grave had all passed on—even then my gravestone would stand there in its
place, beautiful, preserving within itself one aspect of Japanese beauty.
There’s really not much reason to think about the gravestone one will
have when one is dead while one is still alive, but as the gravestones of
more and more friends and acquaintances are erected over their plots, there
come times when such thoughts flicker up in one’s mind. Gravestones have
been built even for people who insisted they didn’t want one. I myself have
always thought of a gravestone as a sort of heavy burden, which probably
accounts for my dreams of having a stone like Rikyu’s or Sansai’s. It’s
unlikely that I would end up with anything beautiful if I were to have a
gravestone carved for me after I die. This is one of the depressing facts of
these latter days of the Buddhist law.
An acquaintance of mine who works as a dealer in old art told me that he
had one thirteen-layer stupa from the Kamakura Period among his things,
and so, looking out at our untended garden, at the grass I had let grow in a
wild tangle, I wondered if it wouldn’t be pleasant to go ahead and buy it, to
have a thirteen layer stupa out there, shooting freshly upward.
“Wouldn’t it be great to have a Kamakura Period thirteen-layer stupa
right in the middle of our garden? That’s all I’d need.”
I didn’t mention that it would become my gravestone when I died.
The young art dealer said he could probably bring the pieces of the stupa
to the house in a single truck…
“But it will be hard to stack them up. It’s a good twenty-one feet tall, you
realize. We’ll have to build something tall to stand on and then just carry
the stones up.”
Even assuming that a thirteen-layer stupa could be used as a gravestone,
a stupa twenty-one feet tall would be visible from quite a distance—it was
a bit too tall to stand over my grave. It would give people too much of a
shock.
