h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What does the monument, "The Mimizuka" , located in Kyoto, Japan, commemorate?

Google and Wikipedia are forbidden

There are klaxons, naturally; so be bold, preferably interesting but never obvious.

Good luck.

isn't that the musical instrument from monty pythons cheese shop sketch?????

"An act of pure optimism to have posed the question in the first place."

No.

is this where buddist monks/matyrs come to go through the long and painfull process of self/living mumification???

there is an entry on it i believe

here you go

Other practitioners of mummification

Mummy-making cultures are scattered across the globe. Among these are the Palomans who, as early as 4000BC were salting their corpses to prevent decay and wrapping them in mats of reed (and then burying them under their houses); people of the Aleutian Islands of Southwest Alaska, who desiccated their dead with herbs and grasses, and preserved the corpses in cool, dry caves; and the cave-dwelling goat-herding Guanches of the Canary Islands, whose mummification techniques suggest a link with the ancient Egyptians; the Ibaloi tribe in the Kabayan island of the Philippines, whose practice of mummifying their dead tribal leaders spanned 1200 to 1500AD7, and was curtailed by Spanish colonists; and the Scythians (a multi-tribed people who inhabited southern Russia from the eighth to the fourth Century BC), who are renowned for their mummified kings.

There is a good account of what happens to the Scythian corpses, written by the Greek writer Herodotus. According to him, the cadaver's viscera was cleaned out and the body cavity filled with a preparation of chopped cypress, frankincense, parsley-seed and aniseed, before the opening was sewn up and the body was encased in wax. The corpse was thereafter placed on a wagon and carted around to the various tribes – and each member of the populace, upon viewing the corpse, was required to sever a portion of his ear, cut his hair short, make a circumference cut on his arm, pierce a hole in his forehead and nose, and (ouch) drive an arrow all the way through his left hand. After every villager had suffered pain, the body was taken to Gerrhi (the most remote area of the Scythian territory) for burial. The king's servants followed him in death, being killed on the spot by strangulation. As if this massacre wasn't enough, another sacrifice would take place on the first anniversary of the king's death, whereby fifty of the dead king's best attendants were killed (strangulation again) along with the fifty most beautiful horses in the royal stables. Their viscera were subsequently removed and their abdomens stuffed with chaff and sewn shut. The horses were buried in a large circular grave around the king's burial mound, posed galloping; a mummified attendant was posed upon each horse, staked down through the spinal cord to the beast. The end-product: a dead king surrounded by a mummy cavalry, protecting him in death.

The strange tale of auto-mummification

A mummy is usually made from a corpse by priests or people specialising in the trade – but what of people who mummify themselves? Strange as it may sound, there is a form of self-mummification practised by Buddhist priests as far back as the first millennium, which has continued to modern times. This grotesque form of auto-preservation was apparently pioneered by the Buddhist priest and mystic, Kuukai, who died at the temple complex of Mount Koya on 23 April, 835 – and has been emulated by an estimated sixteen to twenty-four priests of the Shongin thought of esoteric Buddhism in Japan until the practice was outlawed towards the end of the 19th Century8. Today, these mummies (called sokushinbutsu) can be found on the main island of Honshu, preserved at a number of Buddhist temples.

This act of auto-mummification is in fact an elaborate, prolonged form of suicide drawn out over the course of about a decade. The first step towards becoming a Buddhist mummy is a change of diet, whereby the priest undertaking the task is restricted to eating nuts and seeds found in the forests around the temple, during which time he is to subject himself to physical hardship in all forms. By the end of a thousand days, almost all the fat in his body will have been eliminated.

The next thousand days involve an even more drastic change of diet – the priest now being allowed to eat small amounts of bark and roots from pine trees. Because humans were never designed to eat pure cellulose, this makes a living husk of a man of the priest, who will now have the outward appearance and hydration level of a skeleton. Towards the end of this second phase, the priest also begins drinking a special tea made from the sap of the urushi tree – which, while it makes excellent lacquer for bowls and furniture, is also poisonous to humans. The tea, which induces vomiting, sweating and urination, serves both to dehydrate the priest even further and to create a body so toxic that anything that tried to eat the priest's body after he was dead would be similarly poisoned.

The priest's final days (about another thousand) are spent entombed in a stone room barely large enough for a man to assume the lotus position of meditation. Air is conveyed into the room via a tube, and is supplied only for as long as the priest is alive to ring a bell. When he finally perishes, the tube is removed and the tomb is sealed.

Of course, the fact that there are only about two dozen mummies of this sort bears witness to the fact that the ideal conditions9 were not achieved for every priest who practised auto-mummification; however, out of respect, these 'failures' were sealed back into their tombs after their conditions had been revealed10. Those who had succeeded were immediately raised to the rank of Buddha.

Why attempt to mummify oneself? Or rather – if one were so eager for suicide, why choose a method that causes incredible suffering to oneself? Simply because this is religion and not suicidal masochism.

The Buddhists believe that everything in this world that can be perceived by the five senses is simply an illusion that prevents a person from seeing the truth11, which is that a person is part of a greater being that stands separate and beyond the world we perceive. As long as a person remains blind to this truth, he will be continually reborn in and endless series of illusionary lives; to break this vicious circle, Buddhists monks aim to separate themselves from the world so that at death they become One with this greater being who is Buddha, and thus achieve Nirvana.

Thus there are several sects of Buddhism whose priests are trained to deny the importance of their physical bodies through the endurance of various hardships, the principle being that as a priest becomes more like Buddha, the less he will be concerned about himself. In doing so, devotees are also desensitised of their fear of death – although, conversely, they do not seek it either, as you might think of the priests who perform this feat. Rather, auto-mummification is practiced by men of senior age to push the limits of their ability to ignore their physical manifestation – and also to leave a monument of their beliefs for those who come after them.

Entries I allow. That might be worth a QI bonus if substantiated.

But no.

Fascinating.

Taff.
QI +6

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A3769554

edited entry

good question I am out

the fall of the last samurai/warlord behind the empperor???????cant get the word....book about it......made a tv series????

shogun!!!!!

Not the Samurari's defeat, no.

So not Buddist, and nothing to do with Samurai.........

What else is there??


Hmmmm



GT

nukesbombsWWIIburma railway

You are a true gentleman and a scholar.

The Destruction of Hiroshima

The Destruction of Nagasaki

The Bridge over The River Kwai / Burma Rail

Taff - 15

Kyoto used to be the capital I think? Is it the destruction of Genghis Khan's fleet by a tsunami (divine wind) in 1292? Or was it Kubla's?

Or someone surviving an earthquake?

None of those but do tell me more about this Divine wind for points.

kamakzi is divine wind

kawasaki is just divine

I have a Yamaha, but it's a clarinet, not a motorcycle

One of the Khans (think it was Genghis but not sure) was going to invade Japan, and his freakin' enormous fleet, which carried an army which was sure to have conquered it, was wrecked in a typhoon.

The typhoon was obviously a sign from the gods, as it saved Japan from invasion.

never seen a clarinet with a kickstart