There is a wonder called itohiki, the drawing of threads.
When a believer puts their palms together before the written name of Amida and makes their reverence, fine threads appear from the ends of their fingers. They are described as filaments of the utmost fineness, barely visible to the naked eye. Temples possessed scrolls known to produce them; the effect was associated particularly with scrolls in the hand of one famous priest, though others did it too.
The folk reading of it was moral. If the threads came, that person’s faith was sound. If no threads came, it was because of their sins.
A lecture course of the 1890s deals with this, and what follows is not an argument. It is a report of work done.
The lecturer says he went to a temple some years earlier and made his reverence before one of these scrolls himself. He also says that a test was carried out at the research society he was involved with, and that he obtained threads.
Then he describes what he got, with measurements.
The threads were white. In length they ran from about one or two bu to five or six — call it three millimetres to under two centimetres. In thickness they were finer than a hair. What they most resembled, he says, was the fine fibre that stands up at the torn edge of a sheet of Japanese paper. Most were white; some were red and some were blue.
The decisive observation takes two sentences, and it is a good piece of reasoning.
Touch the thread from outside and you can lift it off easily — and in doing so you feel no sensation of anything being pulled.
If the filament were really growing out of the flesh, then removing it ought to produce at least some faint sense of a hair being drawn. There is none. And you can pick it off with another fingertip and it simply transfers.
Therefore it did not come out of the finger. It arrived on the finger from somewhere else.
Having got that far, he does the thing that makes this section worth an article, and it is the opposite of debunking by assertion.
He tells the reader how to produce the miracle at home.
If anyone wishes to test it, he writes, let them take a paper lamp, or an oil lamp, or a pillar — whatever is convenient — and put their palms together before it in reverence for five to ten minutes. The fine threads will appear at the fingertips exactly as they do before a sacred image.
From which two things follow, and he states both. The threads do not require a Buddha to be present. And whether they come or not has nothing to do with whether the person believes.
They are dust.
Specifically, the longer and coarser of the fibres that float in ordinary indoor air, settling on the skin of the hand.
He offers two ways of checking, and both are things any reader could do that afternoon. Look at a shaft of morning sunlight coming through a gap in the shutters, and count the fibres hanging in it. Or leave the ribs of a paper screen, or the base of a lamp, undusted for a day or two, and look at what has settled: countless fibres of assorted lengths, mostly white, but here and there a red one or a blue one.
The colours match the threads. That is the part I find persuasive, and I notice it is the part he does not underline.
The best passage in the section is the one that explains why the phenomenon attaches itself to worship rather than to any other activity. He lists four conditions.
First, a person about to worship washes their hands, so the skin is damp, and damp skin takes dust readily.
Second, in worship the hands are held still, which lets the dust settle instead of being shaken off.
Third — and he puts it this way — the devout are mostly women, whose hands carry more oil, so that the dust adheres and, once adhering, does not immediately blow away.
Fourth, the posture is held for five to ten minutes, which is long enough for an appreciable quantity to accumulate.
Four requirements for catching dust on your hands, and the rite satisfies all four by accident. It could hardly be better designed for the purpose if it had been built for it.
He adds a reported tendency: among people making the same reverence, threads are said to come more often to women than to men, and more often to boys than to old men.
His explanation is oil on the skin. One might add something he half-notices and does not pursue: the population making these reverences was largely female to begin with, so the miracle would appear to favour women whatever the mechanism was.
Then, one sentence, easy to read past.
He gathered four or five people at his own house — men and women, old and young — and had them make reverence to a pillar, or a lamp.
And they got the same result.
A domestic controlled trial, run in the 1890s, on a religious phenomenon, with a sex-and-age spread in the sample and a null object in place of the sacred one. Whatever else is true of this man, that afternoon he did the work.
The section then turns to something with a cost attached, and this is why the note does not end at the lamp.
A book of secret methods gives a charm for drawing out the worm that causes kan, the wasting complaint of small children. On a clear day, at the Hour of the Snake, rub white sesame oil on the back of the hand, the fingers and the forehead. Set the child facing the sun, hands joined. Recite the verse under your breath. After an hour, many worms like white hairs will come out — take them off at once, so they do not get in the eyes.
A second account, sent in to him, gives another version: write the spell three times on the child’s palm in ink, paint over it so the writing cannot be read, have the child clench the hand for a while, then open it — and white fibres like hairs come out from under the nails.
He notes that pulling out hair-worms is not confined to children’s kan. It is used for toothache, and for illnesses in general, always on the same principle: the worm that is the root of the disease is being drawn out.
So the question is whether such a worm exists in the patient at all. It does not. It is the dust from the lamp, on an oiled hand, held still in the sun.
The same fibres that proved a woman’s faith at the temple were being shown to the parents of a sick child as the thing that had been making the child ill. One of those uses is harmless.
One more layer, which this note could not close.
The wonder has a dignified ancestor. An Edo miscellany, discussing the drawn thread, quotes a poem on the cord tied to the Buddha’s hand, and a court record of the twelfth century describing five-coloured cords fastened to the hand of an Amida image, and a war chronicle saying the same — the practice at a deathbed of running a cord from the Buddha’s hand into the hand of the dying, so that they are led away holding on.
That is the real thing the fingertip threads are a shadow of, and it would make the better history: an actual rite, and a wonder that split off from it.
The dated citation could not be verified, but it is probably recoverable: the title as printed does not resolve, and the court diary it most likely means is one whose surviving volumes do cover the year in question. The entry itself was not read for this note, so the lineage stays a suggestion — but a checkable one. What is documented is the lamp, the pillar, the four or five people in a room, and the dust.
The readings in “Why the Ritual Works So Well” and in the closing sections are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.