Great Construction

Events Behind the Transition from Night to Day


     It is probably necessary for me to detail when the transition from night to day that I always teach about actually occurred. It was on June 15, 1931. In accordance with a divine directive, I performed a certain act. Here I will write about what happened.
     Several days before, I had received a divine revelation. It said to go and worship at the well-known Nihon-ji temple located on Mount Nokogiri in Chiba Prefecture.
     I was to take more than thirty people with me and we were to stay one night. I immediately started preparations. Fortunately, among my followers was a person who was on good terms with the head of the temple, the rather well-known Zen priest Jôsetsu Tanaka, and I had the follower make all the arrangements. With the number of people assembled, we set out on June fourteenth on the train from Ryogoku Station. We arrived at the temple around nine o’clock that evening.
     The Zen temple was located about halfway up a rather high mountain, and the venerable building was large and spacious, so for us city dwellers who were accustomed to uproar and noise, it seemed as if we were travelling in an enchanted fairyland aloof from the world.
     Before dawn the next morning, we all set out with lanterns to light our path and arrived at the summit of the mountain in about an hour. Fortunately the weather was good and the sight of the sea off the Chiba coast appearing out of the morning mist was indescribable. In the distance right before us appeared Mt. Kiyosumi where the famous Priest Nichiren raised the cry “Homage to the Lotus Sutra!” and began his work of teaching the importance of The Lotus Sutra.
     Facing the rising sun, just as dawn was breaking, our group prayed a norito prayer. In the refreshing morning atmosphere, the power of speech from the prayer moved us to the epitome of exhilaration. Soon afterwards, we descended from the mountain and worshiped at the main sanctuary of Nihon-ji temple. After lunch a commemorative group photograph was taken, and we returned to Tokyo. It was after this trip that several mystical occurrences were experienced that I will now relate.
     First of all, in front of the main hall of Nihon-ji temple stood a large sala tree, also known as the Bodhi tree. It was very unusual to see in Japan such a large example of this variety. It is said that Shakyamuni attained enlightenment sitting on a rock under this kind of tree. In addition, Nihon-ji is situated on the side of Mt. Kenkon-zan (the official name of Nokogiri-yama mountain), and from about half-way up the mountain extending to the summit, there must have been hundreds of stone buddhas all about three feet tall. In addition to images of Shakyamuni, Amitabha, and Avalokitshvara (Kannon), there were many other kinds of Buddhist images, including Boddhidharma (Daruma), Acala (Fudô), Ragaraja (Aizen), the Four Peacock Kings, Shakyamuni’s Sixteen Disciples, and arhats.
     Truly the temple and the grounds were a prototype of the Buddhistic world of Japan. Mysteriously though, in December 1943 a fire that had started in the temple turned the whole area into ashes. The newspapers at the time said that rebuilding the complex would be impossible, and it was then that I realized that the destruction of this temple must be a prototype of the end of Buddhism, the end of the law (I composed some poems describing this trip and have published them in Landscapes to which I urge readers to refer). To return home we boarded the train and arrived at Ryogoku Station just as it was becoming dusk. Previously, I had made an appointment with a Mr. Akashi to stop by and perform a religious ceremony at his home in Honjo Midori-cho. No one was aware of what happened at the time, but it was a pleasant surprise for me. The incident is still a mystery within a mystery, and when the time is right I will explain.
     At that time I lived at Hakkeien (Eight-View Park) in Omori and in the next district of Ôimachi there lived a footwear craftsman named Koike. He visited me from time to time and we had pleasant conversations about spiritual matters. After my trip, he visited me the following day, on June sixteenth around ten o’clock in the morning. In an uncharacteristic manner he talked about something awful that would happen. I asked him what awful thing. “I had an awful dream last night. While digging a hole in the street, a friend of mine named Yamaguchi said, ‘The world is all messed up. You have to dig a hole and then you have to get into it,’” reported Koike to me with a very sad face. But in the dream, according to Koike, Yamaguchi’s face was serene like that of the Buddha. I thought, “I see. This is an indication of the end of Buddhism.” Koike