The little reptile has become an enormous four-legged dragon, which leaves the narrow abodes of men and frees himself in this terrific way.Ī remarkable ink-stone was preserved in olden times, says the Kii zodanshu1, in a Zen monastery at Kanagawa, Musashi province. But woe him who possess such a stone at the end of the millennial period which the fetus must pass among mankind, for then the stone splits, and a small snake creeps out of it, which in a few moments becomes larger and larger, and with a terrible noise forces its way to the sky, smashing the roof amid thunder and lightning, and ascending in a dark cloud.
As it invariably has the remarkable peculiarity of constantly producing water (the dragon’s element), it is a very convenient ink-stone indeed3. During these three thousand years the fetus lives as a very small snake within astone, the dragon’s egg, which is first lying at the bottom of the sea, then comes to the mountains (how it got there is not explained), where after a thousand years it is picked up by somebody who carries it home and preserves it on account of its beautiful colours, or uses it as an ink-stone (suzuri, 硯 ). In the sixteenth century of our era a Japanese author1 spoke of an old (certainly Chinese) tradition, according to which a dragon’s fetus lives during a thousand years in the sea, for a thousand years in the mountains and, after having been among men (“in a village”, says the text) for the same long period, it finally is born, becomes a dragon and ascends to the sky2. 1 The dragon-fetus remains in the egg for three thousand years Pp 215 THE CHINESE DRAGON’S EGGS IN JAPAN De Visser’s faithfully recorded collection of Japanese tales of Dragon’s eggs, excerpted from Chapter 7 of “ The Dragon in China and Japan“: Above Duan inkstone with relief carving of kui dragon grasping suns.īelow is M.W. A stone inkstone was found in a 5,000-year-old archeological site in Jiazhai of Shanxi Province, a tradition much older than Japan’s. The best and most sought-after shexian inkstones are said to come from Longwei (Dragon-tail) Mountain in Anhui, Eastern China.
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