by VIKING ADULT
After receiving the gift of life,
you enjoyed such wealth and pleasure
as very few men have ever known.
An emperor’s commoner relative,
you rose to the post of minister,
and no shadow tarnished your glory.
If for you it has now come to this,
the cause is your karma from past lives.
Blame neither the world nor any man.
Samadhi in the Brahma Heaven,
the highest pleasure, is soon gone.
How swiftly, then, a life passes
in this lower realm: like lightning,
like the dews of early morning!
A million times a million years
spent in the lofty Tri Heaven279
speed by like any fleeting dream.
The thirty-nine years you have lived
amount to no more than an hour.
Whose tongue has known the elixir
that sweeps away old age and death?
Whose length of days has ever matched
the Eastern Father’s, the Western Mother’s?280
The First Emperor of Qin, in his pride,
reached heights that no man could surpass
yet soon lay in his Lishan tomb;
Emperor Wu of Han craved endless life
yet fed in death the moss at Duling.
All born to live must also die.
Not even the Buddha Shakyamuni
escaped the clouds of sandalwood smoke
that rose above his funeral pyre.
Pleasure, they say, yields to sorrow.
For each celestial being, there comes
a day to know the five signs of decline.
So it is that the Buddha taught:
‘The mind itself is emptiness.
Sin and success both lack substance.
See into the mind: There is none.
Dharmas do not inhere in Dharma.’281
Grasp therefore that good and evil
are both in their essence void
and you have the Buddha’s meaning.
How, then, could the Buddha Amida,
after five aeons in deep thought,
conceive his most demanding Vow,
when we, hopeless beings that we are,
turn for aeons beyond counting
on the wheel of transmigration,
tread mountains of priceless treasure,
yet stagger on empty-handed?
Is this not the heart of black regret
and foolishness to dwarf any folly?
Never, never allow your thoughts to stray!” the holy man enjoined;
then he gave Munemori the precepts and urged him to call the Name.
Munemori recognized in him a true spiritual friend.
He renounced at once all deluded anxiety,
turned to the west, palms pressed together, and loudly called on Amida.
Kitsu Kinnaga, drawn sword at his side,
moved around behind him from the left
and was already poised to strike
when Munemori’s voice fell silent.
“And Kiyomune? Is it done?”
he asked with affecting concern.
Kinnaga was hardly in position
when Munemori’s head fell forward.
The holy man burst into tears,
and surely every man there was moved.
And Kinnaga, then, a hereditary Heike retainer who had served Lord Tomomori from morning to night! Very well, people naturally change with the times, but those present were disgusted by his obsequious cruelty.
The holy man gave Kiyomune the precepts in his turn and admonished him to call the Name.
“How was my father when he died?” Kiyomune pathetically inquired.
“Magnificent,” the holy man answered. “Have no fear on that score.”
Kiyomune wept with relief. “I ask nothing more,” he said. “Now, do it!”
This time it was Hori no Yatar who wielded the sword. Yoshitsune took the heads into the city, while Kinnaga had the bodies buried in one grave. This was because Lord Munemori had displayed so sinful an attachment to his son.
On the twenty-third of the month, the two heads entered the capital.
The police contingent that came out to receive them, on the riverbank at Sanj,
then paraded them along the avenue
and hung them in a chinaberry tree to the left of the prison gate.
Precedent in the Other Realm may authorize so displaying
the head of a gentleman of the third rank or higher
and hanging it at the prison gate,
but not in this realm of ours. It was unheard of.
No doubt in the Heiji years Nobuyori was beheaded for his evil deeds,
but his head was subjected to no such treatment.
The Heike suffered it first.
Munemori had come up from the west
only to be paraded, alive,
eastward the length of Rokuj;
then, when he came back up from the east,
off he went westward, in death, along Sanj.
Paraded dead, paraded alive—
which meant the greater or lesser shame?
19. The Execution of Shigehira
Lord Shigehira had been in Izu province since the year before,
in the custody of Kano-no-suke Munemochi,
but the Nara monks kept clamoring for him.
“Very well, let them have him,” came the order,
and Izu no Kurando Yorikane, a grandson of Minamoto no Yorimasa,
was sent to escort him down to Nara.
He took Shigehira not by the capital but through tsu, Yamashina,
and on along the Daigo road to a spot not far from Hino.
Lord Shigehira had taken to wife
the Torikai counselor Korezane’s daughter.
The grand counselor Kunitsuna adopted her,
and she became Emperor Antoku’s nurse.
Lady Dainagon-no-suke was her name,
and she remained with His Majesty
even after her husband was taken
at Ichi-no-tani. At Dan-no-ura,
where the emperor drowned in the sea,
ferocious warriors captured her.
