ABSTRACT
I first visited a group of Jizō images located at “the Blood Pond” (chi no ike 血の池), in the late 1980s with my parents and my sister in a taxicab. We had been over to a friend's temple in Odawara for the morning, and he was planning on hosting us for the day, but a funeral intervened, and like a dutiful midwife, this Buddhist priest needed to take the call to deliver the departed soul into a peaceful afterlife. So he bundled us into a taxi and told the driver to take us to “Shōjin ike in Moto-Hakone, the place with the twenty-five bodhisattvas.” With some more instruction and a hastily drawn yet meticulous map for the driver, we were off. Not an hour later, we arrived at a large Jizō image carved into the side of a towering cliff by the highway and pulled into the small turnaround. It was an incredible statue, breathtaking in the simplicity of its composition and in the serenity of its expression (see Figure 9.1). We ooh-ed and aah-ed and took photos; I chanted the Heart Sutra.
