1212 2026
This is an AI modernization of An Account of My Hut into contemporary English. The original is available from Wikisource. Also available as an epub.
Kamo no Chōmei (about 1155–1216) was born into the family that ran the Kamo Shrine, one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Kyoto, and expected to inherit a post there. He was a gifted poet and a skilled player of the biwa, a kind of lute, and for a time he served at the court of the retired emperor Go-Toba, who collected poetry. When the shrine post he hoped for went to someone else, he left the world, became a Buddhist monk, and eventually, at about sixty, built a small hut on Mount Hino, south of the capital. In 1212 he wrote this short account of it.
His hut was one jō square, about ten feet on a side, which is what hōjō means, and ki means an account or record. The essay opens with a river whose water is never the same water, and it is about impermanence: the Buddhist teaching that nothing lasts, not houses, not cities, not the people in them. Chōmei had seen it for himself. In the space of a few years Kyoto burned, was torn by a whirlwind, lost its status as capital for half a year, starved in a famine that left bodies in the streets, and was shaken by a great earthquake. These were also the years of the war between the Taira and Minamoto clans, though he barely mentions it. He describes each disaster, then turns to his own life, his hut and its seasons, and in the last pages he turns the teaching on himself and asks whether loving his quiet hut is just another attachment.
A few things will help. Japanese dates in the original are counted by the years of an era; here each is given with its Western year. Chōmei refers to Buddhist ideas and stories his readers knew, such as the wise layman Vimalakīrti, who lived in a ten-foot room, and these are explained inside the sentence. His "calling on the Buddha's name," the nembutsu, is a short prayer said by followers of Amida Buddha in the hope of rebirth in his Pure Land.
The Hōjōki is short, about nine thousand characters. This edition is translated in full from the Japanese of the 1903 Kokubun Taikan text, from Wikisource, including the short poem that this text prints after his signature.
The river runs on without stopping, and the water in it is never the same water. The foam that floats in the still places breaks up here, gathers there, and never stays for long. People in the world, and the houses they live in, are just like this. Look at the capital, with its floors of jewels, its rows of houses with ridgepoles side by side and rooftops competing, the homes of high and low alike. They seem to last through the generations without end. But ask whether that is really so, and you find that hardly any of those houses is the one that stood there long ago. One burned last year and was rebuilt this year. Another was a great house that fell and became a small one. The people who live in them are the same. The place is the same and the crowds are as thick as ever, but of the twenty or thirty people I knew in the old days, only one or two are left. Someone dies in the morning, someone is born by evening. That is how it goes, and it is exactly like foam on water.
I do not know where the people who are born and die come from, or where they go. And I do not know why anyone should trouble their heart over a house that is only a temporary lodging, or what makes them want to please their eyes with it. The owner and the house race each other toward impermanence, and the way they go is no different from the morning glory and its dew. Sometimes the dew falls and the flower is left. But even left behind, the flower withers in the morning sun. Sometimes the flower wilts while the dew has not yet gone. But even so, the dew will not last until evening.
Since I first understood how the world works, I have lived through more than forty springs and autumns, and in that time I have seen a good many strange and terrible things. There was a night, I think in the third year of Angen (1177), on the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month, when a fierce wind blew and would not settle down. Around eight in the evening, a fire broke out in the southeast of the capital and burned its way to the northwest. In the end it reached the Suzaku Gate, the Great Hall of State, the University, and the Ministry of Popular Affairs, and in a single night they were all dust and ash. They say it began on Higuchi Tomi-no-kōji, in a shack where sick people were being kept. The wind blew every which way and carried the fire with it, and as it went it spread wide at the far end, like a fan opened out. Houses far off choked in smoke, and near the fire the wind drove the flames flat against the ground. Ashes were blown up into the sky, and the fire lit them from below, so that the whole sky was red. In the middle of it, flames that the wind tore loose flew through the air and leapt a block or two ahead, and the fire went on from there. Think what it was like for the people in the middle of it. Some choked on the smoke and fell down. Some were blinded by the flames and died at once. Some barely got away with their lives and could not save any of their belongings. Every treasure they had, every precious thing, turned to ash. What that cost is beyond reckoning. Sixteen mansions of the highest nobles burned in this fire, and there is no counting the others. In all, about two thirds of the city was destroyed. Thousands of men and women died, and horses and cattle beyond number. Everything people do is foolish, but of all the foolish things, the most pointless is to spend a fortune and wear out your heart building houses in a city where the danger is so great.
