by VIKING ADULT
Nobutoshi received it and promised to come again. Then he said good-bye. Narichika replied, “I doubt that you will find me here when you return.
It is too painful to see you go.
Stay just a little longer, please!”
Over and over he called him back.
But no, Nobutoshi could not stay. Swallowing his tears, he returned to the city
and gave the lady her husband’s letter.
She saw as soon as she opened it that he had renounced the world,
for in it she found a lock of his hair.
She took no second look, for that keepsake now was her enemy.69
Weeping, she fell to the floor. The children, too, gave voice to full-throated grief.
The nineteenth of the eighth month
it was, when at Kibi-no-Nakayama
in Niwase, between Bizen and Bitchū,
they finally killed Narichika.
Various rumors told how he died.
They poisoned his wine, but that did not work.
Nobutoshi delivers the letter to Narichika’s wife.
So, under a twenty-foot-high cliff,
they planted sharp stakes and pushed him over.
He met death impaled on the spikes.
This was so exceedingly cruel,
the like of it has seldom been known.
Narichika’s wife learned that her husband was gone from this world.
“I so wanted to see him again, and he to see me, as we both had always been,”
she reflected, “and that is why I am not yet a nun.
But now that time has come.”
She went to a temple, Bodai-in, and took the great step.
Thereafter she occupied herself as well as she could with her devotions
and prayed for her husband’s happiness in future lives.
Her father had been Atsukata,
the governor of Yamashiro.
Exceptional beauty that she was,
His Cloistered Eminence had loved her
beyond all others, but Narichika,
too, was so great a favorite of his
that one day he gave her to him.
Now her children gathered flowers,
drew water, poor things, for the altar,
and prayed for their father’s future rebirth.
So it was that, with passing time
and with cruelly shifting fortune,
she changed, just as the angels do
when blighted by the five signs of decline.
11. Tokudaiji Sanesada’s Pilgrimage to Itsukushima
Now, the Tokudaiji grand counselor Sanesada
had been passed over for appointment as Palace Guards commander
in favor of Kiyomori’s second son, Lord Munemori.
Thereafter he went for some time into seclusion.
In fact, he spoke of wishing to renounce the world.
His despairing housemen had no idea what to do.
One of them, a chamberlain named Fujiwara no Shigekane, had his wits about him.
One moonlit night Lord Sanesada had his southern lattice shutters raised
and was sitting, alone, chanting poems to the moon,
when Shigekane arrived, perhaps hoping to lift his spirits.
“Who is it?” Sanesada inquired.
“Shigekane, my lord.”
“What brings you here?”
“The moon, so beautiful tonight and shining so peacefully.”
“Your visit is very welcome. I have been feeling, somehow, very gloomy and bored.”
Shigekane chatted with him about this and that and managed to cheer him up.
Sanesada then spoke his mind:
“All I see in the world around me
suggests that Heike might is growing.
Kiyomori’s first and second sons
are the left and right commanders.
Next come his third son, Tomomori,
and Koremori, his first grandson.
Once these two rise in their turn,
no one from any other house—
no, not as far as I can see—
has any chance at commander.
For me there is just one last resort:
I might as well renounce the world.”
Shigekane wept. “If you do that, my lord,” he said, “all of us who belong to your household, high or low, will be cast adrift. But I have thought of a novel way out. Here is my idea: The Taira are intensely devoted to Itsukushima in the province of Aki. Why should you, too, not make a pilgrimage there and pray at the shrine? You might do a seven-day retreat. The shrine’s pretty dancing maidens—‘priestesses,’ they are called, and there are many of them—will be impressed. They will be attentive to you. They will also want to know what you are praying for. Tell them the truth. When you start back to the capital, they will be sorry to see you go. So take the chief ones among them back to the city with you. When you get there, they will want to pay their respects at Nishi-Hachij. Lord Kiyomori will ask, ‘What prayer can have drawn Lord Sanesada all the way to Itsukushima?’ So they will tell him. Now, Lord Kiyomori is very susceptible. He will be pleased that you went to pray at a shrine so important to him, too, and he will find a way to favor you after all.”
Lord Sanesada heard him out. “Brilliant!” he said. “What a marvelous idea! I shall go there at once.” He began his preparatory abstinence on the spot. Then off he went to Itsukushima.
He really did find at the shrine
beautiful “priestesses” aplenty.
During his seven-day retreat,
they looked after him constantly
and showered attentions on him.
Over those seven days and nights,
they danced their shrine’s kagura dances
no fewer than three times and played
the biwa and koto. They sang sacred songs.
Lord Sanesada had such a good time
that, for the gods, he sang imay,
rei, fūzoku, saibara—
all the most delightful songs.
