Kakemono

In all the pomp of splendour and of power they buried Iyeyasu at Nikkō, and the greatest artists of Old Japan came and built in his memory a temple more beautiful than any in all the length and breadth of the land. For more than forty years they worked, and brains and money and labour were poured out like mountain water, until the temple stood complete, the mausoleum of Iyeyasu and the eternal monument of this artistic race.

With Buddhist rites was the great Shōgun buried, and for many hundred years daily remembered in a ritual as solemn as it is effective, but Buddha himself has not anywhere a temple so splendid.

They buried Iyeyasu at Nikkō, not in the town of his birth or of his death, not in the city over which he ruled, but four days’ journey from Yedo in the midst of the mountains; and they did it that Japan’s greatest ruler might lie amid the nation’s best in nature as in art, that to the splendour of the temple the Land herself might add the glories of her mountains and her trees.

At Nikkō is the great Shōgun buried, and for twenty miles before his shrine a stately avenue of trees leads up to the temple, and up this avenue prince and pilgrim yearly come; prince and pilgrim, priest and peasant they still come, up the great avenue of dark thick-set cryptomerias, the giant pine-trees of Japan.

At the temple’s foot a mountain stream rushes in a deep green gorge, and two bridges cross the stream: one bright red, the bridge of the Son of Heaven, one painted green, for the rest of this world’s humankind.

And the reason is that when the Buddhist saint Shōdō Shōnin pursued the vision that had been sent to him, he journeyed into the mountains many days until the grey torrent of Nikkō rushing tumultuously across his path barred the way; but the vision abode with him, and Shōdō Shōnin knew that he must cross the stream, yet was there neither bridge, nor boat, nor crossing-place. So the saint kneeled down and prayed. Then there appeared to him an angel, clothed in black robes and blue, wearing a string of skulls around his neck, and holding in his hand two serpents, these he threw across the stream, and they became a bridge firm and strong. So Shōdō Shōnin passed over the torrent in safety, but when he looked back, snakes, bridge, and angel had vanished and only the rushing river remained. Then for a memory the two bridges were built in the very place of the crossing.

Of all the marriages of Art and Nature the Sacred Red Bridge of Nikkō is the most beautiful. Scattered among hills and trees and river, beauty lay; but this people coming through the mountains saw the one bond that had power to bind the pale blue hills, the dark green gorge, the stone-grey stream together in an ordered whole of deep-thought artistic loveliness, planned, perfect, yet supremely natural.

Then the avenue goes on, up the foot of the hill, till it widens and broadens into a great gravel circle before the entrance-gate of the temple. Here the great trees of the mountains spread out and up on either hand, with the temple in their midst surrounded but not overwhelmed by the grace of the wood. Under the granite torī, the first gateway is guarded by two figures, the mythical lions gilded and lacquered; while above, the mysterious baku, with his four ears and his nine tails, who has power to eat all bad dreams that pass before sleeping eyes, crouches alert.

A flight of granite steps leads to the first courtyard, set at right angles to the gateway, and paved with rounded grey pebbles from the stream. Here are all the minor buildings of the temple, the stable for the sacred white horse, the library for the two thousand sutra of the Buddhist scriptures, the tank-house for the purification, the store-houses for the temple furniture; and stable and library, tank-house and store-houses are jewelled gems of carving and design, so rich, so splendid in the ordered magnificence of their colouring that western senses stand amazed. A blood-red lacquered fence aglow with coloured carvings divides the temple from the sombre majesty of the giant cryptomerias.

Then the pebbled space contracts into a flight of granite stairs, and mounts between stone walls that end in painted friezes of carved wood to a second courtyard. This is almost square, and standing on the wide grey sweep of rounded pebbles are three bronze lanterns from the three tributary kingdoms of Old Japan—from Korea, Luchu, and Holland; and there in serried rows and ranged against the blood-red lacquered fence aglow with gilded carvings, stand multitudes of bronze lanterns, which the dead daimyō of Old Japan sent as offerings to the temple. Beyond the lacquered fence the dark still stems of the pine-trees range out of sight.