Then, on the twenty-ninth day of the fourth month in the fourth year of Jishō (1180), a huge whirlwind rose near Nakamikado and Kyōgoku and blew as far as Rokujō. It was terrible. It swept along for three or four blocks, and every house in its path, large or small, was damaged. Some houses were flattened completely. Some were left with nothing but their beams and posts. Gates were torn off and set down four or five blocks away. Fences were blown away, so that one yard became part of the next. And the things inside the houses went up into the sky, every one of them, and the cypress bark and the roof boards whirled about like leaves in a winter gale. Dust rose up like smoke, and nobody could see. The roar was so great that nobody could hear anyone speak. Even the wind of karma in hell, I thought, could hardly be worse. It was not only the houses that were ruined. Many people were hurt while they were mending them, and left crippled, more than I can count. The wind moved on toward the southwest and brought grief to many others. Whirlwinds do blow now and then, but never like this. It was not an ordinary thing. I wondered whether it was a warning of something to come.
In the sixth month of that same year, the capital was suddenly moved. It was completely unexpected. As I had heard, this city had been the capital ever since the reign of Emperor Saga, and by then several hundred years had passed. There was no special reason to change it, and it was not something to do lightly, and people worried about it more than words can say, and with good reason. But complaining did no good. The Emperor himself, and then the ministers and the high court nobles, all moved to the new capital in Settsu Province, at Fukuhara by the bay of Naniwa. Anyone who served the court, could any of them stay behind in the old city? Those who cared about rank, or counted on their lord's favor, all pushed to move even one day sooner. Those who had missed their chance, and been passed over by the world, and had nowhere to go, stayed behind and grieved. The houses of people who had once competed for the finest eaves fell into ruin day by day. Houses were pulled down and floated down the Yodo River, and before our eyes the land turned into fields. People's hearts changed too. They valued nothing but horses and saddles, and no one wanted an ox carriage. Everyone wished for lands in the southwest, by the sea, and nobody wanted estates in the northeastern provinces.
At about that time, some business took me to the new capital in Settsu, and I looked over the place. The site was too narrow to lay out proper streets. To the north the land rose high along the mountains, and to the south it sloped down toward the sea. The waves were always loud, and the sea wind was especially fierce. The palace was up in the mountains, and I thought of that old palace built of logs, which the poems remember. This one was different, but it had a certain grace of its own. Every day houses were pulled down and floated down the river, more than the river could hold, and I wondered where all of them were being put up again. There was still plenty of empty ground and very few finished houses. The old capital had already fallen into ruin, and the new one was not yet built. Everyone in it felt like a floating cloud. Those who had lived there from the start grieved over the land they had lost, and those who had newly moved in complained about the trouble and expense of building. Along the roads you could see men who should have been riding in carriages riding on horseback, and men who should have been in court dress wearing plain hunting clothes. The manners of the capital had changed overnight, and the nobles looked no different from country warriors. I had heard that this kind of thing is a sign of disorder to come, and so it proved. As the days went by, the whole country grew restless, people's hearts could not settle, and the people's misery did not go unanswered. In the winter of that same year, the Emperor returned to the old capital. But what became of all those houses that had been pulled down and carried away? Not one of them was rebuilt as it had been. I have heard that in the wise reigns of long ago, rulers governed with compassion. They thatched the roof of the palace and did not even trim the eaves. When they saw that little smoke rose from the people's houses, they forgave even the tribute that was owed. They did this out of kindness to the people and to help the country. Compare the world today with those times, and you can tell how far it has fallen.
