Essays in Idleness

Preface and Sections 1–40

With nothing to do, I spend the whole day in front of my inkstone, setting down whatever idle trifles pass across my mind, in no particular order, and it gives me the oddest feeling, as though I were going a little mad.

1. Well, now. Once you are born into this world, there is no end of things worth wishing for. The rank of the Emperor is too exalted even to think about. Down to the remotest leaf of the imperial family tree, the princes of the blood are to be revered, for they spring from no common human seed. The splendor of the Regent goes without saying, and even an ordinary noble looks magnificent once he rates an escort of palace guards. His sons and grandsons keep a certain grace even after they have come down in the world. Below that level, people who rise as high as their station allows, get their moment, and look pleased with themselves no doubt think they are doing wonderfully, but it's a sorry sight.

Nothing is less enviable than being a monk. "People think of them as no better than a bit of wood," Sei Shōnagon wrote in her Pillow Book, and she was quite right. When a monk throws his weight about and makes a great commotion, he looks anything but wonderful. As the holy man Zōga said, the craving for a name is a torment, and it goes against the Buddha's teaching. A man who has given up the world entirely, though, may have something to be envied.¹

A man should be good-looking and carry himself well. Someone whose talk doesn't grate on the ear, who has charm and doesn't say too much, is someone you could sit with forever. How disappointing, then, when a man you admired lets his real nature show and drops in your esteem. Birth and looks are what you are born with, but surely the mind, if you work at it, can move from wise to wiser. It is a shame when a man of good looks and good nature turns out to have no learning, so that he sinks in people's estimation and finds himself mixed in with low-born men with unpleasant faces, and outshone by them without even a contest.

What I would want in a man is real learning in the classics, a hand at Chinese verse, Japanese poetry and music, and enough knowledge of court precedent and public ceremony to be a model for others. His handwriting should run along fluently and not be clumsy. He should have a pleasant voice and keep time when he sings. And when he is offered wine he should make a polite show of reluctance, and yet be no teetotaler.

2. A man who forgets how the sage rulers of old governed, takes no notice of the people's suffering or of the harm done to the country, spends lavishly to make everything splendid, thinks himself grand, and takes up all the room in the world, strikes me as tiresome and thoughtless. "From your robes and cap to your horses and carriages, make do with what you have. Do not go looking for finery," says the testament that Lord Kujō, Fujiwara no Morosuke, left his descendants. And Emperor Juntoku, in what he wrote about the customs of the palace, says, "For the Emperor's own clothing, plain is best."

3. A man may be brilliant at everything, but if he has no taste for love he is a sorry thing, like a jeweled wine cup with no bottom. To wander about somewhere or other, soaked with dew and frost, with no peace of mind because you're afraid of a parent's scolding and of what people will say; to be pulled this way and that, never knowing whether things will meet or part; and after all that, to sleep alone most nights and never get a wink of sleep: that is the charm of it. All the same, he shouldn't simply be a rake. The thing to be is a man whom women don't think of as easily had.

4. A man who never forgets the life to come, and keeps close to the way of the Buddha, has my admiration.

5. When someone sunk in grief by misfortune decides to shave his head, I'd rather he didn't do it in a rash moment. Better that he should shut his gate and live as if he hardly existed, passing the days and nights expecting nothing at all. The Middle Counselor Akimoto said he wished he could see the moon as an exile sees it, but without having committed the crime, and I can well understand how he felt.²

6. Whether you are a great man or, still more, a nobody, you are better off without children. The Former Prince of Central Affairs, the Kujō Chancellor and the Hanazono Minister of the Left all wished that their lines would die out. And the old man in The Tale of Generations says it was a fine thing that the Somedono Minister had no descendants, since heirs who fall short of their fathers are a bad business. When Prince Shōtoku had his own tomb built ahead of time, he is supposed to have said, "Cut here, and sever there. I mean to leave no descendants."³

7. If the dew on the fields of Adashino never faded, and the smoke never cleared from the burning grounds on Toribe Mountain, if it were our lot to stay on in the world to the very end, there would be no sadness of things at all. What makes the world so fine is that nothing in it stays settled. Look at the creatures that have life: nothing lasts as long as a human being. The mayfly is gone by evening; the summer cicada never knows a spring or an autumn. A single year, lived out unhurriedly, is already a wonderfully long and peaceful stretch. But if you are never sated and always loath to let go, a thousand years would pass like one night's dream. In a world where no one stays to the end, what good does it do to wait about until you have grown ugly? "Long life, much shame," as the old saying goes. To die before forty at the latest would be the seemly thing. Past that age a man is no longer embarrassed by his looks and wants to be out in company. In the evening of his life he dotes on his grandchildren and plans to live long enough to see them prosper. His heart is set on nothing but greed for the world, and he loses all feeling for the sadness of things. It is a sorry thing to see.⁴

8. Nothing leads people astray like lust. What fools we are! A scent is only borrowed. We know perfectly well that the clothes have just been perfumed for the occasion, and still a lovely fragrance sets the heart racing every time. The wizard of Kume, who could fly, lost his power and fell out of the sky when he caught sight of the white calves of a girl washing clothes in the river, and I can believe it. Arms and legs and skin that are lovely, plump and glossy are no borrowed charm. They are her own.

9. It's a woman's beautiful hair that catches the eye. Her character and temperament you can tell from the way she speaks, even from behind a screen. In everything she does, even in the merest gesture, a woman can lead a man's heart astray. And a woman never really sleeps at ease, never spares herself, and endures what can hardly be endured, and all for love. Truly the roots of attachment go deep and its springs rise far away. The pleasures of the six senses are many, but every one of them can be renounced. Only that one delusion is impossible to stop, and in old and young, wise and foolish, it seems to be the same. That is why they say a rope twisted from a woman's hair will hold a great elephant, and a flute made from a woman's wooden clog will always bring the deer to it in autumn. This is the delusion we must most fear and guard ourselves against.

10. A house that suits the person who lives in it is a delight, even if we know it is only a lodging for a while. Where a person of quality lives quietly, even the moonlight coming in seems to go deeper into your heart. The place is not fashionable or glittering, but the trees have grown old, the grass in the garden hasn't been arranged and yet looks as if it means something, the veranda and the bamboo fence are nicely made, and the everyday things lying about have an old-fashioned calm. That is what I call admirable. A house where a crowd of craftsmen have done their utmost to polish everything, where rare and costly furnishings from China and Japan are lined up on show, and where even the plants in the garden have been trained against their nature, is painful to look at and depressing. Can anyone go on living like that for long? One look, and you think it may all go up in smoke at any moment. You can usually guess a man's character from his house.

The Later Tokudaiji Minister once stretched a rope across the roof of his main hall to keep the kites from perching on it. When the poet-monk Saigyō saw it, he said, "What harm would it do if a kite sat there? That tells you what sort of man the master of this house is." They say he never called on him again. When, some time ago, I saw a rope stretched along the ridge of the Kosaka mansion, where the monk-prince of Ayanokōji lives, I thought of that story. But someone told me, "Actually, the crows were gathering there and catching the frogs in the pond, and His Highness couldn't bear to see it." I thought that was a fine thing. Perhaps the Tokudaiji Minister had his reasons too.⁵

11. One day in the tenth month, early in winter, I passed a place called Kurusuno and made my way deep into a mountain village. Far along a narrow path through the moss I came upon a hermit's hut, a lonely little place. Nothing broke the silence but the drip of a bamboo water pipe buried in fallen leaves. Sprays of chrysanthemum and red maple lay scattered on the shelf where water is set out for the Buddha, which meant someone did live there after all. You can live like this, then, I thought, and I was moved. Then I saw, in the garden beyond, a big tangerine tree with its branches bent under the fruit, and a stout fence all the way around it. That rather spoiled it, and I thought, if only that tree weren't there.

12. What a joy it would be to sit quietly with someone of like mind, talk about things of interest and the little absurdities of the world, and hold nothing back. But there is no such person, and if you sit across from someone taking care never to differ from him in the least thing, you may as well be alone. With someone whose remarks are worth listening to, and who yet differs from you a little, you can argue, "I don't see it that way at all," or explain, "It's like that because of this," and that, you'd think, would cure the boredom. But in fact, with someone who doesn't share even your small grumbles about the world, you can chat about ordinary nothings well enough, but there will always be a great distance between him and a real friend of the heart, and that is a lonely thing.

13. Nothing consoles like this: to open a book alone by the light of the lamp and take for your friends people of an age you never saw. For books, give me the moving chapters of the Wenxuan, the old Chinese anthology, the collected works of Bo Juyi, the sayings of Laozi, and the chapters of Zhuangzi. The writings of our own country's scholars have many moving things in them too, the old ones at least.

14. Japanese poetry is still the most delightful thing. The work of humble woodcutters and peasants turns charming once it is put into a poem, and even the fearsome wild boar becomes gentle when you call it "the boar on its bed of grass." Poems these days may have a clever turn in one line or another, but somehow none of them has that feeling beyond the words that the old poems have. Tsurayuki's poem with the line "though it's not a thing strung on a thread" is said to be the dregs of the Kokinshū, but it doesn't look like anything a poet of today could write. The poems of that age were full of that kind of style and diction, and it's hard to see why this one in particular should have been singled out. The Tale of Genji quotes it as "though it's no such thing." In the Shinkokinshū, the poem they call the dregs is the one with the line "even the pines that remain look lonely on the peak," and perhaps its style really is a little loose. But when the poems were judged by open discussion, this one was pronounced good, and the Retired Emperor went out of his way to praise it afterward, as Ienaga, the secretary of the Poetry Office, wrote in his diary.⁶

People say that poetry is the one art that hasn't changed since the old days, but I wonder. The same words and the same famous places that poets still use today were not the same thing at all in the hands of the old poets. Their poems are plain and natural, clean in their lines and deep in feeling. The popular songs that Emperor Go-Shirakawa collected in the Ryōjin Hishō are often very moving too. It seems the people of old could toss off any phrase at all and have it sound marvelous.

