Nyūjō is the practice of entering the ground alive: a monk has a pit dug, goes down into it, and remains there in meditation, and does not come out.
English-language writing on this almost always routes it immediately to sokushinbutsu, the preserved bodies shown at certain northern temples. The two are not the same thing. The northern mummies are bodies; this record is about a man who was still answering questions. The practices are neighbours — a pit, a bell rung from inside to show the occupant is alive, the chanting that stops when he dies — and the difference that matters here is that this tale has him alive at the end of fifty-five years, which is legend and not preservation.
The record is a tale called “The Attachment of One Who Entered Nyūjō”, in an Edo collection of old women’s tea-talk, reprinted in a Tokyo anthology in 1903.
A monk called Etatsu kept the Kannon hall at a temple in Yamato.
He announced that he had received a revelation from Kannon in a dream. At a place called Mida-ga-hara — the plain of Amida — a pit was dug, and he went into it alive. He was sixty-one. It was the beginning of the Jōō era, in the early 1650s.
And then the detail that makes this record unlike any other on this site.
From the year he went in, for fifty-five years, from inside the mound there came the sound of a gong being struck and a voice chanting the nenbutsu.
The place was named the Nenbutsu Mound of Amida’s Plain. An altar was raised, and a pine was planted to mark it. The pine grew into a great tree. The stupa went over with moss, the dew lay deep, and the grass grew rank.
In the eighth month of the autumn of Hōei 3 — 1706 — a great wind blew the pine down by the roots.
The villagers gathered round. One of them, a sharp-witted farmer, made the argument that opens the grave.
A person has seven souls, he said. Six leave the body, and one stays to guard the dead bones. Kōbō Daishi’s nyūjō is the wonder of the latter age; it is not a thing ordinary monks can manage. We have the chance — let us break this mound open and see what is inside.
Quite right, they said, and took up spades and hoes. They shifted the stone and drew off the earth and lifted the lid of the stone coffin.
In the coffin was Etatsu.
His hair and beard were like silver needles. He was wasted, the record says, like a snapped piece of charcoal. And he was striking the gong that hung at his neck, and chanting the nenbutsu.
He heard the voices of people, and opened his eyes.
The village headman came forward and put the question that the whole tale exists for.
You made the vow of rebirth, of becoming a buddha in this very body, and you entered nyūjō at the beginning of Jōō. Why have you kept an attachment to this world all this time, and not gone?
Etatsu’s reply is a life, and he gives it in order.
He was from Kojima in Bizen. He had his head shaved at a temple in that province at seven. From the spring of his nineteenth year he went about the provinces, worshipping at the holy buddhas and shrines of one mountain after another — seven times to Kōya, seven times to Kumano, seven times to the peak at Yoshino. And at the mountain of Asama he saw the present hell in front of his own eyes, and after that he hated this provisional world all the more, and hurried to reach Amida’s country.
When it became known that he was to enter the ground, people of every rank came in from the country round to receive the ten nenbutsu from him. They pressed and shoved, each trying to be first.
And among them a woman pushed through the crowd and came to the front and caught at his sleeve, and wept, and asked for the ten nenbutsu.
At that moment, he says, I had a thought that stayed on the woman. That, surely, is what became the obstacle to my attaining buddhahood.
The headman asked an old man who had been alive at the time, and the old man knew at once who was meant. She had been spoken of as the beauty of the district, he said, and she had come for the sake of the next life. And she is still living. Send for her.
After a while they brought her.
Her hair was snow-white and wildly disordered. Her eyes were sunken and running. She had not one tooth. Her back was bent double, and she could barely walk; they helped her along, and she came tottering up to the monk on a stick.
This, said the headman, is the one. At the time of your entering she was nineteen. She is now seventy-three. Look at her, and tell me whether any heart of attachment can remain. Leave off delusive attachment, and reach the fruit of buddhahood at once.
Etatsu gazed at the old woman steadily.
And as he gazed, like frost turned to face the morning sun, the flesh and the skin vanished away in a moment, and there remained a single set of white bones.
The record’s last line: truly there is nothing so terrible as the attachment of a human being.
The sentence is placed so that it could be either of them, and I think the ambiguity is the point.
Read it one way and the monk’s preserved body, held together for fifty-five years by a single thought, collapses the instant the thought is released. That is the standard reading, and it is a good one.
But look at what the story has actually done. It has produced a young woman’s beauty as the reason a holy man could not die, kept her alive for fifty-four more years, brought her out in front of a crowd of villagers so that her ruin could be exhibited as the argument, and then dissolved a body.
The old woman is the one who has been dug up here, and the only thing anyone in the tale wants from her is that she should no longer be worth wanting. She is not asked a question. She is not given a line.
One thing about the 1903 anthology in which the tale was reprinted.
The title page credits the collation to two men. One is Tayama Katai, who would become a central figure in Japanese naturalist fiction. The other is Yanagita Kunio.
This is 1903. The Tōno tales are seven years away. The man who is treated in English as the founder of Japanese folklore studies is, at this date, checking the text of a book of ghost stories for a commercial publisher.
And the volume’s preface — signed by the compilers, dated the second month of 1903 — is not a publisher’s blurb. It argues that those who cling to the actual and to science know how to count the stamens of a flower but not how it joins with the divine; it observes that in the West in this new century a banner has been raised for what it calls Modern Mysticism; and it says that this collection is where the compilers have put their own purpose.
The notes on this site about the Tōno tales and about Sasaki Kizen deal with what Yanagita became. The preface is signed for the compilers, not by the two revisers, and there is no warrant for putting it in his hand. What can be said is narrower and still worth having: this is the book he was correcting at twenty-eight, and the sentence about counting stamens would not have looked out of place at either end of his career.
The readings in “Which Body Fell Apart” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
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