I haven’t visited the town where I was born in thirty years, and though I
see chrysanthemums every year I’d somehow managed not to think of that
rock until this autumn, when it occurred to me for some reason that it might
be considered a kind of memorial, a kind of gravestone.
I had been walking from temple to temple in Kamakura, looking at old
stone art.
And I’d been telling people, “There’s not much from the Kamakura
Period left in Kamakura, but I’d guess that most of the pieces that do
remain unchanged were executed in stone.”
Consider a few examples. The treasure-box-seal stupa dedicated to the
founder of Kakuen-ji, the treasure-box-seal stupa of the same temple’s
second head priest, the five-ring stupa marking Ninsho’s grave at
Gokuraku-ji, the stone toru at Tsurugaoka-hachimangu, and the seamless
stupa at Daikakuzen-ji, which is one of the temples within Kencho-ji—all
of these were designated as National Treasures under the old system. The
treasure stupa at Betsugan-ji and the treasure-box-seal stupa erected at
Uesugi Kenpo’s preemptive funeral have been classified as Important
Works of Art, along with a number of other works, while the treasure-box-
seal stupa dedicated to Hojyo Shigetoki has been designated as a historic
place. The kurikara monument at Gosho-jinja, the seven-layer stupa
dedicated to
Hojyo Dogo, and the stone Buddha at Fukomyo-ji also come to mind.
The Kamakura Period was the great age of stone art.
And yet there aren’t many people who walk about looking at artworks of
this sort. I myself have been living in Kamakura for fifteen years, and until
this autumn I never felt any curiosity to see them. No doubt this is because
most of the pieces are old gravestones.
“After all, they’re gravestones,” I murmured to myself as I set out alone
on my tour, without even asking my wife to join me.
