Nyujo: Entering the Ground Alive
WHAT WOULD NOT GO IN THE BOOK
Kusabe village book, the autumn of the great wind. What went into the book
that year is in the book.
This is what was left over. Begun the same night, by the same hand, and
kept apart from it.I keep the book for Kusabe because my uncle’s eyes began to go when I was fifteen and mine had been taught their letters at the temple in the valley. The book has the births in it and the deaths and the rice, the copies of the temple’s register, the count of the houses once a year, and it has never had anything else in it until this year. What went into it this year is nine lines. I am writing the rest here because it would not go in the book, and because I was the one standing there with the brush.
Everybody in Kusabe knows the mound. The field below the hill is Kayano, for the grass, which stands higher than a man in the eighth month and is cut in the tenth. At the foot of the hill, where the field begins, there is a platform of packed earth about the height of a man, square, with a pine on it, and a post at the foot of the platform, of the kind that is set up for the dead with a prayer written down it; the writing had gone under the moss before I was born, and the moss had gone green and then black. The pine was a great tree. It had been planted on the day as a marker, so that people would know where, and it had done what a marker does and gone on doing it for fifty-five years, until it was the biggest thing in the field and you could see it from the road.
On the south face of the platform, level with the top, there was the cut end of a length of bamboo the thickness of a wrist, black with age, that went down into the earth at a slant. Every child in Kusabe was carried up to it and had its ear put to it. I was. What you heard was a bell: a small one, the kind a monk on the road wears at the neck, struck, and struck, and struck, at the pace of a man walking; and under the bell a voice saying the name, the same six syllables, at the same pace, over and over, the way water goes over a stone. It was not loud. You had to put your ear to the bamboo. But it was there, at any hour, in any month, and I put my ear to that bamboo perhaps a hundred times between the age when I was carried and the age when I stopped going, and it was always there.
Everybody knew what was said to be under the platform: a monk of the Kannon hall, who had gone into the ground alive, at sixty-one, fifty-five years back by the count the village keeps, of his own will, and had rung the bell since. We knew it the way one knows the name of a hill. I am putting down the next thing because it has to be put down. I heard a man a hundred times and did not think of him as one. Nobody in Kusabe did. The bell was what the mound did, as a spring runs, and the village had had a name for the mound since before I was born, the Bell Mound, and had said it so long that nobody heard the bell in it. Kichizo, who had seen him go in, went up there like the rest of us and put his ear to it like the rest of us, and never once, that I heard, said his name.
Kichizo is sixty-six and is the only person in Kusabe who was there. He was twelve. If you asked him he would say there had been a great crowd, that he had been on his father’s shoulders, that the monk had been a small man; and he would not say more, not because he was keeping anything, but because in my life nobody asked him more, and I did not either; nobody did, until the day I am coming to, and then it was my uncle who asked.
The Kannon hall on the hill has had no keeper since. The village sweeps it.
The storm came in the night in the eighth month, from the sea side, and the rain went flat along the ground and the roofs went in three places in the village and the valley temple lost its gate. In the morning the pine was down. It had stood through other storms in fifty-five years; why not this one, I cannot say.
I went with my uncle at first light because he cannot see well and I am his eyes as well as his hand, and we were the first at the field after the men who had run to look. The pine lay along the field with its top in the grass, and its root-plate stood up on end where it had been, higher than a man, a wall of roots and earth, and the earth was still falling out of it while we stood there. In the earth of the root-plate, and in the hole it had come out of, there were stones. Cut stones. The corner of a thing that had been built. The bamboo had come up with the roots in pieces, and one of the pieces was lying in the grass with the moss still on it.
The bell was going. You could hear it now without the bamboo, out of the open earth of the hole, the same bell at the same pace, and under it the voice. The men who had run to look were standing back from the hole, and my uncle had me take him to the edge of it, and he stood with his head on one side and listened, and said nothing. How a man rings a bell for fifty-five years under a pine, nobody at the edge of that hole asked, and I did not, then or later; it was the question the whole field was not asking.