15. Going away on a journey for a while, it hardly matters where, wakes you up. You wander about the neighborhood, here and there, and the countryside and the mountain villages are full of things you've never seen. You find someone going to the capital and send a letter home, "Don't forget to see to this and that when you have a chance," and it's a pleasure to write. In places like that you notice everything. Even the things you brought along look better if they are good, and a man of talent or a good-looking person seems more attractive than usual. It is also a pleasure to go and stay quietly in a temple or a shrine, without telling anyone.

16. The sacred dances of the shrines are elegant and delightful. Of musical instruments in general, the flute and the reed pipe are the ones for me, and what I always want to hear is the lute and the Japanese zither.

17. To shut yourself up in a mountain temple and serve the Buddha is never tedious, and the muddiness of the heart seems to clear away.

18. It is a fine thing for a man to live simply, put away extravagance, own nothing, and not hanker after the world. From the earliest times, wise men have seldom been rich. In China there was a man named Xu You who had no possessions at all, not even a cup, and drank his water from his cupped hands. Someone saw this and gave him a gourd. One day he hung it on the branch of a tree, and when it rattled in the wind he found it a nuisance and threw it away, and went back to drinking from his hands. How clear and cool his heart must have been! Sun Chen had no quilt for the winter months, only a bundle of straw, which he slept on at night and put away in the morning. The Chinese thought these things admirable, and that is why they wrote them down and handed them on. People in our own country would not even have passed the stories along.⁷

19. The changing of the seasons moves us in everything. Everyone says that autumn is the season that stirs the feelings most, and there is something in that, but what really lifts the heart is spring. The birdsong takes on a springlike sound, and in the mild sunshine the grass starts to come up along the fences. Then spring deepens, the haze spreads everywhere, and the cherry blossoms are just beginning to show color, and that is exactly when the wind and rain set in, one day after another, and the blossoms are scattered in a hurry. Until the trees are all in green leaf, one thing after another keeps the heart in turmoil. The orange blossom is famous for bringing back the past, but it is the scent of plum blossom that makes the old days come back and fills me with longing. The clean yellow of the kerria, the wisteria trailing so uncertainly: there is so much in spring that is hard to let go of.⁸

Someone once said that around the Buddha's Birthday and the Kamo Festival, when the young leaves are thickening so freshly on the treetops, our feeling for the sadness of the world and our longing for the people we love grow stronger, and it's quite true. In the fifth month, when iris leaves are laid along the eaves, when the rice seedlings are planted, and the water rail drums like someone knocking at a door, how can anyone not feel a little forlorn? In the sixth month, the white of the moonflowers at some poor house, and the smoke of a fire smoldering to keep off the mosquitoes, are moving too. The purification rites at the end of the sixth month are delightful, and the Festival of the Weaver Star is elegant. As the nights grow chilly, the wild geese come crying, the lower leaves of the bush clover turn color, and the early rice is cut and laid out to dry; of all the seasons, autumn has the most of these things crowded into it. And the morning after an autumn gale is a delight.⁹

To go on like this is to repeat what The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book said long ago, but I don't feel I must keep from saying a thing just because it has been said before. Keeping what you think to yourself gives you a bellyache, so I let my brush run on. These are idle scribbles, fit to be torn up and thrown away, and not for anyone else to see.

As for winter, its bare look is hardly inferior to autumn's. A morning when red leaves have fallen and caught in the grass at the water's edge, the frost lies very white, and mist rises from the stream through the garden, is a delight. At the very end of the year, when everyone is rushing about, it is more moving than ever. Nobody bothers to look at the moon after the twentieth of the month, thinking it too bleak; but hanging cold and clear in the sky, it is a lonely sight. The Naming of the Buddhas, and the messengers setting off with the first fruits of the harvest for the imperial tombs, are moving and solemn. So many court ceremonies fall at the end of the year, crowded in with the preparations for spring, and the way they are all carried through is something to see. It's delightful how the Demon-Chasing on the last night runs straight into the Emperor's worship of the four directions at dawn on New Year's Day. On the last night of the year, in the pitch dark, people light pine torches and go running about knocking on gates until past midnight, shouting about who knows what, as if their feet didn't touch the ground. Then toward dawn the noise dies down at last, and the passing of the old year feels lonely. The custom of honoring the dead, since this is the night they come back, is no longer kept in the capital these days, but it was still kept in the eastern provinces, and I found that very moving.¹⁰

And so the day dawns, and the sky looks no different from yesterday's, and yet it feels completely new. The avenues are lined with pine branches set up at every gate, bright and happy, and that is moving too.

20. A certain man who had left the world once said, "I have no ties to hold me to this world. The only thing I'll be sorry to leave is the sky." I can well believe he felt that way.

21. Looking at the moon is a comfort in every circumstance. Someone once said, "There is nothing as delightful as the moon," and another person argued, "The dew is more moving," and I enjoyed the dispute. In its season, what is not moving? The moon and the blossoms go without saying, but the wind, more than anything, seems to touch the heart. The sight of water dashed clean against the rocks is lovely at any time of year. I was moved when I read the Chinese poem that says, "The Yuan and the Xiang flow east day and night, and never stop for a moment for the sake of a grieving man." Xi Kang wrote, "When I wander among the mountains and marshes and watch the fish and birds, my heart is glad." Nothing comforts the heart like wandering far from people, where the water and the grasses are clean.

22. In everything, it is the old days that I miss. The new fashions seem to grow cheaper and cheaper. Even among the fine pieces a cabinetmaker turns out, it's the ones in the old style that please me. As for writing, the scraps of old letters are magnificent, and even the language people speak is going downhill. People used to say, "Raise the carriage!" and "Lift the lamp!" Now they say, "Pick the carriage up!" and "Turn the lamp up!" When the men of the Palace Housekeeping Office are called to their torches, the order should be "Men, stand to!" and people say, "Make the standing torches bright!" The place where the Emperor listens to the lectures on the Sutra of Golden Light ought to be called "the Pavilion of the August Lectures," and they call it "the Lecture Pavilion." An old gentleman I knew used to say what a pity it was.

23. Although this is a fallen and degenerate age, the palace still has an unworldly, godlike majesty about it. The Open Dais, the Breakfast Room, the names of this hall and that gate: they all sound splendid. Even the little shutters and the little plank floors and the high sliding doors that any shabby house might have sound splendid in the palace. "Prepare the guardroom for the night!" is a fine thing to hear. And it's splendid, too, when they say outside the Emperor's bedchamber, "The lamps, quickly now!" A high noble presiding at the guardroom is grand, of course, but it's fun to see the servants of the various offices going about their duties with practiced, self-satisfied faces. And it's delightful how they doze off here and there all through those bitterly cold nights. "The sound of the bells in the Hall of the Sacred Mirror is wonderfully graceful," the Tokudaiji Chancellor used to say.

24. I thought the life of the Ise Priestess at the Shrine in the Fields was the height of grace and charm. She keeps away from anything to do with sutras or buddhas, and it's charming that they say "the one in the middle" for a buddha and "dyed paper" for a sutra. Shrines in general are elegant places that no one could turn his back on. The ancient woods around them have something out of the ordinary, and when a sacred fence runs all the way round and white mulberry streamers hang from the sakaki branches, how can it fail to be wonderful? The most delightful are Ise, Kamo, Kasuga, Hirano, Sumiyoshi, Miwa, Kibune, Yoshida, Ōharano, Matsunoo and Umenomiya.¹¹

25. The world is like the Asuka River, whose deep pools of yesterday are shallows today. Times change and things pass away, joy and sorrow come and go, a place that was once full of splendor turns into a field where nobody lives, and a house that still stands has new people living in it. The peach and the plum say nothing, and who is left to talk with about the old days? And sadder still are the remains of the great places of a past that we never saw. When I see the Kyōgoku mansion and the Hōjō-ji temple, I am moved to think how the founder's intentions live on while everything else has changed. When the Lord of the Great Hall built them and polished them so lavishly, endowed them with so many estates, and meant his own family alone to be the Emperor's guardians and the mainstay of the realm forever, could he ever have imagined that, whatever the age, it would all fall into such ruin?

The great gate and the Golden Hall were still standing until fairly recently, but the south gate burned down in the Shōwa era (1312–1317), and the Golden Hall later fell over and has been left lying there, with no one to put it up again. Only the Hall of Infinite Life survives as it was. In it nine buddhas, each sixteen feet tall, sit in a row, very holy. The tablet in Major Counselor Yukinari's hand and the writing by Kaneyuki on the doors can still be clearly seen, and it is very moving. The Lotus Hall, I believe, is still there too. But how long will these last? In places where not even this much is left, a few foundation stones may still be lying about, but nobody knows for certain what stood there. To make plans for everything, even for an age you will never see, is a futile business.¹²

26. When I think of the years I spent with someone whose heart has faded, like a flower that changes before the wind even touches it, I remember every tender word I heard and can't forget them, and yet the way such a person drifts out of my life is sadder than parting from the dead. No wonder there was a man who wept to see white silk thread, because it can be dyed any color, and a man who wailed at a crossroads, because the roads part. Among the Hundred Poems presented to Emperor Horikawa there is this one:

	The fence of the girl
	I used to visit
	has fallen to ruin.
	Only violets now,
	among the reed flowers.

There must have been some such lonely scene behind it.¹³

27. When the ceremony of the Emperor's abdication is held, and the sword, the jewel and the mirror are handed on to the new Emperor, it is unbearably sad. In the spring after the new Retired Emperor stepped down, he wrote this poem, they say:

	The palace sweepers
	pass me by,
	and in my garden
	that no one sweeps
	the blossoms lie thick.

