by VIKING ADULT
Settsu province, Japan
Continent of Jambudvīpa
FROM: Court of King Enma
DATE: Shan 2, twelfth month, twenty-second day
NOTIFICATION: On the twenty-sixth next, in the Great Hall of State at the Citadel of King Enma, a hundred thousand gathered devotees of the Lotus are to chant the key passages of the sutra. Your presence is therefore required. King Enma so decrees.
That is what Son’e saw written.
He could not decline the invitation.
Willy-nilly, he wrote a note of acceptance and then woke up.
Since as far as he knew he was dying, he told Kyb, the temple abbot, the story.
Everyone who heard it marveled.
With his voice Son’e called Amida’s Name
and in his heart prayed for Amida’s welcome to paradise.
The night of the twenty-fifth soon came.
Son’e installed himself before his altar as usual,
leaning on his armrest while calling the Name and reciting the sutra.
At the hour of the rat, he felt so sleepy that he retired to his room and lay down. [midnight]
At the hour of the ox, two demon figures arrived, as before dressed in white.
“Hurry,” they said, “you are to come with us.”
For him to ignore Enma’s summons
would be to risk dire consequences.
Should he agree to go with them, though,
he lacked the proper stole and bowl.
While he was thinking all this over,
the stole he required, of its own accord,
settled lightly over his shoulders,
and a golden bowl came down from the sky.
Two sturdy attendants, two acolytes,
ten junior monks, and a great carriage
compounded of the seven treasures
appeared before the gate of the temple.
Son’e, transported with delight,
boarded the carriage without delay.
His equipage soared into the heavens,
bound away toward the northwest,
and swiftly reached King Enma’s palace.
Son’e saw walls stretching afar,
a vast expanse of ground within them,
and rising from it a Great Hall of State
built wholly of precious substances.
The services for that day being over, the invited monks were leaving again
when Son’e stopped at the middle gate on the south side
and contemplated the prospect that the Great Hall offered.
He saw the officials of Enma’s court bow low before their pious king.
“How extraordinary that I should be here!” he said to himself.
“I will go and inquire respectfully about my life to come.”
So he approached the Great Hall of State.
His two attendants meanwhile
lifted umbrellas over his head,
his two acolytes each bore a chest,
and the ten others trailed behind him.
So it was that in slow procession
they approached the great edifice.
King Enma descended the broad steps,
amid a throng of his officials,
to greet his guest. The two attendants
now revealed themselves in truth
as Tamon and Jikoku, the acolytes
as the bodhisattvas Yaku and Yuze,
and the ten lesser monks as the ten
demonesses who guard the Sutra.
These followed and waited upon Son’e.
“All of the other monks have gone,” King Enma began.
“Why, then, reverend sir, have you come?”
“I wish to know where I am next to be born.”
“But rebirth in paradise, or not, depends solely on whether or not you believe.”
Enma gave an official this order:
“A document box containing the record
of this monk’s numerous good deeds
rests in the southern treasury.
Go, bring it here, and let him see
all that he has achieved in this life
and all he has done to inspire others.”
Obediently the official addressed
set off to the southern treasury,
carried back the box described,
opened it, and read out the contents.
Son’e groaned and wept, saying, “I beg you for only one thing:
Have pity on me and teach me the way to reach freedom from birth and death!
Show me the straight path to certain enlightenment!”
Compassionately King Enma then preached some lines of sacred verse.
The official dipped his brush and wrote them down:
“Wife, children, throne, wealth, and followers—
none of these stays by a man after death.
With him go only his karmic crimes,
which bind him in screaming pain forever.”
King Enma delivered himself of this verse, then entrusted it to Son’e.
Overjoyed, Son’e remarked, “The chief minister who governs Japan
chose, on Cape Wada in Settsu province, a square twenty-five-acre plot
that he covered with lodges. Then, just as you have done today,
gathering here one hundred thousand Lotus devotees,
he filled each lodge with votaries of the sutra, had it expounded,
and saw to it that each litany was perfectly performed.”
King Enma wept with joy and admiration.
“He is no ordinary man,” he said.
“No, he is a manifestation of the great teacher Jie,
reborn in Japan to assure protection for the Tendai teaching.
Therefore I recite three times each day certain lines in his praise.
I want you to give them to him.”
“I bow before the great teacher Jie,
protector of the Tendai teaching,
now manifest as a great general
so as by evil to lead all to good.”
Son’e accepted the paper bearing these lines.
Ten warriors awaited him when he left again by the same middle gate. They helped him into his carriage and escorted him, before and behind. The carriage flew once more through the air and brought him home. He began to breathe again, feeling as though he had dreamed. He then repaired to Nishi-Hachij, where he presented the paper to Lord Kiyomori. Kiyomori, thoroughly pleased, entertained him, rewarded him generously, and in token of his appreciation promoted him to master of discipline.
