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must have risen to Brahma’s heaven,
struck with fright the God of the Earth.
The great host of indignant monks
there at the guard post abandoned their gods
and wept their way back up the Mountain.
16. The Burning of the Palace
By imperial command, the chamberlain and minor controller Kanemitsu
convened an emergency council of senior nobles in the privy chamber.
When the sacred palanquins entered the city in Han 4, [1123]
in the seventh month, His Majesty sent them on to the Sekisan Shrine;50
and when the same happened in the fourth month of Hen 4, [1138]
the Gion Shrine superintendent was told to receive them there.
The council chose to follow the Hen example.
Chken, the Gion superintendent, admitted them to the shrine at dusk.
Shrine servants went to work removing the arrows still planted in them.
Between the Eikyū and Jish years, the monks of Mount Hiei [1113–18; 1177–81]
carried their palanquins to the palace guard posts on six occasions.
Warriors were summoned to stop them each time,
but never before had their arrows struck a palanquin of the gods.
“When spirits and gods are angry,
disasters visit every street.
Terrifying! Terrifying!”
So people said among themselves.
In the middle of the same night, that of the fourteenth,
the rumor spread that the monks of the Mountain would soon be back.
The emperor therefore summoned at once a hand carriage,
in which he made a progress to the cloistered emperor’s Hjūji residence.
The empress boarded a carriage and left as well.
Lord Shigemori accompanied her in service dress, a quiver on his back.
His eldest son, Koremori, a Guards lieutenant and deputy of Her Majesty’s household,
in full civil dress and flat, formal quiver, attended her as well.
Regent, chancellor, senior nobles, privy gentlemen rushed to do the same.
High and low in the city, palace staff of every degree were near panic.
On Mount Hiei the council of monks,
three thousand strong, agreed as one.
Palanquins bristling with arrows,
shrine servants killed, many monks wounded,
all compelled a single course:
miya and Ninomiya,
every last shrine or sanctuary,
the Lecture Hall, the Central Hall,
temple buildings of every kind
they would reduce to ashes,
then melt away into the wilds.
At last the cloistered emperor agreed
soon to judge the Hiei complaint.
Therefore the Mountain’s senior prelates
started up on their homeward way,
bearing the news, but the host of monks
stopped them at Nishi-Sakamoto
and drove them back to the city.
The Taira grand counselor Tokitada, then still intendant of the Left Gate Watch,
received the mission to calm them. Before the Great Lecture Hall,
the massed monks from the Three Pagodas seized and manhandled him, crying,
“Knock off that stupid court cap of his!”
“Grab him, dump him in the lake!”
They were about to do it, too, when he addressed them:
“Silence, a moment, please! I have a message for you all!”
From the fold of his robe, he drew paper and inkstone and wrote a few lines
that he passed to the monks. They spread out the paper and read:
“That the assembled host of monks
should permit themselves violence
betrays the working of demon powers.
That the sovereign in his wisdom
should then marshal force to restrain them
reveals the protection of the Buddha.”
So he had written. At the sight
every man among them agreed
that they would harry him no more.
Each retreated down his valley,
to the quiet of his own lodge.
One sheet of paper and a few lines
had soothed the wrath of three thousand monks
and spared emperor and subject shame.
Tokitada, for this achievement,
merited astonished praise.
People were impressed that the monks of Mount Hiei, whom they had thought good for nothing but making trouble, had actually understood where right conduct lay. On the twentieth of that month, the provisional counselor Tadachika was charged with executing further orders. Morotaka, the governor of Kaga, was at last relieved of his post and exiled to Idota in Owari. Morotsune, his deputy, was jailed. Sentenced to prison, too, were the six warriors who, on the thirteenth, had shot arrows into the sacred palanquins. They were Fujiwara no Masazumi and Masasue, e no Iekane and Iekuni, and Kiyowara no Yasuie and Yasutomo, all junior officers in the left and right divisions of the Gate Watch and the Watch.
On the twenty-eighth of the fourth month, during the hour of the boar, [ca. 10 P.M.]
fire broke out near the crossing of Higuchi and Tomi-no-kji.
A strong wind was blowing from the southeast, and much of the capital burned.
Great cartwheels of flame leaped three to five blocks, diagonally, northwestward.
“Terrifying” is hardly the word.
The Chigusa Mansion of Prince Tomohira,
the Red Plum Hall at the Kitano Shrine,
Hayanari’s Haimatsu House,
the Demon Mansion, the Takamatsu,
the Kamoi, and Tsanj;
the Kan’in Mansion of Fuyutsugi,
Mototsune’s Horikawa Mansion—
these and other famous landmarks,
more than thirty of them in all,
as well as the homes of senior nobles,
a full sixteen—every one burned;
not to mention, in addition,
the homes of privy gentlemen,
or those of mid-grade officials,
for there were too many to count.
At last wind-driven flames reached the palace.
