'Oh! there is something still to see,' my guide exclaims as we reach
the great Chinese gate again; and he leads the way across the grounds by
another path to a little hill, previously hidden from view by trees. The
face of the hill, a mass of soft stone perhaps one hundred feet high,
is hollowed out into chambers, full of images. These look like
burial-caves; and the images seem funereal monuments. There are
two stories of chambers--three above, two below; and the former are
connected with the latter by a narrow interior stairway cut through
the living rock. And all around the dripping walls of these chambers
on pedestals are grey slabs, shaped exactly like the haka in Buddhist
cemeteries, and chiselled with figures of divinities in high relief. All
have glory-disks: some are naive and sincere like the work of our own
mediaeval image-makers. Several are not unfamiliar. I have seen before,
in the cemetery of Kuboyama, this kneeling woman with countless shadowy
hands; and this figure tiara-coiffed, slumbering with one knee raised,
and cheek pillowed upon the left hand--the placid and pathetic symbol of
the perpetual rest. Others, like Madonnas, hold lotus-flowers, and their
feet rest upon the coils of a serpent. I cannot see them all, for the
rock roof of one chamber has fallen in; and a sunbeam entering the ruin
reveals a host of inaccessible sculptures half buried in rubbish.
But no!--this grotto-work is not for the dead; and these are not haka,
as I imagined, but only images of the Goddess of Mercy. These chambers
are chapels; and these sculptures are the En-gaku-ji-no-hyaku-Kwannon,
'the Hundred Kwannons of En-gaku-ji.' And I see in the upper chamber
above the stairs a granite tablet in a rock-niche, chiselled with
an inscription in Sanscrit transliterated into Chinese characters,
'Adoration to the great merciful Kwan-ze-on, who looketh down above the
sound of prayer.' [3]