The Tales of the Heike

by Burton Watson

  Despairing of this fickle world, Kenreimon’in had entered the true path of religion, but this had by no means brought an end to her sighs. While she could still recall how those she loved had sunk beneath the waves, the figure of her son, the late emperor, and her mother, the Nun of the Second Rank, remained to haunt her memory. She wondered why her own dewdrop existence had continued for so long, why she had lived on only to see such painful sights, and her tears flowed without end. Short as the Fifth Month nights were, she found them almost too long to endure, and since sleep was, by the nature of things, denied her, she could not hope to recapture the past even in her dreams. The lamp, its back to the wall, gave only a flicker of dying light, yet all night she lay awake listening to the mournful pelting of rain at the dark window. The Shangyang lady, imprisoned in Shangyang Palace, had endured similarly mournful nights, but her grief could hardly have been greater than Kenreimon’in’s.1

  Perhaps to remind himself of the past, the previous owner of the retreat had planted an orange tree by the eaves, and its blossoms now wafted their poignant fragrance on the breeze, while a cuckoo from the hills, lighting there, sang out two or three notes. Kenreimon’in, remembering an old poem, wrote the words on the lid of her inkstone box:

  Cuckoo, you come singing, tracing the orange tree’s scent—is it because you yearn for someone now gone?

  The ladies-in-waiting who had once attended her, but lacked the strength of character needed to drown themselves on the sea bottom as had the Nun of the Second Rank or the Third-Rank Lady of Echizen, had been taken prisoner by the rough hands of the Genji warriors. Returned now to the capital where they had once lived, young and old alike had become nuns, their aspect wholly changed, their purpose in life utterly vanished. In remote valleys, among rocky cliffs, sites they had never even dreamed of in the past, they passed their days. The houses where they had dwelled before all had disappeared with the smoke of battle; mere traces of them remained, little by little overgrown with grasses of the field. No familiar figures came there anymore. They must have felt as desolate as those men in the Chinese tale who, having spent what they thought was a mere half day in the realm of the immortals, returned to their old home to confront their seventh-generation descendants.

  And then, on the ninth day of the Seventh Month, a severe earthquake toppled the tile-capped mud wall and rendered Kenreimon’in’s dwelling, already dilapidated, even more ruinous and unsound, so that it was hardly fit for habitation. Worse off than the lady of Shangyang Palace, Kenreimon’in had no green-robed guard to stand at her gate. The hedges, now left untended, were laden with more dew than the lush meadow grasses, and insects, making themselves at home there, had already begun crying out their doleful chorus of complaints. As the fall nights grew longer, Kenreimon’in found herself more wakeful than ever, the hours passing with intolerable slowness. To the endless memories that haunted her were now added the sorrows of the autumn season, until it was almost more than she could bear. Since her whole world had undergone such drastic change, no one was left who might offer her so much as a passing word of consolation, no one to whom she might look for support.

  The Move to Ōhara (2)

  Although such was the case, the wives of the Reizei senior counselor, Takafusa, and of Lord Nobutaka, Kenreimon’in’s younger sisters, while shunning public notice, managed to call on her in private. “In the old days I would never have dreamed that I might sometime be beholden to them for support!” exclaimed the imperial lady, moved to tears by their visit, and all the ladies in attendance shed tears as well.

  The place where Kenreimon’in was living was not far from the capital, and the bustling road leading past it was full of prying eyes. She could not help feeling that fragile as her existence might be, mere dew before the wind, she might better live it out in some more remote mountain setting where distressing news of worldly affairs was less likely to reach her. She had been unable to find a suitable location, however, when a certain lady who had called on her mentioned that the Buddhist retreat known as Jakkō-in in the mountains of Ōhara was a very quiet spot.

  A mountain village may be lonely, she thought to herself, recalling an old poem on the subject, but it is a better place to dwell than among the world’s troubles and sorrows. Having thus determined to move, she found that her sister, the wife of Lord Takafusa, could probably arrange for a palanquin and other necessities. Accordingly, in the first year of the Bunji era, as the Ninth Month was drawing to a close, she set off for the Jakkō-in in Ōhara.

