Jizo Bodhisattva Read online

  Only a few people spoke, and then only few quiet words about the child they had come to remember. A father talked of a baby taken by sudden infant death syndrome thirty years before. A young woman sobbed as she sewed. Her husband cut and stitched in silence, clumsily patting her knee as she spoke of a baby dying just before birth.

  When we had finished sewing, we made a procession to carry the Jizo statues down to the garden. In a bamboo grove we chanted the Heart Sutra and offered incense. As we tied the red garments we had sewn on the weathered Jizo statues, Yvonne read the names of the children who were remembered and mourned.

  Most of the parents stayed for awhile to walk silently in the garden. I had to leave to catch a ride to the airport. Later as I looked out the window of the plane heading back to Portland, I realized that my heart was palpably lighter. I hadn’t realized how heavy the burden of sorrow was, accumulated over ten years of child-abuse work. Also relieved was the hidden sorrow of my own miscarriage twelve years before. I did not talk or think much about the miscarriage because people could not understand long-lasting grief over an eight-week-old fetus.

  Until then I had discounted the power of an “invented” ceremony. When I realized how important this ceremony was, and how deep and long-lasting its effects could be, I conferred with Yvonne, and we began to offer the ceremony at our Zen center in Portland. A member of the Buddhist community, or sangha, who had experience in grief counseling in the perinatal loss unit at the university hospital helped plan the ceremonies, which are described in chapter thirteen.

  For the first ceremony we needed a statue of Jizo Bodhisattva. Where to find one? When I called statuary and garden stores in Oregon, no one knew what I was talking about. My husband challenged me to make a statue myself. He had been collecting Buddha statues since the 1960s when he and Kapleau Roshi had rummaged through antique stores and junk shops for Buddhas to return to their rightful place—altars in homes or temples. I had been telling my husband we should not buy any more Buddhas, that our life practice was to make ourselves into Buddhas—into fully awakened beings. Now he returned those words to me with a box of Oregon carving stone. From it I made a first simple Jizo in time for the ceremony.

  Thus began the making of Jizo images and the establishment of a Jizo garden at our Zen Center. After I gave a Jizo statue to Maezumi Roshi, he named our rural Zen center Jizo-in (temple of Jizo). As I witnessed the benefits of the Jizo ceremony to people moving through the death of children, I began to read about Jizo and to contemplate his aspects and attributes. I am writing this book to share with others what I have gathered and what has opened within my awareness of the living Jizo Bodhisattva. I hope it will help others to discover more about the Way that relieves all suffering.

  The point of learning about Jizo Bodhisattva is not to acquire knowledge that can be stored in a memory file for access during a gap in cocktail party blather. We seek to learn about Jizo Bodhisattva in order to become Jizo Bodhisattva. By means of this black ink on white paper; via the zap! of electricity and fit of neurotransmitter molecules in the retina, optic nerve, and optical areas in the brain; via the attraction to/curiosity about/hope for Jizo Bodhisattva, we can open our individual mind awareness and body experience to the universal bright mind and vast body awareness of Jizo Bodhisattva. This is not a process of gaining knowledge of Jizo Bodhisattva out there but of experiencing Jizo Bodhisattva right here. It is not a matter of worshiping or petitioning Jizo Bodhisattva on the altar, but of asking that the energy of Jizo fully awaken in us and manifest freely in the world.

  In this book we will work together on Jizo Bodhisattva as a koan, entering each aspect—monk, child, jewel, staff, pilgrim, protector—and letting each aspect unfold, petal by petal, to the sweet nectar and fertile pollen heart of Jizo. That heart is the same heart that gives life abundantly to each one of us.

  chapter one

  Jizo in America

  Your face so serene

  Beggar’s staff in your right hand,

  Wish-fulfilling jewel in your lift,

  My brother, please escort him.

  Give comfort to him, as today the sky is crying.

  Jizo, guide my friend to Buddha’s Western Paradise Playground.

