The Hundred-Square-Foot Record (Kamo no Chōmei, 1153—1216)
A Silicate Siesta Obon Special
In memoriam C.I.M.
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The flow of the rushing river never ends, nor is its water the same as at its source. The bubbles here vanish, there reappear, never tarrying in the stagnant pools for long. So too with worldlings and their dwellings.
When you look at the gorgeous houses in the capital, vying in loftiness, houses of the high and of the low, you think they must have stood for generations, but ask around and you’ll find that very few homes have been standing since the old days. Some have burned down and been rebuilt just since last year, others subdivided from a vanished mansion into much smaller accommodations. The people living in the houses are the same way. It might be the same place and just as full of people, but out of twenty or thirty of them there might be only one or two whom I used to see around in my younger days. Dead in the morning, reborn in the evening, just like those bubbles on the water’s surface. We do not know, as people are born and die, whence they come and where they are going—nor know, really, why, being so ephemeral, they give themselves such trouble, the heart grieving, the eye rejoicing… House and householder contend in their temporariness, becoming as the dew on a morning glory. Sometimes the dew evaporates and the flower remains, but the morning sun will wither it. Sometimes the flower fades and the dew remains, but even then it will not still be there by evening.
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It has been forty springs and autumns since I came to know how things really are at heart; I’ve seen a lot of weird goings-on in this world.
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Back in Angen 3, Uzuki 28 if memory serves (that is, May 27 or so, 1177), on an unquiet night with a ferocious wind, in the hour of the dog (that is, eight o’ clock in the evening), a fire broke out in the southeastern part of the capital and spread northwestward. By the end of the night, the Red Sparrow Gate, the Great Palace Hall, the university halls, and even the Ministry of Works, just to name a few, were lost, burned to cinder and dust in the twinkling of an eye.
Apparently the fire started in Higuchi Tomi-no-kōji, where a sick person was boarding. Blowing on the wind, it spread like an unfolding fan. Houses further from the fire were wreathed in smoke, while those closer were annihilated by whirlwinds of flame. Ashes blew up into the sky and reflected the light of the flames, but reflected it a pitch-dark red; since the wind was even stronger than the fire, the blaze also kept shifting from block to block, hitting even more buildings. People caught in the middle lost their sanity to the flames as some fell choking on smoke and others went up like pyres. Some others escaped with their lives, barely, but were unable to salvage any of their possessions. The seven treasures and many precious things (a set phrase) were reduced to ashes.
How great was the loss? Sixteen high-up courtiers were rendered homeless. Of the lower orders, the number is unknowable. Of the capital as a whole, maybe up to two-thirds was affected somehow or other. Thousands of men and women died; of horses and cattle, innumerable.
People are very strange these days, but I think it’s especially foolish to build a house somewhere so dangerous as the middle of the capital, then worry about all the treasures it contains.
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Or again, at the same time of year—Uzuki 29, Jishō 4 (that is to say, May 25, 1180)—a great wind began blowing near Naka-no-Mikado, east of the Imperial Palace, and stormed southwest to Sixth Avenue. It was three or four blocks wide and did not spare a single house, even the big mansions. Some were completely leveled, others left with nothing but their support beams. The wind blew the rooves of gatehouses four or five blocks, and sent fences flying so that property lines melted away. Valuables and wood shingles alike were swept up into the sky and flew hither and yon like leaves in winter. You couldn’t see for the flying debris, nor hear for the terrible howling. I thought that this must be what the karma-winds in the hell dimensions are like. Not only did people lose their homes, in some cases—I don’t know how many—they crippled themselves trying to salvage things from the wreckage. The wind blew south and southwest through the capital and brought woe to many. There are windstorms all the time, but not like this one. This was something else. People wondered if it augured something.
