Mizuko Kuyo

These jizo sculptures honor children dying in war
*photo credit below

We carry our jizo statues

to the garden,

offer incense and offerings

to remember

the children we've lost.
May the ocean of life 
carry their life force
forever back to the shore.

In this month's Shambhala Sun magazine, there is an article about  Mizuko Kuyo, a Japanese healing ceremony to honor and mourn the unborn dead, or children lost in the first years of life. At the  Great Vow Zen Monastery, in Oregon, small jizo statues are made by Abbott and Zen Roshi, Jan Chozen Bays, who has expanded the practice to include children of all ages who have been lost.  The jizo statues are dressed and placed in the monastery garden with incense, offerings and prayers, in hopes the lost children's life energy - that touched their loved ones' lives so briefly - will go on, to emerge in a beneficial place. This captured my heart. As do the small statues.

*photo credit below

Jan Chozen Bays has vowed to make 10,000 of the statues, and sangha members who help her have trouble keeping up with orders coming in. "Sending out an army for peace", Jan calls it. "They go where they're needed."

* Photographs by Jennifer Brinkman, as published in the Shambhala Sun, May 2015 issue

Day 2 of NaPoWriMo