Tag: ancestor worship

Kyoto’s Daimonji

August 11, 2020 / John D. / 0 Comments

It’s said that ancestor worship is Japan’s true religion, and in my experience that’s true. The sense of continuity that this gives is reassuring, and the sense of immortality it conveys is a wonderful antidote to the finality of death. There are moral implications too, for if your actions are being monitored by previous generations, it’s a great incentive to keep on the straight and narrow.

The Obon period coming up this weekend is a grand celebration of the living dead, when ancestral spirits return to the family home. There are welcome festivals to greet the spirits on their annual return, and there are sending off festivals to guide them on their way back to the other world. The most famous of these is Kyoto’s Daimonji, held on August 16th every year. I’m lucky enough to see the hill where it happens from my study window.

It turns out that this year pranksters have been at work and ruffled a few feathers in these Corona times. Joking with ancestral spirits is no laughing matter, and the Asahi newspaper covers the reaction to the elaborate hoax in the article below.

**************** Fake bonfire stunt gets Kyoto residents riled amid bon season
By DAISUKE MUKAI/ Staff Writer
August 10, 2020

Photo/Illutration — *A character resembling “dai” is seen lit up in Kyoto’s Sakyo Ward on Aug. 8. (Provided by Masao Nomura)*

KYOTO–Pranksters pulled off a spectacular stunt late Aug. 8 by lighting up a mountain slope on the eastern side of this ancient city with a giant rendition of the kanji character “dai,” meaning big, apparently to fool residents that an iconic annual summer festival was being held as usual, only earlier.

The Gozan no Okuribi festival, known locally as “Daimonji,” is traditionally held on Aug. 16 and involves setting the slopes of five mountains surrounding the ancient capital ablaze in a gesture to send off the spirits of deceased ancestors to the afterlife after revisiting their former homes during the Bon holiday season.But the festival is being scaled back this year due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Startled residents alerted police around 11 p.m. to report the lights in the Mount Daimonji area. It later emerged the stunt was staged on Mount Nyoigatake in the city’s Sakyo Ward.

Officers attached to the Kawabata station of Kyoto prefectural police scrambled to a rooftop and confirmed the light show.

Masao Nomura, a 41-year-old radio DJ, saw a character resembling “dai” from his home in Sakyo Ward.“This is not the festival night. What on earth is going on?” he asked himself as he snapped photos of the lights.

The “dai” character is usually formed with giant bonfires lit at 75 spots. But this summer, festival organizers decided to reduce the number of locations to be lit to avoid a mass congregation of bonfire workers. As a result, there are no plans this year for bonfires to denote the character.

The unexpected “dai” character, which police speculated was a prank, took residents as well as festival organizers by surprise.”Usually, bonfires are like a wavy flame,” Nomura said. “But this one was different. The light was bluish white and appeared to be very clear and artificial.”

Hidefumi Hasegawa, the 75-year-old chairman of the daimonji preservation organization, was far from happy about the matter. “It is upsetting because we spend a long time preparing to send off the spirits of our ancestors,” he said. “With the assistance of the police and local administrative authorities, we will make sure this never happens again.”

Ghosts of the Tsunami (Parry)

April 21, 2019 / John D. / 0 Comments

March 11, 2011 was a devastating day for Japan. Over 18,500 people perished in the gigantic tsunami that swept over the coastline of Tohoku in the country’s north-east. What’s more it led to a nuclear meltdown, the consequences of which are still on-going. Ghosts of the Tsunami, as indicated by the title, concerns itself with the natural disaster, not the man-made one.

The book, published in 2017, was written by Richard Lloyd Parry, correspondent for the UK’s The Times. It is remarkable in many ways, not the least for the technical feat of turning a sustained investigation of despair and destruction, of grief and mourning, into a compelling read. Based on interviews with both bereaved and survivors, the subject matter is a potential minefield, for a single inappropriate or insensitive statement could blow up in the writer’s face.

Even more astonishing, the book turns out to be a page turner because of the sense of immediacy. The focus on real-life individuals provides a feeling of involvement, and the multiple narratives are skilfully handled in such a manner that the reader is constantly curious as to what or who will be featured next. There’s even a sense of mystery about the elementary school and the court case that comes to dominate the final sections, a mystery that is never fully resolved.

The book covers a broad section of fields: spirituality, folklore, cultural insight, political apathy, legal deficiencies, social values and the role of gaman (endurance, fortitude). Of particular concern for this blog is the conclusion Parry comes to after his intensive examination of the tragic events.

