But to tell the truth, the fact that so many of the pieces are gravestones is
what prompted me to make a tour of them in the first place. Several of my
friends and acquaintances had passed on, and as their graves were
completed I had had the occasion to see quite a number of gravestones of
various shapes. One stands before a grave and thinks about the deceased,
and so naturally one starts thinking of the shape of the stone as well.
One of my friends had had a small treasure-box seal stupa built for the
grave of his wife, who had passed on ahead of him. He explained to me that
the form of the treasure-box-seal stupa was based on that of the gold-
lacquered stupas built by Qian Hong Shu. Following the ancient example of
Emperor Ashoka, who had been a great builder of stupas, Qian Hong Shu,
the king of Wu Yue, ordered his craftsmen to fashion eighty-four thousand
stupas out of copper. He had a copy of the Treasure-Box-Seal Shinịu Sutra
placed in each stupa, and then sent them to various countries. Some of
these stupas made their way to Japan. The small gold-lacquered stupas
were constructed in the year that corresponds to the ninth year of Tenryaku
in Japan. Stone treasure-box-seal stupas were first used to memorialize the
dead sometime after the beginning of the Kamakura Period. It is generally
agreed that truly beautiful works of the treasure-box-seal stupa form were
produced exclusively during the Kamakura Period.
I’ve lived in the valley of Kakuen-ji, the two storied temple, for more
than ten years. I have sometimes visited it on my walks, there at the farthest
end of our small valley, and any number of years have passed since I first
saw the two famous stupas in its precincts. I didn’t know until recently,
however, that these stupas—one of them dedicated to the temple’s founder,
the other a priest’s stupa erected for Master Daito, the Sixth Patriarch—are
considered the largest and most beautiful treasure box-seal stupas in the
entire Kanto region. The upper portion of the stupa dedicated to the
temple’s founder toppled off during the disastrous earthquake in Taisho
twelve, and I’ve been told that if you looked at it then you could see two
