Chinese scholar as well as a Buddhist philosopher, all book-knowledge of the great religion would still leave you helpless in a world of riddles. The marvellous texts,—the exquisite Chinese scriptures chiselled into the granite of tombs, or limned by a master-brush upon the smooth wood of the sotoba,—will yield their secrets only to an interpreter of no common powers. And the more you become familiar with their aspect, the more the mystery of them tantalizes,—especially after you have learned that a literal translation of them would mean, in the majority of cases, exactly nothing!
What strange thoughts have been thus recorded and yet concealed? Are they complex and subtle as the characters that stand for them? Are they beautiful also like those characters,—with some undreamed-of, surprising beauty, such as might inform the language of another planet?
II
As for subtlety and complexity, much of this mortuary literature is comparable to the Veil of Isis. Behind the mystery of the text—in which almost every character has two readings—there is the mystery of the phrase; and again behind this are successions of riddles belonging to a gnosticism older than all the wisdom of the Occident, and deep as the abysses of Space. Fortunately the most occult texts are also the least interesting, and bear little relation to the purpose of this essay. The majority are attached, not to the sculptured, but to the written and impermanent literature of cemeteries,—not to the stone monuments, but to the sotoba: those tall narrow laths of unpainted wood which are planted above the graves at fixed, but gradually increasing intervals, during a period of one hundred years.[18]