Then there was the Yōwa era, around 1181, I think, though it was so long ago that I no longer remember it clearly. For two years the world was gripped by famine, and it was terrible. There was drought in spring and summer, then storms and floods in autumn and winter, one disaster after another, and the five grains did not ripen. People plowed in the spring and planted in the summer, to no purpose, for there was no bustle of harvest in the autumn and no storing away in the winter. Because of this, people in the provinces left their land and crossed the borders, or forgot their homes and went to live in the mountains. All kinds of prayers were begun and extraordinary rites were performed, but there was no sign of any effect. It is the way of the capital that everything, whatever it is, depends on the countryside. When nothing came up from the provinces, how could anyone keep up appearances? People lost hope and began to throw away their treasures, one after another, as if discarding them, but nobody so much as glanced at them. If a trade was made at all, gold was valued lightly and grain heavily. Beggars filled the roadsides, and the sound of their crying and grieving filled our ears. That year passed somehow, in this way. I hoped that the next year would be better, but on top of everything an epidemic broke out, and things got worse with no sign of an end. Everyone was starving to death, and as the days went by the people were driven to their last extremity, like the fish in the old saying, gasping in a shrinking pool. In the end, people who looked quite respectable, with hats pulled low and their feet wrapped in rags, went from house to house begging. I would see one of these worn-out creatures walking along, and the next moment he had fallen down and lay still. Beside the mud walls and on the roadsides, the bodies of the starved were past counting. Nobody removed them, and the smell of rot filled the world, and the changes the bodies went through were often too dreadful to look at. On the dry riverbed there was not even room for a cart or a horse to pass. Even the woodcutters and the mountain folk lost their strength, and firewood grew scarce. Those who had nothing to rely on tore down their own houses and took the timber to sell in the market, and what one person could carry brought in less than would keep him alive for a single day. The strangest thing was that among this firewood there were pieces with red lacquer, or flecks of silver and gold leaf still stuck to them. When people asked about it, they learned that desperate men had gone to old temples, stolen the Buddhas, and broken up the furnishings of the halls, and this was the wood they were selling. To be born in an age of such corruption, and to see such heartbreaking things!
There were also sad things that I can only describe as moving. People who had a wife or husband they could not bear to lose felt it most, and the one whose love was deeper always died first. The reason is that such a person put himself second, and gave whatever food he had managed to beg to the one he loved, whether man or woman. So where there were parents and children, it was the rule that the parents died first. There were even babies still nursing at the breasts of mothers who had already died, and who did not know that their mothers lay dead. At Ninna-ji there was a man named Ryūgyō, a senior monk of the Jison-in. Grieving that so many people were dying like this, he gathered a number of holy men, and every time they came across a body he wrote the letter A on its forehead, to bind the dead to the Buddha. He wanted to know how many had died, so he counted for the fourth and fifth months. Within the city, from Ichijō in the north to Kujō in the south, and from Kyōgoku in the east to Suzaku in the west, the heads lying by the roadside came to more than forty-two thousand three hundred. And that leaves out the many who died before and after that count, and those by the river, at Shirakawa, in the western part of the city, and in all the outlying districts. If you added them all, there would be no end. And how much greater the number would be if you counted all the provinces and all seven circuits of the country! I have heard that something like this happened before, in the reign of the Retired Emperor Sutoku, in the Chōshō years, about 1132. But I do not know how things were in that time. What I saw with my own eyes was so strange and so sad.
And there was the great earthquake, in the second year of Genryaku (1185). It was no ordinary quake. Mountains crumbled and buried rivers. The sea tilted and flooded the land. The ground split open and water gushed up. Great rocks broke loose and rolled down into the valleys. Boats rowing along the shore were tossed about on the waves, and horses on the road lost their footing. In the capital and its surroundings, not a single temple hall, shrine or pagoda was left whole in any place. Some crumbled and some fell over, and the dust rose up like thick smoke. The sound of the earth shaking and the houses breaking was just like thunder. If you stayed inside, the house would crush you at once. If you ran outside, the ground split open. We had no wings to fly into the sky. We were not dragons, who could climb the clouds. Of all the terrible things there are to fear, the one most to be feared, I thought, was an earthquake. Among all this, there was a samurai's only child, six or seven years old, who had built a little house under the shelter of a mud wall and was playing in it, making the kind of pretend games children make. The wall suddenly collapsed and buried him and flattened him. His eyes were pushed out of his head by an inch or so. His mother and father held him and wept aloud without holding back, and it was pitiful and heartbreaking to see. Even a strong man forgets his shame when his child is lost, I thought, and I felt sorry for them, and understood it well. The great shaking did not last long, but the aftershocks kept on. For a time there was not a day without twenty or thirty tremors of the kind that would once have frightened us badly. After ten days, or twenty, they gradually came less often, four or five times a day, then two or three, then every other day, or once in two or three days. The aftershocks went on for something like three months. Of the four great elements, water, fire and wind are always causing harm, but the earth does not usually bring any great disaster. Long ago, in the Saikō era, in 855, I think, there was an earthquake in which the head of the great Buddha of Tōdai-ji fell off, and there were dreadful things then too, but they say that it was not as bad as this. For a while after this earthquake everyone spoke of how empty the world was, and it seemed that their hearts grew a little clearer. But as months went by and the year turned, nobody even mentioned it any more.