In the press of business of the new reign, nobody calls on the Retired Emperor anymore, and he seems lonely. It is at times like these that people show what their hearts are really made of.¹⁴

28. Nothing is sadder than a year of mourning for an Emperor's parent. The rooms of the mourning hut are something to see: the plank floors are set lower, reed blinds hang in place of the usual bamboo ones, the cloth trimming along the top of them is coarse, the furnishings are all plain, and everyone's clothes, even their swords and sword cords, are strange and solemn.

29. When I think quietly about it, the one thing I can do nothing about is my longing for the past. After everyone has gone to bed, I'll pass the long night putting some odds and ends in order, and while I'm tearing up old papers I don't want to leave behind, I'll come across a bit of handwriting practice or a little drawing that someone who has died once dashed off, and I'm back in that moment. Even a letter from someone who is still alive, when it has been put away for a long time, and I wonder on what occasion, and in what year, it was written, is very moving. It's very sad, too, that the things someone used every day should go on for so long without a care, unchanged.

30. Nothing is sadder than what follows a death. For the forty-nine days of mourning everyone moves to some place in the mountains, a cramped and inconvenient one, where they all crowd together to hold the services for the dead, and it is a hectic time. The days go by unbelievably fast. On the last day they are all very cold to one another. Nobody says a word; each of them, looking very capable, packs up his things, and off they all go in different directions. When they get back to their own homes, there will be even more to grieve over. "Oh, you mustn't do such and such, it's unlucky for the ones left behind," people say. In grief like this, why bring that up? People's hearts can be very unpleasant, I think.

Even as the months and years go by, we never quite forget. But "the departed grow more distant every day," as the saying goes, and after all we don't feel as we did at the time, and we chat about trifles and even laugh. The body is buried in some lonely spot in the mountains, and we visit it only on the proper days, and soon the wooden grave tablet is covered with moss and buried under fallen leaves, and only the evening storms and the moon at night come to visit. As long as there are people who remember the dead and think of them fondly, it's well enough. But they too are soon gone, and how much can their descendants, who have only heard of the dead man, feel for him? Then the services for him come to an end, and nobody even knows his name or who he was. Only a person of feeling, seeing the spring grass grow on the grave each year, might be moved by it. In the end, even the pines that sighed in the storm are chopped up for firewood before they have lived a thousand years, and the old grave is plowed under and becomes a rice field. Then not even its shape is left, and that is the saddest thing of all.¹⁵

31. One morning when there had been a lovely fall of snow, I had something to tell a certain person and sent a letter, but said nothing about the snow. The answer came back: "Do you expect me to listen to anything said by a person so perverse that he can't even write a line to ask how I'm enjoying this snow? I am very, very disappointed in you." I thought it was delightful. She is dead now, and so I can't forget even a little thing like that.

32. Around the twentieth of the ninth month, a certain gentleman invited me to go out with him to look at the moon, and we wandered about until dawn. He remembered a house he knew, sent in word, and went inside. In the overgrown garden, wet with dew, a faint scent of incense hung quietly in the air, not put there for show, and the whole place had a hidden, retiring air that was deeply moving. He came out again after a suitable time, but I was still taken with the grace of the place and stood watching for a while from the shadows. The lady pushed the double door open a little wider, and seemed to be looking at the moon. How disappointing it would have been if she had bolted the door and gone straight back in. She could not have known that someone was still watching. A thing like that can only come from a habit of mind kept up from morning to night. I heard that she died not long afterward.

33. When the present palace was built, the experts in court precedent were asked to inspect it, and they found nothing wrong with it anywhere. The day for the Emperor's move was almost at hand when Retired Empress Genki-mon'in came to see it and remarked, "At the Kan'in palace the comb-shaped openings in the walls were round, and had no frames." That was wonderful of her. Here the openings had notched edges and wooden frames, which was a mistake, and they were put right.

34. The incense shell is the lid of a shellfish that looks like a small conch, with a long, narrow mouth that sticks out. They come from the bay of Kanazawa in Musashi Province, and someone told me the local people call them "henatari."¹⁶

35. It's fine for someone with bad handwriting to dash off letters without worrying about it. Getting someone else to write them because his own hand is ugly is tiresome.

36. I hadn't been to see her for a long time, and I was thinking how bitter she must be at my neglect, and feeling I had no excuse to offer, when a message came from her: "Have you a servant to spare? Just one." I was more grateful and happy than I can say. "A woman with that kind of spirit is the one to have," someone said to me, and I think he was right.

37. When someone you have been close to morning and night, with no reserve between you, is suddenly careful with you on some occasion and stands on ceremony, some people would say, "Why bother now?" But I think, what a sincere and fine person. And when someone you don't know well says something open and friendly, that wins you over too.

38. To be the slave of fame and profit, never to have a quiet moment, and spend your whole life in torment, is foolish. Great wealth leaves you poor at protecting yourself. It is the go-between that buys you harm and invites trouble. You could pile up gold after your death high enough to prop up the Northern Dipper, and it would only make a nuisance for others. The pleasures that delight the eyes of fools are worthless too. A great carriage, fat horses, ornaments of gold and jewels: a person of feeling would see these as dismal and foolish. "Throw the gold away on the mountain, and cast the jewels into the deep." A man led astray by profit is the greatest fool of all.

To leave behind a name that will not be buried, down the long ages, would be a fine thing. But are men of high rank and noble birth necessarily superior men? A foolish, incompetent man can rise to high office and live in the greatest luxury, if he is born into the right house and comes along at the right time. And many great sages and wise men have stayed in low positions by their own choice, or died without their times ever coming. To hanker single-mindedly after high office and rank is the next most foolish thing.

One would like to leave behind a reputation for outstanding wisdom and character. But when I think it over carefully, to love a good reputation is to enjoy what people say about you. Those who praise you and those who speak ill of you will not be in the world for long, and those who hear about you from them will soon be gone as well. Who is there to be ashamed in front of, and by whom do you want to be known? And praise is the root of blame. A name that outlives you is no use at all. To wish for that is the next most foolish thing again.

But to say a word to those who insist on seeking wisdom and longing to be wise: "When cleverness appears, falsehood comes with it." Talent is only the passions grown bigger. What you hear from others and learn by study is not true wisdom. What, then, should we call wisdom? Right and wrong are one and the same. What should we call good? The true man has no wisdom, no virtue, no merit and no name. Who will know of him, and who will pass his name along? That is not because he hides his virtue and pretends to be a fool. It is because he never stood in the world where wise and foolish, gain and loss, are told apart at all. When you set out with a deluded mind to seek fame and profit, this is what you come to. All things are wrong. They are not worth talking about, and not worth wishing for.¹⁷

39. Someone asked the Venerable Hōnen, "When I'm calling on the Buddha's name I get overcome by sleep and neglect my practice. How can I get rid of this obstacle?" Hōnen answered, "Call on the Buddha's name as long as you're awake." That was a very holy thing to say. He also said, "If you believe your rebirth in paradise is certain, it is certain. If you think it uncertain, it is uncertain." That too is holy. And he said, "Even if you have doubts, if you call on the Buddha's name you will be reborn in paradise." That too is holy.¹⁸

40. In the province of Inaba there was a lay-monk of some sort whose daughter was said to be a beauty, and many men asked for her hand. But this girl ate nothing but chestnuts and never touched rice or any other grain, and her parents would not allow a match. "A creature as odd as that," they said, "is not fit to be seen by a husband."

Sections 41–79

41. On the fifth day of the fifth month I went to see the horse races at the Kamo Shrine. A crowd of common people had planted themselves in front of our carriage and we couldn't see, so we all got down and went up to the rail, but there was such a crush there that we couldn't get through anywhere. Just then I noticed a monk who had climbed a chinaberry tree on the other side and was perched in a fork of the branches to watch. He was clinging on, but he kept nodding off and waking up just as he was about to fall. The people watching jeered at him. "What an idiot! Fancy falling asleep without a worry in the world up on a branch as dangerous as that!" A thought came into my head and I said it straight out: "Our own deaths may come for us at any moment. Forgetting that, and spending the day watching shows, is a bigger piece of foolishness still." The people in front of me said, "That's very true. We're the bigger fools," and they all turned round and said, "Come through here, sir," and made room and called me in.

Anybody could have thought of a truth as simple as that, but coming just then, when they weren't expecting it, it must have struck home. People are not trees or stones, and there are times when something will touch them.

42. A son of the Karahashi Captain, a man named Bishop Gyōga, was a monk who taught the doctrines of the Shingon school. He suffered from a disease that made the blood rush to his head, and as he got older his nose became blocked until he could hardly breathe. He tried every kind of treatment, but it grew worse, until his eyes, eyebrows and forehead were all swollen and puffed up over his face so that he could not see. He looked like the swollen mask of the Ni-no-mai, the comic second dance of court music, and in the end his face became simply a frightening demon's face, with his eyes up on the top of his head and his nose where his forehead had been. After that he shut himself away and would not be seen even by the people of his own temple, and after many years of this he grew worse still and died. There are diseases like that, it seems.¹⁹

43. Toward the end of spring, under a calm and lovely sky, I passed a house of some quality, with old trees deep in its grounds, and fallen, wilting blossoms in the garden that were too lovely to pass by. I went in to look. The shutters along the south front were all down and the place looked lonely, but on the east side a double door stood open just a little, and through a tear in the blind I could see a handsome young man of about twenty. He was sitting at his ease, but there was something fine and composed about him, and he had a book spread open on the desk and was reading. I would like to find out who he was.

44. From behind a rough plaited bamboo door came a very young man. In the moonlight I couldn't make out the colors, but he wore a glossy hunting cloak over full trousers of some dark shade and looked like someone of very good family. With one small boy for company, he went off along a narrow path far out across the rice fields, getting soaked by the dew on the rice leaves, and as he walked he played his flute, exquisitely, just for his own pleasure. I thought there was no one out here to appreciate it, and I wanted to see where he was going, so I followed him at a distance. He stopped playing and went in through the great gate of a place at the foot of the mountains. A carriage stood there with its shafts propped on the stand, which caught my eye more than it would have in the capital, and I asked a servant about it. "Prince So-and-so is staying here just now. I think there are Buddhist services." Monks were gathering at the chapel. The scent of incense burned in hidden places, carried on the chilly night wind, went straight to my heart. The ladies going along the gallery from the main house to the chapel had perfumed their clothes so that a fragrance would linger after them in the breeze, as careful as if they weren't in a mountain village where no one would see. The autumn fields, overgrown just as they pleased, were drowned in more dew than they could hold, the insects sounded as if they had some grievance to complain of, and the garden stream murmured peacefully. The clouds seemed to move faster here than they do over the capital, and the moon kept coming out and going in so that you could never tell which it would be.