By the second hour after dawn the village was there. I had brought the book because I bring it. My uncle stood by the root-plate and the people stood in the grass and looked at the hole and at him, and it was Jinsuke who spoke.
Jinsuke farms below the temple and has more reading than the rest of us; he has an almanac and a book of stories and reads letters for people who get them. He stood up on the trunk of the pine so that everyone could see him, and I give what he said as he said it, because it was on his saying that the rest was done.
He said: they say a person has seven souls. When a person dies, six of them leave the body and go, and one stays behind and keeps the bones. That is what is in there. The saint who went into the ground on his mountain and sits there to this day is a wonder for all the ages, and no ordinary monk can do what he did; it is not given to them. So there is one soul in there keeping the bones and ringing a bell, and it has done it for fifty-five years, and the storm has opened the door. This is a chance that does not come. Let us open the mound and see.
He said it to all of us. People said, that is reasonable. I wrote that down: that is reasonable. Nobody said the man’s name and nobody said the word man. My uncle, who was the one who could have said no, said nothing against it, and I have thought since that he was listening to the bell and did not hear Jinsuke. The young men went for hoes and spades.
The platform came apart faster than it had taken to build; it was earth over stones, and the stones were the chamber, cut and fitted, the size of a small room for a small man, and the pine’s roots had gone round it on three sides and held it like a hand. They lifted the stones off the top one at a time and passed them down. Under the stones there was a lid, one slab, and under the lid, when six men had got their fingers under it and lifted, there was a coffin, and the bell.
I was at the back with the book, on the far side of the root-plate, because that is where my uncle had put me, and I did not see into the coffin. I heard. When the lid came off, the bell did not stop and the voice did not stop. It was louder, in the open air, than I had ever heard it through the bamboo, and it was the same. The men who had lifted the lid stood with the lid in their hands and did not put it down, and nobody spoke for the time it takes a bell to be struck perhaps ten times, and then somebody said, he is in there, and somebody else said, look at him, and it was at the voices that he opened his eyes. That is what the men at the front said, and they said it the same way, all of them: he heard us and opened his eyes.
They lifted him out onto the grass. It took two men, and they said after that it took two only because they were afraid of him coming apart, and that he weighed less than the lid had. I saw him then.
His hair and beard had grown white and stiff and stood out from his head in every direction, like silver needles, and were the biggest thing about him. He was in a robe that had been dark once. He was wasted to what a charred stick is to the branch it was cut from: the shape of a man with everything but the shape gone out of him, the skin gone over the bones like a wrapping over a frame. There was a cord round his neck and on the cord a bell the size of a fist, and his right hand was closed round a small striker, and the hand was moving. He was striking the bell. His mouth was moving with the name. He was sitting up, because they had set him sitting up and he stayed so, and his eyes were open, and they went over us.
My uncle had me take him forward. He stood in front of the monk as he stands in front of a man who has come to the house about rice, and he asked, as a headman asks, loud enough for the field. I wrote it as he said it.
He said: you set up the vow to be reborn without fail and to become a buddha in this very body, and you went into the ground on that vow, fifty-five years ago. Why have you kept an attachment to this world until now, and not passed on?
It was a headman’s question. It was the question you ask a man who has not paid.
The bell stopped while he answered. His hand with the striker went down to his knee and stayed there, and the voice that answered was small and dry and had to be listened for, and the field listened for it. I give it whole, as I wrote it, and I have not put anything between his sentences that was not there.
He said: I was born in a province on the inner sea. At seven my head was shaved at a temple of that province. From the spring of my nineteenth year I was on the road, and I went round the holy mountains and the holy shrines of every province where there are any. To the mountain of the great teacher, seven times. To the mountain of the shrines by the sea, seven times. To the mountain of the ascetics, seven times. On the burning mountain I saw hell. Not the hell to come. Hell, present, in front of my eyes, in the smoke and the stone, and after that I could not abide this borrowed world, and I wanted only to be quickly in the land of the Buddha of the west, and I came here and kept the hall on the hill and asked the Kannon of the hall to show me how, and she showed me in a dream. So on the day I had chosen I went down.
