by VIKING ADULT
rose a single temple: Jakk-in.
The rocks and waters of the garden,
the ancient grove eloquently
evoked imposing depths of time.
“Through broken tiles mists pour in,
keeping perpetual incense burning;
through gaping doorways moonlight shines,
sustaining eternal altar flames”:301
These lines well describe the place.
In a garden thick with summer grasses,
green willow fronds swayed in the breeze,
and waterweeds drifted on the pond.
All seemed a wide brocade expanse.
Wisteria billows, twined around the pines
standing on the pond’s central island,
blossomed in lovely purple shades,
while late cherries bloomed through green leaves,
more wondrous still in their own way
than the first blossoms of the season,
and around the pond kerria roses
flowered in extravagant profusion.
Through a rent in the lofty clouds
came the call of a mountain cuckoo,
as though in welcome to the sovereign.
At the sight His Cloistered Eminence
was moved thus to express himself:
Fallen to the pond
from boughs leaning overhead,
cherry petals drift
so richly on the water
that the blossoms are the waves!
The very sound of water trickling from among ancient rocks
lent the spot an absorbing charm.
The garden fence, entangled with vines,
the flowing ridgeline of wooded mountains
invited even as they defied the painter’s brush.
There before his eyes it stood: Kenreimon-in’s hermitage,
its eaves festooned with morning-glory vines,
fringed with shinobu ferns and forgetting lilies,302
in spirit evoking those old lines,
“The gourd and rice chest often empty,
thick weeds hem in Yan Yuan’s hovel;
tall goosefoot chokes off the path
where rain beats on Yuan Xian’s door.”303
The cryptomeria-bark thatch
looked far too meager to exclude
cold rains, frost, dew, or probing moonlight.
Off behind it rose the mountains,
and before it spread the fields.
Thin bamboo grass rustled in the wind.
As often for the unworldly,
cares thronged about her flimsy door.
News came rarely from the city;
no one sought her tattered fence.
The only sounds she ever heard
were monkeys calling on the hillside,
springing there from tree to tree,
or a woodman’s ax, ringing
as he felled his firewood load.
Curling vine tendrils came her way,
but a caller, hardly ever.
“Is anyone at home?” His Cloistered Eminence called. There was no answer.
At last, from a great distance, an ancient nun appeared.
“Where can Kenreimon-in have gone to?” the sovereign inquired.
“To the hillside, Your Eminence, to gather flowers for the altar.”
“Has she then no one to do that for her?
I know that she has renounced the world, but that seems too hard.”
“Her excellent karma stored up from past lives,” the nun replied,
“has run its course, hence her present misfortune.
Why should she mind, when she has renounced concern for the flesh?
As one reads in the Sutra of Cause and Effect,
‘Who seeks to know past cause
must look to present effect;
who seeks to know future effect
must consider present cause.’
Once one comes to understand
past and future cause and effect,
then one is free from sorrow.
Prince Siddhārtha was nineteen
when he left his Gayā palace
and, under Mount Dandaka,
hid his nakedness with leaves.
Up he climbed to gather firewood;
down he went to collect water.
Thanks to these austerities,
he came at last to achieve
highest, perfect enlightenment.”
The sovereign could not make out whether her patched robe was silk or plain cloth, and he wondered that so shabby a nun should talk this way. He asked her who she was. For a time bitter tears kept her from answering him. At last she mastered them and replied,
“Painful as this is to confess,
my father was the late Shinzei,
minor counselor and novice:
For, you see, I was once known
as the Lady Awa-no-naishi.
My mother was the Ki-no-nii of whom Your Majesty was once so fond.304
That you do not know me only confirms the ruin I have become.”
Overwhelmed, she pressed her sleeves to her eyes.
The sovereign could not bear to look at her.
“So you are Awa-no-naishi!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, it is true, I did not know you. But I am dreaming, surely!”
He could not keep himself from shedding tears.
The gentlemen with him murmured among themselves,
“I thought she was rather an unusual nun. Now I understand!”
The cloistered emperor gazed about him.
Dew-laden grasses in the garden
leaned heavily against the fence
while, beyond, overflowing paddies
left nowhere dry for a snipe to land.
He approached the hermitage,
slid the door open, and looked around.
There stood the three divinities
who come forward to welcome the soul.
The hands of the central Amida
held a length of five-colored cord.
To the left hung a painting of Fugen,
to the right one of Abbot Shandao,
and, beside it, one of her son.
There lay the scrolls of the Lotus Sutra
and likewise Shandao’s great treatises.
