A Jizo Bodhisattva cradles grief

During the mizu kuyo ritual for pregnancy loss, a small Jizo Bodhisattva statue enshrines ceremonial remains of a lost child.

Following Shin Yu’s miscarriage in 2012, she had a mizu kuyo ceremony to process her grief.

Miscarriage is a socially taboo topic that many people have difficulty talking about. It’s often laden with grief, shame, and self-blame and is a loss that has not been very normalized in public discourse.

Through Shin Yu’s personal story this episode shines a light on the silent subject of miscarriage and how the Jizo Bodhisattva can provide comfort to grieving parents.

Related links:

Adopting a Buddhist Ritual to Mourn Miscarriage, Abortion via NPR

Water Returning to Water: A Buddhist Ritual Brings Release by Shin Yu Pai

Splitting the Milk, a poem by Shin Yu Pai

"Ten Thousand Things" is produced by KUOW in Seattle. Our host, writer, and creator is Shin Yu Pai. Whitney Henry-Lester produced this episode. Jim Gates is our editor. Tomo Nakayama wrote our theme music. Additional music in this episode by inola and The Field Tapes.

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Partial funding of "Ten Thousand Things" was made possible by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture Hope Corps Grant, a recovery funded program of the National Endowment for the Arts, plus support from The Windrose Fund.

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Transcript:

Shin Yu Narration: This story that I’m about to tell discusses the painful topic of miscarriage, so please take care.

I was visiting my neighbor Kanjin and his family in the cold days of Spring a few years back, when my eye fell upon an unusual figure on his shelf. The small stone statue was dressed in a red hat and bib. And didn’t look like a conventional Buddhist statue or deity. I’d never seen anything like it. Kanjin is a Buddhist priest and the head minister of Choeizan Enkyoji. A Nichiren temple. As the head minister for his congregation, he is frequently asked to perform esoteric rituals. They include ceremonies like the hari kuyo: a ritual for retiring broken sewing needles in a bed of tofu or soft jelly where they can finally be laid to rest and thanked for their hard work. There are house cleansings and blessings. Incense listening. And elaborate Japanese tea ceremonies, which is how we first came into each other’s lives. But Jizo, the stone bodhisattva, on Kanjin’s shelf was part of a very different ceremony. One that delivered me through one of the darkest, saddest periods of my life.

This is Ten Thousand Things. A podcast about artifacts of Asian American life.

I’m Shin Yu Pai, your host. Today, Jizo Bodhisattva.

A bodhisattva is a being dedicated to helping others. A being that vows to put off their own enlightenment for the sake of all suffering beings. Until we all awaken. The Jizo Bodhisattva is at the heart of a ritual called “mizuko kuyo.” Or the Water Child ceremony. The ritual is invoked when a mother miscarries a child in the womb, or when there is other pregnancy loss like stillbirth, or abortion. The ceremony helps the grieving parents find closure, while also soothing the spirit of the unborn child.

As Kanjin served me tea in his living room and I listened to him talk about the need for rituals that allow us to grieve, I let his words penetrate my heart. My first pregnancy had ended in miscarriage. At ten weeks. We found out on Thanksgiving Day from our doctor’s office. Hormone testing had confirmed that my pregnancy had ended. I needed to make immediate plans to deal with the medical side of things. Instead of surgery, I opted to take Misoprostol, a medication that ruptures the uterus and induces miscarriage. The nurse said the experience would be like having a heavy period. Anyone who’s had a miscarriage will tell you that it’s nothing like a period. There’s a lot more blood.

A week later, I got on a plane to California to see my father. I had no time for grief. I’d promised to take my aging father back to Taiwan. To visit his family and the sites of his young adulthood, including his military service. When the miscarriage happened, I couldn’t bring myself to cancel the trip. So I accompanied my father back home anyway. In retrospect, that was not the best idea for my marriage. Because I denied my partner the right to process our grief together, in the immediate aftermath of loss. It also wasn’t the best thing for my relationship with my dad. But mostly, it wasn’t the best thing for me. I was still in shock, trying to go through life as normally as possible. But grief would slip out at inopportune moments. I spent nearly 21 days traveling with my father. And everywhere he found a temple, he lit a stick of incense and prayed to the gods that they’d put another baby in my womb to replace the one that didn’t survive. On that journey home, I tended to my father’s well-being. We visited Nangan Island where he’d been stationed as a young soldier in the 1960s, just after the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. China had resumed their bombardments and artillery attacks on the islands during my father’s time in the military. The landscape of Nangan brought his PTSD roaring back to life. My father asked me if I, too, saw the dead bodies that stared back at him from the rock faces and craggy hillsides lining the road, leading up to the military garrison. My father was reliving his own trauma, while I was going through my own. And because I seemed strong enough on the outside, he misunderstood that I hadn’t actually recovered from losing a child.

Shortly after I returned to Seattle, I conceived again. Having been pregnant once before, my body knew what it was supposed to do. My father was eager for a grandson and fixated on the future. On what felt positive. And it was like the pain of losing a child became a kind of amnesia for my family. And for my body too. Though I still carried that loss, psychically.

I put what was left of my mental and emotional energy into trying to make it through a healthy pregnancy. I gave birth to my son Tomo, in an unmedicated, midwife-assisted home birth nine months later.