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Then, in Minazuki of the same year (that is to say, the high summer of 1180), the capital was abruptly moved. Nobody saw it coming or had any idea why. You’d hear people pointing out that it had been the capital for several hundred years, since it was first established in the reign of Emperor Saga (in the early ninth century). There was no good reason to move it, and it wasn’t exactly an easy change to make, so it wasn’t exactly reasonable to expect the people to be at ease about it either. However, all this fell on deaf ears, and first the Emperor, then the rest of the government and the nobility, moved to the new capital, which was at Naniwa in Settsu Province. I remember wondering if any public figure was going to stay where he or she was. Rank-conscious people who were dependent on noble patrons moved on day one. Those who were already out of step with the times and overwhelmed by world events got left behind. The well-appointed dwellings that people had contended so hard over fell to wrack and ruin. Some were stripped for materials that were then floated down the Yodo River, and the land became open fields before one’s eyes. People’s sentiments and what they considered important completely changed, so that horses and saddles were at a premium. Nobody wanted an ox and cart anymore. Land near the sea to the southwest became very desirable, and there was a loss of interest in the provincial estates of the northeast.
At that time I happened to make a trip that took me to the new seaport capital. The geography was visibly too cramped even to lay out the streets. The mountains were too high to the north, the sea too close-at-hand to the south. The sound of waves was incessantly loud, the salt wind remarkably strong; since the Imperial Palace was in the middle of the mountains, there was a fashion for—admittedly—the strange beauty of the trees felled to construct it. Houses were always being built from the materials that had been floated down the Yodo—it almost stopped up the flow of the river—and there weren’t many genuinely new ones being built, even though there was more than enough space to do so. The old capital was in ruins, the new not yet established. People began to feel like drifting clouds. Naniwa natives lamented the loss of their land; transplants from Kyoto complained about the costs of construction. People I saw who should have taken ox-carts around the streets were on horseback instead, and their clothes seemed military rather than courtly. The manners of the capital had changed; people were acting like samurai from the sticks. It seemed like a bad omen, and as the days went by, the milieu got more and more turbulent, the people’s hearts more and more fill with cares and restlessness; finally, when winter set in, the Emperor moved the capital back. But it wasn’t what it had been; many of the old houses were never rebuilt.
I have heard that once upon a time there was a wise and compassionate Emperor in the land. He did not bother to make the eaves level on his thatched-roofed palace. When he saw less smoke rising from chimneys than usual, he cut taxes. He was a blessing to the people because he wanted to do good in the world. To understand the state of the world now, compare it to the past.
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Also around then, I think coinciding with the Yōwa Era (that is to say, 1181-2), although given the time horizons it’s difficult to remember, there were two years of severe famine. Spring and summer were excessively sunny and dry, and autumn and winter had typhoons and flooding; with such a cavalcade of bad conditions, all five staple grains failed. Spring ploughing was futile, summer planting was a waste of time, and there was no harvest in autumn nor surplus in wintertime. In every province there were people upping sticks and abandoning their affairs, or throwing in the towel as householders and decamping to the mountains. We did all the special prayers and rituals for serious crises, to no apparent effect. Kyoto’s prosperity relies on agricultural surplus from the countryside, and without anything coming in, the urban economy imploded. The mournful populace started trying to hawk their valuables, but none of them could afford even the bargain-basement prices they were all offering. Barter replaced the monetary economy as millet came to cost more than gold. You started to see beggars in the streets, lamenting the situation. So much for that year. People thought the new year might be better, but things only got worse, with no end in sight, as communicable diseases set in on top of the malnutrition. With seemingly everyone in the world starving, as the days passed even the great started getting the illnesses associated with extreme poverty, like from the proverb “shallow enough water will choke all fish equally.” Now you saw people going from house to house begging even in fancy hats and leggings. I saw people so destitute that they shuffled around like zombies and then keeled over dead right then and there. Countless people died outside gatehouses or along the roadsides. No one bothered to dispose of the bodies, and a horrible stench seemed to fill the whole world; people could not even stand to look at the carnage. There were places, especially along the riverfront, where horses and carts could not get past the heaps of corpses. Woodcutters and the like languished as well, and as even cordwood started to run out, people started demolishing their houses to sell the building materials as fuel—but what one person could carry at that point couldn’t even sustain life for one day. The strange part was that mixed in with the wood you would find flakes of vermillion, gold leaf, silver leaf…evidently people with absolutely no other options would go into old temples, steal the Buddha statues, and break apart the furniture there, too. I was born into a sad old world indeed, that I’ve had to see such things.
