It was the first winter of my university life. During the nearly one year since starting university, I had visited various haunted spots with an upperclassman who was both my senior and my master in the occult path. But naturally, once the cold weather set in, we both became reluctant to go out. During the New Year holidays, my master came over to my apartment—a rare occurrence. With nothing in particular to do, we crawled under the kotatsu. I stared mindlessly at my Game Boy while my master watched television. Suddenly, my master said, "Huh?" and I turned to look. The television showed underwater footage of some sea floor exploration by divers. "That stone statue—oh, it's gone." The screen changed immediately, but I had seen it for a split second. An announcer was reporting that Hellenistic ruins had been discovered on the sea floor off the coast of Egypt, near the Mediterranean. Ancient stone structures submerged in the ocean were being projected onto the divers' underwater cameras. Among that footage was the figure of a stone statue pinned beneath a collapsed stone pillar. It must have been some kind of deity. At the bottom of the murky sea, it wore an expression that could only be described as one of agonizing torment.
It possessed an eerie intensity, making it hard to believe it had been sculpted with that expression from the beginning. Without missing a beat, the program moved on to the next news segment. As I muttered, "Do things like that really happen?", my master started speaking with a serious look on his face. "Do you know about Haibutsu Kishaku?" My master's major was Buddhist art. He said he knew of a similar case in Japan. During the transition from the Edo period to the Meiji period, the era shifted from one of the syncretism of Shinto and Buddhism to an era dominated solely by Shinto—which could be called a period of great suffering for Buddhism. Many temples were torn down, and Buddhist implements and statues were burned. Also, at shrines that had strong Buddhist leanings, many Buddhist statues had been housed within them, but almost all of those were disposed of as well. "Among them, the suppression of Esoteric Buddhism was fierce." Kinpusen-ji in Yoshino was destroyed, and surrounding temples were attacked one after another. A strange thing apparently happened at one of those temples.
Monks were attacked by a faction of Shinto priests, and Esoteric Buddhist statues, such as Fudo Myoo, were all buried in the temple garden, which was subsequently abandoned. When the fervor of the suppression began to subside, a local prospector type who had heard rumors that valuable Buddhist statues had been buried tried to dig them up. However, every single Buddhist statue that emerged from the soil had a wrathful expression. Leaving aside Fudo Myoo, who naturally has a wrathful expression to begin with, even other statues that were supposed to be gentle had transformed entirely into terrifying faces, worse than the demons of hell. Terrified by that anger, the man set fire to the excavated statues. The wooden Buddhist statues burned for six whole days(!), and during that time, they reportedly kept emitting a groaning sound like "Oooo, oooo." Hearing such an intense story, before I knew it, I was sitting up straight.
"A few years ago, I read an article featuring an interview with a master Buddhist sculptor who was also a Living National Treasure. When a reporter asked him, 'How are you able to express such a profound archaic smile?', the sculptor replied: 'I don't carve it. It smiles.' When I heard that, it gave me chills..." It was rare for my master to praise someone else. I began to think that perhaps even inanimate statues could display emotion. "Oh, that's right. I once used some hypnosis techniques I'm somewhat familiar with to do something interesting." Wondering what on earth he was about to say, I felt a slight wave of anxiety. "I whispered to an ordinary bust, you see: 'You are a human turned into stone.'" How terrifying. What kind of things does this guy think up? And I deliberately didn't ask what happened next.
Comments (-)