by VIKING ADULT
where, in the county of Minochi,
Yoshimitsu enshrined Amida.
Not once in the ensuing years—
five hundred and eighty of them—
did fire ever destroy the temple.
“When ruin threatens the Sovereign’s Way,
the Buddha’s Way collapses first,”
or so they say, which may explain
why so many hallowed temples
were destroyed. Their loss announces,
people claimed, the end of the Sovereign’s Way.
15. Yasuyori’s Prayer
On Kikai-ga-shima, each exile’s life hung in the balance,
as a dewdrop hangs from the tip of a leaf,
and none clung that desperately to it; nevertheless
food and clothing reached the island from the Kase estate in Hizen,
which belonged to Noriyori, Naritsune’s father-in-law;
and these supplies sustained Shunkan and Yasuyori, too.
Yasuyori had become a monk at Murozumi in Su, on his way into exile,
adopting Shsh as his name in religion.
Having wanted so long to take that step, he made this poem:
And so, at long last,
I have given up for good
a world of sorrows
that I desperately regret
not having renounced before.
Naritsune and Yasuyori, who had long been devoted to Kumano, wanted at all costs to enshrine the three Kumano deities on the island, so as to pray that they might return to the capital. Shunkan, however, ignored them, never having been a man of any kind of faith. The pair therefore went off on their own around the island to look for a setting that might resemble Kumano.
They came to a sweeping embankment,
beautifully forested and bright
with leafy scarlet and gold brocade.
The slopes of nobly cloud-topped peaks
offered to their wondering gaze
a gauzy expanse of shifting green.
The mountain prospect, the lovely woods—
this was a setting beyond compare.
Southward the eye took in the sea,
a fuming abyss of rolling billows;
northward towered colossal crags
whence spilled a majestic waterfall,
a hundred feet high, loud as thunder,
and flanked by ancient, sighing pines.
The view so very closely resembled
Nachi, the seat of Hiryū Gongen,81
that they named this waterfall Nachi.
They called the two peaks Hongū and Shingū
and named the other places nearby
after all the lesser Kumano shrines.
Then Yasuyori led Naritsune
every day on their island route
around the Kumano pilgrimage,
praying that they should soon return:
“All hail, Gongen Kong Dji!82
Grant us your compassion, we beg!
Return us soon to our proper home!
Bring us again to our wives and children!”
The days went by. They could not change to new pilgrim robes,
since they had none. They dressed in hemp
and for their ablutions drew from a swale
water that in their minds they drew
from the pristine Iwada River.83
Whatever height they chanced to climb
in their minds was the Hosshin Gate,84
and on each of their pilgrimages
Yasuyori pronounced a prayer.
Lacking the paper for sacred streamers,
he spoke instead while offering flowers:
The current year, the first of Jish, consists of twelve months and over three hundred and fifty days. On this fortunate day, at this fortunate hour, in the presence of the Triple Kumano Deity, whose wonders are unparalleled in Japan, and of Hiryū Daisatta, his manifestation of righteous wrath, we, the devout donors Fujiwara no Naritsune, of the Palace Guards, and the monk Shsh, in full sincerity of heart and in perfect unity of body, speech, and mind, with profound respect make this declaration.
Shj Daibosatsu85 instructs those who cross the ocean of suffering; he is the king of triply accomplished enlightenment. To the east the Jruri Medicine King heals every disease. To the south resides the sublime teacher from Fudaraku, the master of supremely beneficent realization. Nyakuji, who rules the sahā world and banishes all fear, manifests buddha countenances on his head, and grants the prayers of sentient beings.86 From the emperor down to the least of his people, all therefore address to him appeals for peace in this world or for happy rebirth in the next, each morning drawing water to wash away the defilement of the passions and turning each evening toward the mightiest mountains to call the holy names.
Likening in our minds soaring peaks to the loftiest heights of divine virtue and the depths of plunging valleys to the profound reach of the Universal Vow, we struggle upward through cloud and descend slopes through heavy dews. What but faith in your mercy could move us to tread so steep a path? What but trust in your divine virtue could draw us into this wilderness? Accordingly, O Shj Daigongen, O Hiryū Daisatta, open wide your eyes of compassion, listen with all the acuity of your hearing, discern the matchless ardor of our entreaty, and vouchsafe the boon for which we pray.
So it is that to guide sentient beings, each according to that being’s faith and capacity, and to save all beings who lack faith, the divinities of Hongū and Shingū leave dwellings made of the seven treasures, temper their manifold radiance, and mingle with the dust of the six realms and the three worlds.
