The Three Laughers of the Tiger Ravine

Tora no sumu Iwa no to mo kesa Ake no kata Ehou to tsugeru Uguisu no koe Even the boulder door Where the tiger dwells Opens with this morning’s light As the voice of the warbler informs us Of the fortunate direction —Kajuan Fukumaro Itadori ya Warabi uru shizu mo Yamagatsu mo Ume no kaori mo Warau harukaze The women selling Bracken and “tiger cane,” The mountain folk, And the scent of plum, too All laughing in the spring breeze —Kicho ¯do ¯ The source for this surimono is a pseudo-historical Chinese legend. Three famous literati of the fourth-fifth century met one afternoon: the poet Tao Yuanming and the Taoist Lu Xiujing travel to visit Buddhist scholar Huiyuan at his temple. Huiyuan has taken a strict vow of seclusion, and is not permitted to go onto the bridge over the Tiger Ravine, marking the limit of Donglun Temple. While seeing his friends off, Huiyuan becomes so engrossed in conversation that he does not realize, until it is too late, that he is crossing the bridge. There is a brief moment of shock, then the three friends burst into laughter, realizing the absurdity of placing arbitrary boundaries on the human spirit, and even, according to some interpretations, the consequent limitations of artificiality in each of their belief systems.Eisen has depicted the sages as three women crossing a stone bridge over rapids, in a mountainous space with sharp peaks distinctly unlike those of Japan. The women are quite common, contemporary types, apparently returning from a festival. The woman on the left, representing Buddhist Huiyuan, carries a bamboo branch with a festival mask of Otafuku (known, too, as Okame), goddess of bliss; she is also identified with the goddess Uzume, whose dance drew Amaterasu from her cave, as mentioned in the first verse. Next to her is the stand-in for the Confucian Tao Yuanming, holding a patterned tanzaku card such as poets employed for inscriptions. On the right is the representation of Lu Xiujing, holding one of the mountain vegetable plants (zenmae) mentioned in the verse and often associated with natural mysteries (hence Taoism).