Other horrible things happened too. With husbands and wives who refused to be separated, whoever was more in love invariably died first. This was due to the fact that they would put themselves second and give their beloved whatever food they managed to scrounge up—man and woman alike. When it came to parent and child, the parents would die first. There were also cases where a baby, not realizing that their mother was sleeping the sleep of death, would lie beside her still suckling at her breast.
There was a man at Ninna Temple, who also had responsibility for the finances at Jison’in Temple, called High Priest Ryūgyō; a compassionate man who was horrified at how many people were dying unrecorded, he would go around and whenever he found a body with its head intact he would inscribe the Sanskrit letter A on its forehead, thus forging a bond between that person and the Buddha. His people counted up the corpses throughout Uzuki and Satsuki (that is to say, late spring and early summer), and in the core of the capital from First Avenue in the south to Ninth Avenue in the north and from the palace grounds in the west to the Red Sparrow Gate in the east, they tallied forty-two thousand and three hundred dead in the streets. How many more would there have been if they had been able to count deaths before and after that period, and along the riverfront, in Shirakawa, in the western outskirts, in various other suburban areas, and so forth? It defies enumeration. And leaving the capital aside, what about in the rest of Japan?
I’ve heard that there was a similar series of events in the reign of Emperor Sutoku, around about the Chōshō Era (that is to say, between 1132 and 1135), but I wasn’t around back then and don’t know much about it. This charnel house I saw with my own eyes, and it gutted me.
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Then in Genryaku 2 (that is to say, 1185) there was a great earthquake. Its destructive force was beyond even most major quakes. Mountains collapsed into the rivers; seawater pour over the land. The earth split and water poured through; boulders broke and crashed into the valleys; boats along the shoreline were lost in the waves; horses lost their footing on the roads. Moreover, not a single temple or shrine or monumental building in or around the capital was left in one piece. Some collapsed into their foundations, others toppled over, and ashes and dust billowed up like smoke. The earth-shaking and house-crashing sound was exactly that of thunder. Stay in your house and you’d be crushed; run outside and you’d fall into a crevasse. People having no wings, one could not fly into the sky. Nor, people not being dragons, would riding the clouds have been easy. Of all frightening things there is nothing quite like an earthquake.
Among the dead was the only child of a military family, in his sixth or seventh year (that is to say, five or six years old), who had made a little playhouse innocently enough under an overhang, been crushed when the overhang suddenly collapsed, and lay there with his head smashed and his eyes popped an inch or so out of their sockets, while the parents wailed wordlessly—a devastating sight to behold. A child’s death can make even hardened soldiers lose composure, and it moved me deeply to see it.
The mainshock stopped, but the aftershocks went on and on. After the quake not a day went by without twenty or thirty tremors. Ten days passed, then twenty, and they got less frequent—four or five times a day, then twice or thrice, then once, then every two or three days—but it was not completely calm again for maybe three months. Of the four elements, we associate fire, water, and wind with frequent disasters, but earth does not normally trouble us. This did also happen long ago, back in the Saikō Era (that is to say, the mid-850s). That time the Great Buddha of Tōdai Temple had its head fall off, and there was other noteworthy damage too, but not like this. At first people talked about the unsatisfactoriness of things, and it seemed like the clouds in their hearts were lifting, but the days and months went by and the year went out and no one talks about it anymore.
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The fleeting troubles of the world are akin to our own bodies and homes. What sadden us most, then, are the woes that beset our own habtius and habitation, our own places and particularities—these give us grief enough.