Then the pebbled space contracts again, and a flight of granite steps leads between granite walls set with coloured friezes of carved wood to the third courtyard; and the colourless pause of the second court, with its bronze lanterns on grey stones, gains a new meaning as one mounts, for in the third courtyard, between the blood-red friezes with their riotous coloured carvings, is the pure perfection of the Yōmei-mon, a double gateway, of white lacquer, cream-white and supported by four pillars of carved wood. And when they put the fourth pillar in its place they planted it upside down fearing if the beauty of the temple were all-perfect, evil might befall the house of Tokugawa through the jealousy of high heaven.

And the stranger as he draws near pauses in sheer amazement; the wild untamable beauty of the mighty temple set in its giant framework of dark green trees is strange beyond believing.

On either hand stretches the tropical splendour of the blood-red lacquered fence, set with coloured carvings as with shining jewels. Behind is the pale glory of the Yōmei-mon. All around the darkness of the forest lies like a still quiet tomb. And in front, rising in lines of sheer perfection, is the white beauty of the Chinese gate, cream-white, adorned with glittering yellow brass, brass in rounded sunken medallions on the lintel and the gate-posts, brass in quaint designs and shining points of yellow light, which break about the whiteness as sunshine through a mist.

The carvings and the pattern, the picture-panels, the decorated eaves, the chiselled heads and sculptured birds and beasts, the growing, glowing flowers, the hanging lotus-bells that tinkle at the corners of the tent-curved roof, and all perfect, are more than a man’s mind can perceive though he look for many years. Brains and money and labour were poured out here like mountain water, and like the rushing stream of Nikkō the drops go unperceived in the beauty of the whole.

In the short space of forty years were the temple and its fences, the gateways and the carvings, completed and set up; but forty short years from first to last, and the carving of one gateway is more than a lifetime’s work.

Then the splendour culminates. Beyond the Chinese gateway is the actual shrine itself, its cream-white gateway studded too with brass, while superb in the utter beauty of their carving, two writhing dragons stretch on either hand between the door-post and the pillar. Inside is the temple of the memorial tablets, where with daily rites the Buddhist priests prayed for the soul of Iyeyasu. To-day the Buddhist emblems are all gone, the shrine is bare. A shintō rope of rice-straw stretches from post to post, the mirror of the Sun-Goddess shines above the altar for her son, the “Son of Heaven” Tenshi, the Mikado, has come back to his own.

All the magnificence of the temple now is in its walls, walls of panel carvings where the springing phœnix and the crouching lion rise like pale shadows from the pale unstained wood, so little are they raised above the surface. And yet the artist’s hand that carved them was without a rival in the world. They are real and living, delicate and true, and so entirely beautiful that the heart cries out with joy as at a long-lost good. Here is no colour, the sweep of pale yellow matting, the panelled walls of pale dust-coloured wood, are more light than colour. Here the rich joy of sense is laid aside: the temple stands a beauty immaterial.

Through three hundred years they prayed for Iyeyasu daily with long rites, but his tomb is not here.

It lies beyond the temple and above it. One climbs to it by a long, steep stair of grey-green granite, set in the sombre hill. A stairway built of granite in long slabs, so broad and thick that the balustrade with its coping, base, and sculptured columns is all cut from one solid block, with each block fourteen feet long. And the stairway took thirteen years to quarry and set up.

The hillside is steep, the stairs are many, and the tall dark pines, the flame-red maples gather, gather till the temple’s roof, the sound of praying bell or chanted hymn is lost. The little space which Art stole from Nature is completely hidden, even the forest has forgotten.

And the grey stair climbs, climbs among the dark-green trees, then stops.

On the top of the hill is a rounded curve of stately pines. Alone, solitary between sky and trees, stands the tomb of Iyeyasu, a domed pillar-box of bronze glinting golden through the trees. A low stone wall surrounds the tomb, a bronze door solid but uncarved is its gateway, and that is all. Here among the quiet trees, in the stillness of the forest, above the splendour of the temple, lie the ashes of the great Iyeyasu.

All the days of his rule he dwelt among men, but his soul climbed the steep stair of Life, casting off its splendours and its glories, climbed above them, climbed back into the eternal simplicity of Nature, and there he laid him down to rest.