No fragrance here of orchid or musk,
only the smoke of altar incense.
Vimalakīrti’s room, ten feet square,
with seats for thirty-two thousand buddhas
summoned there from the ten directions,
must, he felt, have been just the same.
Sacred texts on strips of colored paper
hung here and there from sliding doors.
One bore this poem by a monk,
formerly e no Sadamoto,305
composed while he was at Qingliang-shan:
“Harmonies of music and song
resound afar on that single cloud.
Now comes the heavenly host in welcome,
descending before the setting sun.”
And a little apart hung this,
no doubt by Kenreimon-in herself:
Never did I think,
then, that I should live one day
among distant hills
and behold the palace moon
as a stranger, from afar!
Glancing to one side, he noted
what could only be her sleeping room.
Draped over a long bamboo pole
hung a hempen robe and paper bedding.
All her damask, silk gauze, and brocade—
the very best from our land and China—
now amounted to only a dream.
The senior nobles and privy gentlemen with him had seen her in her glory, and the memory was still vividly present to them all. Each wrung the tears from his sleeves.
Meanwhile, from up on the mountain,
two black-robed nuns picked their way down the rocky path.
“And who are they?
” the sovereign asked.
The old nun answered, holding back more tears,
“The one with the basket on her arm—
the basket filled with azalea flowers—
that lady is Kenreimon-in.
The one with the firewood and bracken
is Counselor Korezane’s daughter,
whom Lord Kunitsuna then adopted,
the nurse of His Late Majesty:
Lady Dainagon-no-suke.”
She was still speaking when fresh tears flowed.
Deeply moved, the sovereign wept, too.
Despite having turned her back on the world,
Kenreimon-in felt too abashed to let him see her as she looked now.
She only wished she could vanish from sight, but, alas, it was too late.
Sleeves wet from drawing holy water every evening
and wet again with early-morning dew from the hillside,
she knew herself now helpless to dry them and so stood
neither fleeing back up the slope
nor hurrying into her hermitage,
frozen by shame and misery.
Awa-no-naishi went to her
and took charge of the flower basket.
4. Passage Through the Six Realms
“You have rejected the world, after all,” she said.
“What could be wrong with your seeing him?
Please do so at once, so that he can return to the city.”
Kenreimon-in reflected, “When one calling of the Name
brings his kindly light shining in through the window,
and ten bring the heavenly host in welcome to the door,
this imperial visit is a strange surprise!”
She entered her hermitage and, weeping, received him.
The cloistered emperor considered her and said,
“Eighty thousand kalpas spent
in the most transcendent heaven
are certain still to end in grief;
the six heavens of the realm of desire
offer no refuge from fivefold decline.
All the delights of Indra’s palace,
the lofty bliss of Brahma’s abode
are karma rewarded in a dream,
pleasures tasted in illusion.
Transmigration turns on and on,
exactly like the wheels of a carriage.
The miseries of fivefold decline
suffered above by celestial beings
appear, too, in the human realm.”
He continued, “Does anyone ever visit you?
Your thoughts must often linger on times gone by.”
“No,” she replied, “I hear nothing from anyone,
aside from a word or two, now and again,
from the wives of Takafusa and Nobutaka.
I never imagined those two in time looking after me.”
She wept, and her attendant women with her.
At last she managed to swallow her tears.
“It is painful, of course,” she then went on,
“to find myself reduced to what I am now,
but my present state is also a joy,
since it gives me hope for enlightenment in the hereafter.
I pray to join at once the ranks of Shakyamuni’s disciples,
by the power of Amida’s Original Vow to rise above the miseries
imposed by the five obstructions and the triple deference,306
to purify my six senses through the three periods of day and night,307
and to go straight to rebirth in the ninefold Pure Land.
I pray, too, for the happy rebirth of every member of my house,
and I yearn always for Amida, Kannon, and Seishi’s welcome into paradise.
There is one thing that I will never forget, not in any life that may lie before me,
and that is how my son, the former emperor, looked then.
I do try to forget, but each time I fail;
I try to bear the pain, but no, I cannot.
There is no surer path to grief
than a mother’s love for her child.
And so for him, for his salvation,
I miss no morning or evening prayer.
He has become to me, you see,
a proper spiritual friend.”
“Our land is a few remote millet grains,” the cloistered emperor rejoined,
“but upon me the tenfold blessings of superior karma
conferred sovereignty over all the powers of the realm,
so much so that nothing falls short of what I desire.
Born into a world devoted to the Buddha’s Teaching,
I myself aspired to follow the Buddha’s path.