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Those who do not themselves hold stature, but who live near people of consequence, cannot loudly cheer the good times. Nor can they wail over their miseries even in the direst straits. No matter what move one makes, one feels that something isn’t quite right about it, like, let us say, a sparrow approaching the nest of a falcon. As a down-and-out with wealthy neighbors, one sees one’s wife and children come and go morning and evening ashamed of and making apologies for their appearances; they envy even the neighbors’ servants; the rich family holds them in obvious contempt; this is all running constantly through one’s head and one can’t get a moment’s peace of mind. If you live somewhere crowded, there’s nowhere safe to go if a fire starts nearby. If you live somewhere remote, the commute is awful and you have to constantly be dodging highwaymen. Those with influence are still filled with greed; those who lack patronage are despised by all and sundry. Those with treasure guard it fearfully; those who lack means weep harsh tears. Those who depend on others become their bondsmen; those on whom others depend get sick even of gratitude. If you go along to get along, you’re an easy mark. If you don’t, you’re a nutjob. No matter where you live, no matter what you do, is there ease of body or peace of mind to be found anywhere?
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For my part, I inherited my paternal great-grandmother’s house, and that was where I lived for a long time. Afterwards, though, my career stalled out and I fell on hard times, eventually the old manse became untenable, and when I was about thirty I built a smaller house after my own heart. Compared to my great-grandmother’s place it was as little as one-tenth the size. It was barebones, little more than just a place for me to sleep. I put up an earthenware outer wall, but no gatehouse. I did eventually put up some bamboo pillars for a canopy under which to keep my carriage. I got very anxious whenever it was snowy or windy. Also, since it was right near the river, I had to worry about living in a floodplain with a high crime rate.
I spent over thirty careworn years coping with the vicissitudes of life as a householder. In that time as a worldling I bounced from situation to situation and came to realize the reality of fate. Finally in the spring of my fiftieth year I left home and renounced the world. I didn’t have a wife and kids or any of the ties that bind that would have made the clergy a difficult decision. No court ranks or even sinecures or anything like that. Though secluded in the clouds of Mt. ōhara I still went vainly through yet more springs and autumns.
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Now I am in my sixtieth year (which is to say, fifty-nine years old); the dew of my life fades, and so I gather up my last leaves of years in my new lodging. It is like a one-night hunting lodge, or the cocoon an ancient silkworm might spin. It didn’t even amount to a hundredth of the size of that home of my middle age.
As I’ve been implying, it seems that as my years wax and wax my homes wane and wane. The current house looks different from most, being only a square jō and less than seven shaku high (which is to say, a hundred square feet and less than seven feet high). I chose the spot without any special geographic or geomantic considerations. I laid the foundation myself, threw a thatched roof together, and put the whole thing up with metal hinges. That way, if something feels off about where the hut currently is, I can easily just move the whole thing. It’s hard to imagine much trouble putting it up again either. The whole thing can fit in two wheelbarrows. Other than whatever it costs to properly harness wheelbarrow power, there would be no moving expenses at all.
To date, since I have hidden my traces within Mt. Hino’s deep heart, I have added a simple bamboo sun veranda on the south side; a shelf with water for libations on the west side; and, on the western interior wall, a shrine with an icon of Amida, between whose brows the light shines at sunset. There is a case for a sutra scroll on whose doors I’ve put pictures of Fugen and Fudō. Above the screen door to the north I’ve put a smaller shelf with three or four black leather cases on it. These cases hold books of poetry, music, excerpts from sacred scriptures, and the like. A koto and a biwa stand to either side. Specifically they are a folding koto and the kind of biwa that they call a moon guitar.
To the east I’ve spread bracken and straw for a bed. I’ve cut a window in the east wall and put a desk under it. There is some space in the hut beside my pillow for a square brazier. I burn brush in it. North of this hermitage I staked out a little piece of land and enclosed it as a garden in a ramshackle fence. I grow many kinds of medicinal herbs there.
Such is my hermitage. As to its situation, to the south there’s a hollow where I’ve built a rock pool to collect water. The woods come so close to the hut that it is very easy to collect brushwood. The name of the mountain is Toyama (which is to say, Outer Mountain). It is swathed in years of viny growth. The valleys are lush with it, but there is a clear view to the west. I am thus not without some spiritual merit here. In the spring I see waves of wisteria like purple clouds wafting fragrant in the West. In the summer I hear the cuckoo’s calling, purposing to guide me when I trek up Purgatory Mountain. In the autumn the voice of the late cicada fills up my ears. I hear it lamenting this molted shell of a world. In the winter I look with feeling on the snow. It piles and melts like sin and its expiation. If I’m tired or sick and don’t do nenbutsu or sutra recitation, I can rest up and take my time with things and don’t have to worry about someone else not keeping pace with me or about scandalizing friends with my lassitude. I don’t put any effort into keeping a vow of silence, but living alone, I never find myself committing sins of the tongue. I’m not stringent about observing the five precepts; there’s just nothing here to transgress, so how would I go about breaking them?
