by VIKING ADULT
After the late eleventh century, retired emperors came to assert authority of their own. For this reason most of the twelfth century has been called “the period of government by retired emperors” (insei jidai), and because the retired (or “cloistered”) emperor could make real decisions in certain areas, as the reigning emperor could not, he was sometimes referred to as “the lord sovereign over the realm” (chiten no kimi). The expression does not occur in Heike, but it applies to Go-Shirakawa. That is why this translation often refers to him, as occasionally also to the reigning emperor, as “the sovereign.” It is not always clear which of the two is meant.
Go-Shirakawa’s shifting fortunes under Kiyomori limit any notion of the “government” he could actually wield, but some meaningful decisions remained within his reach. The most significant involved defining who was an “enemy of the court” (chteki): that is to say, who was a defender of the emperor and who was a rebel against him.
The role proper to both Genji and Heike was to quell any “enemy of the court,” the assumption being that such an enemy would appear out in the provinces. The Hgen and Heiji conflicts arose because of issues that split the court (the imperial line, extended by the house of the Fujiwara regents) against itself. Each side then regarded the other as an enemy of the court. In the tale Kiyomori repeatedly stresses the selflessness with which he defended the court (his winning side) against those bent on its destruction. Nonetheless Go-Shirakawa (assisted by the monk Mongaku) manages under desperate circumstances to tip the balance against the Heike by defining them as enemies of the court. He sends the exiled Yoritomo a “retired emperor’s decree” (inzen) requiring him, out of loyalty to the court, to suppress the Heike (5:10). This decree is almost certainly a dramatic fiction. (Go-Shirakawa’s more plausibly historical decree, appointing Yoritomo to command the imperial forces, appears in 8:5.) For just that reason, however, it highlights the authority widely attributed to a retired (or “cloistered”) emperor.
THE HIERARCHY OF THE COURT
Just as warlords pursued their own interests behind a veil of service to the throne, loyal service was the ideal associated with ambitious participation in the government over which the emperor nominally presided, with the regent’s assistance. The top post in this government was that of chancellor (daijdaijin), an office that Kiyomori came to hold. Next came three ministers: the left minister (sadaijin), the right minister (udaijin), and the palace minister (naidaijin). The government’s highest-level advisers constituted the body of “senior nobles” (kugy). Below them came the “privy gentlemen” (tenjbito), so named because they enjoyed the privilege of entering the “privy chamber” adjoining the emperor’s living quarters. Acquisition of this privilege by Kiyomori’s forebears is a critical issue early in Book One.
Three guard units secured the palace compound: the Palace Guards (konoefu), the Watch (hyefu), and the Gate Watch (emonfu). Each had a left and right division. Command of a division of the Palace Guards was a special honor. Government bureaus oversaw such areas as ceremonial, civil affairs, justice, war, and treasury. There were counselors, controllers, secretaries, chamberlains, and, of course, governors appointed to the provinces. A successful noble was likely to hold dual appointment in the civil and guards hierarchies. Each office had its place in an order of precedence. An incumbent also held a numbered rank, from one down to nine, and each rank was subdivided into two or more grades (for example, junior and senior). Finally, a high-level office mentioned repeatedly in the tale is that of “Dazaifu deputy” (Dazai no sochi), the government representative to its outpost in Kyushu.
The same government hierarchy figures in The Tale of Genji, written some two centuries earlier. In the Penguin Genji, every office and title mentioned is translated, for reasons explained in the introduction to the book, but not so in the Penguin Heike. There are just too many of them. Moreover, the Genji narrator speaks from within the world to which this hierarchy gave vital form, while the Heike narrator does not. Heike is broader in scope, the focus of interest is elsewhere, and after two hundred years the hierarchy has lost much of its substance. However, where titles and offices are translated, they follow as much as possible the practice adopted in the Penguin Genji.