He said: on that day, word had gone round, and the high and the low came from every village near for the ten invocations, and there were more people than I had known were in the world, tens of thousands, and they pushed and pressed to get to me, and I gave the ten to whoever reached me, as fast as I could give them. And out of the crowd a girl came. She was eighteen, nineteen. She was beautiful. She came through the people as if they were grass and stood in front of me and took the sleeve of my robe in both her hands and her face broke and she wept, and she asked me for the ten invocations.
He said: I gave them to her. And at that moment my mind went to her, and stayed there. That is what it was. That is surely what has stood between me and buddhahood.
He said no more, and after a moment his hand came up from his knee and struck the bell, and the name began again at the same pace, and it was as if the sound had only stopped to let him say that. I have thought about it since and I think it was so. He had one thing to say, and he said it, and it was not a plea and not a confession, and it was not about her. It was the name of the obstacle, as a man names the stone that has stopped his cart.
My uncle turned to the field and asked who was left that had been there on the day. He knew who was left. He asked it so that it would be said in front of everybody, which is how he does things. Kichizo came forward, and he was the only one who did, and he stood by the monk on the grass and did not look at him, and answered my uncle, and I wrote it.
He said: I was there. I was twelve. I was on my father’s shoulders. I saw a girl go through the crowd, and I saw her at his sleeve, and everybody around us said who she was, because everybody knew. She was Rokubei’s daughter, of Shimotani. Tami. She was the beauty of all these villages that year, and everybody said so, and she was devout besides, she was the kind who was always at the hall. She is alive. She is at Shimotani still, in the house she married into, and she is old. Bring her here.
He said bring her here as if it were his to say, and then he looked at my uncle as if he had remembered that it was not, and my uncle said, bring her here, and looked at me.
I put the book in my coat and went for the ox-cart.
The cart went out of Kusabe in the hour of the snake. The road to Shimotani goes over the shoulder of the hill and down the far side, an hour of it, and the ox takes it at the ox’s pace, and the storm had put branches across it that I got down and moved. The sun was still climbing when I came into the village and asked for Rokubei’s daughter, and the man I asked said, Rokubei has been dead forty years, and then said, you mean the old lady at the end house, and pointed.
It was a middling farmhouse, a house that has one ox and enough land to feed the ox. The roof had held. A woman came to the door, fifty or so, with her sleeves tied back, and I told her who I was and who had sent me and what I had been sent to say, which was that the headman of Kusabe asked that the old lady come to the mound at Kayano, that the storm had thrown down the pine and the mound had been opened, and the monk in it had spoken of the day he went in, and that it concerned her. I said it as I have written it. I did not say more because I had not been given more, and because standing at that door I did not know how to say the rest.
The woman said: what does he want with her. And then: she does not walk far. And then, before I had said anything, she looked at the cart and said, the cart, then, and went in.
I went as far as the doorway. The room was what a farm room is: the hearth, the pots, a loom against the wall, sandals by the step. On the wall at the back was a shelf with a small altar on it, and two tablets in the altar, and a lamp. The old woman was in front of it, on her knees, with her back to the door, and she had a rosary in her hands, and she was saying the name. She was saying it at a pace. I stood and heard it, and it was the pace of the bell.
The daughter-in-law went and knelt beside her and said into her ear, loud and plain, the way one speaks to the old, that the headman of Kusabe had sent a cart, that the mound at Kayano was open, that she was wanted there, and that it was about the monk. She said it twice. The old woman did not turn round. She went on to the end of what she was saying; I could hear her count it on the beads; and then she put the beads on the nail beside the shelf, where there was a nail worn bright, and put her hand on the daughter-in-law’s arm and got up, which took a long time, and turned, and put out her other hand for the stick, and the daughter-in-law put the stick in it.
