I will destroy you and everything you hold dear. No kidding, I will grind your bones, your legacy, your very planet to dust. No no don’t try to outrun me, that’ll guarantee you tripping and it’ll be all the worse when I catch up. Besides - I’m not gonna do anything bad to you just yet. In fact, I promise that nothing else will happen to you without my say-so. So relax, we’ve still got a while on this road; we might as well get to know each other.
I’ve been going for what feels like eternity. Waaaaay back when I went by Mahākāla, I had this simple gig doing premise security and dharma protection around Bodh Gaya. Tough work - most of the time you’re just protecting the punters from themselves. Some days you really just want to smite but you have to hold back. Channel that wrath into tough love, you know? That’s what I don’t get about the folks out west - if you blast someone from a storm cloud for being human on a particularly stupid day, how the heck are they supposed to learn? Scare ‘em straight, I say! Sure, it may have looked like I was roving the forests hungry for human souls, but how else was I going to blow off steam? Ok maybe I didn’t need to hang out with that many demons and ghouls but you can’t be picky about your drinking buddies in this line of work. Ultimately though, I think my work was appreciated.
You eat one guy and suddenly you’re the god of eating things…as such I got better known for the eating than why I was eating in the first place. Funnily enough, the contracts for protecting monastery kitchens started rolling in. Humans and their little hops of understanding, never gets old. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I traded up and found myself effigy’d pretty much everywhere there was food being cooked for monks. Food offerings piled up, I put on a little paunch, and before I know it, newer generations just assume I’m your run-of-the-mill Food God. From there it was a straight shot to God ‘o’ Fortune - all it took was miracle’ing up some chow for five hundred hungry monks that showed up at Makuṭabandhana one day. Sometimes you just have to let things develop and take the opening when it appears.
A few thousand miles to the east, a few hundred years down the line, and few rounds of wordplay later and I became a…Fertility God? They made these adorable dolls of me for hopeful mothers, I got my own parade during the Qixi festivals, it was a whole thing. Either way, I eventually was inundated with requests to find love partners for young women. Seriously sweetheart, if you knew what I started off doing you really wouldn’t want me as your fairy godmother. What with the divine wrath and sinner-eating, remember?
So there I am one day doing a little roadwork, trying and failing to burn off the gut. I’m halfway over Honshu when I see this priest, doing some esoteric hoo-hah atop a mountain. Some dragon I met drinking in Okinawa once I think said all temples in Japan are considered mountains - I guess that means all mountains are functionally temples. Seeing as nobody else seemed around to answer the summons, I incorporated and said hi. After some pleasantries and chitchat, it transpired that Saichō over here was building a monastic compound. The hand-waving and the chanting was him trying to petition a deity to guard over it. I said to myself “what the Naraka, toss your hat in the ring big D” and that’s how Dàhēitiān got translated to Daikokuten and I became the patron of Enryaku-ji.
After a few months in the Japans I met this local kami, Ōkuninushi. We exchanged name cards as is mandatory and instantly were like“no way!”. Turns out the Kanji of his name could also be read ‘Daikoku’ and this was enough reason to bring up a few barrels of sake from a shrine of his and trade notes. Funnily enough we both did the fertility racket, were both related to Mount Hiei, an both um…had sacks? We eventually hung out so much people started mixing us up. Not only that, but Bishamonten, a fellow deity of the Northern Direction, gets lumped in with us through association to my Mahākāla days. That gets reinforced because people pick up on the rats in Ōkuninushi’s mythology and as we all know, Rats == North in zodiac cardinality. So it kinda runs away from us and before we know it, everyone is worshipping us as this ‘Three-sided Daikoku”. What can I say, the mutual signal boost helped us really make it big in Japan.
Boy oh boy, those were some wild days. The faithful got increasingly creative with their interpretations and symbolism. Someone came up with the notion of ‘stealing fortune’ (as represented by yours truly). For some hilarious decades I swear every earthly effigy of us ended up at the same year-end market in Asakusa. Probably why there’re so many antique shops there even now. Still, gotta love the tryers - rumour was that if you got away with the theft you’d be lucky so I tossed out a blessing here and there. Someone got really creative and came up with the idea of trans-substantiating reverse ‘theft’ by throwing our talismans into a wealthy house. You can imagine the complaints we got from the celestial door guardian union about the broken windows.
Being a triple-aspect god of fertility, wealth and warfare gave us quite the pull. From the lowliest farmer to the richest merchant, all wanted a favour from Sanmen Daikoku. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was a dearly cherished follower and somehow we still to this day have a hall on the Tokugawa family temple grounds, prime real estate. The invite to join the Shichifukujin came shortly after Edo began and these days I’m drinking sake, wearing silk, sitting on rice bails and hanging out with Ebisu (yes, The Ebisu). A pretty far cry from a howling, skull-necklaced avenger…
That was barely a couple thousand years, who knows where my fortunes will go. It could all be over next millennium, forgotten by whoever descends the good folks I watch over now. If I’m lucky, maybe in ten thousand years more some other intelligence will find a record of me in the ruins of Old Earth and I’ll get a new following. Or maybe they won’t, and I’ll be lost to all those who can understand the notion of divinity.
But even so, that won’t change what I’ll do. To you, to them, to anything that can or can’t rub two neurones, ALUs or memristors together. I will destroy. I will destroy even when nothing in the entire universe believes in or even conceives of me. Because my true name, that what “Mahākāla” was trying to describe, is Time. And I won’t stop if you plead, or forget, or ignore me. When this entire reality dies its heat-death as a soup of perfectly distributed subatomic particles that I’ve ripped apart piece by piece maybe, maybe then I’ll finally die but as long as there is information in this cosmos I’m going to grind on and there’s nothing, not even the theory of general relativity, than stands a chance of bringing me to a true stop.
Don’t look so worried. Yes the pot-bellied, laughing drinking buddy to Ebisu you just tossed your coins and bowed to hoping for success or love has been, and will always be, an inexorable cosmic force that will annihilate everything in existence but you know what? It’s not personal! If I don’t give a whit if you’re an emperor or a black hole, do you really think I’m here to ruin your life in particular? Cut me some slack!
Ok. Listen, listen. The spring that arrives when you’re at your most worn out from winter comes whether you remember or believe it will. What about when your heart broke, and we sat together patching it up over the months? How about those hours and hours we put in, grinding away, and the payoff that finally came? With me kid, you’ll make your fortunes, I promise. Should they crumble, we’ll stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools. I’m still on your side.
Point is - I haven’t ended you yet. And until then, I promise to be with you, every step of the way. I will remember you, even when everyone else who might is gone. So bear witness to me and I’ll bear witness to you.
Now come on, keep up!