Jizo Bodhisattva

by Jan Chozen Bays

  A hundred years after the introduction of Buddhism to the West, there are American Buddhist teachers who have found that Jizo Bodhisattva offers solace to those with a particular kind of poignant suffering, grief over the death of a child. The Mizuko Jizo, who helps children who have died, is the Jizo of the ceremony described in the introduction, the most popular Jizo in Japan today, and the Jizo who has begun to be found at Zen temples in America. In the next chapter we look at the role the Mizuko Jizo has played in Japan and consider how and why she of all the many Jizos in Japan has found her way to America.

  chapter three

  The Water-Baby Jizo

  For Children Killed in a Smallpox Epidemic

  When spring arrives

  From every tree tip

  Flowers will bloom,

  But those children

  Who fell with last autumn’s leaves

  Will never return.

  Ryōkan

  The Mizuko Jizo and the Mizuko Ceremony in Japan

  The most common form of Jizo made in Japan today is the Mizuko Jizo. The Mizuko Jizo often is portrayed as a monk with an infant in his arms and another child or two at his feet, clutching the skirt of his robe. The Mizuko Jizo is the central figure in a popular but somewhat controversial ceremony called the mizuko kuyo.

  The word ku-yo is composed of two Chinese characters with the literal meaning “to offer” and “to nourish.” The underlying meaning is to offer what is needed to nourish life energy after it is no longer perceptible in the form of a human or occupying a body we can touch. In actual use kuyo refers to a memorial service and mizuko kuyo to a memorial service for infants who have died either before birth or within the first few years of life. An image of the Mizuko Jizo usually is the central figure on the altar at such a ceremony. Grieving parents may buy a small statue of Mizuko Jizo to place on the family altar or in a cemetery as a memorial for their child.

  The two Chinese characters in the word mizu-ko are literally translated “water” and “baby.” It is a description of the unborn, beings who float in a watery world awaiting birth. The Japanese perceived that all life originated from the sea long before evolutionary theory proposed this. Their island home and all its inhabitants float in the ocean, which is the source of much of their nutrition. In actual use, the term “mizuko” includes not only fetuses and the newly born, but also infants up to one or two years of age whose hold on life in the human realm is still tenuous.

  In Japan young children are regarded as “other worldly” and not fully anchored in human life. Fetuses are still referred to as kami no ko or “child of the gods” and also as “Buddha.” Before the twentieth century, the probability that a child would survive to age five or seven was often less than 50 percent. Only after that age were they “counted” in a census and could they be “counted upon” to participate in the adult world. Children were thought of as mysterious beings in a liminal world between the realm of humans and gods. Because of this the gods could speak through them. For centuries prepubescent children in Japan have been chosen as chigo, or “divine children,” who do divination and function as oracles. Even today children below school age still are allowed a somewhat heavenly existence, indulged and protected without many expectations or pressures. They often sleep in bed with their parents and younger siblings until age seven. School entry and displacement from the parental bed can come as a rude shock.

  Although people in America and Europe have only recently become acquainted with Jizo Bodhisattva, mistaken beliefs among Westerners about Jizo already exist. The Mizuko Jizo, although currently popular, revered, and omnipresent in Japan, is not an ancient Jizo. Nor is it the only form of Jizo, as the list of types of Jizos at the end of the last chapter demonstrates. The term “mizuko” does not appear in Buddhist or Shinto scriptures. The mizuko kuyo is not an ancient rite nor was it originally a Buddhist ceremony. Both the Mizuko Jizo and the mizuko ceremony arose in Japan in the 1960s in response to a human need, to relieve the suffering emerging from the experience of the large number of women who had undergone abortions after World War II.

  To understand the origins and current popularity of the mizuko ceremony in Japan we have to review some pertinent history.

  A Brief History of Abortion in Japan

  Abortion and infanticide (mabiki) were practiced widely in Japan in premodern times, as they were in Europe. In societies where all life energy is devoted to mere survival, where famine and epidemic are common, early death becomes a fact of life. When infants and children die frequently and when religious beliefs hold death either as the simple but inescapable return of all that lives to the earth, or as a restoration to a pleasant heavenly abode, it can be less—or not at all—a source of sorrow compared to modern societies where we are uncertain as to our destiny and meet early death with anger, indignation, and a sense that somehow we have been betrayed.

  In early times in Japan a first pregnancy was a young woman’s initiation into adult life. She was not recognized as pregnant until a ceremony held in the fourth or fifth month of gestation when the midwife tied a special belly band containing charms on her. New life thus was not recognized until the time of quickening. This was natural at a time when people lacked knowledge of the biology of conception, when irregular menstrual periods could have many causes such as disease and poor nutrition, when early miscarriage was common, and when the outcome of any pregnancy was uncertain. Midwives were responsible for ushering new life into the world. In some areas of Japan they maintained a lifelong relationship to the children they delivered. They made the baby’s first clothing and attended celebrations during the children’s lives. Midwives also made herbal preparations for contraception and abortion. At a birth the midwife could ask if the infant was to be kept or should be sent back to the realm of the gods. The decision was made jointly by the husband and in-laws, not by the woman alone. Mabiki (infanticide) was accomplished by strangulation or by suffocation, sometimes between the legs of the midwife. The infant, newly emerged from between its mother’s legs, thus could be returned between the legs of the midwife to its original dwelling place.

