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and mune sounds like “ridgepole,” mori like “warden”;
moreover, Koremori held the “post” of Guards lieutenant.
So one lampoon played on these and also on hiraya, “one-floor house,”
since the same characters, read otherwise, mean “house of Taira.”
Poor, low, one-floor house!
What despair must agitate
the ridgepole warden,
since the post he counted on
to prop him up has come down!
Frothing over rocks,
the Fuji River waters
still run less nimbly
than those Taira warriors
running, running for their lives.
Another lampoon alluded to Tadakiyo, governor of Kazusa,
abandoning his armor in the Fuji River.
In his armor went,
into the Fuji River.
Yes, Tadakiyo,
time to dress yourself in black
and pray for the life to come.
And so off he sped,
hightailing it on his gray,
that Tadakiyo.
A lot of good it did him,
his crupper from Kazusa.
On the eighth day of the eleventh month, the commander, Koremori,
arrived back up in the new capital of Fukuhara. Lord Kiyomori raged.
“Punitive-force commander and Guards lieutenant Koremori
shall be banished to Kikai-ga-shima,” he announced.
“His field commander, Tadakiyo, the Kazusa governor, shall be executed.”
On the ninth the Heike housemen, young and old, came together
to discuss whether Tadakiyo really deserved death.
One Taira no Morikuni, of the police, was among them.
“No one to my knowledge has ever called Tadakiyo fainthearted.
I believe he was in his eighteenth year
when two home-province desperadoes on the run holed up in the Toba Mansion’s storehouse.
No one dared go in after them until Tadakiyo,
in broad daylight, leaped alone over the wall, burst in, killed one,
and captured the other. He will long be remembered for that.
I cannot imagine this lapse of his to be mere cowardice.
No, this rebellion is not something that we can afford to neglect.”
On the tenth, Koremori was promoted to captain in the Right Palace Guards. “He certainly didn’t do much as the commander of the punitive force,” people whispered among themselves. “What on earth are they rewarding him for?”
Long ago, when ordered to do so,
Taira no Sadamori and Tawara Tda Hidesato marched to the Kanto
to suppress Masakado’s rebellion, but success proved elusive,
and a council of senior nobles ordered the dispatch of a second force.
Fujiwara no Tadafun, lord of Civil Affairs, headed it with his deputy, Kiyowara no Shigefuji.
They camped one night at Kiyomi-ga-seki in Suruga.
There Shigefuji, looking out over the vast expanse of the sea,
sang these lines from a Chinese poem:
“Fires on the fishing boats, cold, burn the waves;
bells on the post road sound through night mountains.”
Tadafun, impressed, shed admiring tears.
Meanwhile Sadamori and Hidesato disposed of Masakado at last.
They were on their way back up to the capital, their men bearing aloft Masakado’s head,
when, there at Kiyomi-ga-seki, they met these two commanders.
Thereafter they all continued on toward the capital together.
When Sadamori and Hidesato received their rewards,
the senior nobles discussed the idea of rewarding Tadafun and Shigefuji as well.
The Kuj right minister Morosuke stated,
“The punitive force indeed went down to the Kanto,
but these two gentlemen followed by imperial order when Masakado put up stiff resistance.
They were almost there when the rebel was destroyed after all.
There is no reason not to reward them as well.”
However, Fujiwara no Saneyori, the regent, observed,
“The Book of Rites advises, ‘When in doubt, take no action.’” He forbade it.
The outraged Tadafun swore this oath:
“The descendants of Lord Saneyori
shall be in my eyes as menials;
the descendants of Lord Morosuke
shall have my protection forever.”
So saying, he starved himself to death.
Indeed, Morosuke’s descendants
went on to flourish exceedingly,
while Saneyori’s achieved nothing
and no doubt have by now died out.
In the meantime Shigehira, Lord Kiyomori’s fourth son,
became a captain in the Left Palace Guards.
On the thirteenth of the eleventh month, at Fukuhara,
the emperor moved into his newly built palace.
A Great Thanksgiving Rite should then have been held,
but His Majesty would then have had to proceed in the late tenth month
to the Kamo River for purification.
For that they lay out a ritual space
on open ground north of the palace,
readying vestments and implements
that priestly celebrants require.
Next, beyond the Dragon-Tail Walk
stretching before the Great Hall of State,
they build a hall, the Kairyūden,
in which His Majesty is to bathe.
The Great Thanksgiving Sanctuary,
built nearby, houses offerings
made to the gods, and it is there
His Majesty offers a sacred feast,
followed by a pleasant concert.
The heart of the rite then at last
goes forward in the Great Hall of State.
Afterward there is kagura
in the Seishod and a banquet,
held for all in the Hraku-in.