45. The elder brother of Lord Kinyo of the Second Rank was the Archbishop Ryōgaku, a man with a dreadful temper. There was a big hackberry tree beside his quarters, and people called him the Hackberry Archbishop. "I won't have a name like that," he said, and had the tree cut down. The stump was still there, so people called him the Stump Archbishop. In a greater rage than ever, he had the stump dug up and thrown away, and that left a big ditch, so people called him the Ditch Archbishop.

46. Near Yanagiwara there was a monk known as the Burglary Hōin, Hōin being the highest rank of the Buddhist clergy. He got the name, they say, because he had been robbed by burglars so many times.

47. A man on his way to the Kiyomizu Temple fell in with an old nun, and as she walked along she kept muttering, "Kusame, kusame," the old charm said over someone who has sneezed. "What is it you keep saying like that, Reverend Nun?" he asked, but she didn't answer and went on saying it. When he had asked her several times, she grew annoyed. "Oh, really! They say that when someone sneezes and you don't say the charm, he'll die. The young lord I nursed is a page on Mount Hiei now, and I thought he might be sneezing this very minute, so I'm saying it for him!" That was a rare devotion.

48. Lord Mitsuchika was serving as the officer in charge of the Lectures on the Sutra of Golden Light when the Retired Emperor called him into his presence and had a meal from his own table brought for him to eat. When he had finished, Mitsuchika pushed the tray with his leftovers in under the blind, and withdrew. "Ugh, how filthy! Whom does he expect to clear it away?" said the ladies-in-waiting. But the Retired Emperor praised him again and again: "That is how a man who knows the precedents behaves. It was very correct."²⁰

49. Don't wait until you are old to start practicing the Way. "The old graves are mostly of the young." Only when we fall ill without warning and are about to leave this world all at once do we understand for the first time how wrongly we have spent our lives. And the wrong is nothing other than this: we took our time over what we should have done at once, and hurried through what we should have taken our time over, and now we regret the past. What use is regret then? A man should hold fast in his heart the knowledge that impermanence is closing in on him, and never forget it for a moment. Then the dirt of this world would surely grow thinner, and his will to follow the way of the Buddha grow more earnest.

The Ten Reasons for Rebirth in Paradise, written by the Venerable Yōkan of the Zenrin-ji, tells of a holy man long ago who, whenever people came to talk to him about some important matter, his own or theirs, would answer, "I have a matter of great urgency, and it is already pressing on me morning and night." Then he would stop his ears and call on the Buddha's name, and in the end he was reborn in paradise. A holy man called Shinkai was so conscious of how brief this world is that he never even sat down properly at his ease, but always stayed crouched on his heels.

50. In the Ōchō years, around 1311, word went round that someone had brought a woman who had turned into a demon up to the capital from Ise Province, and for twenty days or so, every day, the people of Kyoto and Shirakawa went rushing about trying to see the demon. "Yesterday she went to the Saionji mansion." "Today she's going to the Retired Emperor's palace." "She's at such and such a place right now." Nobody said he had actually seen her, and nobody said it was a lie. High and low, people talked of nothing but the demon.

About that time I was on my way from the Eastern Hills toward Agui, and everyone above Shijō was running north, shouting, "There's a demon at Ichijō and Muromachi!" I looked from near Imadegawa, and around the Retired Emperor's viewing stands the crowd was so thick that it was impossible to get through. It looked as if there might be something in it after all, and I sent someone to see, but nobody he asked had actually met with the demon. The commotion went on until dark, and in the end fighting broke out and some shocking things happened. Around that time a lot of people fell ill for two or three days, and some said that this was what the rumor of the demon had been a sign of.

51. The Retired Emperor wanted to draw water from the Ōi River into the pond at the Kameyama palace, and he ordered the people of Ōi to make a water wheel. He paid them a great deal of money, and they spent several days building it and set it up, but it hardly turned at all. They tried to fix it this way and that, and it never turned, and it just stood there doing nothing. Then he sent for the villagers of Uji and had them build one. They put it together with no trouble at all, and it turned just as it should and scooped the water up beautifully. In every field, someone who really knows his business is a thing to be treasured.

52. At Ninna-ji there was a monk who had never once gone to worship at the Iwashimizu Shrine, though he was getting old. It bothered him, and one day he made up his mind and went, all on his own, on foot. He worshiped at the Gokuraku-ji temple and the Kōra shrine at the foot of the hill, decided that was all there was to it, and came home. Then he said to one of the other monks, "I've done what I've been meaning to do all these years. It was even holier than I'd heard. But I wonder what all the other pilgrims were doing, climbing up the mountain. I wanted to see, but I thought, worshiping the god is what I came for, so I didn't go up the mountain." Even in little things, it's good to have someone to show you the way.²¹

53. This is another story about a monk of Ninna-ji. They were having a party to say goodbye to a boy who was about to become a monk, and everyone was enjoying himself, and this monk got drunk and carried away and grabbed a three-legged pot that was lying nearby and put it on his head. It was a tight fit, but he squashed his nose flat, pushed his face in, and got up and danced, and the whole company was enormously entertained. After dancing for a while he tried to pull it off, and it would not come off at all. The party went flat, and nobody knew what to do. Whatever they tried, the skin round his neck tore and bled, and his head swelled up and up until he could hardly breathe. They tried to smash the pot, but it wouldn't break easily, and the ringing in his head was more than he could bear. That was no good either. At their wits' end, they threw a light robe over the three legs, which stuck out like horns, and led him by the hand, leaning on a stick, to a doctor in the capital. All along the way people stared at him in amazement.

What a strange sight it must have been when they went in and he sat there facing the doctor. When he spoke, his voice boomed and echoed inside the pot and nobody could make out a word. "There is nothing about a case like this in the books, and no teaching handed down," the doctor said, so they went back to Ninna-ji. His friends and his old mother gathered at his bedside and wept and grieved, though he could hardly have heard them. Then somebody said, "He may lose his ears and his nose, but surely he can keep his life. Just pull as hard as you can." They stuffed straw all round his neck to keep the metal off, and pulled hard enough to tear his head off, and the pot came off, though it took his ears and nose with it, leaving holes. He escaped with his life, barely, and was ill for a long time afterward.

54. There was a lovely boy at the Omuro palace of Ninna-ji, and some monks there put their heads together to think up a way of luring him out to play. They got some clever monks who could sing and entertain to join in, and they carefully prepared a fancy picnic in compartmented boxes, packed it in a sort of chest, buried it in a likely spot on the hill of Narabi-ga-oka, and scattered red maple leaves over it so that no one would guess. Then they went to the palace and coaxed the boy out. They were all delighted, and they wandered about here and there and finally sat down in a row on the carpet of moss at the place. "We're quite worn out. Ah, if only someone would warm some wine over a fire of red leaves! You monks who have holy powers, try a prayer and see what happens." With that they turned toward the tree where they had buried the picnic, rubbed their rosaries, made the magic hand signs with great ceremony and carried on in the most solemn fashion, and then they brushed away the leaves. There was nothing there at all. Perhaps they had the wrong place, they thought, and they dug everywhere and searched the whole hill, but it was gone. Someone had watched them bury it and stolen it while they were at the palace. The monks were speechless, and then they quarreled with one another in the ugliest way and went home in a temper. When you try too hard to be amusing, it always falls flat.²²

55. "A house should be built with the summer in mind. In winter you can live anywhere, but a house that is badly made for hot weather is unbearable. Deep water doesn't look cool; a shallow running stream is far cooler. When you want to look at something small, a room with sliding doors is lighter than one with lattice shutters. A high ceiling makes a room cold in winter and the lamps dim. And extra rooms built with no particular use in mind are pleasant to look at and come in handy for all sorts of things." That was what some people agreed among themselves when they were discussing it.

56. When you meet someone after a long time apart, it's tiresome if he tells you every single thing that has happened to him, on and on, leaving nothing out. Even with someone you've always been close to, isn't there a little reserve when you see each other after a long while? Lesser people, if they've just stepped out of the house for a moment, will come back and tell you all about it as if it were the most amusing thing, without stopping for breath. When a person of quality tells a story, he speaks to one person, even if there are many there, and the others listen of their own accord. An ill-bred man pushes himself forward among the whole crowd, addressing nobody in particular, and tells it as if he were acting it out, and everyone laughs and shouts together, which is very vulgar. Whether a man is only mildly amused when something funny is said, or laughs heartily at something that isn't funny: that is how you can judge his breeding. When people are discussing whether someone is good-looking or not, or a learned man's learning, it's dismal when somebody drags himself into it.

57. When someone tells you a story about a poem, and the poem turns out to be a bad one, it's a letdown. Anyone who knows a little about poetry would never tell it as if it were wonderful. It's always embarrassing and painful to listen to someone talking about a field he knows nothing about.

58. "If you have a true heart for the Way, it doesn't matter where you live. Even staying at home and mixing with people, why should it be hard to work for the life to come?" Whoever says that knows nothing about the life to come. If you truly saw how fleeting this world is and were set on escaping the cycle of birth and death, what pleasure could you take in serving a master morning and night, and how could you put any heart into looking after a household? The mind moves as circumstances pull it, and unless you are in a quiet place the Way is hard to practice.

