Traditional Japanese Literature

by Haruo Shirane

  In addition, the Nara monks made a big ball, of the kind used in New Year’s games, dubbed it “Prime Minister Kiyomori’s head,” and yelled, “Hit it! Stomp on it!” Easy talk is the midwife of disaster, and incautious action is the highway to ruin, people say.133 This prime minister, Kiyomori, as the maternal grandfather of the reigning emperor, was someone to be spoken of with the utmost respect. It seemed as though only the Devil of the Sixth Heaven134 could have inspired the Nara monks to use such language in referring to him.

  When news of these events reached Prime Minister Kiyomori, he began making plans to deal with the situation. In order to bring an immediate halt to the unruly doings in Nara, he appointed Senoo Kaneyasu as the chief of police of Yamato Province, where Nara is situated, and sent him with a force of five hundred horsemen under his command. “Even if your opponents resort to violence, you must not retaliate in kind!” he warned the men when they set off. “Do not wear armor or helmets, and do not carry bows and arrows!”

  But the Nara monks were not, of course, aware of Kiyomori’s private instructions, and, seizing some sixty of Kaneyasu’s men who had become separated from the main force, they cut off their heads and hung them in a row around the border of Sarusawa Pond.

  Enraged at this, Kiyomori commanded, “Very well, then, attack Nara!”

  He dispatched a force of more than forty thousand horsemen to carry out the attack, with Shigehira as commander in chief and Michimori as second in command. Meanwhile more than seven thousand monks, both old and young, had put on helmets and dug trenches across the road at two places, one at the slope called Narazaka and the other at Hannya-ji temple, and fortified them with barricades of shields and thorned branches. There they awaited the attackers.

  The Heike, their forty thousand men split into two parties, swept down on the two fortified points at Narazaka and Hannya-ji, shouting their battle cries. All the monks were on foot and armed with swords. The government forces, being mounted, could thus charge back and forth among them, chasing some this way, driving others that, showering arrows down on them until countless numbers had been felled. The ceremonial exchange of arrows signaling the start of hostilities took place at six in the morning, and the battle continued throughout the day. By evening, both the fortified points at Narazaka and Hannya-ji had been captured….

  The fighting continued into the night. Darkness having fallen, the Heike commander in chief, Shigehira, who was standing in front of the gate of Hannya-ji temple, called for torches to be lit. A certain Tomokata, a minor overseer of the Fukui estate in Harima, broke his shield in two and, using it as a torch, set fire to one of the commoners’ houses in the area. It was the twenty-eighth night of the Twelfth Month and a strong wind was blowing. Although only one fire had been set, it was blown by the wind this way and that until it had spread to many of the temples in the vicinity.

  Monk soldiers and the Heike clash near Hannya-ji temple in Nara (right). The temples, which have been set on fire by the Heike, burn while the monk soldiers flee (left). (A 1656 Meireki woodblock edition, by permission of Shogakukan

  By this time, those monks who were ashamed to be thought cowardly and who cared what kind of name they left behind them had died in the fighting at Narazaka or Hannya-ji. Those who could still use their legs fled in the direction of Mount Yoshino and Totsukawa. The older monks who were unable to walk any great distance, along with the special students in training at the temples, the acolytes, and the women and children all fled as fast as they could to Kōfuku-ji or Tōdai-ji, some thousand or more persons climbing up to the second story of the latter temple’s Hall of the Great Buddha. To prevent any of their pursuers from reaching them, they then threw down the ladders by which they had ascended. When the flames from the fire came roaring down on them, their shrieks and cries could hardly have been surpassed by even those of the sinners being tortured in the Hell of Scorching Heat, the Great Hell of Scorching Heat, or the Hell of Never-Ceasing Torment.

  Kōfuku-ji was founded at the behest of Lord Tankai, Fujiwara no Fuhito,135 and thereafter served generation after generation as the temple of the Fujiwara clan. Its Eastern Gold Hall contained an image of Shakyamuni Buddha brought to Japan when Buddhist teachings were first introduced. The Western Gold Hall contained an image of the bodhisattva Kannon that, on its own accord, had risen out of the earth. These, along with the corridors strung like emerald gems surrounding them on four sides, the two-story hall with its vermilion and cinnabar trimmings, the two pagodas with their nine-ring finials shining in the sky, all went up in smoke in the space of an instant.

