182 



pond. As the passers-by, who read this, all believed it, on the 

 indicated day an immense crowd flocked together from Yamato, 

 Kawachi, Izumi and Settsu provinces, in order to see the miracle. 

 The priest himself, standing at the gate of the Kofuku temple, 

 was highly amused by the success of his joke and laughed in 

 his sleeve when seeing the crowd on the tiptoe of expectation. 

 When the evening fell and no dragon appeared, they all went 

 home greatly disappointed. 



The Gempei seisuihi^ (about 1250) tells us how in 717 A.D. the 

 Zen priest Shinyu was invited by an unknown goddess, who said 

 to have always protected the Emperor and the people, to come 

 to the top of Mount Hakusan, in order to worship there her 

 "real shape". When he went there, and prayed near the pond 

 on the mountain, at the same time uttering incantations {haji) 

 and making three sacred mudras (mystic finger- distortions), there 

 arose from the midst of the pond an enormous nine-headed, 

 serpent-shaped dragon. The priest, however, declared that this 

 was not the deity's real shape, and increased the power of his 

 mantras (magical formulae), till he at last beheld the august 

 form of the Eleven-faced Kwannon. 



When connecting this legend with the passage of the Kojidan, 

 referred to above, we may easily conjecture that the sacred pond 

 on Mount Hakusan had been from olden times the abode of an 

 original Japanese dragon, which gave rise to different Buddhist 

 dragon legends in regard to this pond. 



In the Genko Shahusho'^ (before 134:6) we read that the day 

 before the priest Jitsuhan's ^ arrival at Daigoji (in Kyoto), Genkaku *, 

 the abbot of this monastery, saw in a dream a blue dragon 

 arising from the pond in the garden, lifting up his head and 

 spouting clear water from its mouth. As he understood the 

 meaning of this dream, the abbot the next morning ordered his 

 pupils to clean the monastery thoroughly in order to graciously 

 receive the venerable pupil, who actually arrived. 



In a much later work, the Sanshu kidan kohen'^ (1779), we find, 

 the following particulars about an old woman who could cure 

 all kinds of diseases. She was believed to be possessed by the god 

 of the neighbouring pond, be it a river-otter {kawa-oso, j^l^^), 

 or a dragon-snake (^| i*^). She was a strange, poor old woman, 



1 Ch. XXXIX, p. 742. See above, p. 1.65, note 2. 



2 Ch. XIII, p. 853. 



3 Wiu. 4 ^m. 



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