The Dragon of Enoshima

On the shore of Sagami Bay, in the country where Kamakura would one day be built, there were villages, and the villages had a dragon.

He lived in a lake in the hills behind them, and he had five heads. The Engi says the people had suffered him for a thousand years and more, longer than anyone's oldest story. He came down out of the lake when it suited him and did harm, and went back, and there was nothing anyone could do about a thing with five heads. The people of Koshigoe, who have told this longest, say the worst of it plainly: he took their children.

Then, in the year 552, the bay changed. The earth shook under the villages. Storms came in off the sea, and the sky over the water did things that nobody had a name for. When it was over there was an island where there had been only water, risen from the floor of the bay, and a goddess came down out of the sky onto it and made it her home. The Engi calls her Benzaiten. The villagers on the shore had never seen anything so beautiful or so calm.

Neither had the dragon.

He came down from his lake and looked at the island from the shore, and all five heads looked at her, and he fell in love. He went to her, and he asked.

"I have lived in that lake a thousand years," he said. "There is nothing on this coast that does not fear me. Be my consort. I will give you the lake and the hills and the villages and everything that moves in them."

The Engi says she was known for her eloquence, and that she used it. She did not raise her voice, and she did not raise her hand.

"Everything that moves in them fears you," she said. "That is what you have just offered me. Look at the shore. Those are villages. There are people in them, and for a thousand years every one of those people has lived knowing that one day you might come down from the lake. Tell me what you have given them in all that time."

He said nothing, which for a creature with five mouths was a great deal.

"Nothing," she said. "You took. A dragon as great as you say you are could have kept that shore safe from everything, and instead you were the thing it needed keeping safe from. That is what you have done. Is that the dragon who asks for me?"

He understood her. The Engi says he was ashamed, and shame is the one thing that a thousand years of being feared had never given him.

"I will stop," he said. "From today I will not come down against them. I swear it."

He turned to face the island, so that he was looking south, towards her, and he stayed that way. His body stiffened and settled and grew over with earth and trees, and he became a hill, the one that still stands there with its mouth open towards the sea. The people call it Dragon's Mouth.

The people of Koshigoe add a little. They say she would not have him unless he reformed and guarded the people he had harmed; that he agreed, and became the guardian of that coast, and that the villages prospered under the two of them. When at last he died, they say, his body lay along the hills from Fukazawa to the place where the temple Ryuko-ji now stands, and the line of the hills between Kamakura and Enoshima is the shape of him. A small shrine there, Ryuko-myojin, keeps him.

The Engi itself was written in 1047, in Chinese, the scholars' language of Japan then, by the monk Kokei. Its first part is the dragon. Its second part is the island's later history, the great monks who crossed to it to pray, Ennin among them, the third abbot of Enryaku-ji. The shrine on the island, three shrines in truth, counts its founding from the same year the goddess came, 552.

The Buddha was teaching the Sutra of Golden Light to a great assembly, and in the assembly the goddess Sarasvati rose. She drew her upper robe over one shoulder, knelt on her right knee, joined her hands and bowed to him.

"Whoever the monk is who teaches this sutra," she said, "I will give him eloquence. I will give him the dharani, and speech that is listened to, and the great clearness of knowledge. If he loses a word of it, or a single letter, I will put the word back in his mouth and the letter back in his memory. By my dharani this sutra will not vanish from Jambudvipa, and those who hear it will have sharp minds and long lives, merit, learning, and skill in every art and craft."

Then she taught a bath. Thirty herbs are named for it, sweet flag and gorochana, shirisha, sandal, saffron and nagakesara among them, measured out in equal parts when the Pushya star is rising, powdered, and blessed with a mantra a hundred times. A circle is drawn in cow dung and strewn with flowers.

Honey is set out in vessels of gold and silver. Four guards stand in armour, four maids hold vases, and mirrors, arrows and spears are placed round the circle at intervals. Incense of bdellium burns, music of five cymbals plays, umbrellas and banners are raised. Behind an image of the Tathagata the sick man bathes, and the mantra of peace is said over the water. It is for the troubles the planets bring, and shooting stars, and bad dreams, and Vinayaka, and sorcerers.

"And I will come," she said, "with the gods, to wherever that bath is taken, and in the temples and the villages and the towns I will end disease. I will lengthen the lives of the monks and nuns and lay people who hold this sutra, until they are free."

In the assembly the brahmin Kaundinya stood and praised her, and his praise is the picture of her that went east.

"Great ascetic, worthy of worship, a mine of virtue. Standing on one foot, clothed in a garment of grass. Chief of goddesses, with your eight arms. The finest lioness, the one who carries people over."

The Buddha heard it out.

"Excellent," he said. "Excellent, great goddess Sarasvati. You came here for the good of many beings, and what you have said was well said."

She bowed at his feet and sat down to one side.

This is the book by which she reached Japan. Translated into Chinese and carried east between the sixth and eighth centuries, it gave her a Japanese name, Benzaiten, which renders the Chinese for the deity of great eloquence, and two bodies: the eight-armed figure of Kaundinya's hymn, holding weapons, and the gentler one who sits with a biwa, the Japanese lute, where in India she holds the veena.