Sleeve to sleeve we therefore pray, despite settled karma, for the happier fortune that you have in your gift, and in that spirit we bring before you ceaseless offerings. Clad in the liturgical stole, bearing blossom offerings of enlightenment, we shake with the ardor of our entreaty the very floor of your shrine and in perfect purity of faith throw ourselves upon your mercy. If you, the gods, accept our prayer, how could you not answer it? Eyes lifted in awe, we beseech you: O divinities of the twelve sanctuaries, soar, wing to beneficent wing, across the ocean of sorrows, relieve for us the pain of exile, and fulfill our profound desire for return to the capital! We bow twice before you.
Such were the words of Yasuyori’s prayer.
16. Stupas Cast into the Sea
Naritsune and Yasuyori came regularly before the triple Kumano Deity,
and sometimes they spent the whole night there on retreat.
They had passed one such night singing imay songs
when, toward dawn, Yasuyori dozed off and had a dream.
A small boat with a white sail came in from the open sea.
Twenty or thirty women in scarlet trouser-skirts disembarked
and sang three times, to the beat of a drum:
Beyond the vows made by all other buddhas,
Thousand-Armed Kannon’s deserves fullest trust.
Even dead trees, even withered grasses
suddenly, so they say, bloom and yield fruit.
Then, in an instant, they were gone.
Yasuyori woke up amazed,
and to Naritsune he said:
“Those women I saw—why, I believe
they must have been provisional forms
assumed by the Dragon God himself.
Of the three Kumano deities,
the one to the west makes manifest
Thousand-Armed Kannon,
among whose twenty-eight followers
the Dragon God himself belongs.
This intimates plainly enough
that the gods have accepted our prayer.”
Another time both dropped off after a night of vigil and dreamed
that two leaves blew in from the sea and lodged, one in each man’s sleeve.
They turned out to be leaves of the nagi tree common at Kumano,
and together they bore a poem apparently gnawed into them by insects:
Your prayers reach the gods<
br />
swift and forever mighty
in such profusion
that you may well, after all,
see the capital once more.
Yasuyori (seated) making stupas while Shunkan (not mentioned in the text as present) looks on.
So greatly did he long for home,
that the desperate Yasuyori
also made one thousand stupas,87
each marked with the Siddham A,
the date, his true and common names,
and two poems he had written:
Here, alas, am I,
marooned on a tiny isle
far off Satsuma:
Take the news to my father,
winds that blow across the sea!
Spare a thought for me,
when, abroad on a journey
sure not to be long,
I still find my heart aching
only to go home again.
He took them out to the seashore.
“Hail and obeisance to the Refuge!”
he intoned. “O Brahma and Indra,
O Four Great Heavenly Kings,88
O gods who compact the earth,
O guardian powers of the city,
and, above all, O mighty gods
Kumano, Itsukushima:
Carry one of these, at least,
all the way to the capital!”
As each wave broke on the shore
and then slid back, he tossed one in—
one he had that moment made;
and so day after day passed by,
while the count of stupas grew.
Perhaps it was his ardent yearning
that turned into the perfect wind,
or perhaps the gods and buddhas
guided the stupa on its way,
for just one among the thousand
washed up on the beach in Aki,
before the Itsukushima Shrine.
Now, a certain monk related to Yasuyori
had set out to travel through the western provinces,
and he meant, should he only find a way to do so,
to cross to Kikai-ga-shima and learn Yasuyori’s fate.
He visited Itsukushima first of all
and met there a man in a hunting cloak, presumably from the shrine.
In conversation with him, he asked,
“Now, ‘tempering the light and mingling with the dust
in order to benefit all sentient beings’89
takes many forms. What affinity, then,
led the divinity of this island
to form a bond with the fish of the deep?”
“You see,” the man replied, “Dragon King Sagara’s
third noble daughter reveals to the senses
the Dainichi of the Womb Mandala.”90
He went on to tell of the countless wonders
worked here since first the divinity came
and now, too, when her boons save so many.
If eight sanctuaries stand here, eave to eave,
and, in fact, if the shrine is on the sea,
no doubt that is why; and why, too, the moon
shines down on the rising and ebbing tides.
At flood, torii and red shrine fence
gleam as though made of some precious stone;
at ebb, the white sand before the shrine
seems even in summer an expanse of frost.
Struck with awe, the visiting monk chanted sutra passages for the deity. Meanwhile the sun set, the moon rose, and the tide came in, carrying here and there bits of rocking flotsam. Among them he noticed a stupa-shaped object and picked it up for a closer look. “Marooned on a tiny isle,” he read. The waves had not washed away the words. They were graven into the wood and stood out quite clearly.
“How extraordinary!” he exclaimed to himself.
He slipped the stupa into his backpack chest and started out for the capital.
There he secretly traveled to Murasakino, north of Ichij,
to call on Yasuyori’s old mother, now a nun, and on his wife and children.
He showed them the stupa.
“What business did this stupa have,
to fail to drift off toward China
yet to reach us, all the way here?
It does nothing,” they lamented,
“except now to make us feel worse!”
