miniature skeleton on enscribed stake! | ||
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Posted 2 years ago
SJG
(3 items)
Any ideas please with this curious find. My grandmothers..or older... 4inch wooden stake with chinese? enscription on the back and skeleton pinned on the front, with movable joints. Possibly made from bone. Any ideas on the story much appreciated.
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Kinda freaky!
Yes i think so and would love to know the story...a friend suggested prisoner of war related? No idea though...
I put the script through Google Lens and, long story short, it is apparently Japanese. It looks very much like “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo”, a sort of Buddhist mantra based on the name of the Lotus Sutra. Full explanation here (and you can compare the characters with the ones in this Wikipedia entry):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namu_My?h?_Renge_Ky?
…although what the skeleton has to do with this is beyond me! Perhaps it was originally nothing to do with the stick.
Ugh, the link didn’t work because the URL contains special characters. Try this:
https://bit.ly/3FEoKJr
P.S. Also I thought I’d seen this style of stick before. It’s a miniature form of a Japanese funerary stick called sotoba. It has 5 indentations that mimic the 5-fold shape of a pagoda. If you Google the words ‘wooden sotoba’, you will see some examples. I’m still not sure what this is really for, but at least this is a start.
That's funny because when I used lens a few days ago, it said it was Chinese and told me something stupid like "south, no luck"..lol
Ok. I got lens to translate but it still said chinese "Nan Wuhao Lian Yuxi". Wondering if that's a person's name?
A Japanese sotoba should have writing on both sides.
Well, Google Lens/Google Translate is imprecise. It gave me the Namu Myoho but the rest was a bit garbled. I think this is because kanji/hanzi can have multiple interpretations. The kanji look like the typography kanji for that “mantra”, plus the sotoba-style design of the stick is distinctly Japanese. I agree it’s not actually a sotoba (for one thing it’s much too small!); but the stick does appear to be based on the sotoba design. I still don’t know what exactly this is, but I don’t think it’s Chinese…. My hope is merely to point its owner in a clearer direction.
Oh my word, thankyou for these insights. I'm really amazed with the potential Buddhist mantra. This is something familiar in my life...and the thought of an appearance as such in my grandparents - possibly great grandparents is incredible, given a strong Christian context of their lives. Fascinating, if that's what is written here. thankyou so much for sharing