She then returned to her home, the city,
and lived with her elder sister at Hino.
When she learned that her husband’s dewdrop life still hung on a leaf tip,
she imagined that she might see him a last time, not in a dream but real.
That was not to be, though, and tears alone consoled her night after night, day after day.
Shigehira said to his guards,
“Your recent kindness and consideration have given me great comfort.
Today there is one last favor that I would ask of you.
Having no children, I will leave no regrets behind me.
But my wife of all these years now lives, or so I hear, at Hino.
I would like to see her again and talk over her prayers for my next life.”
So it is that he requested a short period of leave.
The warrior guards, being neither stock nor stone, wept to hear him.
They saw no objection and, to his great joy, allowed him to go.
He sent a man to her house to announce,
“Lady Dainagon-no-suke lives here, I believe?
Captain Shigehira is traveling past here toward Nara,
and he wonders whether he might have a word with her.
He would not actually enter the house.”
The instant the news reached her,
she ran out, crying, “Where is he? Where?”
There before her, beside the railing,
stood in an indigo hitatare
and a folded eboshi a man
lean and deeply tanned: It was he.
She approached the edge of the room,
just within the blinds, and called out,
“I must be dreaming
! Come in! Come in!”
Her voice started tears from his eyes.
Tears blinded hers, too. She sat speechless.
He leaned in toward her, under the blinds,
weeping, and spoke to her: “Last spring,
at Ichi-no-tani, I should have died,
but in punishment for my crimes,
I suppose, I was taken alive,
paraded through the city streets,
and shamed even in Kamakura.
All this was terrible enough,
but now I am going to Nara,
to be handed over to the monks,
who will behead me. My last wish
was to see you one final time.
I have done so now, and I ask nothing more.
I wanted to renounce the world and send you a lock of hair to remember me by, but they would not let me.” With these words he separated a lock from his forehead, and, where he could reach it, bit it off. “Let this remind you of me,” he said, and gave it to her.
She, who had worried so long about him, now showed signs of utter despair. “After you and I parted,” she said, “I should have drowned myself, like Lord Michimori’s wife, but no reliable report confirmed that you were gone, and I kept wondering whether by some miracle I might see you again as you had once been. That forlorn hope sustained me all this time. Oh, it hurts so, to think that I will never see you again! I hoped that their letting you live this long meant that they would never…”
They talked on, amid endless tears, of things old and new.
“You look so shabby, though!” she said. “Do change into these!”
She brought out a matched short-sleeved robe and white hunting cloak.
He put them on and left with her the clothes that he had been wearing.
“Keep these to remember me by,” he said.
“Of course I will,” she replied, “but to remind me of you forever,
I would much rather have some little thing from your brush.”
She gave him an inkstone, and in tears he wrote down this poem:
These poor clothes of mine,
wet with all the tears my eyes
weep so helplessly,
I give you now in this exchange,
that you may remember me.
At once she replied,
These clothes you give me
in exchange for some from me—
what good can they do,
when the only memory
they leave me is this last day?
“A couple pledged to each other are sure to be born together in the next life,” he said.
“Pray that you and I be reborn on the same lotus throne.
Now the sun is low, and it is a long way to Nara.
It would be thoughtless of me to keep the warriors waiting.”
He started away, but she clung to his sleeve.
“Oh, oh, do stay a little!” she pleaded, to detain him.
“I am sure you understand how I feel,” he answered, “but there is no escape.
I shall be with you again in the life to come.” And off he went.
He would not see her again in this life,
that he knew and longed to look back,
but he steeled himself against such weakness.
She collapsed at the foot of the blinds,
writhed in anguish, and keened his loss.
Her cries, which followed him out the gate,
stayed him from urging his horse forward,
for tears darkened the path ahead.
Now he wished he had never seen her.
She only yearned to run after him,
but that was more than she could do,
so she lay still, a robe over her head.
In due course the Nara monks took custody of Shigehira, then met in council.
“So heinous is this Shigehira’s crime,” they concluded,
“that the three thousand crimes chastised by the five punishments do not even include it.
That such an act should call down commensurate retribution is entirely just.
This man is an enemy of the Buddha and of his Teaching.
We should probably drag him around the boundary walls of Tdaiji and Kfukuji,
and saw his head off, or bury him alive, upright, and then behead him.”
However, the older monks objected.
“That is not the way monks behave,” they said.
“We should just give him over to his warrior guards
and have them behead him beside the Kizu River.”
They returned the prisoner to his guards,
who took him to the riverbank and prepared to do so.
Several thousand monks and countless other spectators watched.
