216 



§ 2. Dragons born from beautiful stones picked up in the mountains- 



A remarkable ink-stone was preserved in olden times, says 

 the Kii zodanshu ', in a Zen monastery at Kanagawa, Musashi 

 province. Drops of water were constantly dripping out of this 

 stone, but nobody understood the reason of this strange pheno- 

 menon. Once upon a time, on a very hot summer day, when 

 the monks were sitting together in a cool room, all of a sudden 

 the ink-stone split of its own accord, and a small worm, about 

 2 bu (0.24 inches) long, crept out of- it. The monks were about 

 to kill the beast, but the head-priest forbade them to do so, and 

 carefully carried it on a fan to the garden, ivhere he put: it into 

 the lotus pond. All the monks followed him, and while they 

 were looking at the worm, they saw with astonishment hOw the 

 little creature, drawing together and stretching its body, grew 

 larger and larger. In a great fright they ran back into the house, 

 but even there they soon felt themselves nO longer safe, for the 

 sky, hitherto quite clear, at once was covered with clouds, thunder 

 and lightning raged, and a pitch-black darkness filled the garden 

 and enwrapped the building. Then they all fled away through 

 the gate and saw from far how the dragon in an immense cloud 

 ascended to the sky, first his head, then his four-legged body, 

 and finally his enormous tail. When he had disappeared, the 

 clouds dispersed and the sky became clear as before. The garden, 

 the pond and the building, however, were all in a terrible con- 

 dition. In the mean time people from the neighbouring villages 

 came to the rescue, thinking that the monastery was on fire. 



A writer of the eighteenth century, Kiuchi Sekitei ^, relates 

 the same accident as having happened in Kanazawa (instead of 

 Kanagawa). Further, he mentions a round stone which was picked 

 up by a boy in the mountains near Sammon, in Omi province. 

 As water was constantly trickling out of this stone, the boy 

 used it in later years to wet his ink-slab. After fifty years, when 

 he had attained the rank of Archbishop — the stone apparently 

 had brought him prosperity — the curious object split and a 

 dragon arose to the sky, after breaking through the ceiling and 

 the roof. The stone existed still in Skkitei's time, and in the 

 middle of it there was a hole of the size of a bean. 



1 Ch. V, p. 1. 



2 ^ ^ ;g ^, who lived 1722— -1801, in the Unkonshi kohen, ^ >jt^ ^ 



:^ ^jB , "Records on cloud-roots continued", written in 1779; Ch. II, p. 2." The first 

 volume of this worli (zempen) appeared in 1772, and the third (sampen) in 1801. 



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