When opinion polls put he question ‘How religious are you?’, Japanese rank among the most ungodly people in the world. It took a catastrophe for me to understand how misleading this self-assessment is. It is true that the organised religions, Buddhism and Shinto, have little influence on private or national life. But over the centuries both have been pressed into the service of the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors.

A typical butsudan, family altar for the dead

Parry follows this up with a description of the part that the family altar, the butsudan, plays in Japanese life. The dead are represented in the form of memorial tablets called ihai (black lacquered wood, on which is inscribed the posthumous name of the deceased). The contract between the living and the dead is simple: the dead will watch over the living as long as their memory is cultivated by respectful attention. Offerings of food, fruit and drink etc. are placed before the altar, a bell is rung to summon attention when paying respects, and reports made about important family developments. ‘The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society,’ Parry quotes religious scholar, Herbert Ooms, ‘It has always made perfect sense in Japan as far back as history goes to treat the dead as more alive than we do … even to the extent that death becomes a variant, not a negation of life.’

The diligence with which Japanese tend to family graves is a further indication of the importance of the dead in the life of the living. And most of the kami that rule people’s lives are simply dead ancestors with special powers. Memorial days for the deceased are marked in religious fashion, and at the great festival of the dead in the summer, known as Obon, the sense of closeness to the dead reaches a peak as the veil between this world and the next opens and spirits return for the three days between the welcome back festivals and the sending off festivals.

The memorial tablets known as ihai that bear the posthumous names of the deceased

It’s possible to read Parry’s book as one long treatise on the role of the dead in Japanese society. ‘When grief is raw, the presence of the deceased is overwhelming,’ he writes. ‘When there’s a fire or earthquake, the ihai are the first thing that many people will save, before money or documents,’ a priest observes. ‘I think that many people died in the tsunami because they went home for the ihai. It’s life, the life of the ancestors.’

For the simple down-to-earth villagers of Tohoku, the tsunami was a cruel interruption to the normal pattern of their lives. Family altars, family graves and family ihai were swept away forever. And those who had died prematurely and were robbed of their dreams become gaki, or hungry ghosts, destined to wander the earth unhappily. Placating them is a vital matter, but impossible when even the necessities of life for survivors were missing. And what of the ancestors who had lost all their living descendants and had no one to care for them?

The book is notable for the way the survivors talk to the dead, comfort them, and show a strong sense of closeness. In such circumstances it was only natural that there should be a swarm of ghostly sightings, and the number of spirits roaming the landscape is striking – there are descriptions of possession, mediums who communicate with the dead, and in one remarkable case a Buddhist priest who exorcises no fewer than 25 different tsunami victims from a single woman.

At this point I couldn’t help thinking of that great ghost believer Lafcadio Hearn, and indeed he was the first foreigner to lay out in book form the central role of ancestor worship in Japan. Surprisingly Parry doesn’t reference him, even when talking of the kaidan, the strange tales, that characterised Tohoku folklore in the past and did so again after the tsunami. (In a note Parry acknowledges use of a more recent book on the subject, Robert J. Smith’s Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan, 1974.)

Graveyeard lanterns at Obon welcome the dead back to their descendants

What comes over strongest of all in Parry’s account is the relentless, almost obsessive drive of survivors to locate the bodies of their family kin. This goes on in some cases for weeks and months of unending toil, even in one case turning into a lifelong quest for closure. Sometimes it results in gory encounters with mud-sodden corpses, rotten beyond recognition, yet still there is a sense of relief, comfort even in having located the body. It’s as if the spirit is still attached and can’t be consoled until the physical entity is properly processed. The Japanese determination to repatriate the remains of soldiers who died in WW2 can be seen in similar light.

In plunging into the depth of misery caused by the disaster of March 11, Parry captures the essence of the Japanese soul. In the passing of the baton from one generation to the next, there’s something very consoling for the memory of the dead is fostered by the living, who in turn are watched over by the deceased. But when disaster strikes, it can all go tragically wrong. You couldn’t get a more vivid depiction of this most Japanese style of disaster. The book is simply a tour de force that exposes the true bedrock of the country’s religious thinking.

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For Lafcadio Hearn and ancestor worship, see here. For Hearn and ‘ghost-houses’, see here. For more on ancestor worship, see here. For another review of Parry’s book, click here. For other pieces related to ancestor worship, see the relevant Category in the righthand column.