  There is no evidence that there were any prescribed religious ceremonies around pregnancy and birth in old Japan. In fact pregnant women were not allowed to enter Shinto shrines between the time of tying on the pregnancy sash until about one month after birth, an interval when they might pollute the sacred site. Midwives sometimes acted as intermediaries for the gods, praying for the sake of women under their care. Infants could be brought to Shinto shrines to be recognized by the kami—(the gods) and placed under their protection. The Shinto religion was concerned with purity and enhancing the life force and had nothing to do with funeral or memorial rites. People prayed to the kami both for fertility for their crops and for themselves. Children were desired and a source of joy but also provided needed labor in the fields and were counted on as social security, caretakers for their aging parents.

  Although the gods could end the sorrow of infertility by granting children, another kind of suffering could be the result of the birth of too many children. A poor family might be able to feed and raise two or three children, but everyone’s life was at risk if they had eight. The Japanese practiced abortion and mabiki as a practical means of ensuring the health and well-being of the entire family. Some historians suggest that this straightforward attitude developed over many centuries of cultivating rice, an awareness that rice plants have to be thinned to thrive. Too many plants, like too many children, overtax the available resources. If some are not culled, all will be weakened or die.

  Buddhism entered Japan flavored with a particularly Chinese preoccupation—what was one’s fate after death? This was not a Shinto concern. Funerals thus became the responsibility of Buddhist priests and temples. Buddhist rites for aborted fetuses and dead babies were uncommon in premodern times in Japan, and, when performed, differed from those held for adults. In fact, the term mizuko was not found in Buddhist or Shinto scripture. A central
aspect of funerals for adults was transfer of merit to help the person attain Buddhahood. The Soto and Rinzai Zen sects had ceremonies for women who died in childbirth. The purpose of the ceremonies was to help the mother avoid a particular hell, the Pool of Blood Hell, and to help her become a Buddha. The concern for the fetus or baby was to help it toward a speedy rebirth. In some areas of Japan, in fact, babies were buried with a dead fish so that the bad smell would keep the Buddhas away. Often dead infants were put in rivers or the ocean to be carried away with other unwanted items. A priest’s wife explained to me that the term mizuko came from the last resort of a poor woman—to starve herself and stand chest high in freezing river water for long periods to induce abortion. The fetus, afterbirth, and blood would be washed away in the river, eventually returning to the ocean. There were no marked graves or periodic memorial services for children dying before birth. If a child died in the first few years of life, the family could hold memorial services and place a tablet on the family altar.

  In fifteenth-century Japan, abortions were common. The government asked physicians not to advertise this service openly. Although child abandonment was prohibited in 1687, it was a common practice among the poor in Japan as it was in Europe throughout the nineteenth century. One priest revered in Japan as a “living Jizo” gathered abandoned and orphaned children and raised them in his temple. While on a pilgrimage in 1684 the poet Basho encountered a deserted child and was moved to write a poem. His diary also reflects the belief that a fetus or child has its own karma.

  As I was plodding along the River Fuji, I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought this child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself and that he was destined to have a life even shorter than that of the morning dew. The child looked as fragile as the flowers of bush-clover that scatter at the slightest stir of the autumn wind, and it was so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had with me.

  The ancient poet

  Who pitied monkeys for their cries,

  What would he say if he saw

  This child crying in the autumn wind?

  How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery? Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him? Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive—by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind.

  In the mid-1800s Japan, isolated for two hundred years, opened its doors and allowed Europeans and Christianity to enter again. With them came new Western perspectives on life and death that began inevitably to alter indigenous views. In 1873 infanticide was made illegal, punishable as homicide. In the 1920s a law was passed to license midwives as medical professionals and their role in the community changed as a result. They no longer delivered infants in just their own communities but traveled outside to families with whom they had no long-term relationship. Pregnancy and childbirth became medical events and lost their ritual context. In the two decades before World War II, the government became aggressively pronatal and abortion became stigmatized as scandalous, shameful, and also unpatriotic. Margaret Sanger, the birth-control crusader, was prohibited from lecturing publicly in Japan. Surreptitious birth-control clinics opened only to be shut down by the government in the 1940s.

  Economic conditions were very poor after the war. Food and other basic necessities were scarce and resources became further strained when tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers returned from occupied countries. During the war, conditions in Japan had been so severe that thousands of civilians had migrated to places like Manchuria to settle and grow food for their families. When Japan was defeated, the occupied countries no longer welcomed these immigrants and all were forced to return to a devastated Japan.

