recorded that "officials of the third rank were
allowed at their funerals one hearse, forty drums, twenty great
horns, forty little horns, two hundred flags, one metal gong, and one
hand-bell, with lamentation for one day." At Temmu's obsequies (687)
mention is made of an "ornamented chaplet," the first reference to
the use of flowers, which constitute such a prominent feature of
Buddhist obsequies.

But there is no evidence that Buddhist rites were employed at
funerals until the death of the retired Emperor Shomu (756).
Thereafter, the practice became common. It was also to a Buddhist
priest, Dosho, that Japan owed the inception of cremation. Dying in
the year 700, Dosho ordered his disciples to cremate his body at
Kurihara, and, two years later, the Dowager Empress Jito willed that
her corpse should be similarly disposed of. From the megalithic tombs
of old Japan to the little urn that holds the handful of ashes
representing a cremated body, the transition is immense. It has been
shown that one of the signal reforms of the Daika era was the setting
of limits to the size of sepulchres, a measure which afforded to the
lower classes much relief from forced labour. But an edict issued in
706 shows that the tendance of the resting place of the dead was
still regarded as a sacred duty, for the edict ordered that, alike at
the ancestral tombs of the uji and in the residential quarter of the
common people, trees should be planted.

Not yet, however, does the custom of erecting monuments with
inscriptions seem to have come into vogue. The Empress Gemmyo (d.
721) appears to have inaugurated that feature, for she willed not
only that evergreens should be planted at her grave but also that a
tablet should be set up there. Some historians hold that the donning
of special garments by way of mourning had its origin at that time,
and that it was borrowed from the Tang code of etiquette. But the
Chronicles state that in the year A.D. 312, when the Prince Imperial
committed suicide rather than occupy the throne, his brother,
Osasagi, "put on plain unbleached garments and began mourning for
him." White ultimately became the mourning colour, but in the eighth
century it was dark,* and mourning habiliments were called
fuji-koromo, because they were made from the bark of the wisteria
(fuji). Among the Daiho statutes was one providing that periods of
mourning should be of five grades, the longest being one year and the
shortest seven da