Kshitigarbha

Kshitigarbha, the name means Earth Store or Earth Womb, is one of the great bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism, known in China as Dizang and in Japan as Jizo, and he is defined by an extraordinary vow: he will not accept full buddhahood for himself until all the hells are empty and every suffering being has been saved. He takes as his special field the beings of the lower realms and the dead, and he is said to work in the long, buddha-less interval between the passing of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni and the coming of the future buddha Maitreya, an age with no buddha present in the world, when his compassionate presence is most needed. He is usually shown not as a crowned and jewelled bodhisattva but as a simple shaven-headed monk, carrying a ringed staff (the khakkhara) with which he forces open the gates of hell, and a wish-fulfilling jewel that lights the darkness.

In China, the bodhisattva's principal earthly seat is Mount Jiuhua in Anhui, one of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism, venerated as such because of a Korean prince, Kim Gyo-gak, known in China as Jin Qiaojue, who travelled to Tang China around 719 CE, took monastic vows and practised in seclusion on the mountain until his death in 794 at the age of ninety-nine, after which he came to be regarded as an actual manifestation of Dizang rather than merely one of his devotees.

In modern Japan, Jizo has taken on a distinct further role in the practice of mizuko kuyo, memorial rites for miscarried, stillborn or aborted children that emerged as a widespread pastoral response from the 1970s onward, in which small red-bibbed Jizo statues, dressed and offered by grieving parents, stand as the bodhisattva's promise to guide these particular dead.

In Japan, Jizo became one of the most beloved and intimate of all religious figures, and his role broadened well beyond the scriptures. He is the guardian of travellers, and his small stone images, often in rows, stand at roadsides, crossroads and the boundaries of villages. Above all he became the protector of children, including those who die young and the mizuko, children lost before or at birth; grieving parents dress his statues in red bibs and caps and leave small offerings, in the belief that Jizo watches over and shelters such children in the other world, gathering them under his robe and defending them on the far bank of the river of the dead. This tender, protective Jizo, humble, approachable, standing patiently at the edges of the human world to guard the vulnerable and the departed, shows how a scriptural bodhisattva of the vow to empty the hells could become, in a particular culture, the gentle guardian of the roadside and of lost children. Across the tradition Kshitigarbha remains the type of the compassion that refuses to rest while any being still suffers.