On mornings when I go look at the boats plying the river from an overlooking hill, my life and body feel like a shining wake; then I compose in an imitation of Priest Mansei’s poetic style; on evenings when wind rustles the katsura leaves, I remember the Xúnyáng River; then I try to channel Minamoto no Tsunenobu on the biwa. If I’m in a particular mood, I try the melodies of autumn wind soughing through the pine trees, or of water burbling up in a spring. I’m not especially good at it, but I’m also not playing to entertain people. I play alone, I sing alone, and this does my heart good; simple enough.
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There is a brushwood hermitage at the bottom of the mountain as well. The warden of the mountain lives there. His young son sometimes comes to visit me. We spend time together as friends when we are bored. He is sixteen and I am sixty; a huge generation gap, but we take the same joy in things. Sometimes we pick tsubana or gather iwanashi fruit. Sometimes we pull up yams or pile up armfuls of water dropwort. Or we will go to the rice paddies at the foot of the mountain and make wreathes from the gleanings.
Too, on fair days I climb the peak facing Kyoto and gaze out on the distant skies of home. I can also see Mt. Kobata, Fushimi Village, Toba, and Hatsukashi. Nobody can take away the comfort this gives me, since you can’t own scenery.
When I feel untired and equipped for a longer journey, I walk along a series of peaks—Mt. Suma; Mt. Kasatori—to visit Iwama, or worship at Ishiyama (temples). Or I’ll traverse Awazu Plain to pay respects at Old Man Semimaru’s old place, or cross the Tanagami River to visit Sarumaru the Bailiff’s grave. On the way back, depending on the time of year, I’ll look at the cherry blossoms, or watch the autumn leaves, or pick bracken, or gather tree nuts, sometimes to offer them to the Buddha and sometimes to take home for my own provender.
On quiet nights, I think back on dead loved ones in the moonlight at my window, or wet my sleeves with tears to the sounds of the monkeys. The fireflies in the meadows look much like the fishing lights of Maki Island seen from a distance; the dawn rains are like storms blowing leaves from the trees. When I hear the pheasant’s cry—ho, ho—I wonder, is it for its father or for its mother?; and when the deer of the high mountain approach me unafraid, I know how far from the world I really am. And when I stir up the banked fire in the middle of the night, the embers are a good friend to an old man’s wakefulness. It is not especially awe-inspiring as mountains go, but there is a lonesome charm to the hoot of the owls, and I never get bored with the panorama of the seasons. All the more these things must mean to someone who feels and thinks more deeply than I do!
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When I first came to live in this place, I thought it would only be for a little while, but now five years have gone by. The temporary hermitage is getting older, with leaf-choked eaves and moss growing on its earthen walls. From time to time I hear news from the capital, of many important people who have died since I came up into these mountains. And of ordinary people, many myriads, I’m sure. Countless too the homes destroyed by the repeated fires. Only in this fly-by-night hermitage am I able to live at peace and without fear. Though small, it has somewhere for me to sleep at night and somewhere for me to sit during the day. There’s more than enough room for these old bones. The hermit crab prefers a small shell because it knows full well its body. The osprey lives on lonely shorelines, because it fears people. I am like them. I know myself, know the world, and don’t want for anything; all I yearn for is peace and quiet, and I enjoy not having cause for sorrow.
People out there in the world don’t build houses for themselves. They build for their families and extended relations, or for their friends. They build for their masters, for their teachers, for their material wealth, or even for their livestock. I have built for myself, the only tie that binds me; I have not built for other people. This is due to the fact that, the world being what it is, at this point in my life, I don’t have any companions or for that matter any dependents. If I did build a bigger house, who would I host?; who would live here with me?