  In Tōdai-ji was enshrined the one-hundred-and-sixty-foot gilt-bronze image of the Buddha Vairochana—burnished by the hand and person of Emperor Shōmu136 himself—the representation of the Buddha who abides eternally, never passing away, as he manifests his living body in the Land of Actual Reward and the Land of Eternally Tranquil Light. The protuberance on the top of his head towering on high, half-hidden in the clouds; the tuft of white hair between his eyebrows, an object of veneration:137 this hallowed figure was as perfect as the full moon. Now amid the flames, the head fell to the ground, and the body melted and fused into one mountainlike mass. The eighty-four thousand auspicious marks of the Buddha were suddenly obscured like an autumn moon by the clouds of the Five Cardinal Sins; the garlands of jewels adorning the forty-two stages of bodhisattva practice were blown away like stars in the night sky by the winds of the Ten Evil Actions.138 Smoke rose to blanket the sky, flames filled every corner of the empty air. Those who witnessed with their own eyes what was happening turned their gaze aside; those far off who heard reports of the disaster felt their spirits quail. All the doctrines and sacred writings of the Hossō and Sanron schools of Buddhism were lost, with not one scroll remaining.139 Never before in India or China, it seemed, to say nothing of our land of Japan, had the Buddhist law suffered such terrible destruction.

  King Udayana fashioned an image of fine gold, and Vishvakarman carved one out of red sandalwood, but these Buddha figures were merely life-size.140 How could they compare with the Buddha of Tōdai-ji, unique and without equal anywhere in the entire continent of Jambudvipa in which we humans live? Yet this Buddha, who no one thought would ever suffer injury or decay whatever ages might pass, had now become mingled with and defiled by worldly dust, leaving behind only a legacy of unending sorrow. Brahma, Indra, the Four Heavenly Kings, the dragons, spirits, and others of the eight kinds of guardian beings, the wardens of the underworld, all those who lend divine protection to Buddhism must have looked on with alarm and consternation. The god Daimyōjin of the nearby Kasuga Shrine, who guards and protects the Hossō sect—what could he have thought? Little wonder, then, that the dew that fell on Kasuga meadow now had a different color, and the storm winds over Mount Mikasa sounded with a vengeful roar.

  When the number of persons who perished in the flames was tallied up, it was found that more than seventeen hundred had died in the second story of the Hall of the Great Buddha, more than eight hundred at Kōfuku-ji, more than five hundred at this hall, more than three hundred at that hall—a total, in fact, of more than three thousand, five hundred persons. Of the thousand or more monks who died in the fighting, some had their heads cut off and exposed by the gate of Hannya-ji, while the heads of others were carried back to the capital.

  On the twenty-ninth day of the month that the commander in chief, Taira no Shigehira, having destroyed the Southern Capital of Nara, returned to the Northern Capital of Heian, only Prime Minister Kiyomori, his anger now appeased, delighted in the outcome. But the empress, Retired Emperor GoShirakawa, Retired Emperor Takakura, Regent Motomichi, and the others below them in station all deplored what had happened, declaring, “It was one thing to punish the evil monks, but what need was there to destroy the temples?”

  The heads of the monks killed in battle were originally intended to be paraded through the main streets of the capital and then hung on the tree in front of the prison, but those in charge were so shoc
ked at the destruction of Tōdaiji and Kōfuku-ji that these orders were never issued. Instead, the heads were simply discarded here and there in the moats and drainage ditches.

  In a document written in his own hand, Emperor Shōmu had declared, “When these temples prosper, the entire realm shall prosper. When these temples fall to ruin, the realm, too, shall fall into ruin.” It thus appeared that without doubt these events must presage the downfall and ruin of the nation.

  Thus this terrible year [1180] came to an end, and the fifth year of the Jishō era began.

  Book Six

  GOSHIRAKAWA: retired emperor and head of the imperial clan.