Hearn 21): The living dead

August 16, 2017 / John D. / 1 Comment

At Obon people burn bunches of incense to call back the dead

Today is Obon, ‘the Japanese day of the dead’, and an occasion about which Green Shinto has posted in several previous years. (Click here for reflections on Japanese and the dead, here for Kyoto’s Daimonji festival, and here for a comparison with Halloween.)

Obon is of course the supreme example of Japan’s cult of the dead, commonly referred to as ‘ancestor worship’, though ‘ancestor reverence’ would be nearer the mark. No one has written better on the subject than Lafcadio Hearn, whose Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904) was devoted to the practice. Ironically, it was the last book he wrote before dying, and the book was published shortly after his death. (Click here to learn more about Hearn and ancestor worship).

Kyoto’s Daimonji festival on Aug 16 to send back the spirits of the dead after their visit back to their family homes (courtesy of Aaron Williamson)

In his book Hearn shows how the dead continue to live on in Japan, and how indeed they control the present. Time and again in his writing Hearn asserts that the living are ruled by the dead. Humans are not autonomous individuals able to think and act for themselves, but are guided by everyone who came before. ‘We are, each and all, infinite compounds of fragments or anterior lives,’ Hearn wrote in Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897), p.92.

It is a recurring theme in Hearn’s writings, and one that proved a rich vein, for it infuses his view of life with the power of the unseen past. The poet Edward Thomas, who surprisingly wrote a book about him, noted that he was ‘most individual when he submits to his favourite obsession, that of the infinite ancestry of every soul and every act.’ (Lafcadio Hearn, p.70)

The scale on which Hearn conceives things is vast. He writes of ‘unimaginably countless experiences in an immeasurable past’, of ‘trillions of trillions of ghostly memories’, of the ‘myriad million voices of all humanity’, of the ‘dim loving impulses of generations unremembered’, of ‘countless anterior existences’. ‘The mind is as much a composite of souls as the body is of cells,’ he writes in Chapter IV of Kokoro (1896).

IN Hearn’s view, then, every human is prone to the numberless experiences of an immeasurable past. A child’s natural love for its mother for example is born of ‘a million caresses in countless previous existences.’ It explains for him many of the mysteries of life, such as deja vu, why we thrill to certain kinds of music or to certain sights such as sunset. Although we like to think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, he notes in an inspired deconstruction of the self in an essay on ‘Dust’ that humans are so much more than that. On this day of all days, it’s a curiously comforting thought for those concerned about the prospect of death.

I, am individual; an individual soul! Nay, I am a population – a population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a thousand millions! Generations of generations I am, aeons of aeons! Countless times the concourse now making me has scattered, and mixed with other scatterings. Of what concern, then, the next disintegration?

Cemeteries at Obon time are full of lanterns to welcome back the spirits of the dead. For Lafcadio Hearn nothing was more central to Japanese culture than belief in the living dead.

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In the Shinto-Buddhist framework, death is usually given over to Buddhist priests to take care of, for they have a greater concern with the afterlife and reincarnation. For Westerners used to a single funeral ceremony, the number of events held by Japanese families can be startiing. Depending on the sect the times of commemoration ceremonies vary, but in general they take place after 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, 28 days, 35 days, 42 days, and 49 days. These are considered the first 7 steps to a deceased person becoming a “hotoke-sama” (buddha). Seven being a magic number, you could say that the deceased are helped thereby to enter ‘seventh heaven’!

Yet the process does not stop after 49 days, for there are the 1 year, 3 year, 7 year, 13 year, 21 year and 33 year memorial ceremonies as well. Some sects have a 49 year ceremony too if relatives still survive. In addition, there is the annual Obon remembrance in mid-August, as well as grave-cleaning visits at equinox (Shubun and Shunbun) or year-end. One can understand why Hearn saw the dead as occupying such an important place in Japanese culture!

The ceremonies are not only an important part of the mourning process, but serve to keep the deceased “alive” in the hearts of those left behind. The prayers are said to guide the dead in the afterworld, in that the chanting encourages them on their way. Similarly the constant incense burning for the first 49 days lights their path for them. There is a ghostly and poetic touch to some of the prayers, as illustrated below:

Fudaraku ya / Kishi utsu nami wa / Mikumano no / Nachi no oyama ni/ Hibiku taki tsuse

On Kannon’s island paradise, / Waves crash upon the shores; / In the sacred land of Kumano, /
Down Nachi Mountain, / The thundering waterfall cascades.

Commenting on the whole process, one Japanese remarks, ‘It’s a lot of work at times, but in the beginning it keeps you focused on the ceremonies and gets you through the first few weeks, and after that, the houji [memorial ceremonies] are a time for getting together and remembering people.’

