Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/439

 9*8. XL MAY 30, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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of their worship were far inferior to the Buddhists' own, and only worthy of serving the latter in guarding their doctrines. So the late Sir M. Monier- Williams is perfectly right in tracing the Buddhist Vadjra into the Brahmanist Siva which view, by the way, is corroborated by the Japanese usage of making an ex-voto to the Blue -faced Vadjra of a chaplet of little triangular cushions, red in hue, as well as miniature monkeys made of cloth pieces and cotton, the same being done among the Hindu worshippers of Siva (see Takaya, * Ydshabako,' early in the nineteenth century, and North Indian Notes and Queries). As there are so many forms of Siva, so numerous are the varieties of Vadjra, one of which being the Blue - faced deity we are upon. In the winter of 1893, one day in the British Museum, I happened to converse about this matter with the late Sir (then Mr.) A. Wollaston Franks, who suggested to me that possibly the three simian attend- ants on the Vadjra were derivable from the Hindu cultusof Hanuman,the Monkey King. Subsequently, in the 'Lectures on Buddhism,' by Moriier-Williams, 1889, I came across a passage relating that a certain university in England keeps in its museum a statue of Vadjra, with the monkeys of the above de- scription. But he does not specify where it was made ; if it prove a production of any other country than Japan, it will give a strong support to our opinion that these monkeys are not a Japanese invention at all, as is asserted by Kitamura above cited After ascertaining the whereabouts of the statue in the 'Lectures,' can any of your readers inform me by what people it was made, and from what locality it was brought to England ?

I shall add here that the image of the Buddha Vaichajayaguru (i.e., Doctor of Medi- cine) in Japan and China has a monkey god among its twelve attendants, whose functions are separately assigned to the twelve hours of the day : viz., rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, serpent, horse, sheep, ape, cock, dog, and hog. Also in Dr. Sven Hedin's 'Through Asia,' 1898, mention is made of a fragmentary statuette of a monkey-god he dug up from some Buddhist ruins amidst a desert of Central Asia. During my studies and services in the Victoria and Albert Museum I often passed, in its Indian section, by a photograph exhibited to the public of the stone statues of two apes that exist in some part of India. They were apparently of different sexes, the one squat and the other half-erect with its hands put on the shoulders of the first, which struck me as quite different from the single

figure of Hanuman familiar to our eyes, and put me forcibly in mind of the Japanese figures in question. Can somebody tell me what they represent, and what legends are attached to them *? *

Whatever origin his attendant monkeys might claim, the Blue -faced Vadjra con- tinues to this day to be worshipped by some Japanese, and among them by the villagers among whom I am now sojourning. They join in a company of, say, five families, and on the days sacred to him make feast by sub- scription in one of their houses, his image being carried round and enshrined among them in their turns. His popular title is Kdshin, or Elder Metal and Monkey, origin- ally the name of a day in the Chinese calendar, occurring once in every cycle of sixty days, so that there are six such days of solemnity in every ordinary lunar year. In the begin- ning people used to be watching the whole night, keeping themselves in a strict taboo, in the belief that then the deity would descend from the heavens and inspect their con- duct ; but later on it seems that the feast gave a great occasion to their mirth, where- with, as they say, to scare away the evil spirits from coming to try to force the way in their houses. The 'Eigwa Monogatari,' eleventh century, ed. 1891, Tokyo, book ii. pp. 16-17, gives an account of the sudden death of the mother of the sixty-seventh emperor, near the end of the tenth century, that took place in a merrymaking party on that night. Nowadays such customs have ceased, at least in this part of the country. From these it would seem that those injunctions symbolized by the three monkeys' attitudes were originally of pur- port to enforce the rigorous inhibitions which the worshippers of the Vadjra were bound to observe on those nights. For this purpose, indeed, the monkey is an opportune animal, for a Buddhist parable allegorizes that the monkey, typifying the conscience, is only able to restrain the ever-flirting horse, or the will the Japanese, Chinese, and Annamese believing that the presence of a monkey in a stable makes the horses very healthy and docile. Besides, a superstition widely prevails in Japan that one who was begotten on the night of Kdshin, irrespective of the imposed taboo, is sure to grow up " long-handed," which means " thievish," the characteristic of the monkeys.

In days of yore it was very common to see

' In a Chinese itinerary of the fifteenth century, ' Hai-wai-hien-wan-luh,' the Japanese are said to have paid an unusual respect to a monkey-king and a monkey-queen, then in life.