A central belief of the Jodo Shinshu school is salvation by faith alone. No ritual is necessary beyond this understanding. Any death, at any age after conception, should be treated in the same way without singling out fetuses. Jodo Shinshu publications describe the mizuko ritual as a magical practice that exploits people’s superstitious tendencies. Buddhist priests of other sects agree with this view and also object to mizuko on other grounds: it is a vulgarization of Buddhist practice; it is a rite that has no scriptural basis; it is an activity that allows people to be relieved of guilt without a sincere review of their behavior and subsequent repentance; it is a practice that can tarnish a temple’s image, causing it to be seen as cheap or moneygrubbing. Rinzai Zen priests in a 1989 survey also commented that mizuko do not cause spirit attacks because the souls of unborn babies are originally pure and innocent.
It is clear from the testimonial letters sent to temples performing mizuko kuyo that people try the ritual in hopes of relieving all manner of suffering in their lives, from chronic pain to infidelity by a spouse. People write that the memory of the abortion has weighed on their minds for years. People are aware that, all rhetoric aside, abortion extinguishes the spark of a potential new life and violates the commandment or precept against killing. They want to acknowledge and atone for what they wish they could have done in a different way. They wish to purify themselves and start afresh, with new wisdom and compassion gained from their suffering.
Of the people who ask for mizuko rites or who can be seen praying to a Mizuko Jizo at a temple, most are women. They fall into three categories: those who have had abortions recently, middle-aged women who would have been reproductive during the peak in abortion procedures in the 1950s to 1970s, and a new category of young people. Although the rate of abortion in teenage girls is rising, most of the last group often has had no experience with abortion. They are moved to pray for the well-being of aborted fetuses and hope to temper any malevolent influences the spirits might exert.*
To preserve anonymity, people desiring mizuko kuyo often go not to their home temple but to a temple in another district or town specializing in mizuko kuyo. Although abortion is common, most people keep it a secret. They may be advised by the priest not to tell a marriage prospect or partner about a premarital abortion that occurred with another man or woman. This secrecy tends to enhance existing feelings of shame and guilt.
Hundreds of temples in postwar Japan have closed for lack of membership and contributions. Some temples that were in danger of closing have found a new and welcome source of income in the mizuko rites. A few have become quite prosperous as a result. Temples may begin offering the ceremony after an approach from a stone masonry company promoting the sale of a huge Jizo statue costing tens of thousands of dollars. The masons point out that if the temple installs a large Jizo and becomes known as a Mizuko Jizo site, the income derived from people on pilgrimage and those seeking mizuko kuyo will cover and soon exceed the cost of the new statue. Temples charge between one hundred and three hundred dollars for a mizuko ceremony, and some temples recommend repeating the ceremony each month for several months or each year indefinitely. In one survey, temples reported performing ten to one hundred ceremonies a month. A stone Jizo statue placed in a Jizo cemetery as a memorial can cost a family over one thousand dollars. A large four-day mizuko festival held annually at one temple was estimated to bring in sixty thousand dollars.
The Form of the Mizuko Ceremony in Japan
The simplest form of mizuko ceremony occurs thousands of times a day all over Japan as people enter the many neighborhood temples that have an altar for Mizuko Jizo on their grounds. They purify their hands with a dipper full of water from a stone basin, light a small candle or stick of pungent incense, make an offering of a toy or sweet, and pray. If the Jizo image is of stone or bronze and accessible, they may dash water over it three times. The ritual is usually brief.
Mizuko (“water baby’’) Jizo in a cemetery in Japan, holding a baby in place if the cintamani jewel.