We are not the men the people of old were, and even if we go off into the mountains and forests, we cannot live there without some means of keeping off hunger and sheltering from the storms, and now and then, when the chance comes, we may do things that look a little like hankering after the world. But it would be quite wrong to say, "Then there was no point in turning his back on the world. If that's how it is, why did he give it up?" A man who has once entered the Way, even if he still has some worldly wishes, is nothing like the powerful, with all their greed. A paper quilt, a hemp robe, a bowl of rice, a soup of weeds: what does any of that cost anyone? What he asks for is easily had, and his heart is soon content. He is ashamed to fall short of the robes he wears, and so, whatever else may be said, he stays clear of evil and comes near to good far more often than not. As proof that you were born a human being, you should try, by whatever means, to leave the world. To give yourself to greed alone and never turn toward enlightenment is surely no different from being any one of the beasts.

59. Whoever means to take up the great matter of his salvation should drop everything, however pressing and however dear to his heart, without waiting to finish any of it. If you think, "Just let me finish this first," "While I'm at it, I may as well settle that," "People will laugh at me if I leave such and such undone, so let me put it in order and make sure nothing goes wrong later," "I've waited all these years, it won't take long to see this through," "I mustn't leave things in a mess," then the things you can't leave will only pile up and up, there will be no end to them, and the day of your decision will never come. As far as I can see, most people with any heart at all spend their whole lives making plans like these.

When a fire breaks out nearby, does anyone running away say, "Just a moment"? To save his life a man forgets his shame, abandons his possessions, and runs for it. Will your life wait for you? Impermanence comes faster than flood or fire, and there's no escaping it. When it does, can you refuse to give up your aged parents, your little children, your master's favor and your friends' affection, because they are hard to leave?

60. At the Shinjō-in of Ninna-ji there was a Bishop named Jōshin, a man of great learning. He was very fond of taro roots and ate them in great quantities. Even when he was lecturing on the scriptures he would have them heaped up in a big bowl beside his knee, and he would eat them as he read. Whenever he was ill he would shut himself up for a week or two for treatment, choose the best taro roots he could find, and eat even more of them than usual, and that cured him of every disease. He never gave them to anybody else. He ate them all himself.

He was extremely poor, and when his teacher died he left him two hundred strings of cash and his temple quarters. The Bishop sold the quarters for a hundred strings, set aside the whole thirty thousand hiki, three hundred strings, as his taro money, and left it with someone in the capital. He had it sent to him ten strings at a time, so that he was never short of taro roots, and since he spent it on nothing else, the whole sum went on taro. "To come by three hundred strings when he was so poor, and use it like that! He really is a remarkable man of the spirit," people said.

This Bishop once took one look at a certain monk and gave him the name "Shiro-ururi." Someone asked him, "What's a shiro-ururi?" "I don't know what it is myself," he said. "If there were such a thing, it would look like that monk's face."

The Bishop was good-looking, strong, a great eater, a fine calligrapher, a scholar and a speaker better than anyone, and he was the light of his school, so the whole temple thought highly of him. But he was an eccentric who made light of the world. He did everything his own way and hardly ever went along with anyone else. When he was invited to an official occasion and sat down to the banquet, he wouldn't wait for everybody to be served. As soon as his own tray was set before him he would start eating by himself, and when he wanted to leave, he would get up on his own and go. He didn't keep to the set hours for meals like everyone else, but ate when he felt like it, in the middle of the night or at dawn. When he was sleepy he would shut himself up even in the daytime and wouldn't listen to anyone, however important the matter. When he was wide awake he would go for nights on end without sleeping, and wander about humming to himself with his mind serene. He was not at all like ordinary people, and yet nobody disliked him and he was allowed to do as he pleased. Perhaps it was because his virtue was so great.²³

61. Dropping a rice steamer when an Empress is giving birth is not a fixed part of the ceremony. It's a charm used when the afterbirth is slow to come. If it isn't slow, there's no need. The custom started among the common people and has no real authority behind it. The steamer is fetched from the village of Ōhara. In an old painting in one of the treasure houses there is a picture of a humble woman giving birth, with a rice steamer being dropped.²⁴

62. When Princess Ensei-mon'in was a little girl, she sent a poem to the Retired Emperor, her father, by someone who was going to see him:

	A double mountain,
	a straight stroke,
	and two crooked snakes:
	that is how
	I think of you.

She meant that she missed him.²⁵

63. The priest who performs the Rite of the Latter Seven Days at New Year has taken to gathering a guard of warriors around him. He was robbed once, some time ago, and ever since then the night watch has become this grand affair. The fortunes of the whole year are said to show themselves in the way things go during this rite, and to bring in soldiers is not a peaceful sign.²⁶

64. "The carriage with the five cords is not for this or that particular person. A man rides in it once he reaches the highest rank his family can hope for," someone told me.

65. "Court caps these days are much taller than they used to be," someone told me. People who own an old cap box have to add an extra piece to the rim to use it now.

66. The Okamoto Regent once told his falconer, Shimotsuke no Takekatsu, to tie a brace of pheasants to a branch of red plum in full bloom and bring it to him as a gift. "I don't know how to tie birds to blossoms," Takekatsu said, "and I've never heard of tying two to one branch." The Regent asked the kitchen staff and had other people asked as well, and then said to Takekatsu, "Very well, then. Tie it the way you think best, and bring it." Takekatsu tied one pheasant to a plum branch with no flowers on it and brought it.

This is what Takekatsu told me: "You tie the bird to a branch of brushwood or a branch of plum, either in bud or with the blossoms already fallen. You can also use a five-needled pine. The branch should be seven feet long, or six, and the end is cut with a slanting stroke and a half-inch counterstroke. The bird is tied at the middle of the branch. There is one branch to tie it to and another for its feet to rest on. You tie it in two places with a length of unsplit tsuzura vine. The ends of the vine are cut to the length of the bird's striking feathers and bent like an ox's horns. On the morning of the first snow you carry the branch over your shoulder and walk in with due ceremony through the middle gate. You go along the stepping stones under the eaves so as not to leave footprints in the snow, pluck out a few of the down feathers at the root of the tail and scatter them, and lean the branch against the railing of the main hall. If you are given a reward, you put it over your shoulder, bow, and withdraw. Even if it is the first snow, you don't go if it isn't deep enough to cover the tips of your shoes. You scatter the down feathers because a hawk takes its prey by the soft part of the back, and it shows that the bird was caught by His Lordship's own hawk."

I wonder why birds aren't tied to blossoms. In The Tales of Ise there is a story of a man who, around the ninth month, tied a pheasant to an artificial plum branch and sent it with the poem, "The blossoms I break for you know no season." Perhaps artificial flowers are all right.

67. The Iwamoto and Hashimoto shrines at Kamo are dedicated to Narihira and Sanekata, but people are always mixing them up. One year when I went there I stopped an old shrine priest who was passing and asked him about it. "Sanekata is the one whose reflection was seen in the stream where the pilgrims wash their hands, so I'd think Hashimoto, being nearer the water, would be his. And the Archbishop of Yoshimizu wrote the poem

	The gentle poet
	of long ago,
	who loved the moon
	and gazed at the blossoms,
	is here: Ariwara.

about the Iwamoto shrine, I've always been told. But you would know more about these things than people like us, sir." He said it so very courteously that I was much impressed.

A lady called Konoe, who served the Imadegawa Empress and has many poems in the anthologies, used to compose a hundred poems at a time when she was young, write them out in water before these two shrines, and offer them there. She had a fine reputation, and many of her poems are on people's lips. She also wrote excellent Chinese verse and prefaces to collections of poems.²⁷

68. In Kyushu there was a certain man, a constable or something of the sort, who believed radishes were the finest medicine for everything, and for years he had eaten two of them grilled every morning. One day enemies chose a moment when there was nobody in his fort, and attacked and surrounded it. Two soldiers came out from inside the fort, fought without any thought for their lives, and drove the attackers off. He was astonished. "I've never seen you here before, and yet you fought for me like this. Who are you?" he asked. "We are the radishes you have trusted all these years and eaten every morning," they said, and vanished. When your faith runs deep, it seems, it can bring you blessings like that.

69. The holy man of Mount Shosha had chanted the Lotus Sutra so many times that he had gained the purity of all six senses. Once, when he stopped at a traveler's hut, he heard the beans bubbling in the pot over a fire of bean pods, and he heard them say, "You, of all people, who are so close to us! How cruel of you to boil us and put us through such misery!" And the bean pods crackling in the fire seemed to say, "Do you think we do it of our own free will? Burning is terrible to bear, but we can't help it. Don't blame us like that."²⁸

70. At the concert held in the Hall of Cool Summer during the Gen'ō years, around 1320, just after the famous lute Genjō had been lost, the Kikutei Minister was to play the lute called Bokuba. When he took his seat he first felt the frets, and one of them came off. He happened to have some rice glue in the fold of his robe, and he stuck it back on, and by the time the offerings were brought to the gods it had dried well and there was no trouble. Someone among the spectators, a woman with her robe drawn over her head, had come up to the lute beforehand, pried the fret loose, and put it back as it was, they say. What grudge she had against him, nobody knows.

71. As soon as you hear someone's name, you seem to know what he will look like, but when you actually see him, nobody ever has the face you expected. When I hear an old story, I imagine it happened in such and such a part of some house I know today, and I picture its people as people I know now. Does everyone feel the same? And sometimes, on some occasion or other, what someone is saying, or what I can see, or what is in my own mind, seems to have happened before, at some time I can't remember, though I'm sure it did. Am I the only one who feels that?

72. Things that look vulgar: too many furnishings in the room where a man sits; too many brushes beside the inkstone; too many buddhas in the family chapel; too many stones and plants in the garden; too many children and grandchildren in the house; too many words when one meets people; too many good works listed in a prayer for the dead. Things that don't look bad in quantity: books on a book cart, and rubbish on a rubbish heap.