At Fukuhara, unfortunately,
there was no sign of a Great Hall of State,
in fact nowhere to hold the key rite;
no Seishod, hence no way to perform
kagura, and no Hraku-in,
so nowhere to offer the banquet.
The senior nobles therefore decided
this year to confine the observances
to a Festival of First Fruits
and to the Gosechi dances.
Indeed, even this First Fruits Festival
was held in the old capital,
in the government’s Bureau of Shrines.
Now, the Gosechi dances began
when the Kiyomibara Emperor,
Tenmu, at his Yoshino Palace,
one windy and brilliantly moonlit night,
was taking pleasure in playing the kin:
An angel descended from heaven
and danced, turning her sleeves five times.
This was the first Gosechi dance of all.
13. The Return to the Old Capital
Emperor and subjects alike had deplored the move to Fukuhara.
Enryakuji on Mount Hiei and Kfukuji in Nara, among many other temples and shrines,
had submitted on the issue formal expressions of dissent.
So it was that even Lord Kiyomori, who never honored any wish but his own,
gave in and ordered the return to the old capital.
Suddenly, on the second of the twelfth month, His Majesty was back.
The new capital had sloped downward
from the high hills that rose to the north
to the sea that stretched south before it.
The noise of the waves there was loud,
and a strong wind constantly blew.
No wonder His Eminence Takakura
often felt very unwell there
and left, when he could, in such haste.
Regent, chancellor, senior nobles, pri
vy gentlemen—all of them rushed to accompany him. Likewise all the ranking Heike nobles, Lord Kiyomori first among them, hastened up to the once-more-imperial city. Who would have stayed on a moment longer in dreary Fukuhara?
Earlier, in the sixth month of that year, they had demolished their houses
and transported to Fukuhara all the tools and materials needed
to put up new ones, of some sort or other,
but now this mad order to return told them all they needed to know.
They instantly dropped everything to start back up to the city.
Not one of them had a place to live,
so off they went to Yawata, Kamo,
Saga, Uzumasa, and so on—
any odd corner of the hills,
western or eastern, where a temple
might perhaps offer a gallery,
a shrine, space in its pilgrim hall—
and there great ladies and gentlemen
sought refuge in what lodging they could.
What, then, explains that first decision to move the capital?
Nara and Mount Hiei were too close to the old one.
The slightest incident could provoke the Kasuga god tree167
or the sacred palanquins of Hiyoshi to pay a riotous visit.
Hills and sea, as well as distance, sheltered Fukuhara from such mishaps.
That, they say, must be what Lord Kiyomori had had in mind.
On the twenty-third of the twelfth month,
a Taira force of twenty thousand and more
under Tomomori, the Left Watch intendant,
and Tadanori, the Satsuma governor,
set out to march into the province of mi,
to put down the Genji uprising there.
One by one they crushed all local bands—
Yamamoto, Kashiwagi, Nishigori—
then crossed straight into Mino and Owari.
14. The Burning of Nara
As the authorities in the capital saw it,
the fact that the Nara temples had sided with Prince Mochihito
when he took refuge at Miidera, and had even come forward to welcome him,
made them enemies of the court.
In due course they proposed to attack both Miidera and Nara.
This threw the monks of the Nara temples into a violent uproar.
The regent solemnly assured them that should they have a grievance,
he would gladly apprise His Majesty of it as often as needed;
however, the monks ignored him.
Tadanari, among other things the director of the Kangaku-in,
was dispatched to them as an emissary.
“Drag him down from that conveyance of his!” they bellowed. “Cut off his topknot!”
He fled back to the city before they could get at him.
Next they sent Chikamasa, an officer of the Right Gate Watch.
“Cut off his topknot!” the monks bawled again.
He dropped everything and fled, too.
Two Kangaku-in servants lost their topknots that day.
Another of the monks’ exploits was to make a big mari ball168
and call it Lord Kiyomori’s head. “Hit it! Kick it!” they kept shouting.
“Loose talk brings trouble,” people say.
“Watch your tongue or court perdition.”
Lord Kiyomori was, after all—
awesome though the mere thought may be—
the reigning emperor’s grandfather.
Carrying on like that about him,
the Nara monks sounded like devils.
Kiyomori got wind of all this. He could hardly approve.
Anxious to put an end immediately to the turmoil in Nara,
he appointed Seno-o no Tar Kaneyasu, from Bitchū, to the Yamato provincial police.
Kaneyasu then set out for Nara with five hundred mounted men.
“Whatever mayhem the monks threaten,” their orders said,
“do not for any reason respond in kind.
Wear no armor and carry no bows or arrows.”
The monks, however, knew nothing of that.
They seized over sixty of Kaneyasu’s men, one by one cut off their heads,
and exposed them all in a row beside Sarusawa Pond.