And that is how people discovered
that Lord Kiyomori was a reincarnation of the great Jie.
10. The Gion Consort
There were those, too, for whom Lord Kiyomori was not Tadamori’s son
but rather the son of Retired Emperor Shirakawa.
This is the story:
Back in the Eikyū years, there was a highly favored lady known as the Gion Consort. [1113–18]
She was originally a gentlewoman,
and she lived in the Gion district, below the Eastern Hills.
Retired Emperor Shirakawa called on her frequently.
Once he was secretly on his way there,
escorted by one or two privy gentlemen and a few of his guards.
The twentieth day of the fifth month had passed, and night had fallen.
It was too dark to see anything much up ahead,
and besides, it was raining. The gloom was impenetrable.
Now, a chapel stood not far from this gentlewoman’s house,
and there appeared next to this chapel some sort of creature, shining.
The creature’s head glittered and gleamed
as though it sprouted silver needles.
It had its two hands (if they were hands)
lifted high; one, it seemed, held a mallet,
the other something that gave off light.
Sovereign and escort together cried out in fear and
surprise.
“That’s scary!”
“I’d say it’s a real demon!”
“That must be the treasure mallet, that thing it’s holding!”
“Oh, what are we to do?”
From among the escort, His Eminence summoned Tadamori, who at the time was still a junior member of his guard. “I believe that you are the man I need,” he said. “Will you shoot that creature for me or stop it with your sword?”
Tadamori dutifully started toward it, meanwhile reflecting, “It really doesn’t look that powerful—it’s probably just a fox or a badger. I’d hate to shoot it or run it through with my sword. No, I’ll take it alive.” So he kept going.
The light flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed two or three times.
Tadamori raced up and grasped the creature as hard as he could.
“What’s going on?” an agitated voice cried. It was no monster, but a man.
The whole party then lit torches to get a good look at him.
They saw a monk of sixty or so—namely, the one in charge of the chapel.
He had been on his way to replenish the lamps on the altar,
with a jug of oil in one hand and, in the other, a lamp in an earthen dish.
It was pouring rain, so to avoid getting wet
he had tied wheat straw into a bundle to wear on his head as a hat.
The straw stalks gleamed like silver needles in the light of the flame.
Now they understood everything.
“Why, it would have been just awful
if he had shot or stabbed the fellow!
Tadamori showed superb judgment—
just what one wants in a warrior.”
Such were His Eminence’s thoughts,
Tadamori and the mysterious creature.
and he rewarded Tadamori
by giving him, for his very own,
the gentlewoman he loved so well,
known to all as the Gion Consort.
Now, at the time she was carrying
the retired emperor’s child.
He said, “If she gives birth to a girl,
then that girl will be my daughter;
but if she happens to bear a boy,
Tadamori, that boy will be yours,
to bring up in the profession of arms.”
And she did indeed give birth to a son.
Tadamori meant to report the event, but he sought in vain an occasion to do so.
Then Retired Emperor Shirakawa set off on a pilgrimage to Kumano.
At a spot called Itogazaka, he had the bearers put his palanquin down and rested awhile.
A thicket nearby was full of wild yam sprouts.
Tadamori put one in his sleeve and came before His Eminence.
A sweet sprout I know
will be crawling very soon:
Yes, the time has come,
he said, and His Eminence
caught his drift perfectly.
Keep that sprout, Tadamori,
let it grow to nourish you,
he added to complete the verse.
From that time on, Tadamori
brought the child up as his own.
The boy cried loud and long at night.
His Eminence, when he heard this,
vouchsafed a further thought in verse:
Cry at night he may,
but heed me, Tadamori:
look after him well.
Through the years yet to come,
pure wealth will accrue to him.
And that is how Kiyomori got his name.181
In his twelfth year, he became second-in-command of the Watch.
In his eighteenth he was raised in that post to the fourth rank.
Those ignorant of the circumstances grumbled,
“Only sons of the very highest nobles get treatment like that!”
Retired Emperor Toba, however, knew the truth.
“As far as that goes,” he said, “Kiyomori need not defer to anyone.”
Emperor Tenchi, in the old days,
made a gift to Lord Kamatari:
a consort of his, carrying his child.
“If she gives birth to a girl,” he said,
“I will think of the child as mine,
but a boy you may keep for yourself.”
The baby in the end was a son:
none other than Abbot Je,
who founded the temple on Tnomine.
Such things happened in ancient times,
and so in this latter age Kiyomori
may, sure enough, have been the son
of Retired Emperor Shirakawa.
Certainly that could nicely explain
the momentous decisions he made—
moving the capital and so on:
decisions affecting the whole realm.
