Daikokuten
Daikokuten is a syncretic Japanese deity of fortune, luck and wealth. Daikokuten originated from Mahākāla, the Buddhist Deva conflated with the native Shinto god Ōkuninushi. He is a patron of farmers, cooks and jobs related to money such as bankers.
Overview
Mahākāla in East Asian Buddhism
The Sanskrit term 'Mahākāla' was originally one of the epithets of the Hindu god Shiva in his aspect as time, the ultimate destroyer of all things. This title and aspect of Shiva was eventually adopted by Buddhism, where Mahākāla became reinterpreted as a dharmapāla or a protector of the Buddhist dharma but also as a terrifying deity who roams the forests at night with hordes of ghouls and demons in his train.Mahākāla is mentioned in many Chinese Buddhist texts, although iconographic depictions of him in China were rare during the Tang and Song periods. He eventually became the center of a flourishing cult after the 9th century in the kingdoms of Nanzhao and Dali in what is now the province of Yunnan, a region bordering Tibet, where his cult was also widespread. Due to Tibetan influence, his importance further increased during the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty, with his likeness being displayed in the imperial palace and in Buddhist temples inside and outside the capital. The deity's name was both transcribed into Chinese characters as 摩訶迦羅 and translated as 大黑天.
File:Hangzhou Baochengsi Mahegela Zaoxiang 20120518-07.jpg|thumb|320px|Mahākāla flanked by the bodhisattvas Samantabhadra and Mañjuśrī. Baocheng Temple, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
In some texts, Mahākāla is described as a fearsome god, a "demon who steals the vital essence " and who feeds on flesh and blood, though he is also said to only devour those who committed sins against the Three Jewels of Buddhism. One story found in the Tang-era monk Yi Xing's commentary on the Mahāvairocana Tantra portrays Mahākāla as a manifestation of the buddha Vairocana who subjugated the ḍākinīs, a race of flesh-eating female demons, by swallowing them. Mahākāla released them on the condition that they no longer kill humans, decreeing that they could only eat the heart – believed to contain the vital essence of humans known as 'human yellow' – of those who were near death. A tale found in Amoghavajra's translation of the Humane King Sūtra relates how a heterodox master instructed Prince Kalmāṣapāda to offer the heads of a thousand kings to Mahākāla, the "great black god of the graveyard", if he wished to ascend the throne of his kingdom.
File:Sichuan o yunnan, mahakala, guardiano della dottrina, xiv sec con piedistallo del xvi sec.JPG|left|thumb|Ming dynasty statue of Dàhēitiān. Sichuan, China. 14th century
As time went by, Mahākāla also became seen as a guardian of Buddhist monasteries, especially its kitchens. The monk Yijing, who traveled to Srivijaya and India during the late 7th century, claimed that images of Mahākāla were to be found in the kitchens and porches of Indian Buddhist monasteries, before which offerings of food were made:
Yijing then relates an anecdote about how the deity once miraculously provided food for five hundred monks who came to visit the monastery of Makuṭabandhana in Kushinagar after one of the female servants prayed and made offerings before his image. This idea of Mahākāla as one who brought prosperity to monasteries and granted wishes may have contributed to the identification of the deity as a god of wealth and fortune in Japan.
In China, the god was also associated with fertility and sexuality: during the Qixi Festival held on the 7th day of the 7th month of the Chinese calendar, married women traditionally bought dolls or figurines called 'Móhéluó' or 'Móhóuluó' – the term probably deriving from 'Mahākāla' – in the hopes of giving birth to a child. Ritual texts also prescribe the worship of Mahākāla to women looking for a male partner or to pregnant women.
Transformation in Japan
Upon being introduced to Japan via the esoteric Tendai and Shingon sects, Mahākāla gradually transformed into a jovial, beneficent figure as his positive qualities increasingly came to the fore – mostly at the expense of his darker traits. Whereas earlier images of Daikokuten showed him as wrathful, later artworks consistently came to portray him as smiling.Saichō, the founder of the Tendai school, is credited with bringing the cult of Mahākāla-Daikokuten to Japan. Legend claims that when he first climbed Mount Hiei, Mahākāla appeared to him in the form of an old man and offered to become the guardian of the monastic community envisioned by Saichō, what would become known as Enryaku-ji.
By the medieval period, when Buddhism and native Japanese beliefs were becoming syncretized, Daikokuten became conflated with the native kami Ōkuninushi, as the first two characters of the latter's name can also be read as 'Daikoku'. Daikokuten's status as patron of Enryaku-ji also influenced this connection: he was identified with Sannō Gongen, the deity enshrined in Hiyoshi Taisha at the eastern foot of Mount Hiei, who in turn was identified with Ōkuninushi or Ōmononushi.
File:Shirousagi_-02.jpg|thumb|left|310px|The god Ōkuninushi, bearing a sack, meeting the Hare of Inaba
The sack or bag Daikokuten carries served to further associate the god with Ōkuninushi: in the story of the Hare of Inaba, the young Ōkuninushi is said to have originally been treated by his wicked elder brothers as their luggage carrier. Besides the sack, Daikokuten began to acquire other attributes such as the golden mallet called uchide no kozuchi and two big bales of rice. He was also considered a god of fertility, and was thus also portrayed making the obscene fig sign, carrying a suggestively bifurcated daikon, sporting a huge erect penis, or being entirely represented himself by a wooden phallus.
Mice and rats also became a part of Daikokuten's iconography, due to Mahākāla's association with Vaiśravaṇa, the Buddhist analogue to the Hindu Kubera, and Pañcika, Vaiśravaṇa's general and consort of the yakshini goddess Hārītī, who were both associated with the northern direction – which corresponds to the sign of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac. This also contributed to the conflation of Daikokuten with Ōkuninushi, as mice also figured in the latter's mythology.
File:恵比寿と大黒天 - Ebisu and Daikoku.jpg|thumb|315px|18th century ukiyo-e depicting Daikokuten and Ebisu
Medieval exegetes interpreted Mahākāla-Daikokuten in both a positive and a negative way: on the one hand he was seen as a symbol of fundamental ignorance, but on the other hand he also represented the nonduality of ignorance / dark and enlightenment. He was identified with Ichiji Kinrin and thus a symbol of ultimate reality, but also with the directional deity Īśāna, who is also considered to be a god of obstacles. Indeed, because of the stigma related to his origins, he was identified in some texts as a jissha, a 'real' god considered inferior to deities who are provisional manifestations of enlightened buddhas and bodhisattvas. However, medieval esoteric Buddhism also posited the existence of a 'higher' Daikokuten, the conventional Daikokuten being but one of the various guises he takes. While the latter represented ignorance, the former was seen as transmuting ignorance into awakening.
Daikokuten was also linked or identified with other deities such as Ugajin, Benzaiten, Vaiśravana-Bishamonten, the earth god Kenrō Jijin, or the wisdom king Acala. Indeed, Acala, like Mahākāla-Daikokuten, is credited in some sources with defeating and converting the ḍākinīs and is also considered to be a wrathful avatar of Vairocana.
In popular belief, Daikokuten is also commonly paired with the folk deity Ebisu. Just as Daikokuten was conflated with Ōkuninushi, Ebisu was sometimes identified with Ōkuninushi's son Kotoshironushi or the dwarf god Sukunabikona, who assisted Ōkuninushi in developing the land of Japan. In homes, the two deities were enshrined in the kitchen or oven, while merchants worshiped them as patron deities of commercial success. Farmers meanwhile revered them as gods of the rice paddy.
Iconography
Mahākāla was originally represented in East Asian Buddhist art as a dark-skinned wrathful deity wearing a diadem and a necklace of skulls, with snakes coiled around his neck and arms. One iconographic type portrays him with three heads and six arms, holding a flayed elephant skin with his upper hands, a trident or a sword horizontally with his lower hands, and a human figure and a goat with his middle hands. Many artworks of this type show Mahākāla in a sitting position, though a description of the deity found in the dictionary compiled by the monk Huilin titled The Sound and Meaning of All Sutras has him standing on the hands of the earth goddess. The same work describes Mahākāla as having eight arms, holding an elephant skin, a trident, a preta, a goat, a sword, and a khatvāṅga. Some images of Mahākāla of this type found in Dunhuang meanwhile show him standing on a snake. Another iconographic variant depicts Mahākāla with one head and two arms, holding a sword in his right hand and a skull cup in his left. He is sometimes also shown as trampling on the elephant-headed deity Vināyaka, another deity Mahākāla is associated with. Indeed, the two deities are shown together in the outer northeast corner of the Womb Realm Maṇḍala, one of the two main maṇḍalas of East Asian esoteric Buddhism.File:Cina, mahakala, guardiano della dottrina, nell'aseptto sitacintamani, xviii sec..JPG|thumb|Qing dynasty statuette of Dàhēitiān. China. 17th century.
Yijing describes the statues of Mahākāla he had seen in Indian monasteries as "holding a golden bag and seated on a small chair, with one foot hanging down towards the ground." Some scholars believe that the images Yijing saw may have actually been that of the god Kubera, who was represented in Indian art as carrying a money bag; indeed, he identifies 'Mahākāla' as being part of the retinue of the "great god". It is thought that the two gods may have been conflated at some point; images of both deities are commonly found guarding the entrances of temples in India, Nepal and other places influenced by Hindu-Buddhist culture, and Kubera was, as mentioned, closely associated with Shiva. The image of the sack-carrying Daikokuten that would become the standard in Japan is thus thought to be derived from Kubera's iconography.File:Mahakala, Indonesia, Central Java, 700-900 AD, andesite - Asian Art Museum of San Francisco - DSC01344.JPG|left|thumb|292x292px|Stone sculpture of Mahākāla, from Central Java, Indonesia
The earliest Japanese representations of Mahākāla-Daikokuten can be classified into two types: one shows the deity standing, his left hand holding a sack slung over his shoulder, with his right hand clenched into a fist and resting on the right hip, while the other depicts him as sitting. Most of these images show Daikokuten wearing Japanese clothing, though a few has him wearing armor. The standing portrayal is first mentioned in the 10th-century Shingon work Yōson dōjōkan and an apocryphal 11th-century text titled Daikokutenjin-hō, while the seated portrayal's first literary appearance is in the 13th-century Asabashō, a Tendai iconographical and ritual compendium. The Daikokutenjin-hō describes Daikokuten as black in color, wearing eboshi, kariginu, and hakama, with his right fist resting at his waist and his left hand clutching a large bag, the color of which is that of rat's hair.
The oldest surviving examples of the two iconographic variants date from around the 11th century. The oldest standing Daikokuten statue is found in Kanzeon-ji in Dazaifu, Fukuoka Prefecture and depicts him wearing eboshi, knee-length hakama, and shoes. The oldest depiction of the sitting Daikokuten, kept in Kongōrin-ji in Echi District, Shiga Prefecture, meanwhile, shows him wearing armor, seated on a rock and holding a small bag and a club or staff.
Daikokuten's iconography evolved during the 14th century onwards, when he increasingly became portrayed as a smiling man with a rotund belly, holding a mallet and standing or sitting on rice bales. The origin of the mallet attribute is uncertain, although Bernard Faure links it with Mahākāla-Daikokuten's association with the cult of the Saptamātṛkas, who are pictured as holding mallets – symbolizing their role as plague deities – in the Madarijin ritual. During the 16th century, the three deities Daikokuten, Vaiśravaṇa-Bishamonten and Sarasvatī-Benzaiten were fused together into the three-headed 'Sanmen Daikokuten', which in a way 'reconnected' the deity's popular benign form with his less well-known wrathful form. This form was eventually introduced in later variants of the legend of Daikokuten's apparition to Saichō in Mount Hiei: in response to Saichō's dilemma over how to provide daily sustenance for three thousand monks, the god is now said to have shown himself to the latter with three faces and six arms.
An iconographic grouping known as the 'Roku Daikoku' also developed during the same period, showing the deity in six different forms:
- Biku Daikoku : Daikokuten in the form of a Buddhist monk, holding a mallet in his right hand and a sword in his left
- Ōji Kara Daikoku : Daikokuten as a prince brandishing a sword and a vajra; sometimes interpreted as Mahākāla-Daikokuten's son
- Yasha Daikoku : Daikokuten as the subduer of demons, wearing Japanese aristocratic garb and holding a wheel in his right hand
- Makakara Daikokunyo : Daikokuten as a female figure holding a bale of rice above her head; sometimes interpreted as Mahākāla-Daikokuten's consort
- Shinda Daikoku : Daikokuten as a boy with the wish-granting jewel in his hand
- Makara Daikoku : Daikokuten in his 'regular' benign form, holding a mallet and a sack