The Suzaku Gate caught first,
then the ten Gate, the Kaish Gate,
the Great Hall of State, the Buraku-in,
government offices, the Eight Bureaus,
the senior officials’ morning room
in an instant burned to the ground.
Diaries kept in the great houses,
papers going back generations,
priceless treasures of every kind—
all were reduced to a heap of ash.
Imagine, then, the total damage!
Hundreds of people burned to death
and countless oxen and horses.
This was no common disaster.
Some dreamed that down from Mount Hiei
came several thousand large monkeys,
torches in hand, to burn the city.
It was in Emperor Seiwa’s reign,
in Jgan 18, that fire first claimed [876]
the Great Hall of State; in consequence
the accession of Emperor Yzei,
on the third day of the following year,
had to be held in the Buraku-in.
Rebuilding started in Gangy 1, [877]
the fourth month and the ninth day,
and was finished in the tenth month,
the eighth day, of Gangy 2.
Then, in the reign of Go-Reizei,
Tenki 5, second month, the twenty-sixth, [1057]
the Great Hall of State burned again.
Rebuilding began in Jiryaku 4, [1068]
on the fourteenth of the eighth month,
but the work remained unfinished
when Go-Reizei passed away.
At its completion in Enkyū 4, [1072]
> on the fifteenth of the fourth month,
men of letters made Chinese poems,
and, in welcome, musicians played
for His Majesty’s formal visit.
These, though, are the latter days,
and the might of the realm runs low.
The Great Hall of State has not been rebuilt.
1. The Japanese reader must always have heard in the opening lines the familiar boom of a bronze temple bell, but scripturally these bells were silver and glass. At the Jetavana Vihāra (Japanese: Gion Shja, built for the Buddha by a wealthy patron) they hung at the four corners of the temple infirmary and were rung when a disciple died. At the Buddha’s passing the twin-trunked sal trees that stood around where he lay, including their yellow flowers, turned pure white.
2. China. Chinese historical examples, like those that follow, will be annotated only when their general significance is not immediately obvious.
3. The northern provinces of Echizen, Etchū, and Echigo, along the Japan Sea.
4. “His Eminence” will always refer, below, to a retired emperor, just as “His Majesty” refers to a reigning one. A cloistered emperor will be “His Cloistered Eminence.”
5. The nobles who frequent the emperor’s “cloud palace” (kumoi).
6. Toyo-no-akari, an annual event associated with the Niinamesai (First Fruits Festival) or, in an accession year, the Daijsai (Enthronement Festival).
7. Iesada’s unmarked hunting cloak betrays him as lacking authorization to enter the palace.
8. Kin’yshū (1127), an imperially commissioned anthology of waka poetry. The syllables of the place-name Akashi also form the word that means “bright,” hence a wordplay of a kind fundamental to the practice of classical verse.
9. From the palace.
10. Commander of the Left or Right Palace Guards, an intensely coveted post.
11. A two-wheeled palanquin used within the palace grounds by personages of the highest dignity.
12. The whole world.
13. The fundamental Buddhist rules of virtuous conduct.
14. Kiyomori’s residence compound in the capital.
15. Shirabyshi entertainers were certainly popular in Kiyomori’s time, but the meaning of the word remains unclear. Alas, this passage does not explain it.
16. A second residence of Kiyomori’s, located north of Hachij and west of miya.
17. A kind of popular song especially current at the time of the tale, the late twelfth century.
18. Pines, tortoises, and cranes all stand for happy longevity.
19. From Ariwara no Narihira’s “death poem” in episode 125 of Ise monogatari (tenth century): “That this path is ours, / every one of us, to take, / I heard long ago, / yet never imagined then, / yesterday, or today.” Translation from Joshua S. Mostow and Royall Tyler, The Ise Stories: Ise monogatari (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), p. 247.
20. Patricide, matricide, killing a saint, injuring a buddha, or sowing discord among the community of monks.
21. Those of hell, hungry ghosts, and beasts.
22. “Saga moor.” Saga is a broad area west of the city.
23. These lines evoke the Tanabata festival on the seventh night of the seventh lunar month. The Herd Boy star then rows across the River of Heaven (the Milky Way) to spend that one night of the year with his love, the Weaver Maid.
24. Fujiwara no Tashi (1136?–1201) was appointed empress by Konoe in 1150.
25. Gao Lishi, a Tang court official, discovered the beautiful Yang Guifei for Emperor Xuanzong. In Heian Japan an eligible young woman who “entered the palace” or “entered palace service” became an imperial wife.
26. The women riding in a “display carriage” arrange to flaunt as much as possible their beautiful trailing sleeves and skirts.
27. A stock trait of the good empress, who loyally recalls the emperor to sterner duties after a night of tender pleasures.
28. Michikaze (894–966) was one of the three great calligraphers of his day.
29. A prince must be granted this title by his father, the emperor. Not all imperial sons received it.
30. Fujiwara no Fuhito (659–720), the founder of Fujiwara power.
31. The great monk Enchin (814–91).
32. From an ennen dance song of the time, performed as entertainment after a major temple ceremony.
33. Below Mount Hiei toward the southwest, hence just northeast of the city.
34. The Chinese emperor Xuanzong (685–762) was so smitten by her beauty that he neglected matters of state to the point of provoking rebellion.
