218 



which was said to belong to the Dragon-god of the place and 

 was called "Dragon-god- stone" in§,W^' Ryujin-seki) hy the 

 villagers. In the Kyoho era (1716—1735) five or six men came 

 to the neighbouring villages and asked the inhabitants to sell 

 them woman's hair in order to make a rope by means of which 

 they might carry the stone as an offering to the Dragon-god of 

 Seta. A short time afterwards the stone actually disappeared, 

 but it was much too heavy to have been carried away by human 

 hands (probably the men in question were transformed dragons) '. 

 The second stone, which was black and about three shaku long, 

 lay in a garden and was said to cause even a clear summer 

 sky to become cloudy in a moment, when it was touched by 

 somebody. In 1764 the stone was no longer outside, but within 

 the castle, so that the experiment could not be made any more. 

 ''Perhaps", says Hotta, the author of the Sanshu hidan, "it is a 

 so-called 'cloud-root' {'^i^, un-kon)" ^. 



We find the following details in the Shosan chomon kishu (1849) '. 

 The abbot of a Shingon monastery had a so-called dragon-gem 

 (^ y ^, ryu no tavia), which was considered to be an un- 

 commonly precious object. On cloudy days it became moist at 

 once, and when it rained it was quite wet. In reality it was 

 not a dragon-gem, but a dragon's egg [ryu no tamago, ^ y J^|i|). 

 Such eggs are hatched amid thunderstorm and rain; then they 

 destroy even palaces and uproot big trees, and it is therefore 

 advisable to throw them away before-hand on a lonely spot in 

 the moifntains. The abbot, however, deemed it not necessary to 

 take this precaution with the dragon's egg in his possession, 

 because it was dead. "Thirty years ago", he said, "the egg 

 became moist as soon as the weather was a little cloudy, and 

 its luster was magnificent; but as it afterwards did not show 

 moistness any more even on rainy days, nor grew any longer, 

 it is evidently dead". Miyoshi Shosan (the author) himself went 

 to the monastery to see this wonderful egg, and gives a picture 

 of it . (p. 573), which shows the dragon-fetus inside. Its dimen- 

 sions were: length, 4 sun, 8 bu; breadth, 4 sun, 6 bu; it was 

 like a " diamond-natured thunder-axe-stone" (3S;MM^'5' 

 gyohu-shitsu rai-fu-seki, called by the people Tengu no ono, 



1 Ibidem, Ch. II, p. 13. 



2 Sanshu kidan, Ch. IV, p. 788. 



^ ^ Uj ^ ^ W ^' '*^""®" '" ""^^^ ^y ^^°^^^ ^*' ^''"■'™' ^ l-U ^ 



rp A ; Zoku Teikoku bunko, Vol. XLVII, Kinsei kidan zenshQ. Ch. IV, pp. 572 seqq. 



Digitized by Microsoft® 