One’s friends value one’s wealth and put a high priority on one’s favors to them. They don’t necessarily love the genuinely affectionate, or the plainspoken and straight-shooting; so best make friends of silkworms, of bamboo, of flowers, of the moon. One’s servants consider the balance of rewards and punishments one gives them, and value one for one’s generosity towards them. Yet even if one treats them as piteously as all get-out, they don’t actually care about one’s wellbeing, so it is best to be one’s own slave-of-all-work.
Put another way, if there’s something that I want to get done, I do it myself. It’s not always easy, but it’s easier than employing and then having to worry about someone else. If I have to go somewhere for something, I walk. My legs hurt like a bitch, but it’s no worse than having to worry about fussing around with a horse and saddle, ox and cart, all that. Now I’ve divided my body in half. I use it for two things. My hands are my manservant; my feet are my carriage; they’re after my own heart.
I pay attention to my mental and physical agonies; I rest when they’re bad and work diligently when they’re up to it. I try not to overwork myself, and if it’s just too much, I don’t let that get to me. Besides, walking daily and working daily is best for one’s health. Why would I just sit around doing nothing? As well, it is a sin to harass and harangue other people. How then can we justify making others do all this stuff for us?
And then there’s clothing and food. I clothe my nakedness in whatever is at hand: wisteria robes; hempen blankets. The tsubana of the field and the tree nuts of the mountain are enough to keep me alive. Since I am not among others, I don’t have any modesty or shame. The food, though scanty, is toothsome in its simpleness.
All of this advice is not what I would give to a happily wealthy person; I’m only speaking for myself here, juxtaposing my past and present ways of life. Since I have shirked the great ways of the world and lost care for my own stature, I don’t hate anyone or fear anything. My lifespan I leave up to heaven; that is enough for me; my body is like unto a drifting cloud; pleasures are not important to me. My life’s joy is to sleep on my pillow, and my life’s ambition is to see the seasons march on by.
The three worlds are but one mind. If one’s mind is not at peace, cattle and horses and the seven treasures will not help, and one cannot even cogently desire a palatial or towering home. Now I live alone, in this little hermitage that I yet love. Naturally, if I go to the capital on errands, I’m ashamed to present myself as a beggar, but upon my return I feel sorry for all those people who grapple in the dust of this world. If anyone doubts me on this, just look to the watery world of the fish and the airy world of the bird. Fish do not tire of water, but if one is not a fish, how could one know a fish’s heart? Birds yearn for the woods, but if one is not a bird, neither does one know a bird’s heart. Such is the feeling of life in a secluded place. Without making one’s own home here, how could one understand?
Now the moonshadow of my life sinks in the sky and nears spilling itself out over the mountainy horizon. Then I will suddenly find myself facing into the darkness of the three ways—so what am I even doing? The kerygma of the Buddha’s teaching to humanity is nonattachment-to-things. So too, then, my love for my little grass hermitage, and how it is clothed in such tranquility, I’m sure…how can I fritter away time talking about such trivial delights?
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I kept mulling over these truths one quiet dawn, and I plumbed my heart and asked myself whether it couldn’t be said that I fled the world and immersed myself in the mountains and the woods precisely so that I could clear my mind and walk the way. Well, no, I said to myself; you look like a saint, but your mind is cloudy and stained. You may have built your house in imitation of Vimalikirti, but what you’ve held on to of proper practice is Chudapanthaka-like at best. Do you ever worry that your poverty and seclusion might in fact be some kind of karmic punishment, and that you’re just being delusional about that?—and at that point my heart had no good answer for itself. I could only go through the motions of a nenbutsu, an almost involuntary exercise of the tongue muscle, two or three times—that’s all.
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Yayoi 30, Kenryaku 2 (which is to say, May 2, 1212); Hieromonk Ren’in wrote this at his Toyama hermitage.