  KIYOMORI (Taira): lay priest, prime minister, and retired Taira clan head.

  MUNEMORI (Taira): son of Kiyomori and Taira clan head.

  NUN OF THE SECOND RANK (Taira): wife of Kiyomori.

  YORITOMO (Minamoto): leader of the anti-Taira forces in the east.

  YOSHINAKA (Minamoto): cousin of Yoritomo and leader of the anti-Taira forces in the north; also called Lord Kiso.

  The New Year’s ceremonies are shortened and do not have their normal luster owing to the burning of Nara. The gloom is deepened by the death of Retired Emperor Takakura. Yoshinaka of Kiso, working to overthrow the Taira, begins to gather allies in the north. The Taira’s rule continues to weaken, and rebellions break out in Kyushu, Shikoku, and elsewhere.

  THE DEATH OF KIYOMORI (6:7)

  After this, all the warriors of the island of Shikoku went over to the side of Kōno no Michinobu. Reports also came that Tanzō, the superintendent of the Kumano Shrine, had shifted his sympathies to the Genji side, despite the many kindnesses shown him by the Heike. All the provinces in the north and the east were thus rebelling against the Taira, and in the regions to the west and southwest of the capital the situation was the same. Report after report of uprisings in the outlying areas came to startle the ears of the Heike, and word repeatedly reached them of additional impending acts of rebellion. It seemed as though the “barbarian tribes to the east and west”141 had suddenly risen up against them. The members of the Taira clan were not alone in thinking that the end of the world was close at hand. No truly thoughtful person could fail to dread the ominous turn of events.

  On the twenty-third day of the Second Month, a council of the senior Taira nobles was convened. At that time Lord Munemori, a former general of the right, spoke as follows: “We earlier tried to put down the rebels in the east, but the results were not all that we might have desired. This time I would like to be appointed commander in chief to move against them.”

  “What a splendid idea!” the other nobles exclaimed in obsequious assent. A directive was accordingly handed down from the retired emperor appointing Lord Munemori commander in chief of an expedition against the traitorous elements in the eastern and northern provinces. All the high ministers and courtiers who held military posts or were experienced in the use of arms were ordered to follow him.

  When word had already gotten abroad that Lord Munemori would set out on his mission to put down the Genji forces in the eastern provinces on the twenty-seventh day of the same month, his departure was canceled because of reports that Kiyomori, the lay priest and prime minister, was not in his customary good health.

  On the following day, the twenty-eighth, it became known that Kiyomori was seriously ill, and people throughout the capital and at Rokuhara whispered to one another, “This is just what we were afraid of!”

  From the first day that Kiyomori took sick, he was unable to swallow anything, not even water. His body was as hot as though there were a fire burning inside it: those who attended him could scarcely come within twenty-five or thirty feet of him so great was the heat. All he could do was cry out, “I’m burning! I’m burning!” His affliction seemed quite unlike any ordinary illness.

  Water from the Well of the Thousand-Arm Kannon on Mount Hiei was brought to the capital and poured into a stone bathtub, and Kiyomori’s body was lowered into it in hopes of cooling him. But the water began to bubble and boil furiously and, in a moment, had all gone up in steam. In another attempt to bring him some relief, wooden pipes were rigged in order to pour streams of water down on his body, but the water sizzled and sputtered as though it were landing on fiery rocks or metal, and virtually none of it reached his body. The little that did so burst into flames and burned, filling the room with black smoke and sending flames whirling upward.

  Long ago, the eminent Buddhist priest Hōzō was said to have been invited by Enma, the king of hell, to visit the infernal regions. At that time he asked if he might see the place where his deceased mother had been reborn. Admiring his filial concern, Enma directed the hell wardens to conduct him to the Hell of Scorching Heat, where Hōzō’s mother was undergoing punishment. When Hōzō entered the iron gates of the hell, he saw flames leaping up like shooting stars, ascending hundreds of yojanas into the air. The sight must have been much like what those attending Kiyomori in his sickness now witnessed.