The form of a more formal mizuko ceremony varies with many factors including the type of temple (Buddhist sects, Shinto, or new religion), the priest who officiates, and whether the ceremony is held privately for one woman or family, or is a large public event attended by many people. There are elements that are common to most ceremonies. The central figure is almost always a Mizuko Jizo. Occasionally it is a Mizuko Kannon or Jizo and Kannon together. On the altar are the traditional five offerings: flowers, candlelight, incense, water or tea, and food. There may be offerings of children’s toys, bibs, and other clothing, and food and drink such as juice, milk, candy, or a piece of fruit. A wooden rack for mizuko offerings at a Kyoto temple, for example, includes plastic toys, stuffed animals, and cartons of milk with plastic straws inserted, ready for the infant to drink. A woman at one temple told me of a friend who had a miscarriage. Every year on the anniversary date, she carefully prepares a meal for the child whom she believes was a girl. She offers the food on her home altar and talks to her daughter about what the family has been doing in the last year. She chooses the food appropriate to the child’s age. This year, when the girl would have been fifteen, the mother offered a McDonald’s hamburger and french fries.
Offerings to Jizo
Small felt Jizos that are purchased, inscribed with a message, and hung on a rack at a small temple in a shopping arcade. They serve as both a prayer and an offering.
Jizo with offerings of small coins and, at left, a bird’s nest.
Author with hundreds of hand-made bibs and wooden plaques at a Jizo temple.
Mizuko Jizo with offerings if pinwheels (on post) water in a coffee mug, flowers and stuffed toys. On the wooden slats (ihai) behind the Jizo is calligraphy with names if those who have died.
Jizo with red crocheted hat, bib, and pinwheel.
The liturgy for a Buddhist mizuko service includes chants such as the Heart Sutra, the sutra to Kannon, and specific songs or short chants (dharani) to Jizo Bodhisattva. The priest may pick a kaimyo, a posthumous Buddhist name, for the infant, writing it in black calligraphy on a thin wooden plaque called an ihai. The ihai has a rounded shape at the top representing a pagoda or stupa, the traditional memorials constructed for the dead in India or China. The ihai can be left in the temple in a memorial room full of plaques, or in a cemetery, or taken home to the family altar. The priest gives an invocation asking Jizo and the other Buddhas and bodhisattvas to watch over the mizuko, says a prayer for the mizuko, and also reads the names of the people who sponsored the ceremony. Typically those who attend are asked to offer incense individually during or after the service. At a temple specializing in mizuko kuyo for abortions, a family may purchase a small statue of Jizo to place in an area especially designated for Jizo statues, often containing rows of hundreds of Jizos. In the case of an infant who dies, the parents may place the baby’s ashes and a Jizo statue at their family grave site.
Some priests also offer counseling to those who request it. Here is what one priest has written about the type of advice he provides:
Neglecting a mizuko without having a (mizuko-kuyo) service for it is like trying to run or swim with a heavy weight attached. . . . If a couple has a mizuko they must, while one of them is still alive, have a suitable and proper memorial service for the mizuko. One should not have to live a gloomy life and not having a memorial service by the law of delayed cause and effect is tantamount to leaving sin unatoned for future generations. Mizuko prayer should be carried out by parents as the fundamental and natural thing to do. Let us say that a child is born, and then dies one minute later. The parents [would not] say to the doctor, “Take the child away and bury it.” No, of course they would not. They would call a priest, have him say at least one sutra, and hold a funeral for the child with all due ceremony. But [since] the child is in the womb and they [have not] actually seen it, they do not do these things. Just a slight gap in time makes the difference between abandoning it on the one hand and holding a fune
ral service for it on the other. I feel that prayer for the mizuko ought to be carried out as the parents’ role-or rather duty. Is that not true parental love?
Family plot (outlined by the cement curb) in a cemetery in Kyoto. A small mizuko Jizo is at right with offerings of flowers. The wooden slats (ihai) are for deceased family members.
The book this priest has written contains testimonials about the benefits of the mizuko ceremony. These letters are typical:
Thank you very much for your letter acknowledging my contribution for the mizuko prayers. I had just gone to bed with [your letter] under my pillow when I dreamed my child came to me and smiled all over his face. I felt so glad!
