The Cult of Kshitigarbha: From Jiuhua Shan to the Roadside Shrine

Kshitigarbha's worship is unusually concrete for a bodhisattva of his doctrinal reach, anchored at both the continental and the neighborhood scale. In China he is Dizang, and Mount Jiuhua in Anhui province, one of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism, is dedicated to him and remains a major destination for Buddhist pilgrimage, tradition holding that a Korean prince who became the monk Jin Qiaojue achieved enlightenment there in a form identified with Dizang. In Japan, as Jizo, his cult moved decisively toward everyday devotional practice rather than staying confined to temple halls. Small stone statues of Jizo mark crossroads, mountain passes and roadsides across the country, protecting travelers, and he is frequently represented not as a single image but as a set of six, Rokujizo, standing for the six realms of rebirth he guards simultaneously. Since roughly the 1970s his cult has taken on a further, more sorrowful role: statues dressed in red bibs and children's caps at temples and roadside shrines mark mizuko kuyo, memorial rites for miscarried, stillborn and aborted children, with Jizo addressed as the guardian who carries those unborn souls across the river separating the living from the dead. The combination, a major continental pilgrimage mountain and a genuinely popular, still evolving neighborhood devotional practice, gives Kshitigarbha one of the most active cults of any bodhisattva figure in living East Asian Buddhism.