So it is hard to live in this world, and both our own bodies and our houses are as fragile and empty as I have said. And the troubles that come with each place and each station in life are too many to list. Someone of no importance who lives next to a powerful family may have great joys, but he cannot show his delight. When he is sad he cannot cry out loud. He cannot move freely, and every time he stands or sits he trembles with fear, like a sparrow that has come near a hawk's nest. Someone who is poor and lives next door to a rich family is ashamed of his shabby looks morning and evening, and he goes in and out fawning. When he sees his wife and children and servants envying the rich, and hears how the rich household looks down on him, his heart is stirred up every moment and never rests. If you live on a cramped lot, you cannot escape harm when a fire starts nearby. If you live out in the far districts, the coming and going is a burden, and you cannot get away from thieves. The powerful are greedy. The solitary are looked down on. Wealth brings many fears, and poverty brings bitter grief. If you depend on others, you become their slave, and if you take care of others, your heart is bound by love and duty. If you follow the world, your body suffers. If you do not, you seem to be mad. What place should a person choose, and what work should one do, in order to find some shelter for this body, even for a little while, and some peace for the mind, even for a moment?
I inherited my grandmother's house on my father's side, and I lived there for many years. Later my ties to the family wore thin, my fortunes declined, and there were many things that made me want to hide, so in the end I could not stay. Past thirty, I built a small hut of my own, by my own choice. Compared with the house I had lived in before, it was one tenth the size. I built only a room to live in and did not go to the trouble of putting up proper buildings. I did have a mud wall of a sort, but I had no means to build a gate. I made posts of bamboo and used them to shelter a cart. Whenever snow fell or the wind blew, it was not without danger. The place was close to the riverbed, so the danger of floods was great, and I feared the white waves as well. In this way I endured a world that was not what I wanted, worrying my heart for more than thirty years. In those years, through the turns and misfortunes I met from time to time, I came to see that my luck was short. So when I reached my fiftieth spring, I left my house and turned my back on the world. I had never had a wife or children, so there was no one I found hard to leave. I held no court rank or pay, so there was nothing for me to cling to. I lay down in the clouds of Mount Ōhara to no purpose, and how many springs and autumns have passed since then.
Now that I have come to sixty, and my life is like a dew about to vanish, I have made a new dwelling for the last leaves of my life. It is like a hunter making a hut for a single night, or an old silkworm spinning its cocoon. Compared with my middle-aged house, it is not even a hundredth of the size. While I have been saying all this, my years have gone down a little more each year, and my dwelling has shrunk a little each time. The place is unlike ordinary houses. It is only ten feet square, and under seven feet high. Since I had not decided where to settle, I did not claim any piece of ground and build on it. I laid a wooden frame on the ground and put a simple roof over it, and fastened each joint with a latch. If something displeases me, I can easily move it somewhere else. How much trouble would it be to rebuild it? Two carts would carry it all, and apart from paying the carters, I would need nothing more. Now that I have hidden myself deep in Mount Hino, I have put out a temporary awning on the south side and laid a floor of bamboo slats under it. On the west I made a shelf for offerings of holy water. Inside, along the west wall, I have set up a painting of Amida Buddha, so that the setting sun shines on it and becomes the light between his brows. On the doors of the hanging screen next to it I have hung pictures of Fugen and Fudō. Above the north sliding door I made a small shelf and put three or four black leather boxes on it. In them are books of poetry, music, and selections from the Essentials of Rebirth in the Pure Land. Beside them stand a koto and a lute, one of each. They are what people call a folding koto and a jointed lute. Along the east side I have spread bracken fern fronds and straw mats for my bed at night. In the east wall I opened a window, and I set a writing desk there. By my pillow is a small hearth, where I burn brushwood for warmth. North of the hut I took a little piece of ground and put up a rough brushwood fence to make a garden, and there I planted many kinds of medicinal herbs. That is my temporary hut. As for the place, to the south there is a water pipe, and I have piled up rocks to hold the water. The woods are close, so I never lack for kindling. The place is called Toyama, the outer hills. Vines of masaki cover the paths. The valley is thick with trees, but the western sky is open. So