Kiyomori was furious. “Well then,” he said, “attack Nara!”
The commander was Lord Shigehira, his deputy Lord Michimori.
The mounted force, over forty thousand strong, set out for the southern capital.
Seven thousand monks, the old with the young,
bound on their helmets and, at two places,
Narazaka and Hannyaji,
dug a deep trench across the road,
built a wall of shields and an abatis,
and lay in wait. Meanwhile the Taira
split their forty thousand in two
and rode down on these makeshift forts
with deafening battle cries.
The monks, all on foot, were armed with blades.
The warriors galloped around and around them,
harrying them one way, then another,
showering them with volleys of arrows,
killing countless defenders outright.
The two sides traded opening arrows
at the hour of the hare and fought all day. [ca. 6 A.M.]
That night both fortified positions,
Narazaka and Hannyaji, fell.
One of the fleeing monks, a fierce fighter,
was Saka no Shir Ykaku.
In prowess with sword or bow, in strength,
no monk of the Seven Great Nara Temples
or Fifteen Great Temples compared with him.
Over close-fitting armor laced in green,
he wore outer armor with black lacing.
Five neck plates completed his helmet.
One hand gripped a plain halberd shaft,
the blade curved like a long grass frond,
the other a great sword, the hilt black-lacquered.
With a dozen or so men from his lodge,
he fought his way out the Tengai Gate,
to stand fast awhile, scything down
many enemies and their horses.
But the attackers just kept coming,
wave after wave, until the companions
once at Ykaku’s side were all dead.
Boundless courage he certainly had,
but with no one to cover his back,
he fled southward at great speed.
They were fighting at night now. It was pitch dark. Shigehira, the Heike commander, stood at the gate of Hannyaji. “Start a fire,” he ordered. One Tomokata, an estate official from Fukui in Harima, promptly split a shield to make a torch and set fire to a local’s house.
This was the night of the twenty-eighth of the twelfth month.
A strong wind was blowing, and its erratic gusts soon carried the fire,
originally sprung from a single source, to many temples.
Those monks who felt shame and wished to be well remembered
had already met death at Narazaka or Hannyaji.
Others, who could still walk, had fled for Yoshino and Totsugawa.
Ancient monks unable to walk,
great scholars, cherished acolytes,
women and children had fled pell-mell
into the grounds of Kfukuji.
At Tdaiji over a thousand people
climbed to the second floor of the Great Buddha Hall
and, lest the enemy follow them there,
took up the ladders. Devouring fire
swept straight into their huddled mass.
Sinners burning in bottomless hell
never uttered such hideous screams.
The burning of the Great Buddha of Tdaiji.
Kfukuji, founded by Lord Tankai,
is the Fujiwara ancestral temple.
The Shakyamuni in the East Golden Hall,
made in the earliest days of the Buddha’s Teaching;
the Kanzeon in the West Golden Hall,
risen spontaneously from the earth;
the gallery, four-sided around its court,
gleaming as with rows of precious stones;
the imposingly lofty Two-Story Hall,
all brilliant vermilion and cinnabar;
the twin pagodas, topped by nine rings,
that rose, glittering, into the sky—
alas, every one went up in smoke.
For Tdaiji, Emperor Shmu conceived
an image of the everlasting,
indestructibly living Buddha
Roshana, made of gilt bronze,169
one hundred and sixty feet tall,
which he adorned with his own hands.
This Buddha’s hair knot soared aloft,
disappearing into the clouds;
his noble full-moon countenance,
the white curl between his eyebrows,
inspired devotion ever renewed.
Now the head, melted, had fallen to earth;
the body had fused to a molten mound.
His eighty-four thousand perfections
were gone, as when the autumn moon
slides from sight behind fivefold clouds;
the ornaments of his enlightenment
now drifted on winds of the ten evils
like stars wandering the night sky.
Smoke filled the heavens. The sky was flame.
Eyewitnesses could not bear to look,
and those told the story fainted with horror.
The Hoss and Sanron holy scriptures,170
down to the very last scroll, were gone.
In this land of ours, needless to say,
but equally in India or China,
no disaster approaching this one
can ever before have struck the Teaching.
Those statues made by King Udayana
from refined gold, by Vishvakarman
from red sandal were only life-size.
This Buddha, then, so unparalleled
in the whole realm of Jambudvīpa,
should clearly have lasted forever,
but he succumbed to the world’s poisons,
leaving behind him eternal mourning.
Brahma, Indra, and the Four Kings,
the Dragon Gods, the Eight Guardian Tribes,
every denizen of the afterworld
could only experience shock and horror.
And how can the Kasuga God have felt,
who mounts guards over the Hoss doctrine?
The very dew on the Kasuga meadows
changed color, and bitter reproach
raged in the wind from Mount Mikasa.