“This for the sake of our noble Elder Sister ----. May the Lotos of Bliss by virtue of these prayers be made to bloom for her, and to bear the fruit of Buddhahood!”[27]
But usually the prayers are of the simplest, and differ from each other only in the use of peculiar Buddhist terms:—
—“This for the sake of the true happiness of our lay-brother—[kaimyō],—that he may obtain the Supreme Perfect Enlightenment.”
—“This tower is set up for the sake of ——, that he may obtain complete Sambodhi.”[28]
—“This precious tower and these offerings for the sake of —— ——,—that he may obtain the Anattra-Sammyak-Sambodhi.”[29]
One other subject of interest belonging to the merely commemorative texts of sotoba remains to be mentioned,—the names of certain Buddhist services for the dead. There are two classes of such services: those performed within one hundred days after death, and those celebrated at fixed intervals during a term of one hundred years,—on the 1st, 2d, 7th, 13th, 17th, 24th, 33d, 50th, and 100th anniversaries of the death. In the Zen rite these commemorative services—(perhaps we might call them masses)—have singular mystical names by which they are recorded upon the sotoba of the sect,—such as Lesser Happiness, Greater Happiness, Broad Repose, The Bright Caress, and The Great Caress.
But we shall now turn to the study of the scripture-texts proper,—those citations from sûtra or sastra which form the main portion of a sotoba-writing; expounding the highest truth of Buddhist belief, or speaking the deepest thought of Eastern philosophy.
III
At the beginning of my studies in the Kobudera cemetery, I was not less impressed by the quiet cheerfulness of the sotoba-texts, than by their poetry and their philosophy. In none did I find even a shadow of sadness: the greater number were utterances of a faith that seemed to me wider and deeper than our own,—sublime proclamations of the eternal and infinite nature of Thought, the unity of all mind, and the certainty of universal salvation. And other surprises awaited me in this strange literature. Texts or fragments of texts, that at first rendering appeared of the simplest, would yield to learned commentary profundities of significance absolutely startling. Phrases, seemingly artless, would suddenly reveal a dual suggestiveness,—a two-fold idealism,—a beauty at once exoteric and mystical. Of this latter variety of inscription the following is a good example:—