73. Most of what people tell one another is lies, perhaps because the truth is dull. People make things out to be more than they were, and when years have passed and the places are far away, they tell them however they like, and once a thing is written down it is settled. Fools who know nothing about a craft will speak of its masters as if they were gods, but people who know the craft don't believe a word of it. Everything is different when you see it from what it was when you only heard of it.

When a man rattles on with whatever comes into his head, without caring that the truth is coming out even as he speaks, you can tell at once that he's talking nonsense. When someone tells a story he doesn't really believe himself, just as it was told to him, with a smug twitch of the nose, the lie isn't his. But the lie that is told plausibly, with a vague spot here and there, as if the teller weren't quite sure, and yet with every detail fitting neatly together, is a frightening thing. A lie that makes us look good we don't argue with much. With a lie everybody is enjoying, there's no point in one person saying it didn't happen that way, so he listens in silence, and then he's even called on as a witness, and it's more settled than ever. One way or another, the world is full of lies.

If you take things as being just what usually happens, nothing out of the ordinary, you will never go wrong. The stories of the common people are full of astonishing things. A person of quality does not tell tales of marvels. All the same, the miracles of the buddhas and gods and the lives of the holy ones who came into the world to save us should not be disbelieved altogether. To believe these as wholeheartedly as people believe the world's lies is foolish, and it's no use saying, "That can't possibly be true." On the whole, it's best to treat these things as true, without believing them blindly, and without doubting or mocking them either.

74. People swarm together like ants, hurrying east and west and running north and south. Some are high and some low, some old and some young. They have places to go and homes to come back to. They go to bed at night and get up in the morning. And what is it all for? They hanker after life and chase after profit without stopping. They take care of themselves, but what are they waiting for? All that is sure to come is old age and death. They come fast, and do not stop for a moment. While we wait for them, what pleasure can there be? The deluded are not afraid of them, because they are drowned in fame and profit and never look at how near the end of the road is. Fools, on the other hand, grieve over them, because they want everything to last forever and do not understand that all things change.

75. I wonder what goes on in the minds of people who complain of having nothing to do. It's best to have nothing to distract you and simply be alone. If you go along with the world, your mind is stolen by the dust outside it and easily led astray. If you mix with people, your words follow what others want to hear, and are not what is in your heart at all. You joke with people and quarrel over things, now resentful, now pleased, and nothing stays settled. Calculations rise up wildly, and there is no end to gain and loss. We are drunk on top of our delusion, and dreaming inside our drunkenness. We rush about busily, dazed and forgetful, every one of us. Even if you don't yet know the true Way, get free of these ties, live quietly, keep out of affairs and let your heart be at peace, and you might at least be said to enjoy yourself for a while. "Give up the ties of your livelihood, your social dealings, your arts and your studies," says the Great Calming and Contemplation.²⁹

76. When some family at the height of its fame and fortune is having a time of grief or celebration, and crowds of people come calling, it seems a pity to see a holy man among them, sending in his name and hanging about at the door. Even if he has good reason, a monk should keep his distance from people.

77. When there's some piece of gossip everybody is talking about, I can't stand it when a person who has no business getting involved knows all the inside details, tells everyone about it, and asks questions. Holy men from out-of-the-way places, especially, seem to look into other people's affairs as if they were their own, and spread the news so freely that you wonder how they ever found out so much.

78. Nor can I stand people who take up the latest fashions and go about spreading them. I admire someone who still hasn't heard of a thing even after the world has grown tired of it. When a newcomer is present, some people who share a pet phrase or a name for something will trade bits of it, catch each other's eye and laugh, and leave the newcomer feeling he doesn't understand. Ill-bred people who don't know how to behave in company always do it.

79. It is best not to look as if you know too much about anything. A person of quality doesn't talk knowingly about something just because he knows it. It's the man who has just arrived from the backwoods who answers as if he were an expert in every subject. Some of them do know enough to put you to shame, but the way they so obviously admire themselves is boorish. In a subject you really understand, the fine thing is to be slow to speak, and say nothing unless you're asked.

Sections 80–120

80. Everybody loves best the thing he is least suited for. Monks go in for the arts of war, while the rough warriors of the east, who don't know how to draw a bow, put on airs of understanding the Buddha's teaching and take up linked verse and music. People will think less of them for this than they would for being bad at their own trade.

It isn't only monks. Among the high nobles, the courtiers and those above them, a great many people are fond of soldiering. Even if a man fights a hundred battles and wins all hundred, his name for courage is not yet settled. That is because, when luck is with him and he crushes his enemies, anybody would call him brave. Only when his men are gone and his arrows spent, and he still will not surrender to the enemy, but goes calmly to his death, does a warrior's name become clear. As long as he is alive, no one should boast of his skill in arms. Fighting is far from what makes us human and close to the ways of birds and beasts, and unless you are born into a warrior house, there is no good in being fond of it.³⁰

81. When the paintings or the writing on a folding screen or a sliding door are done in a vulgar hand, the thing that looks bad is less the work itself than the taste of the master of the house. Even a man's possessions can make you think less of him. I don't mean that he ought to own only fine things. I mean things that have been made ugly and graceless so that they won't break, or loaded with useless extras so as to look novel, or fussed over until they are a nuisance. The best things look a little old-fashioned, aren't showy, cost little, and are good in themselves.

82. Someone said, "The trouble with silk gauze covers is that they wear out so fast." And the poet Ton'a answered, "Gauze is at its best once the top and bottom edges have frayed, and a mother-of-pearl roller is best after the shell has fallen out." I thought much more of him for that. People think it looks bad when the volumes of a set of books don't match, but I was impressed when Bishop Kōyū said, "Making a point of matching everything up into a full set is what clumsy people do. Things are better with a piece missing." In all things, it is bad to have everything perfectly complete. To leave something unfinished and simply let it lie is interesting, and makes for a longer life. "Even when they build the palace," someone told me, "they always leave some part unfinished." And in the writings of the wise men of the past, Buddhist and Confucian alike, there are always chapters and sections missing.

83. The Chikurin-in Minister of the Left, now a lay-monk, could have been promoted to Chancellor with no difficulty at all, but he said, "There's nothing new in that. I'll stop at Minister of the Left," and took vows. The Tōin Minister of the Left admired this so much that he too gave up any hope of becoming Chancellor. There is a saying about "the dragon that has flown too high, and regrets it." The moon wanes when it is full, and things decline when they reach their height. In everything, when you have come as far as you can go, you are close to ruin.³¹

84. When someone heard how the great pilgrim Faxian, having gone to India, grieved when he saw a fan from his homeland, and when he lay ill longed for Chinese food, he said, "Fancy a man like that showing such weakness in a foreign country!" But Bishop Kōyū said, "What a gentle and feeling man he was!" That was not at all what you'd expect a monk to say, and I liked him for it.³²

85. People's hearts are not honest, and so there is falsehood in them. But surely there are some people who are honest by nature. It is the way of the world that a man who is not honest himself will envy someone else's goodness when he sees it. A complete fool, coming across a good man, will hate him. "He refuses a small gain so as to get a big one," he sneers. "He's a fraud putting on a show to make a name for himself." Because the good man's heart is so unlike his own, he mocks him like this, and that tells you what he is. The nature of a man as foolish as this cannot be changed. He could not even refuse a small gain as a pretense.

Never imitate a fool, even for a moment. If you run down the avenue pretending to be a madman, you are a madman. If you kill a man pretending to be a villain, you are a villain. A horse that copies a thoroughbred is of the thoroughbred's kind, and a man who copies the sage-king Shun is Shun's disciple. Someone who imitates the wise, even as a pretense, may be called wise.

86. The Middle Counselor Koretsugu was a man of great gifts for poetry. He kept a strict Buddhist diet all his life and chanted the sutras, and he shared his lodging with Archbishop En'i, a Temple Monk, that is, a monk of the Mii-dera temple. When Mii-dera burned down in the Bunpō years, around 1319, he said to the Archbishop, "We used to call you a Temple Monk, but now that there's no temple, from now on we'll just call you a monk." That was a very clever thing to say.³³

87. You should be careful about giving wine to servants. A man who lived in Uji was on very friendly terms with his brother-in-law, a refined monk called Gukaku-bō, who had left the world and lived in the capital. Once the man sent a horse to fetch him. "It's a long way. Let the groom have a drink before we start," Gukaku-bō said, and brought out some wine. The groom took cup after cup and drank it down in great gulps. He had a sword at his side and looked so capable that Gukaku-bō felt quite safe with him, and they set off together.

Near Kohata they met some monks from Nara with a large band of soldiers. The groom planted himself in front of them. "This is suspicious, in the mountains after dark! Halt!" he said, and drew his sword. They all drew their swords too, and fitted arrows to their bows, but Gukaku-bō rubbed his hands together and begged, "He's drunk and out of his senses. Please be kind enough to forgive him." They all jeered and went on their way.

Then the groom turned on Gukaku-bō. "Your Reverence has done me a bad turn. I'm not drunk at all. I was about to win myself a name, and you've made me draw my sword for nothing!" And in his fury he hacked him down. Then he started shouting, "Bandits! Bandits!" When the villagers came running out, he cried, "I'm the bandit!" and went for them, slashing all around. A crowd of them wounded him, knocked him down and tied him up. The horse ran, covered in blood, into the house on the main street of Uji. The master was horrified and sent a whole crowd of men running, and they found Gukaku-bō lying moaning at a place called Kuchinashihara and carried him home. He escaped with his life, barely, but his hip was so badly cut that he was crippled.

88. A man owned a copy of the Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems for Singing that he said was in the hand of Ono no Tōfū. Somebody said to him, "I'm sure the tradition in your family is not without foundation, but the collection was compiled by the Shijō Major Counselor, and for Tōfū to have copied it the dates would seem to be a little wrong. I do wonder." "That's exactly why it's so rare," the owner said, and treasured it more than ever.³⁴

89. "Deep in the mountains there's a thing called a nekomata that eats people," someone said. "Not only in the mountains," someone else said. "Around here too, a cat that lives long enough turns into a nekomata and carries people off." A monk called So-and-so Amidabutsu, who wrote linked verse and lived near the Gyōgan-ji temple, heard this and thought, "Someone who goes about on his own should be careful."