there is no lack of help for contemplation. In spring I see the wisteria blossoms, floating to the west like purple clouds. In summer I hear the cuckoo, and every time it sings it promises to guide me over the mountain road of death. In autumn my ears are full of the sound of the evening cicadas. It sounds as if they are mourning this world, empty as a shell. In winter I feel for the snow. The way it piles up and melts away is like the sins that weigh on us. When I do not feel like calling on the Buddha's name, or my chanting is half-hearted, I simply rest, or simply let it go, and nobody stands in my way, and there is no friend to be ashamed before. I do not take a vow of silence, but living alone I keep my speech in check. I do not make a point of keeping every commandment, but where there is nothing to tempt me, what is there to break? On mornings when I feel like the white waves that leave no trace behind a boat, I look out from the hillside hut at the boats coming and going, and steal a little of the feeling of Priest Mansei. On evenings when the wind in the katsura tree rustles the leaves, I think of the Xunyang River and imitate the playing of Minamoto no Tsunenobu. If I feel more spirited still, I sometimes match the "Autumn Wind" tune to the sound of the pines, or play the "Flowing Spring" piece to the sound of the water. My skill is poor, but I do not play to please anyone's ears. I play alone and sing alone, only to feed my own heart.
At the foot of the mountain there is one more brushwood hut, where the keeper of the mountain lives. He has a young son, and the boy comes to see me from time to time. When I have nothing to do, I take him along as a companion and we wander about. He is sixteen and I am sixty, an extraordinary difference in age, but the pleasure we take in each other's company is the same. We pull up the tsubana grass shoots and pick rock-pear berries. We gather wild yam bulbs and pick water parsley. Sometimes we go down to the rice fields at the foot of the hill, gather the fallen ears of rice, and tie them into little bundles. When the day is fine, we climb to the ridge and look far off toward the sky over the old capital. We see Kohata Mountain, the village of Fushimi, Toba, and Hazukashi. A beautiful view has no owner, so nothing stops us from enjoying it. When my legs are strong and my heart wants to go far, I follow the ridge from here across Sumiyama and past Kasatori, and go to pray at Iwama or at Ishiyama. Or I push through the fields of Awazu and visit the place where old Semimaru once lived, or cross the Tanakami River and look for the grave of Sarumaru Dayū. On the way back, we pick cherry blossoms or hunt for red leaves as the season allows, or gather bracken and nuts, and we offer some to the Buddha and take the rest home as gifts. On quiet nights I think of friends who are gone, looking at the moon in my window, and the crying of the monkeys wets my sleeves with tears. The fireflies in the grass seem, from a distance, like the fishing fires at Maki no Shima, and the dawn rain sounds like a storm blowing through the leaves. When I hear the mountain pheasant calling, I wonder if it is my father or my mother. And when the mountain deer come close and let me be, I know how far I have gone from the world. Sometimes I stir up the buried embers and keep them as company when I wake in my old age. It is not a fearsome mountain, but even the hoot of the owl moves me, and so the sights and moods of life in the mountains never come to an end with the seasons. And for someone who thinks deeply and knows a great deal, there would be far more to find here than I can say. When I first came to live here, I thought it would be for a short while, but now five years have passed. My temporary hut has slowly become an old house. Rotted leaves lie deep along the eaves, and moss has grown over the base. When I happen to hear news of the capital, I learn that since I shut myself up in these mountains, many high and noble people have died. And how many more, of no account, that no one could count them all? How many houses have been lost in the fires, time after time? Only my temporary hut is peaceful, and I have nothing to fear. It is small, but at night there is a place to lie down, and in the day there is a place to sit. It is plenty for one body to live in. The hermit crab likes small shells, because it knows its own size. The osprey lives on the wild rocky shore, because it is afraid of people. I am the same. Knowing myself and knowing the world, I ask for nothing and mix with no one. I want only quiet, and my joy is to have no worries. In the world, people usually build their houses not only for themselves. Some build them for their wives and children and relatives, some for their friends and close companions. Some build them even for their lord, or for their teacher, or for their goods, their horses and their cattle. I have built this hut for myself. I did not build it for others. Why? Because in these times and in my situation, I have no one to bring with me, and no servant to rely on. Even if I had built it large, who would I put up in it, and who would I seat there?
People who make friends prize the rich, and put those who are attentive first. They do not necessarily love those who are kind or honest. It is better to make friends with strings and pipes, with flowers and the moon. People who become servants look to see how great the rewards and punishments are, and they think most of generous favor. Even if their master cares for them and pities them, they do not want peace and quiet. It is better to make a servant of oneself. If there is work to be done, I do it with my own hands. It is not that I never get tired, but it is easier than ordering people about and looking after them. If there is somewhere to go, I walk there myself. It is tiring, but it is better than worrying over horses and saddles and oxen and carts. Now I have divided one body into two uses. My hands are my servants, and my feet are my carriage, and they suit my heart well. And my heart knows the troubles of my body, so when the body is tired, it lets it rest, and when it is well, it puts it to work. Even so, I do not overwork it, and I am not stirred if it is reluctant. Besides, always walking and always working is a way of keeping healthy. Why should one sit idle to no purpose? To make others suffer and wear them out is also a sin. So how could I borrow anyone else's strength?
Clothes and food are the same. I cover my skin with wisteria fiber and a quilt of hemp, whatever I can get. I keep myself alive with the tsubana on the moors and the nuts on the peaks, only enough to go on living. Since I do not mix with people, I have no regret about how I look. Food is scarce, so it is poor fare, but I still make it sweet in my mouth. All of this I do not say to people who are happy and wealthy. I only compare my own life now with how it was before. Since I fled the world and threw myself away, I have had no resentment and no fear. I leave my life to fate, neither clinging to it nor hating it. I compare my body to a floating cloud, neither relying on it nor thinking it is not yet time. The joy of my whole life comes to its height on the pillow when I take a nap, and my hope for my whole life rests on the fine views of each passing season.
The three worlds are only the mind. If the mind is not at peace, oxen and horses and the seven treasures are of no use, and palaces and towers mean nothing. Now I love my lonely dwelling, this one small room. When I go into the capital, I am ashamed to have become a beggar, but when I return here, I pity those who are attached to the dust of the world. If anyone doubts what I have said, let him look at fish and birds. The fish never tire of water, but if you are not a fish you cannot know its heart. The birds long for the forest, but if you are not a bird you cannot know its heart. The taste of a quiet life is the same. Who could understand it without living it?
But now the moon of my life has sunk low, and my last days are near the edge of the mountain. Soon I will head into the darkness of the three dark paths. What will I have to complain about then? The Buddha's teaching to us is that we must not cling to anything. If I love my grass hut, that too is a fault, and if I am attached to a quiet life, that too is an obstacle. Why should I go on describing pleasures that are of no use, and let precious time slip away?
In the quiet before dawn, I thought this through to the end, and asked my own heart: You left the world and came to live among the mountains and woods in order to calm your mind and practice the Way. But you look like a holy man and your heart is sunk in mud. Your dwelling is a poor copy of the hut of Vimalakīrti, the wise layman who lived in a ten-foot room, and yet you have not even kept up the practice of Cūḍapanthaka, the dullest of the Buddha's disciples. Is it the reward of poverty and low rank that torments you? Or has your deluded mind grown so strong that it has driven you mad? My heart had no answer at all. I only hired my tongue and said the Buddha's name, the nembutsu, two or three times without any wish to, and stopped.
The last day of the third month, in the second year of Kenryaku (1212). Written in the hut at Toyama by the monk Ren'in.
The moon's light, too, is hard to bear when it sinks behind the mountain's rim. If only there were some way to see a light that never fails.