Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (77 page)

At last we had fresh sheets of newspaper, this time with harmless black-and-white printing that conveyed nothing more than world events. Semp
opened up one bag and dumped the bones on the newspaper. There it was: all that remained of my grandfather. There were lots and lots of small pieces of bone that looked like chalk, and a few that were recognizably bone-shaped. Mixed in with all this was fine powdered gold.

At my grandfather’s cremation, my mother had insisted on placing the little box containing my grandmother’s hyoid bone in the casket along with an expensive, 18-karat gold-ink painting of Kokuzosama, the Buddhist deity my grandfather considered to be his personal protector. My mother’s older brother had argued that the painting was valuable and could be sold for cash. My mother persisted. Looking at the bones now, in their luminous golden glory, I had the feeling that I was seeing my grandfather’s true interior; he was a sparkling, rich, and beautiful creature, despite the temper tantrums to which he had subjected us when he was alive.

Semp
emptied out my grandmother’s bag of bones too, before finally putting everything all together in one bag, and then wrapping this up with the newspaper. At last, he said, we were ready for the ceremony. But not quite!

“Do you see the statues?” he asked me, nodding at the ten figures placed along the eaves. They were brand new, commissioned from an artist in Taiwan. “You’ll never see another temple like this,” he said. “Certainly not a Zen temple.”

By now I knew that most S
t
Zen temples paid tribute to the historical Buddha—Siddharta Gautama—and that it was he who dominated most altars. Semp
’s temple had other figures too. There was Dainichi Nyorai, the Cosmic Buddha that the Shingon worshippers love so much. There was Amida Nyorai, the Pure Land Buddha. Jiz
was up there, along with several other bodhisattvas I didn’t recognize. There was my beloved, ferocious Fud
scowling out at me. There was Senju, bodhisattva of a thousand arms, doing his metaphysical yoga and representing electrons in motion. There was Monj
bodhisattva, who oversees wisdom and to whom people pray for good grades and success in school. In the past, one of Semp
’s
danka
might have had to travel to a temple specially dedicated to Monj
, but not anymore; now there was a statue here.

“But Fud
isn’t Zen,” I heard myself say.

“Nope!” Semp
said cheerfully. “And who cares? I want anyone who comes to my temple to find what they are looking for. Anyone! Maybe they are wandering around in the middle of the night, and they need to see the face of Amida. I don’t want them to come here and be disappointed.