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Blow after blow, the skirmish raged,
until Morotsune’s favorite horse ended up with a broken leg.
There ensued, with bows and arrows,
swords, and weapons of every kind,
a fierce clash that lasted for hours.
Morotsune must have foreseen defeat,
because that night he made himself scarce.
Next the provincial authorities
assembled a thousand horsemen.
These rode off to attack Ugawa
and burned every hall to the ground.
Now Ugawa comes under Hakusan,42
to which its senior monks appealed.
And who were they, then, these monks?
Chishaku, Gakumy, Hdaib,
Shchi, Gakuon, the Tosa adept.
The warrior-monks of all three shrines,
all eight subtemples of Hakusan,
rose in a body, two thousand men,
and on the ninth of the seventh month,
late in the afternoon, closed in
on Deputy Morotsune’s house.
Sunset decided them to wait
and launch their attack the next day.
For now they stayed where they were.
The autumn wind, laden with dew,
fluttered the sleeves of their bow arms;
lightning bolts, bright in the heavens,
flashed and gleamed from their helmet stars.43
No doubt despairing of victory,
the deputy fled that night to the city.
Dawn came, and the attack.
The monks roared out their battle cry.
From the compound arose no sound.
A scout sent to investigate
reported that every last man was gone.
That was that, then. The monks withdrew.
Instead they appealed to Enryakuji.
Adorning the sacred palanquin
belonging to Hakusan’s central shrine,
they bore it all the way to Mount Hiei.
On the twelfth of the eighth month, at noon,
it reached Higashi-Sakamoto.
The news spread; at which, from the north,
mighty claps of thunder boomed
and moved on to the capital.
White clouds lowered over the earth,
and mountain and city alike,
even to the pines on the slopes,
turned a brilliant white.
14. The Vows
Into the Marto Shrine grounds
went the Hakusan palanquin,
for Marto is none other
than Hakusan Myri Gongen;44
plainly said, they are father and son.
What would come of the appeal
naturally remained to be seen.
The meeting, though, gave the gods joy
such as they had known in life:
more joy than when Urashima’s son
came at last on his descendants
seven generations past his own,
and also surpassing that unborn son’s
when he saw his father on Vulture Peak.45
The three thousand monks of Mount Hiei
in serried ranks, all the holy priests
from the Seven Shrines, sleeve to sleeve,
chanting together sutras and prayers,
made a spectacle beyond words.
The assembled host of the Mountain let it be known to the cloistered emperor
that for Morotaka, the governor of Kaga, they demanded exile
and for his deputy, Morotsune, prison.
The answer was slow to come.
Those senior nobles and privy gentlemen who mattered exclaimed,
“Dear me, he must issue prompt judgment!
Petitions lodged by Mount Hiei have always received special attention.
Tamefusa, the lord of the Treasury, and Suenaka, deputy viceroy of Kyushu,
were both pillars of the court, yet complaints from Hiei got them exiled.
How could these men, Morotaka and what’s-his-name,
deserve a moment’s thought? There are no doubts to weigh.
The minister holds his tongue,
preferring to keep his wages;
the lesser official chooses silence,
fearing reprisal,” they say.
Every one of them kept his mouth shut.
“The flow of the Kamo River, dice at backgammon, and the monks of Mount Hiei—
these are things beyond my control,”
Retired Emperor Shirakawa is said once to have declared.
In Retired Emperor Toba’s time,
Enryakuji received Heisenji in Echizen as a dependency.
“I have righted a wrong,” Toba declared when he issued his decree,
for Mount Hiei commanded his deep allegiance.
Lord Masafusa, then the deputy viceroy of Kyushu, put this question to Shirakawa:
“Were they to advance against you with the palanquins of their gods,
Your Majesty, to press a complaint, what would you do?”
“Indeed,” Shirakawa replied, “a complaint from the Mountain is difficult to ignore.”
Long ago, on the second of the third month of Kah 2, the governor of Mino, [1096]
Minamoto no Yoshitsuna, was busy abolishing a newly created estate
when he killed En’, a monk sworn to permanent retreat on Mount Hiei.
The Hiyoshi Shrine priests and the senior Enryakuji monks, over thirty in all,
therefore advanced, petition in hand, on the retired emperor’s guards office.
The regent, Moromichi, ordered Yoriharu of the Yamato Genji to stop them.
Yoriharu’s men shot arrows, killing eight and wounding more than ten.
The others fled. Next came news that the senior Enryakuji prelates
were on their way down to the capital, to address the retired emperor.
Warriors and police rushed to Nishi-Sakamoto and turned them back.
Judgment on Yoriharu was slow to come. Up on the Mountain,
they bore the gods of the Seven Shrines, in their palanquins, to the temple’s Central Hall
and chanted in their presence, for seven days, the Great Wisdom Sutra.