The cloistered emperor, from his distance, heard the news and examined the stupa.
“How dreadful!” he cried, shedding gracious tears.
“So in fact these men are still alive!”
He forwarded the stupa to Shigemori,
and Shigemori in turn showed it to his father.
Kakinomoto no Hitomaru mourned
a boat vanishing round an island,
while Yamanobe no Akahito
sang of cranes crying in the reeds.91
The deity of Sumiyoshi
grieved over a fallen crossbeam,
and the divinity of Miwa
talked of the cedars at his gate.
Since Susano-o-no-mikoto
first strung thirty-one syllables
together into a Japanese poem,92
the gods and the buddhas alike
have voiced in the words of poetry
every emotion under the sun.
Neither stock nor stone, Kiyomori—
even he—seemed to respond with pity.
17. Su Wu
Since Lord Kiyomori had been moved to compassion, everyone in the capital, young or old,
went about humming the Kikai-ga-shima exile’s poem.
He had made a thousand of those stupas, though, so they must have been very small.
How extraordinary that one should have reached the capital all the way from Satsuma!
Perhaps that is what truly passionate fervor can achieve.
Of old, the Han sovereign attacked the land of the Xiongnu. He first dispatched three hundred thousand mounted men under the command of Li Xiaoqing. The Han force was weak, however, and the Xiongnu were strong. Not only did they destroy the Han army, they also took Li Xiaoqing prisoner. The next Han force, under Su Wu, numbered five hundred thousand men. It was still too weak, and the stronger Xiongnu destroyed it as well. They also took more than six thousand Han prisoners, from whom they separated out the general, Su Wu, and six hundred and thirty senior officers. They cut a leg off each and sent them away. Some died at once, some later on. Su Wu, however, did not die. With his single leg, he climbed hills to gather nuts, picked seri parsley from the swales in spring, and in autumn collected fallen ears from the rice paddies; and so he managed to sustain his dewdrop life.
The geese on the paddies were too used to him to fear him.
All of these, Su Wu reflected, return in the end to their home!
The thought stirred such longing in him that he wrote down what he had to say,
added the note “See that this reaches the emperor of Han,”
and tied it to the wing of a goose that he then released.
Sure enough, those geese in autumn
flew back from the northern marches
to the capital city of Han.
One day at dusk, Emperor Zhao,
relaxing in the Shanglin Garden
under a lightly overcast sky,
was feeling somehow melancholy
when a line of geese passed above him.
One of the geese flew down to him,
bit off the letter tied to its wing,
and dropped it at the ruler’s feet.
An official picked up the letter
and gave it to his sovereign lord.
The emperor opened it and read:
“At first, confined to a rock cave,
I spent three springs in misery;
now, cast out in desolate fields,
I am a barbarian with one leg.
Even if my bones are to lie scattered in this alien land,
my spirit will return to serve my emperor once more.”
That was when people started calling
letters “goose notes” or “goose missives.”
“How terrible!” the emperor said. “This is the much-praised writing of Su Wu!
He is still there, among the barbarians!”
This time he dispatched a force a million strong, under Li Guang,
and this time the stronger Han army crushed the Xiongnu.
News of the victory brought Su Wu forth from the wasteland.
“Behold me!” he cried. “I am the Su Wu of old!”
So it was that after nineteen years of stars and frosts,
a palanquin carried home the man with one leg.
Su Wu was sent in his sixteenth year to the land of the Xiongnu, and thereafter he always managed somehow to hide the banner that the emperor had given him. He had kept it with him the whole time. Now he took it out at last for a deeply moving audience with his sovereign. His peerless service won him many large provinces, as well as oversight of all vassal states. As for Li Xiaoqing, he remained in the barbarian land and never returned. Not that he did not long desperately to do so, but the Xiongnu king would not let him go. The Han emperor, who did not know this, condemned him as disloyal. He exhumed the bones of Li Xiaoqing’s dead parents and had them flogged. He also punished his close family.
This news reached Li Xiaoqing, who was outraged.
Nevertheless he still longed to go home,
and he therefore addressed to the emperor
an account to prove that he remained loyal.
“What a terrible thing!” the emperor sighed.
He regretted after all having had the bones of the man’s parents dug up and flogged.
Su Wu, of old in Han China,
tied to the wing of a goose a letter
that he wished to reach his old home,
while in our own realm Yasuyori
sent poems home on the ocean waves.
One wrote as the brush moved,
one put together poems.
One lived long, long ago,
and one in our latter age.
One wrote among the Xiongnu,
one on Kikai-ga-shima.
So far apart in setting and time,
they still shared the same inspiration.
Their stories are a wonder to tell.
51. Nyoirin is an esoteric form of the compassionate bodhisattva Kannon. A “palace chaplain” (gojis) was one of a roster of distinguished clerics responsible especially for protecting the emperor, by their prayers, while he slept.