  As Kenreimon’in passed along the road, observing the hues of the autumn leaves on the trees all around her, she soon found the day coming to a close, perhaps all the sooner because she was entering the shade of the mountains. The tolling of the evening bell from a temple in the fields sounded its somber note, and dew from the grasses along the way made her sleeves, already damp with tears, wetter than ever. A stormy wind began to blow, tumbling the leaves from the trees; the sky clouded over; and autumn showers began to fall. She could just catch the faint sad belling of a deer, and the half-audible lamentations of the insects. Everything contrived to fill her with a sense of desolation difficult to describe in words. Even in those earlier days, when her life had been a precarious journey from one cove or one island to another, she reflected sadly, she had never had such a feeling of hopelessness.

  The retreat was in a lonely spot of moss-covered crags, the sort of place, she felt, where she could live out her days. As she looked about her, she noted that the bush clover in the dew-filled garden had been stripped of its leaves by frost, that the chrysanthemums by the hedge, past their prime, were faded and dry—all reflecting, it seemed, her own condition. Making her way to where the statue of the Buddha was enshrined, she said a prayer: “May the spirit of the late emperor attain perfect enlightenment; may he quickly gain the wisdom of the buddhas!” But even as she did so, the image of her dead son seemed to appear before her, and she wondered in what future existence she might be able to forget him.

  Next to the Jakkō-in she had a small building erected, ten feet square in size, with one room to sleep in and the other to house the image of the Buddha. Morning and evening, day and night, she performed her devotions in front of the image, ceaselessly intoning the Buddha’s name over the long hours. In this way, always diligent, she passed the months and days.

  On the fifteenth day of the Tenth Month, as evening was approaching, Kenreimon’in heard the sound of footsteps on the dried oak leaves that littered the garden. “Who could be coming to call at a place so far removed from the world as this?” she said, addressing her woman companion. “Go see who it is. If it is someone I should not see, I must hurry to take cover!” But when the woman went to look, she found that it was only a stag that had happened to pass by.

  “Who was it?” asked Kenreimon’in, to which her companion, Lady Dainagon no Suke, struggling to hold back her tears, replied with this poem:

  Who would tread a path to this rocky lair?

  It was a deer whose passing rustled the leaves of the oak.

  Struck by the pathos of the situation, Kenreimon’in carefully inscribed the poem on the small sliding panel by her window.

  During her drab and uneventful life, bitter as it was, she found many things that provided food for thought. The trees ranged before the eaves of her retreat suggested to her the seven rows of jewelladen trees that are said to grow in the Western Paradise, and the water pooled in a crevice in the rocks brought to mind the wonderful water of eight blessings to be found there. Spring blossoms, so easily scattered with the breeze, taught her a lesson in impermanence; the autumn moon, so quickly hidden by its companion clouds, spoke of the transience of life. Those court ladies in the Zhaoyang Hall in China who admired the blossoms at dawn soon saw their petals blown away by the wind; those in the Changqiu Palace who gazed at the evening moon had its brightness stolen from them by clouds. Once in the past, this lady too had lived in similar splendor, reclining on brocade bedclothes in chambers of go
ld and jade, and now in a hut of mere brushwood and woven vines—even strangers must weep for her.

  The Retired Emperor Visits Ōhara (3)

  Things went along like this until the spring of the second year of the Bunji era [1186], when the retired emperor, GoShirakawa, decided that he would like to visit Kenreimon’in in her secluded retreat in Ōhara. During the Second and Third Months, the last of the winter cold lingered, and the winds continued to bluster. The snow on the mountain peaks had not yet melted, and the icicles remained frozen in the valleys. The spring months had given way to summer and the festival of the Kamo Shrine was already over when the retired emperor, setting out before dawn, began the journey to the mountain recesses of Ōhara.