She did not ask what for. She did not look at me. She went past me out of the door at the pace she had, which is not a pace, and the daughter-in-law went with her to the cart and a boy of fifteen or so came from behind the house and took the ox’s head without being told, and between them they put her up on the boards and sat her against the side with the stick across her knees.
The daughter-in-law said to me, at the cart’s tail, as I was getting up: she has been at that shelf saying the name since before I came into this house, and that is thirty years; morning and evening without fail, and other times as she likes. She will want to be home for the evening.
I said she would be home for the evening.
The boy led the ox. I sat on the boards across from her. She said nothing on the road, over the shoulder of the hill and down, and I said nothing, and I have been asked since why I did not ask her anything and the answer is that I did not think of it as a thing that could be asked. She was seventy-three, as my uncle said in the field an hour later, and had been fetched out of her house by a stranger with a cart. She sat with her hands on the stick and her face down, because her back is bent so that her face is toward the ground unless she lifts it, and she did not lift it, and the ox went at the ox’s pace, and we came over the shoulder and down into Kayano with the sun past noon, and the field was full of people who had not gone home, and the bell was going.
They had not moved him. He was sitting on the grass where they had set him, in front of the opened stones, with the bell going, and the people had made a ring and stayed in it. The boy brought the cart to the edge of the ring and the people opened, and Kichizo came and stood at the tail of the cart, and my uncle came, and I came round from the ox with the book.
They helped her down. It took the boy and Kichizo and me. She stood in the grass with the stick and with the boy’s arm, and she was as I will put her here, because it is what everybody saw. Her hair was white as if snow were lying on it, and it had come loose on the road and hung. Her eyes were red at the rims and sunk back in her head. She had not one tooth. Her back was bent double, so that standing, she was the height of the boy, and her face was toward the grass. They walked her forward to where the monk sat, three steps, four, and stood her in front of him, an arm’s length off, and she lifted her face.
I do not know whether she knew him. I am putting that down. He had been a man of sixty-one in a robe, on a day the village counts fifty-five years back, in a crowd of tens of thousands, for the time it takes to say the name ten times; and what was on the grass in front of her had silver needles for hair and was the size of a child. She lifted her face and looked at him, and what she saw, I do not know.
The priest of the valley temple had come up by then and stood in the ring with the rest, and did not come forward. My uncle spoke to the monk. He spoke as he speaks to the village, loud, and in order, and looking at the man he spoke to, which he does by the voice. I wrote it as he said it.
He said: this is the one. This is the woman on whom you fixed your attachment on the day you went in. Rokubei’s daughter, of Shimotani, called Tami, that was called the beauty of these villages. She was nineteen then. She is seventy-three now. Look at her. Is there anything here for attachment to hold to? Put off delusion and clinging, and go quickly where you meant to go.
The bell went through all of it. I wrote the words, and when I had them and looked up, the bell was going at the same pace, and the name under it, and I wrote that down too: the bell going. My uncle had said what a headman says and what a priest would have said, and he had said it well, and it had gone by the man like wind, and the man had not stopped striking.
Then the monk looked at her.
I have to put it in that order because that is the order it was in. He had been told. Then he saw. He turned his eyes from my uncle to her face, and they stayed there, and his hand with the striker came down onto his knee and the bell stopped, and the name stopped, and he looked at her. He looked for a long time. I have been asked how long and I have said, long enough to say the name ten times, and I do not know whether that is so or whether I have made it so. He looked the way a person looks into a face for something he has seen there before, and I do not know whether he found it. I did not see anything come into his face. I do not know that there was any face left for it to come into.
In Kayano in the tenth month there is frost on the grass at dawn, and when the sun comes over the hill it takes the frost off the grass from the top of the field down, and you can stand at the bottom and watch it come. It was like that. The flesh and the skin went off him from the face downward, as the frost goes, without anything falling, without anything to pick up after, and there was a skeleton sitting on the grass in the robe with a cord round its neck and a bell on the cord and a striker in the bones of its right hand, and the sun on it, and it did not move, and nothing had moved.
