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distant banishment after all.
When Lord Kiyomori called to announce the decision,
His Cloistered Eminence pleaded indisposition so as not to receive him.
Disappointed, Kiyomori withdrew.
As established custom requires
whenever punishment strikes a monk,
Meiun was obliged to surrender
his certificate of ordination;
he became a layman once more,
named Fujii no Matsueda.
In descent he was six generations
removed from Prince Tomohira,
Emperor Murakami’s seventh son,
and his father was Lord Akimichi,
the Koga grand counselor.
He was a man of peerless worth,
the greatest monk in all the realm.
Sovereign and subject so revered him
that he headed Tennji, too,
and six other major temples.
Nonetheless, Abe no Yasuchika, head of the Yin-Yang Office,
had been heard to question Meiun’s name.
“I simply do not understand,” he remarked,
“how a man as learned as he could call himself Meiun.
The first character, mei, sets next to each other the light of both ‘moon’ and ‘sun,’
but the un that follows means ‘cloud.’”
Appointed abbot in Nin’an 1, the second month and twentieth day, [1166]
Meiun first worshipped formally in the Central Hall on the fifteenth of the third.
He opened the treasury nearby and found a box a foot square, wrapped in white cloth.
Abbot that he was, a monk who had never sinned in his life,
he opened it and found inside a single scroll of yellow paper.
Dengy Daishi, the great founder,52
had foreknown and written there
the names of all future abbots.
Customarily, each new one
read as far as his own name,
no further, then rerolled the scroll
and restored it to its place.
No doubt Meiun did the same.
Although indeed a holy man,
he did not in the end escape
karma accrued from past lives.
His is a sad and sobering tale.
(speech)
On the twenty-first of that month, Meiun’s place of exile was fixed as the province of Izu, chosen over other locations suggested because of his denunciation by Saik and his sons. The authorities sent police to his Shirakawa residence, with orders to expel him from the city that very day. Weeping, Meiun left Shirakawa and entered the Issaiky ascetic community at Awataguchi. On the Mountain the monks grasped that Saik and his sons were in the end their chief foe. They wrote down their names and placed them under the raised left foot of Konpira, one of the Twelve Divine Generals in the Central Hall, so as to have Konpira trample them.
“O Twelve Divine Generals!” they bawled.
“O seven thousand Yaksha minions!53
Let not a day, not an hour go by
before you recall the lives of those three!”
Their curses were a terror to hear.
On the twenty-third, Meiun left the Issaiky community for his place of exile.
It is all too easy, alas, to imagine so great a prelate’s feelings
as he looked one last time on the city, hounded forward by the police,
and from the saka barrier started out toward the east.
On reaching Uchide beach at tsu,
he caught sight of the Monju tower,54
glimmering whitely in the distance,
but one look was all he could bear.
He then pressed a sleeve to his eyes
and dissolved in a flood of tears.
Among the Mountain’s many wise and learned monks,
Chken, who rose later to supreme clerical rank,
was so saddened by Meiun’s departure that he saw him off as far as Awazu.
Farther than that, however, he could not go,
so he bade Meiun farewell before turning back. Touched by Chken’s kindness,
Meiun gave him personal initiation into Triple Insight in One Mind,55
which for many years he had kept concealed in his heart.
The Buddha himself, Shakyamuni,
taught this practice, which passed down
through Ashvaghosha of Varanasi
and Nagarjuna of South India,
until this day it repaid warm devotion.
Truly, this realm of ours lies remote,
like a few scattered grains of millet,
and this is indeed the soiled, latter age.
Nonetheless, Chken, taught this practice,
wrung tears of emotion from his sleeves
while on his way back to the capital,
lost in the loftiest of thoughts.
On the Mountain the monks rose up and gathered in council.
“Between Gishin, who began the line of our Tendai abbots,
and the present, when we have reached the fifty-fifth,
there is no record of any, ever, having been sentenced to exile.
Now let us further consider the matter.
It was during the Enryaku years that our sovereign built his imperial city [782–806]
and Dengy Daishi ascended this Mountain to teach the Tendai doctrine.
No woman blighted by the five impediments has trodden these slopes since then;
they are now home to three thousand undefiled monks.
The peak has echoed long years to voices chanting the Lotus Sutra,
while, below, the Seven Shrines vouchsafe boons ever new.
In India, Vulture Peak, northeast of the Magadha royal city,
sheltered the Buddha in the depths of its cavern;
so, too, in our land, Mount Hiei, rising northeast of the capital,
offers the realm protection from baneful influences.
Here generations of sage emperors and wise subjects have built their altars.
These may indeed be the latter days of the Law,
but that excuses no one who injures our Mountain.
No, this is not to be endured.”
So they spoke, amid cries and imprecations.