continued. “Right in the middle of your grounds is a small pond. Someone threw a stone into that pond. The water in the pond started to form a ripple, which got bigger and spread worldwide. Innumerable people were caught in the vortex from the wave and perished. After a while, the vortex subsided, and the region became lonely. Statues of Kannon stood here and there,” he said. I told him that his dream had been a message from God to me transmitted through him and that the dream had nothing to do with him. He would not hear of that. Quite terrified he said, “No, this dream has a great deal to do with me. That’s because the first stone that is thrown into the pond has to be thrown by me. That is the way it is. But when I do that, my own life is over.” I tried to sooth and calm him down before sending him home.
     Then, something extremely mysterious occurred. In the evening that day, there was a telephone call from Koike’s wife. She said that her husband was acting quite strangely and to please come right away. I went to their house and indeed found that he was behaving very curiously. He said to me, “The world will be in trouble if I don’t put it in focus. I was born in this world to put it in focus.” I began to feel that I had been shown some kind of mystery. I was quite awed. Telling him, “Well, if you must put the world in focus in order to save it, that is very fine, but just don’t do anything rash,” I went home. The next morning, Koike’s wife called to tell me that Koike had plunged into the sea at the Suzugamori Beach and died. At that moment I felt everything became clear to me. It was indeed an incident enveloped in mystery.
     Two days later, on June 18, Mori Hosei, a sculptor, who was rather well known at the time and with whom I was quite close paid a call. He said he wanted to sculpt a very precious wooden statue but did not think he was qualified and wanted to ask my opinion about what he should do. I asked whom he wished to sculpt and he replied that it was Amaterasu Okami, the sun goddess. I told him it was a good idea and that he should do it. He was very happy and went away. Later, when the sculpture was close to completion, he came again and asked me to look at. I went and saw that it was rather well done. He asked me about what to do with the pattern behind the back, and I replied that it should symbolize the sun, be very big and round, and carved in relief. He nodded in agreement with my answer and was very happy. About a half a year from the time he had first to come to talk with me, he finished his life-sized statue. Mori was a member of Oomoto at the time, so he donated the statue to Oomoto. It was soon after he had given the statue to Oomoto that the religion experienced its fatal persecution, so I thought there must be some connection between the statue and the events of June 15.
     Still another incident that I believe was related was the following which occurred at a branch of Oomoto in a place called Wadabori in Tokyo. In the branch, there was a life-sized porcelain statue of the Boddhisatva Avaloketishvara. For some reason, its neck broke off. At the time I thought the occurrence very curious and it was a little while later that the Oomoto persecutions began.
     In analyzing Koike’s dream and his later behavior as previously described, I am convinced that when Koike “fixed the focus of the world,” it was the same as the dawn, so it must have been a suggestion that the world had transitioned to day.
     The story of Mori’s wooden statue is curious as well as the events surrounding Nippon-ji temple. The name Akashi, although written in different ideograms, is synonymous with the Japanese word for “proof,” so the combination of all these different incidents at the time led me to believe they tallied up to the same thing.
     All these happenings made me surmise that the day of June 15, 1931, was the very day of the transition of the change from night to day.
     Finally, there is one more incident to add. After I got back from Nippon-ji temple, a follower who was living in the Kojimachi district, brought me the fragment of a tile. Upon close inspection, I saw that on the fragment was a chrysanthemum insignia. The crest itself was whole, but everything around it was broken. At that moment I had an epiphany and recalled the old proverb, “break the jewel, keep the tile whole” which means “die in honor or lead a mediocre life.” I cannot but think that this was a divine prediction about the Japanese emperor who since those times has denied his divine status and declared that he is a human being. 


Manuscript, written probably in or after 1950;
posthumously published in an eight-page leaflet
commemorating Recognition Day of Paradise on Earth, 1963.
translated by cynndd