Nobody in the ring moved either. My uncle said, what is it, because he could not see, and I told him, and he said nothing.
The boy and Kichizo took her back to the cart. She had not said anything. I do not know whether she had looked away before the end or after it; I was looking at him. They put her up on the boards and sat her against the side with the stick across her knees, and the boy went to the ox’s head, and I got up onto the boards across from her because I had brought her and I would take her back, and we went out of the ring and over the shoulder of the hill at the ox’s pace, and she said nothing on the road, and I said nothing, and we were at Shimotani in the middle of the afternoon, well before evening, and the daughter-in-law came out to the cart and took her in.
This is what went into the book that night, and I copy it here as it stands, because I wrote it and it is the only thing in what I am writing that is a record.
Eighth month. In the night a great wind from the sea. Roofs down at three houses; the valley temple’s gate down. In the morning the pine on the mound at Kayano down by the roots; stones under it. On Jinsuke’s proposal, and with the headman’s consent, the mound opened in the morning. Within, a stone chamber, and a coffin, and in it the monk Kakuzen, formerly keeper of the Kannon hall, as the temple’s register has him, who entered the ground fifty-five years back by this book’s count, at sixty-one, alive, striking a bell and reciting the name. Questioned by the headman, he gave his history and named as the obstacle to his rebirth a woman who held his sleeve on the day he entered. Kichizo of this village identified her as Tami, daughter of Rokubei of Shimotani, now of that village, seventy-three. She was brought by cart. Shown her, and admonished by the headman, the monk looked at her and thereupon lost his flesh, and the bones remain. The bones and the bell to the valley temple. The chamber to be closed. The pine to be cut for the temple gate.
That is nine lines in the book, and it is what happened, and there is nothing in it that I would take out.
The bones went to the valley temple that evening on a door, with the robe, and the bell on its cord, and the priest, who had been at the field, read over them what he reads, and they are in the temple’s ground and the bell is on the temple’s shelf, and I have seen it there and it is a bell. The chamber was closed with its own stones and earthed over, and there is no pine, and there is a stump, and the post with the moss on it is where it was. The young men call the field the Bell Field. The old men call it Kayano. The children are not taken up, because there is nothing to put an ear to, and because nobody has offered to carry them.
Whether anything my uncle said reached the man before he looked, I cannot say; I have set down in what order it was. What the girl on the day felt, or the woman on the grass, I do not have, and nobody asked her either, and she did not say. I know the pace of the bell, which I put my ear to from the age I could be carried until the age I stopped going up, and heard again out of the open ground; and I know the pace of the name in a farm room at Shimotani; and they were the same pace, and I heard both, and that is all I have of it.
The monk said what held him. He said it in one sentence, and I wrote it, and it is in the book. He did not say what let him go, because he did not say anything after it; he looked. Kichizo says she was the beauty of all these villages. I saw her once, for half a day, at seventy-three, and I have written what I saw. What he saw I have not written, because he did not say, and it was the one thing on that grass that was his.
Nyujo is entering the ground alive: a man sealed into the earth while he is still breathing. What this record gives is one man’s case. He went down of his own will, having made a vow first, and a bell went down with him. The words the record sets down as his vow are that he would be reborn without fail and become a buddha in this very body. This is not the same as what came later to be called sokushinbutsu, and the record does not use that word.
The story came from an item in Roo Chawa, “An Old Woman’s Tea Talk,” one of the older pieces gathered into Kinsei Kidan Zenshu, “Complete Collection of Strange Tales of Recent Times,” published by Hakubunkan in 1903.
The item is short, and almost everything in it is that sound. What it gives of the years the sound went on is a pine growing tall, a grave-post going under moss, and dew lying deep. No person is in any of it.
This is the first of the 5 tales in RATHER THAN LOOK AT ME, each one followed by a note on where it comes from.