Then, to a man, they descended on Higashi-Sakamoto.
2. The Adept Yixing
The monks deliberated once more before the shrine of Jūzenji Gongen.
“Please hear us!” they prayed. “We simply must go down to Awazu,
recover our abbot, and ensure that he stays with us.
But he is closely guarded, and bringing him back safely will not be easy.
We have no choice but to trust in the might of our great divinity, Sann.
If we really are to recover him successfully, without incident,
then, we implore you, show us now a miraculous sign!”
So the old monks begged their patron with fierce intensity.
Thereupon a young man, a servant of Jen at Mudji,
Tsurumaru by name, at the time in his eighteenth year,
betrayed great distress of body and mind.
Sweat poured from him, and all at once he began to rave.
“Jūzenji has entered me!” he cried.
“These are perhaps the latter days,
but nonetheless I fail to grasp
how they can simply march our abbot
off to some other, distant province.
The horror of this will last many lives.
If this is how things are to be now,
what is the good of remaining present
here below the slopes of the Mountain?”
He pressed his sleeves to his eyes
and sobbed bitterly. Unconvinced,
the monks addressed him: “If in truth
you speak an oracle from Jūzenji,
then we must ask you to offer proof.
Return each of these, without mistake,
to the monk who actually o
wns it.”
There were hundreds of elders present,
each with a rosary in his hand,
and they tossed all these rosaries
up onto the broad veranda
before the sanctuary of Jūzenji.
The possessed youth went rushing about,
collecting them and giving each back,
unerringly, to its rightful owner.
Deeply stirred by this miracle,
the monks, palms pressed together,
shed tears of joy. “All right!” they shouted.
“All right! Let’s go and fetch our abbot!”
And off they went, like a moving cloud.
Some followed the lakeshore path
toward Shiga and Karasaki;
others sailed straight across the lake
from Yamada and Yabase.
The spectacle was too much for the guards,
although there were a good many of them.
They took to their heels in all directions.
The monks headed for the old provincial temple in tsu.
Their arrival astonished the deposed abbot.
He protested, “But they say that a man under imperial ban
should never even see the sun or the moon.
When His Cloistered Eminence’s decree orders me driven forthwith from the city,
I cannot possibly loiter a moment on my way.
Hurry back, you monks, hurry back up your Mountain.”
Then he came out to the very edge of the room and spoke.
“I was born,” he went on, “into a house
that furnishes ministers of state,
and ever since I first gave myself
to studying the Tendai doctrine
in the peace of the Hiei valleys,
I aspired to master the full Teaching,
exoteric and esoteric,
and successfully grasped them both.
I only wanted our Mountain to flourish,
and I prayed ardently as well
for the prosperity of our realm.
Another cherished ambition of mine
was properly to nurture you monks.
Surely the gods who watch over us
know that I speak only the truth.
I have done nothing to merit blame.
Falsely accused, I have received
a harsh sentence of banishment—
one for which I would never presume
to reproach gods, buddhas, or men.
The warmth of feeling you have shown
in coming all the way here to find me
is something that I can never repay.”
Tears of emotion soaked those sleeves,
dyed to a senior prelate’s clove tan,
and every monk present wept with him.
They brought a palanquin forward.
“Please, Your Reverence,” they urged him, “get in, quickly!”
“Once upon a time,” he replied, “I stood at the head of three thousand monks.
Now that I am, as you see, a mere banished criminal,
how could I possibly let you monks, men of great learning and wisdom,
bear me on your shoulders? No, even if it were right for me to go with you,
I would put on straw sandals and walk, like the rest of you.”
He would not board the palanquin.
Now, present in the throng was one Adept Yūkei, a fighting monk from the West Pagoda of Hiei.
Seven feet tall, he wore black leather-laced armor,
roughly plated with leather and steel and prolonged by sturdy skirts.
He had removed his helmet, which his monks now carried for him,
and he leaned, as on a staff, upon a long, plain-wood-handled halberd.
“Make way!” he cried, pushing ahead through the throng
until he came before the deposed abbot himself
and fixed on him, for a moment, a glittering gaze.
“Your Reverence, this stance of yours
is just what got you into this trouble,”
he said. “Now, get in.” The frightened Meiun hastened to do so.
Overjoyed to have him at last,
the monks let no menial bear him;
no, it was the great ones among them
who, with whoops and shouts of triumph,
shouldered him onward up the slope
turn by turn—except for Yūkei,
whose fierce grip on the forward poles
all but broke both pole and halberd.
Up that long, steep climb he strode
as though walking on level ground.
They set the palanquin down before the Great Lecture Hall and deliberated further.
“We have now been down to Awazu,” they said, “and recovered our abbot.
However, he is under imperial ban.