The priestesses said, “Most pilgrims to this shrine are gentlemen of the Taira.
Your pilgrimage is exceptional. What prayer has inspired this retreat?”
Sanesada replied, “I was passed over for appointment as Palace Guards commander.
My prayer is for redress.”
Soon the seven days were over.
He bade farewell to the deity
and started back to the capital,
at which a dozen young priestesses,
the shrine’s finest, sorry to lose him,
readied a boat and sailed with him
a day’s journey, to see him off.
He said good-bye to them then. But no:
It really was more than he could bear.
One more day’s journey, then! Two days!
he kept saying until, in the end,
he took them all the way back to the city.
He lodged them in his own residence,
entertained them in countless ways,
and showered them with many gifts
before he let them start home again.
Now that they had come so far, the priestesses understood
that they could not leave without greeting Kiyomori, their great lord and patron.
They therefore called at Nishi-Hachij.
Kiyomori hastened to meet them.
“What are all of you doing here?” he wanted to know.
“Lord Sanesada came on pilgrimage to the shrine,” they explained,
“and he spent seven days there on retreat.
We saw him off a day’s journey on his return,
but when the time came to say good-bye, he was so sad to let us go
that he kept begging for a day or two more,
and so we stayed with him all the way.”
“And what prayer then took him all the way to Itsukushima?” Kiyomori inquired.
“He said he was praying for appointment to t
he post of commander.”
Kiyomori nodded.
“Poor fellow!” he said. “He turned aside
from all the mighty temples and shrines
open to him here in the city
to pray instead at the one I revere!
What a wonderful thing to do!
Well, if he feels that strongly about it…”
He had his eldest son, Shigemori,
resign the post of left commander
and gave it instead to Sanesada
over his second son, Munemori,
who at the time commanded the right.
How beautifully the ploy had worked!
And what a shame that Narichika
had never planned anything so clever
but had instead raised futile rebellion,
destroyed himself and his family—
indeed, his whole house—and on them all
brought down final disaster.
12. The Battle with the Rank-and-File Monks
Now, His Cloistered Eminence had been receiving from Kken,
a great prelate of Miidera, instruction in the Shingon mysteries.
Kken had taught him the essence of the three major esoteric sutras—
the Dainichi-ky, the Kongch-ky, and the Soshitsuji-ky—
and on the fourth of the ninth month
the sovereign’s formal initiation was to take place at Miidera.
The monks of Mount Hiei were furious.
“From the very beginning,” they said,
“initiations and ordinations have always been the prerogative of our Mountain.
Such has been the established rule.
After all, that is the very purpose of our Sann Deity’s teaching.
If this initiation takes place at Miidera nonetheless,
we will burn Miidera to the ground!”
His Cloistered Eminence understood the need for discretion.
After finishing his preparations, he gave up the idea.
So it was that he took Kken with him to Tennji,
where he built a subtemple named Chik-in.
Having elevated the Tennji70 well water to “wisdom water of the five sacral jars,”
he accomplished at this hallowed spot, where the Buddha’s word first sounded in Japan,
the initiation of the Consecrated Teacher.71
The cloistered sovereign had, after all, forgone initiation at Miidera in order to calm the uproar on the Mountain. Nonetheless, the scholar-monks and the temple rank and file remained at odds with one another and fought repeatedly. The scholar-monks lost every time. Doom seemed to threaten Mount Hiei, and crisis the court. Properly, the rank and file were either youths who had served the scholars and then become the simplest kind of monk, or worker-monks half clerical and half lay. Since the time of Kakujin, the Kongju-in abbot, such men of the Three Pagodas of the Mountain had turn by turn provided flowers for the altars, under the rubric of “summer retreat support.” Known in more recent years as “practitioners,” they had come to despise the full-fledged monks and had defeated them in recurring skirmishes. They ignored their masters’ orders and plotted war. The monks proper appealed to the senior nobles to suppress the practitioners immediately, and the senior nobles reported their appeal to the warrior hierarchy.
So it came to pass that Kiyomori,
armed with a decree from the cloistered sovereign,
dispatched one Muneshige from the province of Kii,
at the head of two thousand men from the inner provinces,
to join forces with the monks proper against the practitioners.
The practitioners’ established base was the Ty lodge,
but now they went down to the Sanga estate in mi,
raised a large force, climbed back up the Mountain,
and entrenched themselves in a fortress on Sizaka.
That same ninth month, on the twentieth day,
early in the hour of the dragon, [ca. 8 A.M.]
monks to the number of three thousand
and two thousand imperial horsemen—
in all a force of a full five thousand—
bore down upon Sizaka.
