CHAPTER V. 



CHINESE AND INDIAN DRAGONS IDENTIFIED Oil CONNECTED WITH 

 ANCIENT JAPANESE DEITIES. 



The Chinese and Indian ideas on dragons having so thoroughly 

 pervaded the Japanese mind as we have seen in the preceding 

 chapters, it is not astonishing that many an ancient Shinto god 

 was identified or connected with them. Sea-gods or serpent-shaped 

 mountain-deities were especially liable to be considered in this 

 light, and the thirteenth and later centuries did not hesitate to 

 explain old legends of the gods in their own way, making abundant 

 use of the words "Dragon-god" and „ Dragon-king". The following 

 passages are specimens of this tendency. 



§ 1. Sagara, the Dragon-king, the Yamato no oroohi, Antoku Tenno 

 and the Kusanagi sword. 



The GuhwansM"^ (before 1225) tells us that Itsukushima no 

 Myojin ( ^ -^ y 5^ jjil^ ) the goddess of the island Itsukushima 

 in the Inland sea) was according to tradition a Dragon-king's 

 daughter, reborn as Antoku Tenno, the unhappy Emperor 

 who was drowned in his seventh year in the battle of Dan- 

 no-ura (1185). His grandmother, Nii-no-ama, Kiyomori's widow, 

 jumped over board with the little Emperor, when she saw that 

 the battle was lost. So the Dragon-king's daughter returned to 

 her father. 



Details of this legend are found in the Gempei seisuiki ^ (about 

 1250), which relates that this goddess was a grandchild of 

 Amaterasu, the Sun-goddess, and the daughter of the Dragon- 

 king Sagara \ The same work gives, in another passage *, the 



1 Ch. V, K. T. K. Vol. XIV, p. 533. About the Gukwansho cf. above, p. 187, note 1 



2 Ch. XII, Teikoku Bunko, Vol. V, p. 333. 



3 ^ ^W^i Shakatsura, i. e. Sagara, one of the eight Great Dragon-kings. Cf. 

 above Introd., § 1, p. 4; Book II, Ch. IV, § 6, p. 189. According to Eitel, Handbook 

 of Chinese Buddhism, Sagara's daughter, eight years old, became a Buddha under 

 •Manjugri's tuition. 4 Ch. XLIV, p. 1158. 



Digitized by Microsoft® 