  Although the progress was unofficial, the retired emperor was accompanied by six ministers of state, among them Fujiwara no Sanesada, Fujiwara no Kanemasa, and Minamoto no Michichika, as well as eight high-ranking courtiers and a small number of armed men from the imperial guard. The party proceeded by way of the village of Kurama, stopping along the route so that the retired emperor might see Fudaraku-ji, the temple founded by Kiyohara no Fukayabu,2 and the site where Empress Dowager Ono3 had resided after she retired from court life and became a nun. From there he continued the journey by palanquin.

  The white clouds hovering over the distant mountains seemed like mementos of the cherry blossoms that had earlier bloomed there and scattered, and the green leaves that had replaced them in the treetops spoke regretfully of the spring now gone. Since it was already past the twentieth day of the Fourth Month by the lunar calendar, the party found themselves pushing through lush summer grasses. And since this was the first time that the retired emperor had made the journey, he was not familiar with any of the places they passed. Encountering not a soul along the way, how bleak it all must have seemed to him.

  At the foot of the western hills stood a little hall, the Jakkō-in, or Cloister of Tranquil Light. The ornamental pond in front of it and the groves of trees told of the long history surrounding it. It perhaps was the sort of place the poet had in mind when he wrote

  Roof tiles broken, the odor of mist forever lingers there;

  doors fallen off, the moon shines in like a constantly lighted lamp.

  The garden overflowed with new foliage; green strands from the willows hung down in a tangle; and the duckweed on the surface of the pond, undulating with the ripples, could have been mistaken for brocade stretched out to dry. Wisteria clinging to the pine on the island in the pond descended in cascades of purple; the last late cherry flowers remaining among the newly opened green leaves appeared more to be prized than the first blossoms of the season. Kerria roses flowered in profusion on the banks of the pond, and from a rift in the many-layered clouds sounded the note of a cuckoo, as if to herald the ruler’s arrival.

  Surveying the scene, the retired emperor recited this poem:

  Cherries on the bank have strewn the pond with petals—

  wave-borne blossoms now are in their glory.

  Even the sound of the water as it dripped from a cleft in the age-old rocks seemed to mark this as a setting of rare charm. The fence of green vines and creepers, the blue hills beyond, darkened as though with an eyebrow pencil, surpassed anything that could be captured in a painting.

  When the retired emperor examined Kenreimon’in’s little dwelling, he noted the ivy and morning glories twined around the eaves and the daylilies mixed in among the ferns, and they reminded him of Yan Yuan, the impoverished disciple of Confucius who lived in a grass-grown alley and whose dipper and rice bowl were so often empty, and Yuan Xian, another disciple, his pathway clogged with pigweed and his door soaked with rain. In Kenreimon’in’s retreat the autumn showers, the frost, and the falling dew seeped in through cracks in the cedar shingles, vying with rays of moonlight, since there was little to keep any of them out. With hills behind, barren fields in front, the wind rustling through the scant bamboo grass that grew there, its knotted posts of bamboo suggested the knotty trials and grief constantly borne by one living away from the world; and its gaping fence of stalks hinted at how far removed the spot was from all news of the capital. Few sounds reached there other than the cries of monkeys springing from limb to limb in hilltop trees or the echo of a lowly woodcutter’s ax; aside from the prying tendrils of creepers clinging to the spindle tree or the strands of green ivy, few sought entrance there.

  “Is anyone in? Is anyone in?” called the retired emperor, but no one responded. Finally, after some time, an elderly nun, bent with age, appeared.

  “Where is the imperial lady?” asked the retired emperor.

  “She has gone to the hilltop to pick flowers,” was the answer.

  “Doesn’t she have someone who can do such things for her?” he asked. “This is too pitiable, even for someone who has renounced the world!”