What really matters is the significance, both to the character concerned and to the tale’s intended audience, of belonging to this hallowed hierarchy at all. This is poignantly clear from the way the narrative still refers to a Heike lord, even after the Heike have fled from the capital, solely by his now-empty formal title. The title is still the man. In 9:7 the fugitive Heike even proceed with a round of promotions and appointments that one of their number, in a poem, calls a “dream.” The translation identifies these lords by name rather than by title, since the reader would soon lose track of them otherwise, but it is indeed the titles that support the Heike dream of recovering all that they have lost. When Taira no Munemori (Kiyomori’s son and successor) is beheaded at last (11:18), his son Kiyomune faces the same fate, but before the sword falls, he longs to know that his father died well. The passage reads in English, “‘How was my father when he died?’ Kiyomune pathetically inquired.” The original, however, identifies Kiyomune not by name but as “the intendant of the Right Gate Watch,” and it has him ask not after his father but after “His Excellency the minister.” Such is the pride that sustains a man to the last.
RELIGION IN THE TALE
Differing modes of religious faith and practice pervade The Tale of the Heike, and religious institutions play a major role in its story. These institutions include great temples or temple complexes devoted to the study and practice of Buddhism and major shrines established to honor deities more or less native to Japan. Although utterly dissimilar in most ways, both doctrinally and architecturally, these temples and shrines were closely linked in medieval times. Buddhist temples had their associated shrines, and shrines their temples, and the deities on either side merged into one another in shifting, idiosyncratic ways. Broadly speaking, native deities were honored as local, tangible manifestations of the universal, transcendent Buddhist divinities, while these divinities were revered as the eternal essences of native deities manifest in particular ways and at particular places in Japan.
The chief Buddhist institutions in The Tale of the Heike are still there and remain famous today, however reduced they may be from what they once were. The most prominent is Mount Hiei, an immensely powerful temple complex on the mountain of that name, just northeast of the capital. The main temple there is Enryakuji, but the tale also mentions three major centers of the extended monastic complex: the Central Hall, the East Pagoda, and the West Pagoda. Mount Hiei loomed so large in the life of the capital that it was usually enough just to call it “the Mountain.” It upheld the Tendai Buddhism brought to Japan from China in the early ninth century, and it stressed faith in the Lotus Sutra and the Buddha Amida. The abbot of Mount Hiei was a major figure, and the vast community below him included thousands of monks, in a hierarchy that extended from scholars down to workers and fighters. Below the Mountain stood Miidera, another powerful Tendai temple. As the tale makes all too clear, Enryakuji and Miidera were bitter, sometimes violent rivals.
The Buddhism taught on Mount Hiei was “exoteric” (kengy) because in principle it required no secret, initiatory transmission. By the twelfth century, however, it was strongly influenced by the “esoteric,” or tantric, Buddhism (mikky) most closely identified with Mount Kya. The Tendai abbot Meiun, for example, had mastered both (2:1). Mount Kya dates from the same time as Mount Hiei, but, being far from the capital, it was less entangled than Mount Hiei in the capital’s affairs. The great monk and culture hero Kb Daishi, traditionally credited with inventing Japanese phonetic writing, founded it when he brought Shingon Buddhism (as the esoteric teaching is more particularly known in Japan) back from China. Taira no Kiyomori received a divine gift on Mount Kya (3:5), and his grandson Koremori went there to renounce the world (10:9, 10).
Two older temples of great importa
nce, Kfukuji and Tdaiji, were located in the old capital of Nara. Both were large, powerful monastic communities with a strong population of warrior monks. Kfukuji, the Fujiwara ancestral temple, dated from the early eighth century and championed Hoss Buddhism, which was then new to Japan. Tdaiji, where, in 752, Emperor Shmu dedicated a bronze Great Buddha that for Japan was the wonder of the age, upheld a school of Buddhism known as Sanron. Both temples burned when Taira no Shigehira set fire to the town in his campaign against the Nara monks, and the Great Buddha melted. The horror of this crime haunted him thereafter, until at last the Nara monks had him executed (11:19).
The shrines most prominent in the tale are Ise, Iwashimizu, Itsukushima, Kasuga, Kumano, and the shrine complex on Mount Hiei. Ise, south of modern Nagoya, enshrines the Sun Goddess (Amaterasu), the source of the imperial line. Kiyomori’s widow has little Emperor Antoku, her grandson, salute Ise before she plunges with him into the sea (11:9). The Sun Goddess and Ise figure in many passages of the tale.
