Ksitigarbha- Buddhist GodDeity"Earth Store Bodhisattva"

The Brahmin Maiden

The Ksitigarbha Sutra traces his first origins to a Brahmin maiden whose mother had accumulated terrible karma through killing living creatures and slandering the Three Jewels. After the mother died, the daughter sold everything she owned and made offerings to a Buddha called Flower of Meditation and Enlightenment. She prayed until she gained supernatural sight and saw her mother burning in Avici Hell.

Her devotion generated enough merit to free her mother, who was reborn in heaven. But the maiden had seen the other beings in Avici. She had heard them. She vowed before the Buddha to liberate every one of them across however many lifetimes it took.

Sacred Girl

In another past life, during the time of the Buddha Enlightenment-Flower Concentration-Wisdom King, she was a young girl whose mother had eaten fish and turtle eggs and mocked the dharma. Through offerings and single-minded recitation of the Buddha's name, Sacred Girl entered a trance and was transported to the border of hell. A guardian spirit told her that her filial devotion had already freed her mother.

But again the girl had seen too much. The vow she made that day was the same: not until every hell is emptied.

The Riverbed

In Japan, Ksitigarbha became Jizo. Stone statues of him line roadsides and cemeteries across the country, dressed by grieving parents in red bibs and caps, surrounded by toys and pinwheels.

According to folk belief, children who die before their parents cannot cross the Sanzu River. They gather on the dry riverbed called Sai no Kawara and build small stone towers to accumulate merit for their parents. The demon hag Datsueba knocks the towers down. The children build them again. She knocks them down again. Jizo appears on the riverbed, hides the children in his monk's sleeves, and carries them to safety.

The Prince on the Mountain

Mount Jiuhua in Anhui province became the center of Ksitigarbha's cult through a Korean prince. Jin Qiaojue of the Silla kingdom arrived in the eighth century during the Tang dynasty and practiced austerities on the mountain for seventy-five years. He lived in a cave and ate only what grew wild. Winters that would have killed other monks passed over him.

Local villagers built him a temple. When he asked a patron named Min Rang-he for enough land to cover his meditation mat, Min offered the whole mountain. Jin Qiaojue cast his mat into the air. It expanded to cover the peak.

He died in 794 at ninety-nine. Three years later his tomb was opened and his body was perfectly preserved, joints flexible, face unchanged. The monks enshrined him in a pagoda. Pilgrims still climb Mount Jiuhua to burn incense before his reliquary and pray for their dead.