  “The good karmic effects resulting from her observance of the Five Precepts and the Ten Virtuous Acts in a previous existence have ended,” the old nun explained, “and so she has been reduced to the state in which you see her. But when one has renounced the world to pursue religious practice, why recoil from such hardships? As the Sutra on Cause and Effect tells us, ‘If you would know past causes, look to present effects; if you would know future effects, observe present causes.’ When Your Majesty understands the relationship between cause and effect in the past and future, you will see that there is no occasion for lamentation. At the age of nineteen the crown prince Siddhartha left the city of Gaya and went to the foot of Mount Dadaloka. There, fashioning a garment of tree leaves to cover his nakedness, he climbed the peaks to gather firewood, descended into the valleys to draw water, and through the merit accruing from these difficult and painful practices he was able in the end to gain complete and perfect enlightenment.”

  Looking at the nun more closely, the retired emperor could see that she was dressed in a sort of patched robe in which bits of silk and plain cloth had been randomly sewn together. Wondering that such a speech should emanate from a person dressed like this, he asked, “Who are you?”

  Breaking down in sobs, the nun was at first unable to reply. Finally, mastering her tears, she replied, “I cannot answer without feelings of great embarrassment! I am the daughter of the late lesser counselor and lay priest Fujiwara no Shinsei. I was known by the name Awa-no-naishi. My mother was the Kii Lady of the Second Rank. At one time you were kind enough to treat me with great favor. If now you no longer recognize me, then, old and decrepit as I am, what good would there be in trying to remind you …” She hid her face in her sleeve, helpless to control her emotions, a sight too pitiable to behold.

  “Are you really Awa-no-naishi?” the retired emperor exclaimed, tears welling up in his eyes. “Indeed, I did not recognize you. This all seems like a dream!”

  The lords and courtiers accompanying him remarked to one another, “We thought she was a very unusual nun, and now it appears we had good reason to do so.”

  Turning his gaze this way and that, the retired emperor could see that the many different plants in the garden were heavy with dew, their stalks bending down toward the hedges. Water brimmed in the paddy fields beyond, leaving hardly enough space for a snipe to alight.

  Entering the hut, the retired emperor slid open the paper panel and walked in. In one room were enshrined the three venerable ones who come to greet those who are on their deathbed, the Buddha Amida and his attendants and the bodhisattvas Kannon and Seishi. A five-color cord was attached to the hand of the Buddha, the central figure.4 To the left of the images hung a painting of the bodhisattva Fugen, while on the right were paintings of the Chinese priest Shandao and of Kenreimon’in’s son, the late emperor. The eight scrolls of the Lotus Sutra and the nine chapters of Shandao’s writings on the Pure Land also were nearby. The rich fragrance of orchid and musk that in earlier days had surrounded the imperial lady had vanished, giving way now to the scented smoke of altar incense. That ten-foot-square chamber of the lay believer Vimalakirti, which neverth
eless, we are told, could accommodate thirty-two thousand seats set out for the buddhas of the ten directions when he invited them to call, must have been a room just like this. Here and there on the sliding panels were key passages from the Buddhist scriptures, written out on colored paper and pasted there. Among them were the lines by the Buddhist prelate Ōe no Sadamoto that he wrote shortly before his death at Mount Qingliang in China:

  Pipes and songs far off I hear from a lone cloud—

  in the setting sun the sacred hosts coming to greet me!

  A little to one side was a poem that appeared to be by the imperial lady herself:

  Did I ever think that, dwelling deep in these mountains,

  I would view from far off the moon that shone on the palace?

  Looking in the other direction, the retired emperor saw what appeared to be a sleeping apartment, with a hempen robe, paper bedclothes, and other articles hanging from a bamboo pole. The adornments of silks, gauzes, brocades, and embroideries, the finest to be found in all Japan or China, that the imperial lady had once known in such abundance, were now no more than a dream. Having had glimpses of her in former times, the courtiers and high ministers seemed to see her still as she was then, and their tears rained down.

  Soon two nuns dressed in robes of deep black were to be seen cautiously making their way down the steep rocky trail that led from the hilltop.