  He wants to run and play at last.

  When I come, J will play tag with him, and hold him in my arms once more.

  Mind him for me, gentle Jizo.

  John Wentz

  A Jizo Garden

  A little man made of gray stone stands in the garden. His eyes are closed and his lips curve in a faint smile. A fern leaf arches over his head like an umbrella, holding a few bright drops of rain. Someone has made a small bonnet and cape of red cloth for him. A bit of paper peeks out of a pocket sewn on the cape. If you slip it out, you will find it is a message to a child, a dead child. You had a sweet soul. In your short life you knew pain and love. I miss you.

  A small kite flutters on a low branch. It has a long tail made of twists of bright paper, each bearing a message. “Uncle Jim remembers your wonderful laugh.” “Auntie Jean sends you butterfly kisses.” “Bye, bye, baby boy. Mommy loves you.”

  As you walk around the garden you find other stone figures standing among the slender trees and seated on cushions of green moss. Some have begun to crumble, their features softening, and the gray lichen has begun to creep over their patient bodies. There is something here that makes you fall silent, a tinge of sadness mixed with an embracing calm. You see several thin wooden plaques hanging from a tree and see that they bear names and dates of birth and death separated by only a few months or years. On some plaques are faded drawings, flowers, a teddy bear, a sprinkling of stars and on some, more prayers. “You are loved and remembered my sweet baby girl. Conceived in love and desired. Died through medical mishap. Never far from our hearts and minds—one of God’s smallest angels.”

  There are messages to a seven-year-old boy who was killed when a soccer post fell on him during a pickup game and to twins conceived after many months of fertility treatments who died following a routine amniocentesis. There is a poem for an adult son who was irreversibly brain damaged when he was drunk and fell out of a tree. He had lost his house keys and was just trying to get in to go to sleep. There is a small statue of a turtle left by a man who cannot quite forgive his seven-year-old self for leaving a pet without water in the sun. At the base of a standing Jizo, there is a little blue doll. It was painstakingly cut and sewn from a favorite T-shirt by a man whose unborn son died when the mother was struck by a car. He had stuffed the doll with paper tissues wet with the tears of friends who came to mourn. There are notes and remembrance tokens from women recalling abortions many years past and from doctors and nurses who have assisted in abortions. A little card, beautifully decorated in an old-fashioned style is from a seventy-year-old mother who was bewildered to have survived her beautiful daughter, a young doctor and mother of two, who died of breast cancer only a few months after her diagnosis.

  Under one statue there is a fringed miniature carpet. A note says, “I came to remember the three miscarriages my wife had. They came so fast and I was afraid to feel then. I’m ready to remember now. Today I made a magic carpet because I always hoped to tell stories to my child about castles and magic carpets. Now we are divorced and I will have no children but these three who are gone.”

  Today you are alone in this unusual garden. If you came on another day, you might witness a procession of men and women wending their way to the garden carrying tiny garments sewn from red cloth, wooden plaques, and pinwheels or other handmade toys. Led by a woman in a Zen priest’s black robes, they chant together, offer incense, then place the remembrances they have made on the statues in the garden. The priest intones a dedication, a list of names of children including babies whose sex was unknown or who were never named. A few couples hold hands, tears run silently down cheeks, and one woman slips quietly into the trees for a few minutes to sob alone before joining the group for the final chant.

  This is
a Jizo garden, one of the first in America. In Japan there are many thousands of these sanctuaries, but in America as this book is written, only a few. Who are the figures of stone in these quiet gardens that embrace the fragility and brief happiness of a child’s life? Where did this ceremony originate and how has it come to be celebrated in America?

  Jizo statues with garments sewn in memory children who have died. Pockets hold flowers, toys and messages for the children, Jizo garden in Oregon.