Iwashimizu, on a hill named Otokoyama, southwest of the capital, enshrines Hachiman, an important divinity everywhere in Japan and, more particularly, the patron deity of the Genji. Iwashimizu (also called Yawata in the tale because the characters used to write “Hachiman” can be read that way, too) played an enduring role in the religious life of the city. In the provinces, Kiso no Yoshinaka addresses a formal prayer to a local Hachiman shrine before his devastating triumph at Kurikara Ravine (7:5, 6).
The patron deity of the Heike was enshrined on Itsukushima, an island (now better known as Miyajima) just off the coast near Hiroshima. The beautiful shrine buildings, which seem to float over the water, are still the ones that Kiyomori built long ago in obedience to a divine command (3:5). As for the deity’s name, it involves a kind of complexity normal at such shrines: The “Itsukushima Deity” is actually triple. In this case all three divinities, each with a distinct identity and history, are female. The name “Hachiman,” too, sums up a triple divinity, while the divine presence at Sumiyoshi and Kasuga is quadruple. With the exception of Hachiman, the name of a deity as it appears both in the tale (Itsukushima, Sumiyoshi, Kasuga, and so on) and in common usage over the centuries is the name of the place where the shrine sanctuaries stand, not of any particular divinity enshrined there.
This issue is worth mentioning especially because of the role played in the tale by the various shrines on Mount Hiei, and also by the shrines summed up under the place-name “Kumano.” The Hiei shrines are many and their names (Hiyoshi, Jūzenji, Marto, Hachiji, etc.) are confusing, but they mean a great deal to the monks (for example, 1:15). Confusing, too, is the deity name “Sann” (“Mountain King”), which corresponds to none of these shrines individually. In 1:14, Sann, the divine presence of the entire Mountain, speaks through a medium.
Kumano, a region at the southern tip of the Kii Peninsula, figures repeatedly and dramatically in the tale. In the twelfth century, it was a major pilgrimage center. Kiyomori was at Kumano when the Heiji Conflict broke out, and his son Shigemori made a portentous pilgrimage there shortly before his death (3:11). Since a Kumano pilgrimage took in three major (as well as dozens of minor) shrines, the place was sometimes called “Triple Kumano” (Mi-Kumano). Kumano Hongū (“Main Shrine”), first in order of precedence, stood beside a river, inland from the sea; then came Shingū (“New Shrine”), on the coast at the river mouth; and finally the Nachi waterfall, some way back from the sea. Mongaku performs his startling and picturesque austerities at Nachi (5:7), and it is to Nachi that Koremori comes on his final journey (10:11), after renouncing the world on Mount Kya. He first salutes the sacred waterfall, associated as it is with the merciful bodhisattva Kannon, then continues to the shore and sets out at last in a boat to seek rebirth in paradise (10:12).
This paradise, or Pure Land, is that of Amida, the buddha of infinite light and life. The Buddhist scriptures place it at an incalculable distance toward the west, the direction of the setting sun. At Kumano, Amida was associated particularly with the divinity of Kumano Hongū, but access to him was universal. Faith in his salvation pervades the tale. Like a few others in medieval Japan, the despairing Koremori seeks rebirth in paradise by drowning himself, but such examples were rare. Amida faith requires nothing like that. It is very simple.
Time and again the tale mentions someone calling, or being urged to call, “the Name”: that of Amida in the ultimately Sanskrit-derived invocation Namu Amida Butsu (“Hail Amida Buddha”). The Name had to be voiced, although the final syllable was partially dropped. One called it not as a prayer for admission to paradise but rather as an expression of the conviction that welcome into Amida’s paradise was certain, in accordance with Amida’s Original Vow (hongan) to save any sentient being who calls sincerely upon him. The faithful debated over the centuries how many callings were needed, and a widely accepted answer was ten, but no one could deny the efficacy of a single calling made in full faith. The devout called the Name continually.
Calling the Name became urgent as death approached. The defeated Taira no Tadanori asks to be allowed to do so on the battlefield, before his opponent beheads him (9:14). A dying person might wish to face an image of Amida and hold a five-colored cord attached to the image’s hands, so that Amida should be able to draw the departing soul straight to paradise. Shigehira does this before his execution (11:19), and so, too, Kenreimon-in at her death (13:5). The practice assumes the visualization of Amida’s welcome to the soul that the illustration for 13:5 shows in ethereal outline: Amida comes forward to greet the soul, accompanied by the bodhisattvas Kannon and Seishi and by a host of saints and celestial musicians. Witnesses knew that the soul had gone to paradise because an unearthly perfume lingered in the air after the heavenly host’s departure and the purple cloud on which it rode still floated in the sky.