RIP

Zen and Shinto 8: Animism and ancestry

March 6, 2016 / John D. / 0 Comments

Rituals at Shinto shrines are for ancestral or animist spirits

Green Shinto has written before of how Shinto stands on the twin pillars of animism and ancestor worship, and how these two different strands are interlocked. (See here for instance.) Zen too cultivates both aspects, though they are not so central to its practice. Perhaps the influence of Shinto brought out the tendencies in the imported religion.

In an essay in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye entitled ‘The sound of the valley stream, the colors of the mountain’, Dogen, the founder of the Soto sect wrote as follows:

The sound of the valley stream, the colors of the valley stream, the sound of the mountain, and the colors of the mountain all reveal truth unstintingly. If you do not prize honor and gain, then the valley stream and the mountain will expound truth to you without stint.

“The sound of the stream, the colour of the mountain…”

Dogen advocated recalling nature internally and searching out ways to live according to the laws of nature. It all sounds very similar to the thinking of Shinto and cold water austerity (misgoi) as a way to immerse oneself in nature and so be true to one’s real self.

Along with the reverence of nature goes reverence for ancestors. In Shinto this begins on a personal level with maintenance of the memory of one’s parents and grandparents, and then extends to the larger anonymous mass of ancestors that goes to make up the whole inherited past of the nation.

Similarly in Zen there is a concern with maintaining the spirit-memory of one’s teachers, both one’s own teacher and the whole line of transmission back to the founder of the sect, and beyond that to the founder of Zen, and beyond that to the historical and other Buddhas. The pamphlet of the subtemple of Ryogen-in at Daitoku-ji states the following about the images of founders Rinzai and the subtemple founder Tokei:

We attend to them as if they are still here, and we hold fast to the first teaching of Zen Buddhism, ‘hoon shatoku’ (display gratitude for the kindness and virtue shown to you).

Attending to ancestral spirits as if they are still here – you could hardly get a better description of kami. Displaying gratitude for what you have received is a key Shinto virtue too. Here then is a strong overlap in the mindsets of Zen and Shinto – unseen spirits in a living universe.

The Zen garden abstracts the quintessence of nature as a means to bring the practitioner closer to enlightenment

Okinawa 3: Way of the Dead

December 3, 2012 / John D. / 2 Comments

Okinawan family tomb

Driving around Okinawa, one can’t help noticing the many distinctively large tombs. They resemble small houses, with a porch and courtyard. Some are turtle shaped and nestle into the slope of the earth, as if wombs. The dead who are buried here will be reborn in spirit form.

For Lafcadio Hearn, ancestor worship was not only the defining characteristic of religion throughout East Asia, but the origin of religion in all countries. In early societies ghosts were regarded as the spirits of dead family members, who were honoured as immortal beings with the power to protect and punish. In this way ghosts became gods.

In the case of Okinawa, treasuring the memory of past generations is given expression both within the house in the form of a family altar and outside in the form of family graves. The altar, known as a buchudan, is ostensibly Buddhist but contains no buddhas. Instead it houses memorials of the deceased.

Funeral urns

After death, the cremated remains of the deceased are placed in funeral urns and taken to the family tomb. Twice a year prayers and offerings are made there by the extended family of descendants. The gatherings can be sizable, involving anything up to thirty or more. Offerings are made of rice, water and saké. Expressions of gratitude are given, as well as solicitations for blessings. Afterwards food and drink are shared between the living and the dead, much as in the manner of a wake.

Though ancestor worship has been carried out in some form or other since ancient times, the large tombs used now were not introduced until the seventeenth century, influenced by the customs of south China. The oldest tomb dates back to 1687, and in former times the deceased were carried to the grave in a form of palanquin called ‘gan’. Once a mere mortal, the family member had passed over into the form of a higher being.

How many urns are kept within the family tomb, I couldn’t hep wondering? When I asked a friendly waiter about it, he told me that in his family at least the tradition was to keep as many urns as possible within the tomb, and that when there was no more space the oldest would be smashed up and the contents mixed into the floor of the tomb. Dust returns to dust, but within the safekeeping of the family.

Traditional tortoise-shaped tomb, built womb-like into the side of the hill

Gathering of an extended family at an ancestral tomb (picture in Nakajin Castle museum)

Portable offering set used at rituals before the ancestral tomb

Traditional palanquin used up to Meiji times for carrying the dead to the family tomb

Paying respects at Tama-u-dun, a World Heritage site and mausoleum of the Ryukyu kings