Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (44 page)

The next room contained an even bigger surprise, for here stood a Heian-period statue of Fud
My
-
, the Buddhist deity whom I had most loved from childhood. Temple lore indicated that the statue had existed around the time of K
kai himself—that he would have seen it. “And now you are seeing it too,” Yanagi said.

Instantly I thought about my father. Fud
was without question his favorite deity too. We both loved how Fud
always appeared to be at once charming but ferocious, and whenever we ran into a Fud
statue in an art gallery or museum, we instantly tried to copy his expression.

I should note here that while my father listed his occupation as “farmer” on his tax returns, because he had inherited a family wheat farm in Nebraska, he was in reality a sort of jack-of-all-trades, extremely skilled with his hands and enthusiastically curious about everything. He had always loved all the arts, and in the 1960s, he rented a car and drove around the Balkans and on to Greece and Crete and then to Italy, in a pilgrimage to see some of the world’s great art treasures. He hadn’t known too much about Japanese art as a young man, though his mother had a collection of
netsuke
, little ivory figures in whimsical shapes that the Japanese used to help attach containers to their kimonos, since traditional Japanese clothing did not include pockets. Once he met my mother, however, my father’s curiosity led him to investigate Japanese art, which in the 1970s and ’80s could still be collected for a reasonable price.

My father liked to find damaged and undervalued antiques and to repair them either for us to keep or to resell. Mostly he kept what he found because we were unable to part with the treasures he nursed back to life. Our house was full of Japanese screens that he had patched up, Buddhas who literally needed a hand, and porcelain
ewers requiring a lid. My dad would supply all these pieces with new parts. Though he always looked for and hoped to find a Fud
, he never had.

Yanagi asked me to continue to follow him. He paused just outside a small building, perhaps no larger than six tatami mats. The doorway was quite low, and I had to stoop to enter the dark space. Inside there was another altar, with gold cups and bells and the intricate trappings to associate with Shingon. At the back of the room was a closed box, the kind that holds a statue.

“This,” Yanagi explained, “is the true
hond
. The original.” The room we had inhabited for morning prayers, while still a
hond
, was not the original one that had existed in K
kai’s time. That room was for visitors. This room was the real thing. And it had a history.

Yanagi chose his words carefully. He said that this
hond
—this little room—was very important in the history of Shingon, and for true believers. This marked the spot where K
kai had once built a little hut for himself. Later, the hut was replaced by a small temple of the same dimensions—this very temple—which explained why the room was so small. Before K
kai was taken off to his mausoleum in Okunoin, he spent the night in this room. While alive, K
kai had also told his followers that if they were troubled and felt they needed to speak to him, they could come to this little
hond
and he would be there for them. The closed box contained a statue of Odaishisan, or “the great master,” as believers refer to K
kai, on view only one day of the year—April 20.