Then they called down curses on the regent. The great monk Chūin,
presiding on the last, seventh day, mounted the high seat, rang his bell,
and pronounced these solemn words to the assembly and to the gods:
“You who, since we first drew breath,
have tenderly nurtured us, O gods!
Strike, we pray, with a humming arrow46
the regent Moromichi!
O Great Hachiji Gongen, strike!”
He spoke this prayer in a mighty voice.
That night a wonder occurred.
Dreamers heard a humming arrow
fly from the Hachiji Shrine
off toward the imperial palace.
The next morning, at the regent’s,
they found when they opened his shutters
planted there a branch of star anise,47
dew-laden as though fresh from the Mountain.
This was a terrifying sign.
At once the regent fell gravely ill, apparently stricken by Sann, the divinity of the Mountain. In intense distress, his mother, a very great lady, disguised herself as a woman of the people and confined herself on retreat at the Hiyoshi Shrine.
She prayed there for seven days and nights and announced the following vows. She offered one hundred open-air dengaku dances; one hundred devotional procession costumes; one hundred horse races, wrestling bouts, and mounted archery matches; one hundred discourses on the Sutra of the Benevolent King; one hundred discourses on the Sutra of the Medicine King; one hundred Medicine King images one and a half handbreadths tall; and life-size images of the Medicine King, Shakyamuni, and Amida.
Deep in her heart, she also made three further vows.
No one else could have known of them, since they were secret,
but, strange to relate, on the night of the last, seventh day,
one of the many pilgrims then at the Hachiji Shrine,
a shrine maiden and medium newly arrived from the far north,
suddenly fainted. When they carried her off to a place apart,
she quickly revived and began to dance.
People looked on in wonder. She danced for an hour,
until the Sann divinity came down into her and she spoke a frightening prophecy:
“Hear my voice, sentient beings!
The regent’s mother has been on retreat,
here at my shrine, for seven days.
She has undertaken three vows,
begging me for the regent’s life.
Should he live, she will, first,
mingle here with the crippled and sick
and for a full thousand days,
morning and evening, serve my shrine.
This lady had not earlier known
life’s sorrows, but now she is lost,
all because of love for her son.
Wholly indifferent to revulsion,
she will, as she herself declares,
mingle with the unsightly maimed
and for a thousand days, day and night,
devote herself solely to my service.
I am profoundly touched.
Second, she will build a gallery all the way here, to Hachiji,
from the Bridge Hall at the miya Shrine.
I feel for the three-thousand-strong host of Hiei monks
who come here on pilgrimage, rain or shine.
This gallery will benefit them greatly.
Third, should the regent be granted life, she will sponsor at this shrine,
each and every day, a formal Lotus Sutra debate.
All three vows are admirable, but while the first two could be dispensed with,
the daily debates on the Lotus Sutra strike me as especially worthy.
Nonetheless, although this complaint should have been easily resolved,
the court withheld judgment. Instead my shrine servants were wounded or killed
and returned to me to report, weeping, the outrage they had suffered.
I will never forget this, not through all ages to come.
Moreover, the arrows that struck them lodged equally in me,
a visible manifestation of higher divinity.
See, then, with your own eyes,
whether or not I speak the truth!”
She bared one shoulder, and there,
beneath her left arm, a wound
gaped like the mouth of a large wine cup.
“No, it is simply too much.
Whatever her prayers and promises,
her son cannot live out his full life.
Provided she sponsors the Lotus debates,
I will give him another three years.
If that is not enough for her,
the matter is out of my hands.”
With these words Sann ascended.48
The regent’s mother had never mentioned these vows to anyone, so she could not suspect anyone of having passed on knowledge of them. Awestruck that the oracle had known them so precisely, she replied, in tears, “I would be grateful enough for a day or even an hour, and three years is a very great boon.” She made her way down the Mountain, still weeping.
In haste she returned to the city and donated the regent’s Tanaka estate,
located in the province of Kii, in perpetuity to the Hachiji Shrine,
where, they say, a Lotus debate has been held daily ever since.
Meanwhile the regent Moromichi
felt better and better, until soon
his health was as good as ever.
People high and low were relieved.
Three years then sped past like a dream,
until, in the second year of Eich, [1097]
the sixth month and twenty-second day,
an evil boil broke out at the hairline
on Lord Moromichi’s forehead,
and he had to take to his bed.
On the twenty-seventh he died,
in only his thirty-eighth year.
Daring in spirit, strong in mind,
he made a most impressive figure,
but with the end fast approaching,
he clung to life, and no wonder.
Not even yet in his fortieth year,
alas, he went before his father.