A man long in Shigehira’s employ, Moku Uma-no-j Tomotoki by name, now served the Hachij Princess. He rode as fast as he could to Nara, with liberal use of the whip, to witness the death of his former lord, and he arrived just as Shigehira’s head was about to fall. Cleaving his way though the vast throng, he approached the condemned man and said, weeping, “My lord, it is I, Tomotoki. I have come to be present at your end.”
“That is very good of you,” Shigehira replied. “I should like my head to fall while I worship the Buddha, but that seems impossible—my crime is so very great.”
“That presents no difficulty.” Tomotoki discussed the matter with the guards and brought Shigehira a buddha image from nearby. Fortunately, it was an image of Amida.
He stood the Amida on the gravel riverbank,
undid the cord from a sleeve of his hunting cloak,
attached one end to Amida’s hands, and gave Shigehira the other.
Shigehira, holding the cord, addressed Amida as follows:
“I have heard that Devadatta,
who committed the three offenses282
and burned the eighty thousand scriptures,
Tomotoki (right background) arrives just in time.
learned from the Buddha that in time
birth would be his as the buddha Ten’.
Despite the gravity of his crimes,
just having heard the holy Teaching
assured his enlightenment after all.
What foul crimes I myself committed sprang from no wish of mine,
but solely from natural obedience to orders from on high.
What man, intent on preserving his life, would make light of his sovereign’s command?
What son would ignore his father’s?
Sovereign or father, refusal is out of the question.
Only the Buddha can decide the right and wrong of the matter.
Now retribution is poised to strike, and my life is at an end.
The bitterest regret now comes too late.
However, the heart of all the buddhas is compassion,
and there are many, varied paths to salvation.
‘The all-embracing doctrine teaches, in essence,
that wrong paths are the same as right’—
this saying is graven in my heart.
‘Call once the Name of Amida and abolish countless sins.’
May this evil path of mine prove to lead only to good,
and may this last time I call the Name bring me to birth in paradise!”
He called the Name aloud ten times,
stretched forth his neck, and gave his head to the sword.
Evil committed in the past
requires due acknowledgment,
yet what they now saw before them
moved the monks in their thousands
and the warrior guards to tears.
Shigehira’s head was nailed up before the great torii of Hannyaji, for this was where he had stood, that night during the Jish wars, when he burned the temples of Nara. His wife, Lady Dainagon-no-suke, sent a palanquin to retrieve his headless body, so as to be able to give him the last rites. The palanquin brought it back to Hino. Her feelings when it arrived are easily imagined. The body had retained the full look of life
the day before, after the execution, but by now, in the summer heat, it was sadly changed.
It was therefore imperative to proceed.
She roused the most worthy monks from nearby Hkaiji to perform the services needed.
As for the head, she begged the Great Buddha holy man, Shunjb Chgen, for it,283
and he had the monks send it to Hino. Head and body together turned to smoke.
She sent the bones to Mount Kya and erected a funeral monument at Hino.
The Lady Dainagon-no-suke
changed to the habit of a nun
and devoted herself to prayer
that her husband in the life to come
should attain enlightenment.
Such is their deeply moving story.
256. Near the mouth of the Yodo River, on the south bank.
257. The harbor of Fukushima adjoined Watanabe.
258. Yashima was then an island separated from the mainland by a narrow passage of sea, most of which is now filled in.
259. Kiyomune.
260. Ichinichiky, a particular form of intense Lotus Sutra devotion.
261. A “willow” layering consisted of white over green, here repeated five times.
262. One of the Kumano Hongū divinities. Tanz’s ship carries the divinity’s mishtai, or shintai: the object in which the divine presence inheres.
263. The normal length was seven and a half feet.
264. Everlasting Life and Eternal Youth are names associated with the Chinese imperial palace.
265. A fire-heated stone slipped into clothing for warmth.
266. The hills and river of Tatsuta (south of present-day Osaka) were associated in poetry with brightly colored autumn leaves; Tatsuta-hime was the goddess of autumn.
267. Zhu Maichen, a man of the Han dynasty, returned home in triumph, wearing brocade. Wang Zhaojun (Japanese: shkun), a palace beauty, was sent by Emperor Wu of Han, much against her will, to the king of the barbarian Xiongnu people.
268. In Juei 2 (1183), on their return to Fukuhara.
269. So sacred was the imperial sword that this chapter was treated as a “secret piece” by the guild of professional Heike performers.
270. Yamato-hime, the High Priestess of Ise. The Sun Goddess moved to Ise early in Keik’s reign.
271. The line of descent from Emperor jin.
272. A doctor of yin-yang astrology and divination.
273. A younger brother of Emperor Antoku and an older brother of the currently reigning emperor, Go-Toba.