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Notes on the Translation
The foregoing translation of the Hōjōki is an exercise in what I have called “translation by any means necessary.” I have no theory underlying this translation other than a dislike for many other people’s theories (especially Dryden’s and those of translators deriving their ideas, wittingly or unwittingly, from Dryden’s ideas) and a desire to make clear to other people some of what becomes clear to me when reading this text. A few self-imposed restrictions on the process, themselves unsystematic:
I have retained the sentence divisions in the Japanese text from which I worked (that available on Aozora Bunko). Thoughts that are combined in one sentence in that text are combined in one sentence in my English text. If there’s some long, contorted point about what it’s like to have rich neighbors that’s all crammed into one sentence, that is because Kamo no Chōmei crammed it all into one sentence, at least according to the Aozora Bunko people.
I have generally avoided searching hither and yon within English for “equivalent” cultural, literary, or idiomatic items. Much of this I have just translated directly and “literally,” as that term is understood by people who aren’t translators, from the Japanese. This rendering thus will have come across to many readers as a more obviously and firmly foreign text than many other translations (as in Schleiermacher’s, rather than Dryden’s, ideas about translation). I don’t want to give readers the impression that they now know everything there is to know about the Hōjōki, or for that matter imply that I know everything there is know about the Hōjōki.
One exception to the policy of leaving cultural allusions in their original format concerns certain Buddhist names. In the original, the names Vimalikirti and Chudapanthaka towards the end are not transliterated Sanskrit; they are fully nativized Japanese names for the same figures, Jōmyō Koji and Shuri Handoku. Most previous translations have left these as Japanese names. Yet these names don’t signal to an English reader that they should mentally classify these references as ones made to legendary figures of very early Buddhist history, because we invariably think and talk about those figures with their Sanskrit names when we discuss them in English. The reader should know roughly what kind of obviously foreign text she is looking at, not just that it is an obviously foreign text—which is, after all, an effect that can most easily be achieved by declining to translate the text at all. One sees two long Sanskrit names dropped in a piece of Buddhist religious writing, and one has, perhaps, some vague prior associations with very early Buddhist history to activate; one sees “Jōmyō Koji” and “Shuri Handoku” and does not know if they are legendary figures, deities, historical personages, or even acquaintances of the author. I made a similar decision about the Chinese place name “Xúnyáng River,” associated with the biwa via Chinese poetry.
Basil Bunting’s interwar-period verse recension “Chomei at Toyama” is my favorite previous translation of this material into English; it’s also my favorite poem, although Bunting isn’t my favorite poet. Bunting’s wording is evocative—devastating—even more so at many points than what Kamo no Chōmei wrote himself. Unfortunately, “Chomei at Toyama” is not a particularly successful translation, not even because Bunting could not read Japanese—he worked from a previous translation into Italian—but because he was not interested in taking the text’s Buddhism seriously. He was also, in my opinion, excessively influenced by Ezra Pound, and his debt to Pound reinforces his misreading of Chōmei on this point. In other words, Chōmei’s religious project must fail in order for Pound’s aesthetic project to succeed, and because Bunting at this point in his writing period is largely in alignment with Pound’s aesthetic project, he has additional incentive not to take Chōmei’s stated Buddhist religious values seriously. For Chōmei to be a real Buddhist literary force he must not be speaking ironically, or, at any rate, his irony must not be of the kind that can be marshaled to support Pound’s Modernist, Vorticist, and racist poetic and artistic vision. For more on this see Andrew Houwen, “Thinking by Images: Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki and Basil Bunting’s Chomei at Toyama,” Translation and Literature Vol. XXV, No. 3 (November 2016): 363-379, DOI: 10.3366/tal.2016.0263. At least it’s still a great poem.
Kamo no Chōmei was as sincere, solemn, profound, and overall “good” at being a “man of religion” as the next person, which is to say not very. It is to his credit, not to Buddhism’s discredit, that he ends by recognizing this. I hope the two or three almost mechanical nenbutsus did him some good; they certainly ought to have on Pure Land Buddhism’s own terms.
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August 14, 2025 (which is to say, Urūminazuki 21, Reiwa 7); N.M. Turowsky, an aspirant Franciscan tertiary, wrote this at her house in Massachusetts.