Thanks to you the soul of my mizuko baby is living perpetually free from sadness and suffering at the feet of the Buddha.
At the end of last year my girlfriend became pregnant. As we were not married and too young, we had an abortion. After that there was a rift between us and I felt her heart had gone far away from me.[By trying] the mizuko prayer, my girlfriend and I recovered our love for each other which had cooled off after the abortion and now we plan to get married and to have children as the happy result of our love.
I am embarrassed to say it, but until this year although I did have the mizuko on my mind, I did not know what to do about it, so I tried not to think about it. Thank you very much for praying for my mizuko. The burden I had been carrying for such a long time was lifted from my shoulders and I started to get up each morning feeling that life was really worth living.
Some historians note that the peak in mizuko ceremonies was reached in the 1980s and assert that the practice is dying out. A stone mason in Kyoto told me that demand for Jizo statues had fallen dramatically in the last ten years. Others feel that even when the rate of abortion drops in Japan, which seems inevitable-oral contraceptives became legal in the year 2000—the ceremony will always be needed. Babies will always die and parents will always grieve.
The Buddhist View of Life and Death
People might think that the acceptance by Japanese society of infanticide (until the last few centuries) and of abortion (through modern times) would lead to weak family values. In fact the opposite is true. The Japanese value the family highly. Children are noticeably cherished in Japan today, as they have been for centuries. The high regard of the Japanese people for their children was observable even to a European who worked for the Dutch East-India Company in Japan in the 1600s. He wrote:
Children are carefully and tenderly brought up; their parents strike them seldom or never, and though they cry whole nights together, endeavor to still them with patience; judging that Infants have no understanding, but that it grows with them as they grow in years, and therefore to be encouraged with indulgences and examples. It is remarkable to see how orderly and how modestly little Children of seven or eight years old behave themselves; their discourse and answers savoring of riper age, and far surpassing any I have yet seen of their times in our Country.
In times before effective birth control was available, abortion and mabiki were means to try to attain what we all wish, a society in which all children are wanted and have a high quality of life. The Japanese have been remarkably successful. Their infant mortality rate (after birth) is much lower than that in the United States and among the lowest in the world. The literacy rate is 99 percent and few children drop out of school or live in poverty. These attainments have not come without a price. The popularity of mizuko ceremonies indicates that many people feel sorrow and shame over abortion. It is a great consolation to those who suffer over abortion to believe that Jizo Bodhisattva protects and guides all children, those who die early and those who live.
Japanese attitudes about abortion or early death have as their partial foundation the Buddhist belief that life continually arises and disappears like waves on the surface of the ocean. In the largest view then, a life is not a discrete event with a certain beginning and end, but a constant appearing and disappearing due to the working of cause and effect. When causes and conditions are appropriate, life appears in this realm where we are aware of it and call it “newly born.” When causes and conditions no longer support the temporary aggregation of the five elements they deteriorate, die, and decay. They separate back into the constituent elements, physical and psychical energy, which is recycled into new life.
If we can predict that a newly conceived life will be born in a situation of suffering, for example, to parents who could not care for an infant because of poverty or illness, then it would be seen as an act of mercy to return that life to a realm of no suffering, back into the ocean of life, the great mystery from which it emerged, and then for the parents to pray that those life elements would reemerge in a time and place where they could be loved and cared for properly. This view of life and death is extremely helpful in relieving the emotional pain that can accompany abortion, miscarriage, or early death.
The healing aspect of the mizuko kuyo was experienced by one woman who came to our ceremony grieving over an abortion that had occurred ten years before. She said that at the time she had been unmarried, very young, and unable to support even herself. Her family was angry with her and insisted that she terminate the pregnancy. She felt that to bring a new life into such an environment would cause only misery, and reluctantly underwent an abortion. Now she was mature, financially secure, and in a loving relationship; she wanted a child but had been unable to conceive. Her life was undermined by sorrow, her pain deepened by each baby she happened to see.