  The ceremony in the Jizo garden has arisen to address a particular kind of suffering, the grief of those who have lost children. The statues are of Jizo Bodhisattva, a figure who is venerated in Japan as a benevolent protector of those who travel. There, stone figures of Jizo are frequently found along pathways between rice paddies in the country, beside city streets and busy highways, and particularly at crossroads. Jizo is there to help travelers on both the physical and spiritual plane, especially those who face a difficult decision about which path to take in life. Jizo is regarded as the especial guardian of those in difficult or potentially dangerous transitions such as pregnant women and young children. In the last three hundred years he has come to be seen as a particular caretaker of infants and children who have died.

  Jizo Bodhisattva probably first entered America from Asia about one hundred to one hundred fifty years ago, carried as small images in the portable altars of Asian laborers and in the chants and devotional practices of Buddhist priests sent as missionaries to the new immigrants. The Buddhist religion, although new to the young American nation, was already almost twenty-five hundred years old, more than five hundred years older than Christianity. As the wave of Buddhism traveled across the Pacific, it carried with it many bodhisattvas, among them Jizo.

  Bodhisattvas and Saints

  What exactly is a bodhisattva? To begin to answer this question I will tell a story.

  A few years ago I led a retreat in Alaska. It was held in a lodge on the shore of a frozen lake outside of Anchorage. We arranged our small altar between two big windows overlooking the lake. Behind it was the forest, dark with spruce, light with aspen, and behind the forest, great snowy mountain peaks. We had been meditating for three days and were sunk deep in silence by Friday night when suddenly cars began arriving at the adjacent lodge. Doors slamming, excited voices and shrill giggles . . . a flock of teenagers had descended for a weekend of silent retreat!

  I went next door after evening zazen to find out who was brave enough to lead such an event. A lay leader told me it was a preconfirmation retreat for sixty-four Catholic teens from Alaska and a lone boy who had flown in from Samoa. He promised to send the two brothers in charge of the retreat to visit me the next day.

  They arrived during our silent work period, a brother and a priest, both in the dark habit of the order of St. John. I showed them the meditation hall and began to explain our daily schedule. We arose at 5 a.m. for two hours of silent meditation. They nodded, eyes bright in recognition of a monastic schedule and discipline.

  “Then we do chanting service,” I said. They pounced on the chant book and started to read a seminal Zen scripture called the Heart Sutra, over my shoulder. I tried to think how to explain its words, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” to the brothers in terms that might be understandable to a Christian.

  No need. “Oh, emptiness,’ they said, “of course, all is empty except the Great Mystery!”

  They pushed on, reading quickly. “Ah . . . Prajna Paramita . . . what is that?”

  “Wisdom beyond wisdom,” I replied. “Wisdom that is beyond intellectual knowledge and . . .”

  “Oh, of course,” they shot back. “Do you believe it has compassion too?”

  “Yes, the two basic aspects, wisdom and compassion,” I replied.

  They nodded. “What else do you believe it has?” they asked.

  “Well,” I answered, “my experience is that it has a sense of humor . . . and a wicked one at that!” We laughed in joy and mutual recognition.

  Again they scanned the Heart Sutra and suddenly stopped. “A ‘bodhisattva,’ what is it?”

  How to explain, I thought? “It’s a person who is fully enlightened, completely awake to the Great Mystery, who could choose to merge with the Mystery forever, but looks back and sees others suffering and turns back from that merging to help the others!” I looked into their eyes, a little worried it wouldn’t translate.

  “Ah, saints!” they exclaimed, “We know saints!”

  Jizo Bodhisattva is in fact similar to the Christian apocryphal Saint Christopher. Both are revered as protectors of travelers, women, and children. Both have taken on the task of relieving human suffering in very practical ways. Both have a role as ferrymen who help in carrying people to the “other” shore. According to the fifteenth-century book The Golden Legende, Saint Christopher was a man of great stature and strength who declared in a straightforward way that fasting and praying were practices that were beyond him. A wise hermit then placed Christopher beside a dangerous river and instructed him to bear people over the flooding waters.

