It is still the season of mists in this land whose most ancient name
signifies the Place of the Issuing of Clouds. With the passing of
twilight a faint ghostly brume rises over lake and landscape, spectrally
veiling surfaces, slowly obliterating distances. As I lean over the
parapet of the Tenjin-bashi, on my homeward way, to take one last look
eastward, I find that the mountains have already been effaced. Before
me there is only a shadowy flood far vanishing into vagueness without a
horizon--the phantom of a sea. And I become suddenly aware that little
white things are fluttering slowly down into it from the fingers of a
woman standing upon the bridge beside me, and murmuring something in a
low sweet voice. She is praying for her dead child. Each of those little
papers she is dropping into the current bears a tiny picture of Jizo and
perhaps a little inscription. For when a child dies the mother buys
a small woodcut (hanko) of Jizo, and with it prints the image of the
divinity upon one hundred little papers. And she sometimes also writes
upon the papers words signifying 'For the sake of...'--inscribing never
the living, but the kaimyo or soul-name only, which the Buddhist
priest has given to the dead, and which is written also upon the little
commemorative tablet kept within the Buddhist household shrine, or
butsuma. Then, upon a fixed day (most commonly the forty-ninth day
after the burial), she goes to some place of running water and drops the
little papers therein one by one; repeating, as each slips through her
fingers, the holy invocation, 'Namu Jizo, Dai Bosatsu!'
Doubtless this pious little woman, praying beside me in the dusk, is
very poor. Were she not, she would hire a boat and scatter her tiny
papers far away upon the bosom of the lake. (It is now only after
dark that this may be done; for the police--I know not why--have been
instructed to prevent the pretty rite, just as in the open ports they
have been instructed to prohibit the launching of the little straw boats
of the dead, the shoryobune.)
But why should the papers be cast into running water? A good old Tendai
priest tells me that originally the rite was only for the souls of
the drowned. But now these gentle hearts believe that all waters flow
downward to the Shadow-world and through the Sai-no-Kawara, where Jizo
is.