But I still hadn’t fully grieved the loss of my first child. I tried a lot of things to acknowledge the grief. Therapy. Antidepressants. Talking to other women who had experienced miscarriage. I even tried a shamanic soul retrieval that I hoped would give me information about the baby that couldn’t be born. I learned about the Jizo bodhisattva and the mizuko kuyo ceremony from Kanjin, more than a year after I had miscarried. It spoke to me deeply. Like giving birth to grief itself, looking it in the eye, and letting it go. Magic and metaphor seemed like better medicine than anything I’d tried yet. So after that Spring conversation, I went straight home and told my husband what I needed from him. Then I emailed Kanjin and asked him to perform the ritual for our family.

The mizuko kuyo ceremony involves organizing several things.

It’s necessary to acquire a Jizo statue. Jizos are often depicted standing. Attired in robes. With calm little faces. Sometimes their hands are posed in prayer. Others hold precious stones.

I also received a set of verbal instructions from Kanjin. We’d need to choose gifts that we’d offer during the ceremony

And I’d need to bring milk. I ordered the Jizo online from Etsy after looking at hundreds of stone, wood, and plastic figures. The design of the statue needed to be specific. Kanjin would be placing ashes inside the Jizo, so it needed to have a removable head. I settled on a small four-inch statue holding a small gem. A wish-fulfilling jewel that lights up all darkness and grants any wish.

Kanjin also told me to “make clothes” for my Jizo before the scheduled ceremony. So I bought some red felt from Hobby Lobby which sat in a pile of stuff on my desk for weeks. I don’t actually sew. But I knew that what was being asked of me, was to bring my best effort and self. That said, I was so overwhelmed by feelings. So much of the time. I needed help.

I asked my mother who was visiting from California. She repairs clothes, hems pants, and crocheted hats for my newborn son. And does everything I can’t. In the absence of words and a common language - It’s how she shows her love to me. She removes obstacles.

She didn’t ask questions. My mom took one look at Jizo and cut enough fabric to sew a hat and cloak, with a needle and a handful of stitches.

There were other things that we were asked to prepare. But the hardest part was the letters that both my husband and I had to write to our unborn baby. Kort waited until the last possible moment to write his note and then he hid it from me. Like he’d hidden away his tears and his grief. I demanded to see the letter for proof. I needed to know that he’d been as deeply affected by the loss that we refused to talk about. I needed to know that he had loved that child too. But each of us had mourned alone when I chose to go to Taiwan. Moved on. Or not.

The day of the ceremony, we drove to the Chinatown-International District with the Jizo and everything else we were asked to bring. Breast milk pumped from my body. Fresh flowers. And gifts. Our son Tomo was with us too. Kanjin had warned us that the spirit of an unborn child can sometimes trouble their sibling in sleep. In their longing for a playmate.

Kanjin’s assistant met us outside on the sidewalk and took us up several flights of stairs to the temple. Kanjin greeted us and introduced us to his assistants. They were all white men. I hadn’t known what to expect, in every sense. I was the only woman, the only mother, in the room and it felt so lonely. Yet they were all there because I had asked for someone to hold the space. These men didn’t have to be like my Confucian father – who’d just needed me to move on. And because I wasn’t married to any of them, they had no opinions about me. My choices hadn’t alienated them in the way that my decision to grieve separately from my partner had hurt him.

These men had appeared in my life, at my request. To help remove grief. I placed the Jizo on the ceremonial altar.

Kanjin chanted prayers and produced a paper figure with a face drawn on it. He handed my husband and I small green leaves and instructed us to dip the leaves in the milk that we had brought and “feed” the paper baby. We drew the leaves to the effigy’s mouth. We offered gifts of rice candy, saved from our wedding years ago, and a wooden toy top and a miniature figure of Totoro. We presented our notes to our paper child. We didn’t get to read them. So I was grateful that the night before, I’d snuck a look at my husband’s note when he wasn’t looking. Addressed “Dear Baby,” his words expressed regret and a simple wish: “I hope you find the love you need.” I promptly ‘fessed up to my partner that I took a long look at his note. Knowing my deep need for words, he wasn’t surprised or mad, at all. But his note opened up the space for us to talk honestly. And helped me to understand that my husband had felt his own pain about what happened. We were connected in that loss.

Our offerings expressed our care and the completion of a relationship that could not come to being. We’d fed our child, played with them, and celebrated their life. Given them the love that we’d been denied the opportunity to share.

Kanjin tossed flower petals into the air which rained down like sakura blossoms in spring. He turned his back on us when he lit the paper figure on fire, so that we wouldn’t have to watch. Or see that he was cremating the body. And once it had burned to ash, Kanjin spooned what remained into the body of the stone Jizo. We enshrined the Jizo at the temple where they will be cared for long after my husband and I are gone. Through the metaphor and symbolism of the mizuko kuyo ceremony, I found a way in which I could fully let myself grieve.

My child would have been born on June 22, 2013. Every year, as the days grow longer and the summer solstice comes nearer, my own days get heavier as I approach a private anniversary of loss and letting go.

I think of the child that was never born. And I think of Jizo, holding my child’s spirit, giving them the companionship that I could not. In another land. Where we are all awake. And no one is alone. Where every wish is fulfilled. And we all find the love we need.