  Christopher bore all manner of people over without ceasing and there he abode for many days. As he slept in his lodge he heard the voice of a child which called to him and said, “Christopher come out and bear me over.” Then he awoke and went out but he found no one. And when he was again in his house he heard the same voice and ran out but found nobody. The third time he was called and came thither and found a child beside the ravage of the river who prayed him goodly to bear him over the water.

  Then Christopher lifted the child on his shoulders and took his staff and entered the river. The water of the river arose and swelled more and more. The child became as heavy as lead. As the man went further the water increased and the child grew more and more heavy until Christopher was in great anguish and was afraid he would drown.

  When he escaped with great pain and passed through the waters he set the child on the ground, saying “Child thou hast put me in great peril, thou weighest almost as much as if I had carried the burden of the whole world.” And the child answered, “Christopher do not marvel for thou has borne not only all the world upon thee but thou hast borne him also that created and made the whole world upon thy shoulders. I am Jesus Christ the king whom thou servest in this work. And to give you cause to know that I speak the truth, set thy staff in the earth by thy house. And thou shalt see in the mom that it shall bear flowers and fruit. And anon he vanished from sight. And then Christopher set his staff in the earth and when he arose in the mom he found his staff like a palm bearing flowers, leaves and dates.

  There is similar legend from Japan about Jizo Bodhisattva ferrying a man across a river. In this legend Jizo appears as a child monk.

  Once Governor Tagaya of Shimotsuma undertook a pilgrimage to a Jizo temple but the River Ki was flooded and he could not cross. A small boy monk appeared in a boat and ferried him across the waters. When he arrived at the Jizo-in temple, the governor questioned the resident priest, asking who the boy might be, but the priest knew noting about him. Then, as Tagaya prayed before the Jizo statue in the temple, he saw little muddy footprints crossing the chapel floor, leading right to the altar. He realized that it was Jizo himself who had rescued him. His faith became even stronger and he admonished the people of his province to believe in the power of Jizo Bodhisattva and to worship him.

  A bodhisattva (“enlightenment being” in Sanskrit) is a sort of saint, one foot in the human realm and one in the realm of the divine, which in Buddhism is called nirvana. In Western or Christian terms this is the longed-for state of oneness with the source of all existence, the ground of being. As a bodhisattva is about to cross the threshold into that realm, she looks back and sees clearly all those left behind who suffer as she once did. With her wisdom eye she discerns the cause of their sorrow and harmful acts, which is ignorance. As compassion wells up in her heart she turns back, taking a vow not to merge with the wonder of the Great Mystery until every single being has also cro
ssed over out of needless suffering and been brought to freedom.

  There are many bodhisattvas who are revered in Buddhist countries. The most beloved is known in Japan as Kannon. She is called Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, Kuan-yin in China, Kwan-um Bosal in Korea and Chinrezi in Tibet. Like Jizo Bodhisattva, Kannon is an embodiment of compassion. Her name means “she who hears the cries of the world.” She responds to these cries with her thousand arms, each of which holds a tool to help with yet another form of human suffering. Jizo and Kannon are often linked and venerated together as a sacred pair or as two of the eight great bodhisattvas. Both Jizo and Kannon have the ability to travel unharmed through the hell realms to rescue those who are trapped, unable to free themselves through their own efforts. Bodhisattvas are usually portrayed as masculine in form and energy, like Manjushri who rides a lion and carries an upright sword to sever all delusions. Jizo and Kannon both have strong feminine aspects. Thus I have chosen to refer to Jizo with both male and female pronouns in this book.

  A person who is able to be aware and function simultaneously from both the huge awareness of the ground of being and also from the unique single body and mind they inhabit is called awakened. Each bodhisattva represents a different aspect of the Awakened Mind, a different way in which beings are delivered from dukkha, from suffering, and are helped to awaken. Each bodhisattva points to energies that are in us, at times hidden, at times manifest. How can we believe that we have in us the aspects of a bodhisattva?