The seated statue of Avalokitesvara sits as if to watch over the back of the sutra storehouse

Image of Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva seated in the sutra collection at Jigen-ji Temple — Sutra box and seated statue of Saint Avalokitesvara at Jigen-ji

I've never been to Tibet, so I've only seen them in Nepal, but I quite like the Buddhist tools called prayer wheel that Tibetan Buddhists carry. The one that attracts me is the one for personal use, in which a scroll with a printed mantra is placed in a weighted tube and rotated with one hand.

In Kathmandu, there are many people who fled Tibet, and you can see a few of them walking around with a prayer wheel in their hands. I am sorry to say that the sight of them spinning the wheel as they walk around reminds me of a child walking around with a drum in his hand, and it makes me smile.

Although there are followers of esoteric Buddhism in Japan, unfortunately, no matter how many times I walk around town, I never see anyone walking around with a prayer wheel in their hands. Instead, some temples have a large prayer wheel, often called a Rinzo. At Hasedera Temple in Kamakura, a couple of high school students were happily spinning the prayer wheel to accumulate virtue.

Jigen-ji Temple in Chichibu was another temple with a Rinzo. The sutra storehouse on the side of the approach to the temple was equipped with a sutra box. It contains 1630 scrolls of all the sutras, and if you turn it seven times, it has the same merit as if you had read all the sutras.

If there is merit in just turning the sutra, it seems that it doesn't matter how you turn it, but this is a naive idea. The seated statue of Saint Avalokitesvara sits at the back of the sutra collection, as if to check if you are turning the sutra collection with a pure heart.

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