Certain that victory was theirs
this time at last, the monks preferred
to have the imperial troops go before them,
while the latter deferred to the monks.
Being so much at cross-purposes,
neither could put up much of a fight.
Stones catapulted from the fort
killed nearly all of them, on both sides.
The practitioners had recruited
ne’er-do-wells of every description:
thieves from provinces hither and yon,
armed robbers and mountain bandits,
even pirates, inflamed with greed
and with only contempt for their lives.
Every one fought like a man possessed,
and this time, too, the scholars lost.
13. The Ruin of Mount Hiei
Thereafter Mount Hiei simply fell to pieces.
Apart from the Twelve Perpetual Chanters,72
only rare monks continued to live there.
In valley after valley, the preaching lapsed;
in lodge after lodge, devoted practice died.
The windows of sacred learning closed;
meditation seats remained unclaimed.
Nothing the Buddha taught throughout his life
now gave forth its fragrance of spring flowers.
Clouds veiled the autumn moon of the Three Truths.73
Nobody upheld the lamp of the Teaching,
lit three hundred years ago and more,
and smoke that once rose from incense
burning through the hours seemed gone for good.
Imposing temple halls towered aloft,
three-tiered, into the blue empyrean;
roof- and crossbeams pierced the sky
until the rafters vanished into mist.
But now only winds from off the peaks
tended gilded images spattered with rain.
The moon’s soaring light shone through cracked eaves.
Dawn bejeweled with dewdrops lotus thrones.
Such are the evils of this latter age
that, in all Three Lands,74 the Buddha’s Teaching
by slow degrees has fallen very low.
A journey to far-off India,
to see where the Buddha lived and died
and where he began to teach the Law,
reveals both the Bamboo Grove Temple
and the Jetavana Temple now to be
lairs only to foxes and to wolves.
Their foundation stones alone remain.
No water fills the White Heron Pond;
its only depths are a tall growth of weeds.
The stupas that the king erected there,
to warn off the unworthy and urge all to dismount,
now lean, moss-covered, at mad angles.
And so it is in China, too. Tientai-shan,
Wutai-shan, Bomasi, Yuquansi—
the last monk is gone from every one,
and each of them is falling to ruin.
Both great bodies of the holy Teaching,
the Mahāyana and the Hinayana,
lie moldering in abandoned chests.
Likewise, in our realm, the Seven Great Temples
there in Nara languish pitifully.
The Eight, the Nine Schools are gone forever.
Atago and Takao, where once
halls and pagodas rose, eave to eave,
in a single night turned to wasteland.
Tengu75 live there now, and nothing else.
That may explain why the Tendai doctrine,
noble beyond price as it has been
(so lamented every thoughtful witness)
now, in Jish, seemed at last extinct.
One monk, before quitting the Mountain,
had written on a pillar of his lodge:<
br />
Has it come to this?
That these well-forested slopes
whence such prayers once rose
must now become a mountain
devoid of human presence?
His words hark back, or so it seems,
to what Saich prayed for long ago,
when founding the temple on this Mountain:
blessing from all enlightened buddhas.
The poem’s conception is very fine.
The eighth of the month is Yakushi’s day,76
but no voices rose to call his name.
In the fourth month, Sann descended,
but nobody presented offerings.77
The sacred fence, once a bright, fresh red,
had dulled with age, and old shimenawa78
alone remained to deck the sanctuaries.
14. Zenkji Destroyed by Fire
There came the news that Zenkji79 had burned down.
The story of the temple’s sacred image is this:
Of old, a plague of the five diseases swept the Indian land of Shravastī.
So many people died that the wealthy Somachatta
managed to get Jambudvīpa gold dust from the Dragon Palace
and, with the Buddha Shakyamuni and Maudgalyāyana,
cast it into an Amida triad a foot and a quarter tall.
It was the holiest image in all of Jambudvīpa.80
After the Buddha passed away,
the image stayed on in India
five hundred years, until at last
the eastward movement of the Teaching
carried it to the land of Paekche.
After a further thousand years,
when King Sŏngmyŏng reigned in Paekche
and, in Japan, Emperor Kinmei, [r. 539–71]
the image came from across the sea
to the harbor of Naniwa
in Settsu province, where it remained
through many rounds of stars and frosts.
Because it gave off golden light,
the new era was named Konk.
In the third of the Konk years,
the third month had just begun
when mi no Honda Yoshimitsu
came from the province of Shinano,
stood before the golden image,
and invited Amida home with him.
By day it was Yoshimitsu
who bore the image on his back,
but by night it was Amida
who carried Yoshimitsu.
So they arrived in Shinano,