Text (seventh contemplation: The remaining together of the white Bones)

Translation of Chinese poem accompanying the seventh of nine contemplations from the seventeenth-century Japanese artist Morishige.

"Before one fundament decays it is very rotten, but when the five limbs are opposed to each other they destroy this body. A wine jar, empty and broken, still lies next to her pillow, and her threadbare clothes, just tidied away, decay to dust.

In former times she was a woman with a pink face who had gone to the imperial court. Now she is a person with white Bones on the open plain. Whilst clouds and rain darken the moon above the plain, weeping people are keeping watch the whole night over the spirit of her corpse."