To keep here and recognize as our abbot a man condemned to exile
is to court reprisals. How are we to proceed?”
Yūkei stepped forward to speak his piece.
“Our Mountain,” he declared, “is sacred
beyond any holy site in Japan.
Here we pronounce concerted prayers
for peace in the realm; here shines
the full dignity of mighty Sann.
Here the Buddha’s and the Sovereign’s Ways
reign equally, like the horns of a bull.
Therefore the very monks of Mount Hiei are peerless in understanding;
nor does the world at large make light of the least of them.
And our abbot, then: He is lofty in wisdom, the chief of our three thousand.
He is weighty in virtue, the greatest monk of our Mountain.
Blameless, he has nonetheless been saddled with blame.
Does not the whole of Mount Hiei,
the whole capital rage at this?
Kfukuji and Miidera—
do they not mock this spectacle?
Gone is the master of both schools,
the esoteric and exoteric,
and everywhere the scholar-monks
neglect what was once devoted study.
Nobody, surely, could fail to mourn.
To put the matter perfectly plainly,
they are welcome to call me, Yūkei,
the ringleader of the rebels,
welcome to jail me, to banish me,
welcome to cut off my head if they wish,
for I would take that in this life
as a very great honor and, in the next,
as a memory worth eternal pride!”
Tears poured in streams from his eyes
while the assembled monks murmured, “Yes!”
Everyone after that called Yūkei
“Reverend Thunderbolt”
and his distinguished student Ekei
“Little Thunderbolt.”
The monks took their deposed abbot to the valley south of the East Pagoda,
where they accommodated him in the Myk lodge.
Perhaps not even divinity incarnate can escape when calamity strikes.
Of old, there was in the realm of Great Tang a learned adept named Yixing,
a chaplain to the emperor, Xuanzong.
It came to be noised about that Yixing was carrying on
with Xuanzong’s great favorite, Yang Guifei.
In ancient times, as they do now, in states great or small,
people delight in malicious gossip. The rumor was quite untrue,
but the mere suspicion sufficed. Yixing was banished to Tokhara.56
Three roads lead to that land.
The Rinchi road is for the emperor, the Yūchi road for commoners.
Down the Anketsu road are sent those guilty of heinous crimes.
Yixing traveled this road, for he was a criminal.
On he went, seven days and nights, and never saw sun or moon.
All was darkness and desolation.
The path ahead vanished into gloom
among dense tr
ees and plunging slopes.
No sound, until far down the ravine
a single bird called, and fresh tears
soaked his mossy, blameless sleeves.
False as that accusation was,
and the sentence that banished him,
heaven then had mercy on him,
showing him the Nine Luminaries,
so as thereafter to protect him.
On the instant he bit his finger
and drew in blood, on his left sleeve,
the Luminaries as he saw them.
This is the Mandala of the Nine,57
so revered in the Shingon school,
both in China and in Japan.
3. The Execution of Saik
News that the monks had taken back their deposed abbot further enraged the cloistered emperor.
“The monks of Mount Hiei have made trouble often enough before,” Saik said,
“but if you ask me, they have gone too far this time.
I have never heard of such brazen impertinence.
It is time for decisive action.”
So did Saik, oblivious of his own coming demise
and heedless of the Sann Deity’s manifest will,
trouble the cloistered sovereign with his words.
The subject who slanders others
sows, they say, discord in the realm.
And, indeed, it is perfectly true:
“Orchids eagerly multiply,
but the autumn winds lay them waste;
a king aspires to greater glory,
but the slanderer brings darkness.”
Perhaps this was just such a case.
The cloistered sovereign discussed the matter with Lord Narichika and those around him,
and word of a coming attack on the Mountain spread;
hence also a rumor that some of the monks there were saying,
“No one born and nurtured on imperial soil may defy an imperial command,”
and therefore secretly urging compliance with the cloistered sovereign’s decree.
Meiun, at the Myk lodge, heard of these divided loyalties.
“Ah,” he said sadly, “I wonder what trials await me next.”
However, he heard no more about exile.
Because of the trouble on Mount Hiei,
Narichika had had to put aside the project that most deeply absorbed him.
Privately he went on preparing for it in various ways, but really only for show.
There was no sign that his rebellion could possibly succeed.
His closest co-conspirator, Tada no Yukitsuna, therefore came to lose hope. The cloth that Narichika had given him, to make covers for his men’s bows, he had sewn instead into hitatare and simple, unlined robes, and meanwhile he racked his brains over what to do. “No,” he reflected, “considering the tremendous strength of the Heike, it is now all but impossible to overthrow them. I have lent myself to a pointless plot, and I am finished if word of it gets out.” He decided to stay alive by shifting his loyalty to the Heike, before they should learn from someone else what was going on.