On the twentieth of the intercalary second month,
the grand counselor Lord Kunitsuna passed away.
His relationship with Kiyomori had been unusually close,
which is perhaps why he fell ill on the same day and died in the same month.
Descended in the eighth generation from the counselor Kanesuke,
Kunitsuna was a son of Morikuni, once the deputy right equerry.
Not yet even a chamberlain, he was only an aspirant scholar
in Emperor Konoe’s reign, back in the Ninpei years, [1151–54]
when all of a sudden fire broke out in the palace.
The emperor escaped to the Shishinden,
but no one from the Palace Guards came to assist him,
leaving him stuck there, wondering what to do,
until Kunitsuna turned up with a light palanquin.
“Please, Your Majesty,” he said, “under the circumstances
I beg you to avail yourself of this conveyance.”
The emperor did so. “And who are you?” he asked.
“Fujiwara no Kunitsuna, an aspirant scholar serving in the chamberlains’ office.”
“Well, you certainly have your wits about you. I hope they appreciate you.”
He praised Kunitsuna to Lord Tadamichi, the regent,
awarded him several estates, and took him into his service.
Again Emperor Konoe made during his reign a progress to Yawata.
The chief dancer for the occasion got drunk and fell in the water.
His costume was now soaking wet, and the kagura dancing was delayed.
Kunitsuna spoke up. “There is nothing remarkable in this,” he said,
“but I did have my people bring along a similar costume.”
He took it out, the dancer put it on, and the kagura was ready to start.
It began a little late, to be sure, but the singing was lovely
and the dancers’ sleeves swayed ever so gracefully to the beat.
Gods and men alike respond to the delights of kagura,
as did the Sun Goddess long ago, in the age of the gods,
when such carryings-on tempted her out of the celestial rock cave.
That moment seemed almost to live again.
One of Kunitsuna’s ancestors was the counselor Yamakage,
whose son, the distinguished prelate Jomu, excelled in wisdom and learning
as greatly as in virtuous conduct and in observance of priestly discipline.
In the Shtai years, Cloistered Emperor Uda made a progress to the i River, [898–901]
and at Mount Ogura, Sadakuni, a son of the palace minister Takafuji,
had his hat blown off into the stream.
He could only stand there, a sleeve over his head to hide his topknot,
until Jomu, they say, fished another hat from his vestment chest and passed it to him.
This Jomu was in his second year when his father, Yamakage,
went down to Kyushu as the Dazaifu deputy.
Jomu’s stepmother, who hated him, put on a show of cuddling him in her arms
in order to drown him by dropping him into the sea.
Jomu’s nat
ural mother, however, while still alive,
had saved a turtle from a Katsura cormorant fisherman—
the man had caught it and meant to kill it for cormorant feed—
by removing her outer robe and trading it for the turtle, which she let go.
The grateful turtle surfaced under the little boy and bore him, safe and sound, on its back.
Perhaps this story is not entirely reliable, being so very old.
At any rate, in this latter age Lord Kunitsuna enjoyed a high reputation.
Under the regency of Lord Tadamichi, he became a counselor.
After Tadamichi’s death Lord Kiyomori cultivated him for reasons of his own.
The enormously wealthy Kunitsuna had a new gift for him every day.
“He’s my best friend in all the world,” Kiyomori liked to say.
He adopted Kunitsuna’s son as his own and named him Kiyokuni,
and Shigehira, Kiyomori’s fourth son, became Kunitsuna’s son-in-law.
When the Gosechi festival of Jish 4 was celebrated at Fukuhara, [1180]
the privy gentlemen took it upon themselves to call on the empress.
One of them sang the rei poem “Speckled bamboo lines the Xiang lakeshore.”182
Kunitsuna, who happened to be nearby, overheard him. He was appalled.
“Why,” he reflected, “that song is said to be extremely ill-omened!
I refuse to listen to anything of the kind!” He stole away.
Now, this is what the song is about:
Of old, Emperor Yao had two daughters, Ehuang, the elder, and Nüying.
Both were consorts of Emperor Shun. After Shun died,
they took his body to the Cangwu burning ground, where he became smoke.
His two mourning consorts followed the cortege as far as the lakeshore at Xiang,
where their tears spattered the bamboos and left them speckled.
They remained at the spot, to seek comfort in playing the koto.
The bamboo growing there on the shore is speckled still,
and cloud broods over the place where they played.
Lord Tachibana no Hiromi composed a rhapsody on their sad story.
Although no genius at letters, Kunitsuna still had the sense to notice such things.
Appointment to grand counselor had never occurred to him.
However, his mother once made a pilgrimage to the Kamo Shrine
and prayed there fervently, for one hundred days,
“I beg that Kunitsuna, my son, should serve at least a day as head chamberlain.”