THE CAPITAL, THE PROVINCES, AND THE TKAID
In the time of The Tale of the Heike, there was only one city in Japan: the capital (ky or miyako, often in this translation just “the city”), founded in 794 when Emperor Kanmu moved away from Nara. It is now the city of Kyoto. The capital was the imperial seat (roughly the meaning of the word miyako) and the center of civilization. Anyone from elsewhere was more or less a rustic, which is how the Heike lords viewed the Genji warriors from the wilds of the east. In those days the Kanto area, the site of modern Tokyo, was distant, rough, and uncouth, and the regions beyond it even more remote. The provinces to the west were perhaps slightly less so, thanks to traffic along the Inland Sea, but Kyushu (known then as Chinzei or Tsukushi) was still very distant.
The streets and avenues of the capital were laid out in a grid pattern adapted from the capital of Tang China. The north-south thoroughfares were named, while the east-west avenues (j) were numbered. This translation identifies the east-west j by their Japanese names: Ichij (First Avenue), Nij (Second), Sanj (Third), Shij (Fourth), Goj (Fifth), Rokuj (Sixth), Shichij (Seventh), Hachij (Eighth), Kuj (Ninth), and Jūj (Tenth). The tale identifies the location of a dwelling by naming the nearest street intersection. Examples are “Naka-no-mikado and Higashi-no-tin” and “Hachij-Karasumaru.” The Kamo River ran north-south along the east side of the city, between wide gravel banks. Mention of the Kamo riverbank at Rokuj becomes increasingly menacing as the tale progresses, because so many executions took place there.
Nara (the “old capital” or “southern capital”) had been the imperial seat during most of the eighth century, but before then the capital had moved from place to place, often with each new reign. Taira no Kiyomori’s decision to move the capital to Fukuhara (5:1), on the site of modern Kobe, was shocking because it violated centuries of proud stability. Fukuhara was then a port that figured in the Heike-controlled trade with Song China. The tale evokes the site as unsuitable for a proper capital, but it concedes that moving the capital was not without precedent in the longer perspective of history, and it then lists these moves. Fukuhara soon proved a failure, and Kiyomori had to give it up (5:13).
The ev
ents in the tale range over almost all of Japan, but one long stretch of land deserves special mention: the Tkaid (Eastern Sea Road) route from the capital to the east, especially Kamakura. Travelers who followed it came first to the saka barrier, an ancient checkpoint long honored in waka poetry, on the low pass between the city and the shore of Lake Biwa. There Semimaru, in legend a banished son of Emperor Daigo (reigned 897–930), had played his biwa beside the Shinomiya brook. The traveler then descended to Lake Biwa and beyond, passing more spots famous in poetry. Several Heike passages acknowledge their fame, but none as fully as 10:6, which evokes Shigehira’s journey to Kamakura in the form of a full-fledged michiyuki (travel song), the only one in the tale.
HEIKE PERFORMANCE AFTER THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Japan remained relatively stable for a hundred years after Kakuichi’s death, and biwa hshi then enjoyed perhaps their greatest popularity at all levels of society. The century and more of internecine warfare that followed naturally challenged them, but warrior lords continued to value Heike for its evocation of a stirring past. Heike performers were called to artistic gatherings, and no doubt they remained active at the village level as well. In time some seem to have broadened their repertoire into other areas of popular music and begun to cultivate also the three-stringed samisen, then recently introduced to Japan.
During the Edo period (1600–1868), the Tokugawa shoguns patronized Heike performance and adopted it as a form of ceremonial music. Under such patronage the Japan-wide guild of Heike performers flourished and new schools of Heike performance appeared. During the seventeenth century, cultural pursuits of all kinds diffused through the population at large, especially in the cities, and printing flourished. Printed editions of Heike (not necessarily the Kakuichi version) became readily available, and amateurs began to study Heike recitation. The development of a music-notation system for the work yielded the score already mentioned and culminated in the widely disseminated Heike mabushi (1776), which supports one line of Heike performers even today.