Not every man dies after his father,
but death comes to all: The very Buddha,
complete in all virtues, the bodhisattvas
approaching final emancipation,
can do nothing to resist it.
The deeply compassionate Sann
exists to benefit sentient beings;
therefore his censure is just.
15. The Palanquins of the Gods
The monks of Mount Hiei petitioned repeatedly to have Morotaka,
the governor of Kaga, exiled and Mototsune, his deputy, jailed.
When they got no response, they canceled the Hiyoshi Shrine festival.
Early in the hour of the dragon, on the thirteenth of the fourth month of Angen 3, [1177, ca. 8 A.M.]
they adorned the palanquins of the gods of Jūzenji, Marto, and Hachiji
and marched on the guard posts of the palace compound.
At Sagarimatsu, Kirezutsumi, the Kamo riverbank, Tadasu, Umetada, Yanagihara,
and around Tboku-in, countless junior monks, shrine servants, and temple menials
thronged to watch the palanquins surge westward along Ichij.
The sacred treasures glittered on high, as though sun and moon had fallen to earth.
Senior Genji and Heike commanders secured the posts
on all four sides of the compound and ordered their men to stop the monks.
For the Heike, Lord Shigemori, palace minister and left commander,
led three thousand horse to secure the Ymei, Taiken, and Yūh gates to the east.
His younger brothers Munemori, Tomomori, and Shigehira
Minamoto no Yorimasa.
and his uncles Yorimori, Norimori, and Tsunemori did the same to the west and south.
For the Genji, Yorimasa, the palace warden, secured the Nuidono post
at the North Gate, with just three hundred horse under Watanabe no Habuku and Sazuku.
This was a vast area, and his small force was spread all too visibly thin.
The monks noted this weak spot and moved to bring their palanquins in past the Nuidono guard post, at the North Gate. Being the man he was, Yorimasa dismounted, removed his helmet, and saluted the palanquins. His men did so, too. Then he sent the monks a message through an envoy, one Watanabe no Chjitsu Ton.
Ton wore that day, over a gray-green hitatare,49 leather-laced armor
embellished with tiny yellow-dyed cherry blossoms;
at his waist, a sword with gold-alloyed copper fittings;
The sacred palanquins at the Taiken Gate entrance to the palace grounds.
and on his back a quiver filled with white-fletched arrows.
A rattan-wrapped bow rode clasped under his arm.
He doffed his helmet, which he slung on a cord over his back,
respectfully saluted the palanquins of the gods, and began,
“I have a message from Lord Yorimasa to the monks of the Mountain:
The Mount Hiei complaint is just;
that of course goes without saying.
That judgment has been delayed so long is to be deplored.
Obviously, you can bring the palanquins in through here if you wish.
However, Yorimasa’s men are few. If you seize that advantage,
break past this post, and carry the palanquins in this way,
the youth of the city will bandy it about that the Hiei monks
did so with sheepish looks on their faces, to your discredit in years to come.
To allow the palanquins passage
&nbs
p; would mean, for Lord Yorimasa,
to breach His Majesty’s decree,
while to stop them would, equally,
mean for a man long devoted
to Sann and the Medicine King
giving up the calling of arms.
The dilemma is insoluble.
Lord Shigemori has secured the guard post to the east with a large force.
On the whole you would do better to enter through there.”
So he spoke, then withdrew. His words gave the shrine servants pause.
“Why in the world should we do that?”
many among the younger monks cried.
“Take them straight in here, past this post!”
But there advanced from among the elders the greatest speaker on the Mountain,
the preacher Gun, from Settsu province, who expressed himself as follows:
“Lord Yorimasa is quite right.
Those who march to press a complaint
with the palanquins of their gods
should pit themselves against real force
if they are to win lasting praise.
In any case Lord Yorimasa descends in direct Genji line from the Sixth Prince,
and in war he has never been known to err.
Indeed, he excels not only at arms but also at skill as a poet.
At an impromptu poetry gathering in Emperor Konoe’s reign,
the assigned topic was ‘Blossoms Deep in the Mountains.’
No one but Yorimasa knew what to write:
With so many trees
crowded on the mountainside,
which the one may be
no one knows, until those boughs
reveal their wealth of blossoms.
That is the splendid poem he made.
How could anyone cruelly shame,
over one tense moment, a man
delicate enough in feeling
to elicit an emperor’s praise?
Turn the sacred palanquins back!”
Such was his judgment, and the monks
far and near, a host of thousands,
all agreed: He is right, quite right!
So off they went, palanquins first,
eastward to the Taiken Gate guard post,
intending to enter from there.
Mayhem ensued. The warriors
loosed upon them a rain of arrows.
Many lodged in the palanquin
bearing Jūzenji. Shrine servants died,
monks in large numbers sustained wounds.
The groans and screams of agony