There is a story to the effect that Sansai carried his lantern with him even
on the biannual journeys to Edo that were required of all daimyo by the
Shogunate—journeys that he made on foot. This may or may not be true,
but whatever the case, it’s certain that Rikyu’s and Sansai’s gravestones
were not carved for them by stonemasons after their deaths. They are
products of an age even more ancient than that of Rikyu and Sansai’s,
stones which the two viewed as works of art while they lived. And the
beauties they saw in those stones while they lived became their graves just
as they were. It’s certainly an interesting way of making a grave. The
aesthetic spirit of the person buried in the grave assumes the form of a
gravestone.
Rikyu could probably have sketched out a design for precisely the kind
of treasure stupa he wanted in his head, but it’s unlikely that he would have
ended up with an artwork as beautiful as the one he imagined, if he had
given the design to a stonemason and asked him to carve it. Al the strengths
of the age couldn’t have helped. And of course, there’s a certain quiet
beauty that only certain ages produce—one sees this even in stones. It’s
true that stone lanterns of various unusual shapes started reappearing
around the beginning of the Momoyama period—lanterns carved to suit the
tastes of those involved in the tea ceremony—but even so it seems
reasonable to say that the designs only grew less and less interesting
following the end of the Kamakura period, that there was a general stylistic
collapse. Rikyu and Sansai selected stones they liked from the works of art
that older ages had left them—works that their own age lacked the power to
produce—and they used these stone artworks as gravestones. Perhaps this
was the extreme limit of extravagance, of arrogance. But then on the other
hand perhaps one might think of it as a pure elegance, as humility. Even
those of us who visit their graves now, generations later—who can say how
much our sensitivity is honed and deepened by the ancient treasure stupa,
the old stone lantern? One might say that Rikyu and Sansai became so
obsessed with their stones—the one with his treasure stupa and the other