Just then, as it happened, he had been composing linked verse somewhere until late at night, and was going home all alone, when at the edge of a stream there it was, the nekomata he had heard about, darting straight at his feet. It leaped up on him and went for his throat. He was frightened out of his wits and had no strength to fight it off. His legs gave way and he tumbled into the stream, screaming, "Help! A nekomata! Help, help!" People came running out of the houses with torches, and found that it was a monk they knew from the neighborhood. "Whatever's the matter?" they said, and lifted him out of the stream. The prizes he had won at the linked verse, a fan and a little box and so on, which he had been carrying in the front of his robe, had all gone into the water. He crept into his house, looking as if he'd had a narrow escape.

It was his own dog, they say, that knew its master even in the dark and had jumped up to greet him.³⁵

90. Otozuru-maru, a page who served the Major Counselor Hōin, made friends with someone called Lord Yasura and used to visit him all the time. One day, when he came back from going out, the Hōin asked, "Where have you been?" "I've been to see Lord Yasura." "And this Lord Yasura, is he a layman or a monk?" Otozuru-maru folded his hands in his sleeves and said, "I'm not sure, sir. I didn't see his head." Why would his head be the one thing he didn't see?

91. The Red Tongue days are not mentioned in the art of divination. The people of old didn't avoid them. I wonder who began to make so much of them, and when. People say that nothing done on such a day will come to a good end, that whatever is said or done on it will fail, whatever is got will be lost, and whatever is planned will not come off. That is foolish. If you counted up the things begun on lucky days that never came to a good end, there would be just as many.

The reason is that in this world of impermanence and change, what we think exists does not last, and what has a beginning has no end. Our aims go unfulfilled, but our wishes never stop. The human heart is never settled. All things are illusions. What stays put for even a moment? People who fear these days don't understand that. It is said that evil done on a lucky day always brings bad luck, and good done on an unlucky day always brings good luck. Luck depends on the person, not the day.³⁶

92. A man learning archery faced the target holding a pair of arrows. His teacher said, "A beginner should never hold two arrows. He'll count on the second and be careless with the first. Every time, with no thought of hitting or missing, think: this one arrow decides it." With only two arrows, and in front of his teacher, would anyone think of being careless with one? He doesn't know himself that he is slacking, but his teacher knows.

This warning applies to everything. A man studying the Way thinks in the evening that there will be a morning, and in the morning that there will be an evening, and means to work at it harder later. How much less will he notice slackness within a single instant! How very hard it is to do a thing now, at this moment, at once.

93. "A man was selling an ox. The buyer said he would pay for it and take it the next day. In the night, the ox died. The buyer gained and the seller lost," someone said. A man who was there heard this and said, "The owner of the ox did suffer a loss, but he also made a great gain. The reason is this. Living creatures don't know how near death is. That was true of the ox, and it is just as true of people. Unexpectedly, the ox died; unexpectedly, the owner lived. One day of life is worth more than ten thousand pieces of gold, and the price of an ox is lighter than a goose feather. A man who gets ten thousand pieces of gold and loses one copper coin can't be said to have lost." The others all jeered. "By that argument everybody gains, not just the owner of the ox."

He went on. "Then if people hate death, they should love life. Shouldn't we enjoy the happiness of being alive every day? Fools forget this pleasure and go to great trouble looking for other pleasures. They forget this treasure and risk everything greedily chasing other treasures, and they are never satisfied. If you don't enjoy life while you have it, and then fear death when it comes, that doesn't make sense. People don't enjoy life because they don't fear death. It isn't that they don't fear it. They forget how near it is. And if someone could say he was untouched by either life or death, then he could be said to have found the true principle." At this they laughed at him more than ever.

94. When the Tokiwai Chancellor was going to the palace, one of the North Guards of the Retired Emperor met him, carrying a letter from the Emperor, and got down from his horse. The Chancellor later said to the Retired Emperor, "A North Guard named So-and-so dismounted while he was carrying an imperial letter. How can a man like that serve Your Majesty?" And the guard was dismissed. A man carrying an imperial letter should hold it up and show it while he stays on his horse. He should not dismount, they say.³⁷

95. I asked an expert in court precedent, "When you attach a cord to the cut-out handle of a box, which side should it go on?" "There are two schools of thought," he said, "one for the roller side and one for the cover side, so either is acceptable. On a letter box it usually goes on the right. On a toiletry box it is quite usual to put it on the roller side."³⁸

96. There is a plant called the menamomi. If you crush it and put it on someone bitten by a viper, he will recover at once, they say. It's a plant worth knowing by sight.

97. Things that attach themselves to something and use it up and ruin it are past counting. The body has its lice. The house has its rats. The country has its rebels. The small man has his wealth. The gentleman has his benevolence and justice. The monk has the Buddha's Law.

98. I read a book called Fragrant Words, the Ichigon Hōdan, in which someone had written down the words of holy men of great virtue, and these are the ones that struck a chord with me:

When you are wondering whether to do a thing or not, it's generally better not to.

A man who thinks of the life to come should not own so much as a crock of pickled bran. Even in the sutras he keeps by him and the image he prays to, it is pointless to have fine things.

The best way for a man who has left the world to live is to arrange things so that he never misses what he lacks.

The senior monk should become a junior, the wise man a fool, the rich man poor, the man of talent a man of no talent.

To aspire to the way of the Buddha means nothing special. The first rule is to have time on your hands and not to care about worldly things.

There were others, but I don't remember them.

99. The Horikawa Chancellor was a handsome, cheerful man, and very fond of extravagance in everything. When he had his son Lord Mototoshi made Chief of the Police Commission and was handling the business of the office, he said the chests in the office building were an eyesore and ordered handsome new ones to be made. But the officials who knew the old usages said, "These chests have been handed down from the earliest times. No one knows where they came from, and they are several hundred years old. With heirlooms of the state that have come down through the generations, it is their very age and shabbiness that makes them a standard. They cannot lightly be replaced." And the matter was dropped.

100. Once, when the Koga Chancellor asked for water in the courtiers' hall, the steward brought it in an earthenware cup. "Bring a bentwood dipper," he said, and drank out of that.

101. A certain nobleman was presiding at the banquet held for the appointment of a minister, and he went up into the hall without taking the edict of appointment from the secretary who was holding it. It was a frightful breach of etiquette, but he couldn't very well go back for it, and he didn't know what to do. Then Yasutsuna, a clerk of the Sixth Rank, persuaded one of the ladies, who had her robe drawn over her head, to carry the edict and slip it to him quietly. That was splendid.

102. The lay-monk Mitsutada, Major Counselor and Chief of the Board of Censors, was to preside at the Demon-Chasing, and he asked the Tōin Minister of the Right about the procedure. "There's nothing for it but to take that fellow Matagorō as your teacher," the Minister said. This Matagorō was an old palace guardsman who knew all about the ceremonies.

Once, when Lord Konoe had taken his seat in the guardroom, he forgot the kneeling mat and was calling for the clerk. Matagorō, who was tending the fire, muttered under his breath, "Perhaps you should call for the kneeling mat first, sir?" It was very amusing.

103. At the Daikaku-ji palace the gentlemen in attendance were making up riddles and solving them, when the physician Tadamori came in. The Chamberlain Major Counselor Lord Kinakira made up a riddle: "What is Tadamori, who does not look like a native of our land?" "A Chinese Heiji!" someone answered, and they all laughed. Tadamori went off in a temper.³⁹

104. A lady was living in seclusion in a dilapidated house where no one ever called, shut away with nothing to do, during a time when she had to keep out of sight. A certain gentleman wanted to visit her, and he went secretly one evening when the moon was faint. The dog barked at him furiously, and a maid came out and asked, "Who is it?" He had her take his name in, and he went inside.

It looked so lonely there that he wondered how she managed to live, and it pained him. He stood for a while on the rough plank floor, and then he heard a quiet, youthful voice say, "This way, please," and he went in through a sliding door that stuck in its grooves. Inside it wasn't dreary at all. It was a charming room. A lamp burned dimly in the far corner, but he could see that the furnishings were good, and a scent hung there that had not been burned in a hurry for his visit. It was all very cozy and lived in. "Lock the gate properly. It might rain. Put His Lordship's carriage under the gateway, and his people over there," someone said. "We'll get a good night's sleep tonight, it seems," the servants whispered, and though they spoke softly, the house was so small that he could just hear them.

Then he told her in detail all that had happened lately, until the first cocks crowed in the depth of the night. They talked earnestly of everything, past and future, and now the cocks were crowing loudly, one after another, and he thought it must be getting light. But it was not a place he needed to leave in a hurry before dawn, and he lingered a little longer, until the cracks in the door went white. Then he said something she would not forget, and went out. Treetops and garden were all a fresh, new green, and it was a lovely dawn in the fourth month, at the start of summer. He remembers it still, they say, and whenever he passes that way, he looks back at the house until the big katsura tree there is out of sight.

105. In the shade on the north side of the house the snow still lay unmelted and frozen hard, and the shafts of a carriage drawn up there glittered with frost. The late moon was bright, but not unclouded. In the corridor of a lonely chapel a man who looked like no ordinary person sat on the doorsill with a woman, talking. What they were talking about I can't say, but there seemed to be no end to it. The way she bent her head and her figure looked very fine, and a wonderful scent suddenly drifted over, which was delightful. And I would have liked to hear the bits of their talk that I caught now and then.

106. When the Venerable Shōkū of Mount Kōya was on his way up to the capital, he met a woman on horseback on a narrow road. Her groom led her horse so badly that he pushed the holy man's horse into the ditch. The holy man flew into a rage and scolded him. "What outrageous violence! Of the Buddha's four kinds of disciples, the nun ranks below the monk, the layman below the nun, and the laywoman below the layman. For a laywoman like this to have a monk kicked into the ditch is an unheard-of crime!"