35. A phrase that recurs often in the tale, usually paired with “the Buddha’s Way.” The full expression (bupp b) summed up the ideal complementarity between the “way” (or “law,” or “teaching”) of the Sovereign (government) and that of the Buddha (the ideals and protection of religion).
36. A gate (mon) into the outer palace compound.
37. Iwashimizu Hachiman, the great Hachiman shrine on Otokoyama, southwest of the capital. Elsewhere, the tale sometimes calls this shrine Yawata, another reading for the characters used to write “Hachiman.”
38. The Upper and Lower Kamo shrines, north of the city, especially protect the emperor and the capital. The name “Karasumaru,” just above, is familiar to many now as “Karasuma.” The reading has changed.
39. An esoteric, magic rite to invite prosperity and good fortune.
40. As in the mocking song sung by the courtiers to Tadamori in 1:2, the syllables heiji mean both “house of Taira” and “wine jar.”
41. Literally, “evil” (aku). However, The Tale of Hgen describes him at length not as cruel or corrupt but rather as so overwhelmingly (hence discouragingly) accomplished that he became arrogant, overreached himself, and courted ruin.
42. A major sacred mountain, associated with a large and powerful religious community, on the Japan Sea side of Honshu.
43. Hoshi, small metal bosses on a warrior’s helmet.
44. The divinity of Hakusan.
45. An ancient legend tells how the fisherman Urashima traveled to the sea god’s palace and married his daughter but then became homesick and returned to his native village seven generations after he had left. The Buddha’s son, Rāhula, remained in the womb for six years and emerged on the night when his father, who preached the Lotus Sutra on Vulture Peak, attained enlightenment.
46. A humming arrow (kaburaya) ended in two elements. The first was a hollow wooden bulb pierced with holes that made the arrow hum loudly in flight. The second was a forked iron arrowhead (karimata) with two points. The kaburaya was not a battle arrow, although the forked arrowhead could certainly injure its target. The sound was meant to frighten and impress. Kaburaya were often exchanged at the start of hostilities between two sides, and they also served to repel evil influences (in this passage Moromichi himself, seen from the perspective of the Hiei monks). A related arrow type, the hikime, served even more clearly to inspire fear and awe by means of sound, since it lacked the karimata head.
47. Shikimi, customarily offered on a Buddhist altar.
48. The expression used when a possessing spirit leaves the medium.
49. A warrior’s standard garment in the tale, worn over wide trousers (hakama).
50. Below Mount Hiei, just northeast of the capital. It enshrined, as it still does, a protector deity brought from China to guard the mountain.
BOOK TWO
1. The Exile of the Abbot
(recitative)
In the first year of Jish, the fifth month and day, [1177]
Meiun, abbot of Mount Hiei, was barred from religious services at the palace.
A chamberlain arrived to take back his Nyoirin Kannon,
and he was replaced as a palace chaplain.51
Next the police sent men to arrest him
for instigating his monks’ descent on the palace with the palanquins of their gods.
Saik and his sons denounced Meiun to Cloistered Emperor Go-
Shirakawa.
“Morotaka, the Kaga governor,” they said, “has confiscated an estate of his in that province.
This has made him so angry that, in concert with his monks,
he has instituted legal proceedings. For the court this is a crisis.”
The cloistered emperor was furious.
“He’s really in for it now,” people murmured.
Such was Go-Shirakawa’s wrath that Meiun returned his seal and keys and resigned.
(song)
On the eleventh of that month,
the seventh son of Emperor Toba,
Cloistered Prince Kakukai, instead
became the abbot of Mount Hiei:
He was a disciple of Gygen,
the great prelate of Shren-in.
On the twelfth came a further blow:
Two policemen arrived to seal
Meiun’s well and douse his fire,
in formal denial of fire and water.
Because of this the word went out
that the monks would very soon
be heading down, back to the city.
The news started an uproar there.
On the eighteenth the chancellor, Moronaga,
repaired to the palace with twelve other senior nobles.
They seated themselves in their usual conference chamber
and debated the subject of Meiun’s crime.
Counselor Nagakata, then still a left grand controller,
spoke up from his station as the most junior among them.
“It appears that those versed in the law
advise reducing death by one step
to distant exile. I wonder, though.
Meiun, the former abbot, mastered
both sides of the exalted Teaching,
the exoteric and esoteric.
Pure in conduct, he kept the precepts,
so perfectly that under his guidance
the emperor mastered the Lotus Sutra.
From him the cloistered emperor
received the bodhisattva vows.
Strict punishment for such a teacher
might offend the unseen powers.
Would sentencing him to distant exile and returning him to lay life really be wise?”
Nagakata expressed himself boldly, and the senior nobles present agreed.
The cloistered sovereign’s profound displeasure settled the matter, however: