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Are you beginning to get the idea as to how someone who isn’t even all that interested in the beauty of a cemetery might just find the one at 化野念仏寺 to be quite beautiful and peaceful? If you ever get bored of this vantage point (but how could you?) just turn around to behold a bamboo forest.
As mentioned in yesterday’s entry, beyond the bamboo stair path in 化野念仏寺 lies a modern, upper cemetery which had a wonderful atmosphere about it. I’m dying to go back and see it again, no pun intended.
While there are several, nice, public bamboo-viewing points in Kyoto, most are crowded with tourists. The one pictured, above, is not crowded, nor is it public. You can only get to it by paying an admission fee at Adashino Nembutsuji. This Buddhist temple is best known for its thousands of small, stone Buddhist statues. Don’t look at them and then head for the exit thinking you’ve seen it all. Keep moving to the back of the grounds until you see the stairs pictured.
After climbing the stairs you will find yourself in a large graveyard surrounded by bamboo (竹林), trees, and mountains. I found it to be about the most beautiful and peaceful place I’ve ever encountered. It didn’t hurt that I was the only one there. Still, I wouldn’t mind the cemetery at Adashino Nenbutsuji being my eternal resting place.
For directions and current prices see this page.
“No matter how many photographs of the colossus you may have already seen, this first vision of the reality is an astonishment. Then you imagine that you are already too near, though the image is at least a hudred yards away. As for me, I retire at once thirty or forty yards back, to get a better view. And the jinrikisha man runs after me, laughing and gesticulating, thinking that I imagine the image alive and am afraid of it.
But, even were that shape alive, none could be afraid of it. The gentleness, the dreamy passionlessness of those features, — the immense repose of the whole figure, — are full of beauty and charm. And, contrary to all expectation, the nearer you approach the giant Buddha, the greater this charm becomes. You look up into the solemnly beautiful face, — into the half closed eyes that seem to watch you through their eyelids of bronze as gently as those of a child; and you feel that the image typifies all that is tender and calm in the Soul of the East…
…a priest, who acts as guide, states the age of the statue to be six hundred and thirty years, and asks for some small contribution to aid in the erection of a new temple to shelter it from the weather.
For this Buddha once had a temple. A tidal wave following an earthquake swept walls and roof away, but left the mighty Amida unmoved, still meditating upon his lotus.” (Lafcadio Hearn, 1894, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, pp. 78-79)
And here we are more than 110 years in the future and the new temple still hasn’t been built! I suppose the moral to this story is “Never trust the religious man asking for contributions.” 😉
“Blessed are they who do not too much fear the gods which they have made!…
Descending the shadowed steps, I find myself face to face with six little statues about three feet high, standing in a row upon one long pedestal. The first holds a Buddhist incense box; the second, a lotsu; the third, a pilgrim’s staff; the fourth, the beads of a Buddhist rosary; the fifth stands in the attitude of prayer, with hands joined; the sixth bears in one hand the shakujou, or mendicant priest’s staff, having six rings attached to the top of it, and in the other hand the mystic jewel, nioi houjiu, by virtue whereof all desires may be accomplished… Archaic, mysterious, but inexplicably touching, all these soft childish faces are.
Roku Jizou — “The Six Jizou” — these images are called in the speech of the people…” (Lafcadio Hearn, 1894, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, pp. 35, 43)
“Most of us who now call ourselves agnostics can recollect the feelings with which, in the period of our fresh emancipation from a faith far more irrational than Buddhism, we looked back upon the gloomy theology of our fathers…
Japan has nothing whatever to gain by conversion to Christianity, either morally or otherwise, but very much to lose.” (Lafcadio Hearn, 1894, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, pp. xii, xvi)