Therefore I am sure of fortunate rebirth,
and the vanity of human life should not surprise me.
Nonetheless it pains me greatly to see you.”
Kenreimon-in ventured to speak again:
“Born the daughter of the chief minister, Taira no Kiyomori,
I became in time an emperor’s mother.
The realm and the four seas lay in my palm.
From the very first spring salutation
to the clothing color changes, season by season,
and to the buddha-names litany that closes the year,
I enjoyed such honor from regent, ministers, and senior nobles
that I rode, as it were, the clouds of the transcendent heavens,
surrounded by eighty thousand celestial admirers.
No official, however minor, held me in anything short of awe.
As at home in the Seiryden,
as in the Shishinden,
I was fêted within jeweled blinds.
In spring I gave my heart all day
to the cherry tree before the Nanden;
amid the fiercest summer heat
I scooped up, for casual pleasure,
fresh water from a cooling spring;
in autumn I was never allowed
to watch alone the moon on high;
and on freezing, snowy winter nights,
many-layered covers warmed me.
I desired everlasting youth
and coveted the Penglai elixir
that confers immortality.
Yes, I wished only to live forever.
Dawn and dusk ushered in such renewed delights
that (so I felt) the beings whose reward is heaven
could hardly enjoy pleasure greater than mine.
But then, early one autumn in the Juei years,
for fear of a man named, I believe, Kiso no Yoshinaka,
the whole house of Taira fled the city that had long been our home,
left our own capital a burned-out ruin,
and from place to place that to us were once only names—
Suma to Akashi, along the shore—
we wandered, absorbed in our misery.
All day we cleaved the waves with dripping sleeves;
all night we cried like plovers on a sand spit.
Shore by stretch of shore, island by island,
we saw places famed in song and story
but could never forget our home.
Thus denied refuge anywhere, we seemed clearly to be suffering that ineluctable fivefold decline. All of us in the human realm taste the sorrow of parting from someone we love and the distress of keeping company with someone we detest. The four pains and the eight agonies touch us.
At any rate, we were somewhere called Dazaifu, in the province of Chikuzen, when this fellow—his name was Koreyoshi, I think—drove us all the way out of Kyushu. The mountains and plains seemed spacious enough, but we could not stop to rest anywhere. Late that same autumn,
the moon we had watched high above the palace
now floated over vast reaches of sea.
So days and nights passed. The tenth month had come
when Lord Kiyotsune said to himself,
‘The Genji drove us from the city,
Koreyoshi hounded us from Kyushu
.
Like netted fish, we have no escape.
I have no life left before me.’
And he drowned himself in the sea.
That was the first of our afflictions.
We spent the days riding the waves
and the nights confined to our ships.
Because tax goods no longer reached us,
nobody could prepare me meals,
and when there was anything to eat,
there was no water to wash it down.
There we were, on the vast ocean,
but salt water is not fit to drink.
Such are the sufferings, I felt then,
that plague the realm of the hungry ghosts.
When we won at Muroyama and Mizushima,
we all managed to take heart a little,
but then, at that place they call Ichi-no-tani,
most of the men of our house came to grief.
No more court dress after that, or ceremonial wear.
No, everyone left went about clad in steel,
and battle cries rang out day and night;
just so, I felt sure, do the ashuras howl
in their endless battles to overthrow Indra.
And once Ichi-no-tani had fallen,
fathers found that they had outlived their sons,
wives their husbands. The least fishing boat
stirred fear that it might be the enemy,
and white herons clustered in some far grove of pines
looked terrifyingly like Genji banners.
The battle between Moji and Akama-no-seki seemed certain to be our last, and Lady Nii, my mother, left me her final instructions. ‘Our men have next to no chance of lasting out this day,’ she said, ‘and no distant relative who might survive could be expected to devote himself to praying for the rest of us. But it has always been the custom to avoid killing a woman in battle, so see that you stay alive, to pray for His Majesty and to assure all of us a happier rebirth.’ Those were her words. It all seemed a dream. But then a wind blew up, thick cloud covered us, our warriors panicked, and our fate was sealed. No one could do anything to save us. It was all over. Lady Nii took the emperor in her arms and advanced to the side of the vessel.
Looking very frightened, he asked,
‘Grandmother, where are you taking me?’
To her little sovereign, she said, near tears,
‘Why, does Your Majesty not understand?
Tenfold good karma from past lives
gave you birth as lord over the realm,
but evil influence intervened
to bring your good fortune to an end.
First, Your Majesty, if you please,