  After Japan lost the war, the government reversed its policy and both birth control and abortion became legal. Abortions were legalized in Japan in 1948 under the Eugenics Protection Act, later renamed the Law for Protection of Mothers’ Bodies. Illegitimacy was not tolerated in Japanese society. Abortion was openly advocated as necessary and inevitable in light of dire economic conditions. The ideal of the two-child family was promoted; large families were stigmatized. Hospital births became the norm and professional midwives disappeared. At the same time, the technology of X rays and ultrasound created visual images that changed notions of the fetus as a mysterious and ethereal being into that of an unborn and concrete individual with an existence already separate from the life of the mother.

  The Eugenics Act was passed at that time to allow abortion for reasons of economic hardship. Other effective methods of birth control were not available. The primary means of family planning were the rhythm method and condoms. The former was unreliable even when understood, and condoms were expensive and unavailable to most people. Even today, the oral contraceptive, IUD, and diaphragm are not in widespread use due to fear of side effects, modesty, reluctance to handle one’s genitalia, as well as lack of education about sex and reproduction. A significant portion of the income of gynecologists is derived from performing abortions, an economic fact that further embeds abortion within a matrix of social acceptance. Thus abortion became and still remains a primary form of birth control in Japan. The majority of women marry in their early twenties and soon give birth to the current ideal, two children. Because birth control is not used or is not effective, unwanted pregnancies are common. One in three pregnancies ended in abortion in 1989. In 1960 it was two in three. As a consequence it is not uncommon for women ages forty to fifty to have had two or more abortions.

  While modern medical technology made the procedure safe and efficient, and poverty and legislative sanction made it common, the effect of abortion upon the psyche of the women was overlooked. The ritual context, which in earlier times had addressed the spiritual aspects of a life transition such as abortion, had been lost.

  The Recent Development of the Mizuko Ceremony

  Small wonder that the women and men who were caught up in the government’s abrupt reversal of policy toward contraception, abortion, and family size, and who had no ethical and spiritual rudder to steady them as they entered these rapidly changing times had difficulty with psychic whiplash. People may do what has to be done to survive in desperate circumstances, but it does not mean they escape without emotional pain. Once abortion was perceived as the ending of an individual life and once economic conditions became less severe, then abortion could no longer be held as a compassionate act, an act that would return a child destined for a life of suffering back to a heavenly realm. Abortion then became a difficult decision, fraught with conflicted and repressed emotions-sadness and resignation, shame and relief. Women began to request help. They wrote letters to advice columns in newspapers and magazines asking for guidance and approached their religious leaders to appeal for help in their distress.

  When people are under stress and feel that their lives are influenced by unseen forces, religions based on superstition and magic flourish. In the context of rapid social change, some of the new religions that emerged after the war returned to old beliefs in ancestral spirits who could be protective or malevolent, depending upon whether and how they were honored. These churches were called spiritualist. They offered the services of a medium, who, if life brought misfortune, could contact the spirits to see why they were upset and find how to propitiate them.

  If there is a demand to relieve a particular kind of distress, sympathetic people of compassion and integrity will try to develop a spiritual context to meet the need. People with less integrity will seize the opportunity to make money. Both responses have occurred in Japan. With many women and some men feeling guilt and grief over previous abortions, it is natural that a ceremony such as mizuko kuyo arose.

  I
n its best form, the mizuko kuyo is performed by Buddhist and Shinto priests only upon request. The ceremonies are private and infrequent, and the priest also may provide counseling to the woman or couple. At its worst, the mizuko kuyo has become a vehicle for deliberately enhancing and exploiting the feelings of guilt people have after abortion. Certain spiritualists and priests tout the ceremony as a cure-all for every type of physical problem from joint pain to poor vision to cancer. It is the solution for an array of difficulties including traffic accidents, rejection from arranged marriages, and delinquency in surviving children. Advertisements from these “mizuko specialists” and lurid stories in tabloids illustrated with images of fetuses tell of terrifying tatari, or “spirit attacks,” in which unborn infants haunt people and cause a long list of problems. The lists are of ills common to all who are human and especially to menopausal women, that is, the current age of women who were fertile during the time when abortions were most frequent.

  Once the ceremony was offered, requests for mizuko rites increased. Between 1965 and 1984 the number of religious organizations offering mizuko ceremonies rose from 15 percent to 42 percent. However, almost half of religious organizations reported in 1986 that they took a negative view of these ceremonies and did not believe in the existence of spirit attacks. The mizuko ritual is offered most often by spiritualist groups, called Spirit Rappers, and “new” religions. About 10 percent of Shinto shrines do mizuko rituals. Among the Buddhist schools, the Shingon sect performs mizuko ceremonies most often (about one-quarter of temples) followed by the Soto Zen, Jodo, and Tendai sects. Rinzai Zen temples are least likely to offer mizuko kuyo (4 percent in one survey). Only the Jodo Shinshu sect has prohibited mizuko kuyo officially, although some Jodo Shinshu temples will do the ceremony quietly if requested.