  Kiyomori’s wife, the Nun of the Second Rank, had a most fearful dream. It seemed that a carriage enveloped in raging flames had entered the gate of the mansion. Stationed at the front and rear of the carriage were creatures, some with the head of a horse, others with the head of an ox. To the front of the carriage was fastened an iron plaque inscribed with the single word mu, “never.”

  In her dream the Nun of the Second Rank asked, “Where has this carriage come from?”

  “From the tribunal of King Enma,” was the reply. “It has come to fetch His Lordship, the lay priest and prime minister of the Taira clan.”

  “And what does the plaque mean?” she asked.

  “It means that because of the crime of burning the one-hundred-and-sixty-foot gilt-bronze image of the Buddha Vairochana142 in the realm of human beings, King Enma’s tribunal has decreed that the perpetrator shall fall into the depths of the Hell of Never-Ceasing Torment. The ‘Never’ of Never-Ceasing is written on it; the ‘Ceasing’ remains to be written.”

  The Nun of the Second Rank woke from her dream in alarm, her body bathed in perspiration, and when she told others of her dream, their hair stood on end just hearing about it. She made offerings of gold, silver, and the seven precious objects to all the temples and shrines reputed to have power in such matters, even adding such items as horses, saddles, armor, helmets, bows, arrows, long swords, and short swords. But no matter how much she added as accompaniment to her supplications, they were wholly without effect. Kiyomori’s sons and daughters gathered by his pillow and bedside, inquiring in anguish if there were something that could be done, but all their cries were in vain.

  On the second day of the second intercalary month, the Nun of the Second Rank, braving the formidable heat, approached her husband’s pillow and spoke through her tears. “With each day that passes, it seems to me, there is less hope for your recovery. If you have anything you wish to say before you depart this world, it would be good to speak now while your mind is still clear.”

  In earlier days the prime minister had always been brusque and forceful in manner, but now, tormented by pain, he had barely breath enough to utter these words. “Ever since the Hōgen and Heiji uprisings, I have on numerous occasions put down those who showed themselves enemies of the throne, and I have received rewards and acclaim far surpassing what I deserve. I have had the honor to become the grandfather of a reigning emperor and to hold the office of prime minister, and the bounties showered on me extend to my sons and grandsons. There is nothing more whatsoever that I could wish for in this life. Only one regret remains to me—that I have yet to behold the severed head of that exile to the province of Izu, Minamoto no Yoritomo! When I have ceased to be, erect no temples or pagodas in my honor, conduct no memorial rites for me! But dispatch forces at once to strike at Yoritomo, cut off his head, and hang it before my grave—that is all the ceremony that I ask!” Such were the deeply sinful words that he spoke!

  On the fourth day of the same month, the illness continuing to
torment him, Kiyomori’s attendants thought to provide some slight relief by pouring water over a board and laying him on it, but this appeared to do no good whatsoever. Moaning in desperation, he fell to the floor and there suffered his final agonies. The sound of horses and carriages rushing about seemed to echo to the heavens and to make the very earth tremble. Even if the sovereign of the realm himself, the lord of ten thousand chariots, had passed away, there could not have been a greater commotion.

  Kiyomori had turned sixty-four this year. He thus was not particularly advanced in age. But the life span decreed him by his actions in previous existences had abruptly come to an end. Hence the large-scale ceremonies and secret ceremonies performed on his behalf by the Buddhist priests failed to have any effect; the gods and the Three Treasures of Buddhism143 ceased to shed their light on him; and the benevolent deities withdrew their guardianship.

  And if even divine help was beyond his reach, how little could mere human beings do! Although tens of thousands of loyal troops stationed themselves inside his mansion and in the grounds around it, all eager to sacrifice themselves and to die in his place, they could not, even for an instant, hold at bay the deadly devil of impermanence, whose form is invisible to the eye and whose power is invincible. Kiyomori went all alone to the Shide Mountains of death, from which there is no return; alone he faced the sky on his journey over the River of Three Crossings to the land of the Yellow Springs. And when he arrived there, only the evil deeds he had committed in past days, transformed now into hell wardens, were there to greet him. All in all, it was a pitiful business.