As she was listening to a description of life as a continuous process, appearing and disappearing, her sorrow for herself dropped away. It was transformed into an energy that moved outward, a sincere wish that the child whose life had touched her very briefly go on to find happiness. In releasing the child at last, she also released herself.
The Buddha helped a grief-stricken mother to this realization. The woman must have been young, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, and had never seen a dead person before.
At the time of the Buddha there lived a young woman from a poor family. She was so thin that she was called Kisagotami, which meant Haggard Gotami. A rich merchant fell in love with her and married her over his family’s objections. When she gave birth to a son her in-laws accepted her at last and she was completely happy. One day the little boy became acutely ill and suddenly died. Kisagotami became distraught, and never having seen death before, refused to believe that her son could be dead. Carrying the baby in her arms she went from house to house asking for medicine to revive him. At last a kind man advised her to go to the greatest physician, the Buddha, for a remedy.
The Buddha told her to go into the village and bring him a few mustard seeds from a house where no one had died. The young woman went from house to house with her dead child, asking for the seeds. Everyone was glad to give her a few seeds but at each house she heard of someone beloved who had died there, a child, a wife or husband, a mother, or a father. She was told, “The dead are more numerous than the living.”
By evening she understood for herself how brief and fragile life was and that death and sorrow came to all who were born. She took her child’s body to the cemetery and buried it. Then she returned to the Buddha and entered the order of nuns. The Buddha told her, “When a person’s mind is deeply attached, infatuated with sons and cattle, death grabs him and carries him away, as a flood does a sleeping village.” Later Kisagotami became enlightened as she was watching the flickering flame of an oil lamp. The Buddha appeared before her and said, “Though one should live a hundred years without seeing the deathless state, yet it is better indeed to live a single day seeing the Deathless.”
In the West we view life as a discrete, personal event. We are born at a certain hour on a specific date. We live a certain number of years, months, days, and minutes, and at a certain time on a specific date we die. Our life has a start and a stop point.
The Buddhist concept of life is different. Our life is only a small part of the eterna
l life. It is interconnected with that huge body-mind always. Birth is not a complete separation but rather the appearance of a new bud, branch, or leaf. Death is not the end of life but one step in a dynamic of change that has no beginning or end. A leaf emerges from a small bud when conditions are right in the spring. It is visible on the tree until autumn when it changes color, falls, and disappears from our view. We do not say the tree dies, only the leaf. To say a leaf—or any individual—has died is not incorrect but is only a very small part of what we see if we enlarge the framework of time and place.
When a leaf falls, it decays, turning into oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon in the soil. It is taken up into roots of trees, usually the very same tree it fell from, and is literally turned into new leaves. If we fast forwarded a video of its life it would appear as bud, leaf, dry husk, C+N+O2, sap, bud, leaf. Increase the speed and it would appear as a flickering, leaf, leaf, leaf. Only its location on the tree would change. If we, like Kisagotami, could perceive clearly and continuously the constant birth and death that comprise the Deathless, our suffering would not increase but would end.
No one believes that abortion is good. Some sincerely believe it to be killing and therefore wrong. They believe that each human life is a spark of the divine that must be allowed to be born and to grow. They believe that the creator had the largest view and has made each life to be “right.” Others believe that abortion is in some circumstances the more appropriate of two very difficult choices. They believe that humans, in open and humble communication with the divine, can hold a larger view and realize circumstances into which a life would be born only to endure terrible hardship and abuse.
Neither view is right. They are only views, part of what the Buddha called a “wilderness of views.” Either view can be taken to an unhealthy extreme. The “right to life” for every human conception can be taken to the extreme of human overpopulation and destruction not only of other human life but of many other living creatures, and finally to the extreme of killing people who do not agree with you. While fighting for the survival of each fetus, this view evades the subsequent and huge responsibility of ensuring the support and care of each life after it is born, for instance, to a poor single mother or into an abusive family.
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