"What's that you're saying, sir?" the groom said. "I don't understand a word of it." The Venerable fumed more than ever. "What did you say? You untrained, unschooled oaf!" he shouted, and then, looking as if he realized he had said something unforgivable, he turned his horse round and fled. It must have been a very holy quarrel.

107. "A man who can answer straight off, and suitably, when a woman says something to him, is a rare thing," they say. In the time of Retired Emperor Kameyama, some mischievous ladies of the court used to test the young gentlemen whenever they came in by asking, "Have you heard the cuckoo yet?" A certain Major Counselor answered, "A humble fellow like me hasn't had the honor." The Horikawa Inner Minister said, "I believe I heard it at Iwakura." The ladies agreed among themselves, "Iwakura is faultless. 'A humble fellow like me' is overdoing it."

People used to say that the Jōdo-ji Former Regent spoke so well because Empress Anki-mon'in had trained him well as a child, saying that boys must be brought up so that women will not laugh at them. And the Yamashina Minister of the Left used to say, "Even when some humble serving girl looks at me, I feel very shy and take care how I behave." If there were no women in the world, nobody would bother about the fold of his collar or the set of his cap.

When you think how fine women must be, since men are so shy of them, the fact is that women are all perverse by nature. They are deeply selfish, extremely greedy, and know nothing of reason. Their hearts are quick to run off toward delusion, and they are clever with words. When you ask them something harmless, they won't answer. Just when you think they are being discreet, they come out, unasked, with the most shocking things. They lay their plans so deep and dress them up so well that you would think them cleverer than men, but they never realize that it will all come out later. Woman is a crooked and foolish creature. To want to be thought well of by obeying such a creature's whims would be a wretched business. Why, then, should anyone be shy of women? If there were a wise woman, she would be cold and forbidding too. Only when you let delusion be your master and follow it do women seem gentle and delightful.⁴⁰

108. Nobody begrudges the passing minute. Is that because they understand it well, or because they are foolish? For the benefit of the foolish and the lazy: a copper coin is a small thing, but pile them up and they will turn a poor man into a rich one. That is why a merchant guards every coin so jealously. We are not aware of each instant as it passes, but they keep moving on without stopping, and suddenly the time of death has come. A man who follows the Way should not grudge the days and months still far off. He should grudge the present moment slipping away for nothing.

If someone came and told you that you would certainly lose your life tomorrow, what would you hope for, and what would you do, before today was over? How is the day we are living now any different from that day? In the course of a day we lose a great deal of time to eating and drinking, to the privy, to sleep, to talk and to walking about, all of which can't be helped. In the little time left over we do useless things, say useless things and think useless thoughts, and we let not only the hours but the days and months slip by, and so spend our whole lives. That is the height of folly.

Xie Lingyun took down a translation of the Lotus Sutra, but his heart was always on the wind and the clouds, so Huiyuan would not let him join the White Lotus Society. A man who lacks that awareness of time, even for a moment, is the same as a dead man. If you ask why we should grudge the passing time, it is so that, with no idle thoughts within and no worldly business without, those who want to stop may stop and those who want to practice may practice.⁴¹

109. A man known as the famous tree-climber was directing someone to climb a tall tree and cut off the top branches. While the man was in what looked like real danger he said nothing at all, but when the man was coming down and had got to about the height of the eaves, he called out, "Careful, now! Mind how you come down!" I said to him, "At that height he could jump down. Why do you say it now?" "That's just the point," he said. "While he's dizzy and the branches are dangerous, he's frightened himself, so I don't need to say anything. People always make their mistakes when they get to the easy part."

He was a humble working man, but what he said agrees with the teachings of the sages. In kickball too, they say, after you've got a hard ball back into play and you think the rest is easy, that is when you are sure to drop it.

110. I asked a man who was known as a master of backgammon about the secret of his game. "Never play to win," he said. "Play not to lose. Work out which move will lose you the game fastest, and don't make that move. Take the move that will put off losing, even by a single square." That is the teaching of a man who knows his art, and the same is true of the way to govern yourself and keep a country safe.⁴²

111. "To spend your days and nights in love with go and backgammon is a worse evil, I think, than the Four Grave Sins and the Five Heinous Crimes," a certain holy man said. Those words stuck in my ear, and I think them splendid.⁴³

112. If you heard that someone was setting off for a distant province tomorrow, would you bring up something that needed to be settled at leisure? A man who is dealing with some sudden emergency, or who is in deep grief, pays no attention to anything else and doesn't ask after other people's sorrows and joys. Nobody resents his not asking, or says, "Why didn't he?" The same allowance should be made for a man who is getting on in years, or plagued by illness, and all the more for a man who has left the world.

Of all the ceremonies of human life, which one can you easily skip? If you give way to the ordinary world, which is hard to refuse, and treat every one of them as necessary, you will have more and more demands on you, your body will suffer, your mind will have no rest, and your whole life will be hemmed in by petty duties and trifles and come to an end for nothing. "The day is ending and the road is long." My life has already stumbled. It is time to let go of all my ties. I won't keep my promises, and I won't think about etiquette. Those who don't understand how I feel can call me mad, or think me out of my senses and heartless. If they speak ill of me I won't mind, and if they praise me I won't listen.⁴⁴

113. When a man past forty has amorous affairs, it can't be helped if he keeps them to himself. But when he talks about them openly, and jokes about love affairs, his own or other people's, it is unbecoming and ugly. Things that are generally unpleasant to hear and ugly to see: an old man mixing with young people and talking away in an effort to be amusing; a nobody speaking of some man of high reputation as if they were the closest of friends; a poor household fond of drinking parties, putting on a lavish show to entertain guests.

114. Once, when the Imadegawa Minister was going to Saga, at a place near the Arisugawa where there was running water, the ox-driver Saiōmaru drove the ox on, and the water it kicked up splashed right up to the front board of the carriage. Tamenori, who was riding at the back of the carriage, said, "What an extraordinary boy! Driving the ox on, in a place like this!" The Minister was displeased. "You couldn't possibly know more about driving a carriage than Saiōmaru. You're the extraordinary man," he said, and knocked Tamenori's head against the side of the carriage.

This famous Saiōmaru was a man of the Uzumasa lord's household, and drove the Emperor's own oxen. The ladies who served in the Uzumasa household were given the names Hizasachi, Kotozuchi, Hōbara and Otoushi.⁴⁵

115. At a place called Shukugawara a crowd of boroboro had gathered to chant the Nine-Fold Nembutsu, when a boroboro came in from outside and asked, "Is there by any chance a boroboro here named Iroshi-bō?" "Iroshi is here," said a voice from the crowd. "Who is asking?" "My name is Shira Bonji. I heard that my master, a man named So-and-so, was killed in the eastern provinces by a boroboro named Iroshi, and I've been looking for him so that I can meet him and settle the score." "It was good of you to come looking for me," said Iroshi. "It's true, it happened. If we meet here, we'll defile this hall of worship. Let's meet on the riverbed in front. Mind you, all of you who carry swords, don't help either side. If a lot of people get hurt, it will spoil the service." Having settled this, the two of them went out onto the riverbed and ran each other through to their hearts' content, and both of them died.

I don't think there were any boroboro in the old days. They say they began quite recently, with people called Boronji, Bonji, Kanji and the like. They look as if they had renounced the world, but they cling hard to the self. They look as if they sought the Buddha's way, but fighting is their business. They are dissolute and shameless, but I admire the way they make light of death and don't cling to life in the least, and so I have written this down as it was told to me.⁴⁶

116. When it came to naming temples, or giving names to anything else, the people of old didn't strain after effect in the least. They named things simply, just as they were. These days names sound as if somebody had thought very hard over them to show off his cleverness, which is most tiresome. It is pointless, too, to use unfamiliar characters in people's names. Always to be looking for the novel and to like unusual theories is a sure sign of a shallow mind, they say.

117. There are seven kinds of people who make bad friends. First, people of high rank and birth. Second, the young. Third, people who are strong and never ill. Fourth, people who like drink. Fifth, fierce and warlike people. Sixth, liars. Seventh, the greedy. There are three kinds of good friends. First, friends who give you things. Second, doctors. Third, wise friends.

118. On a day when you have eaten carp soup, your sidelocks won't get untidy, they say. Glue is made from carp too, so it must be sticky stuff. The carp is the only fish that may be cut up in the Emperor's presence, so it is a noble fish. Among birds, the pheasant is the finest. A pheasant or a pine mushroom may hang above the imperial kitchen without any harm, but anything else is distasteful. When the lay-monk of Kitayama saw a wild goose on the smoky shelf above the kitchen in the Empress's quarters, he went home and wrote to her at once: "I am not used to seeing creatures like that sitting on Your Majesty's shelf in their natural state. It is unseemly. It must be because there is nobody capable in attendance."⁴⁷

119. The fish they call the bonito, from the sea at Kamakura, is thought to have no equal in those parts, and these days it is served as a great delicacy. But an old man of Kamakura told me, "When we were young, that fish was never served to anyone of quality. Not even the servants would eat the head; it was cut off and thrown away." In these latter days, even things like that find their way to the tables of the great.⁴⁸

120. We could manage perfectly well without anything from China except medicines. Chinese books are so widespread in this country by now that we can copy them ourselves. It is very foolish for Chinese ships to make that difficult voyage loaded with nothing but useless things, packed in so tight there's no room to move. "Do not treasure things from far away," and "Do not prize goods that are hard to get," as it says in the books, I believe.

Sections 121–136

121. Of the animals people keep, there are horses and oxen. It is a pity to tie them up and make them suffer, but we can't do without them, so what else can we do? Dogs are better than people at keeping watch and guarding a house, so we should certainly have them. But since every house has one already, there's no need to go out of your way to get one. Other birds and beasts are no use at all. The running beast is shut in a cage and chained up, and the flying bird has its wings clipped and is put in a basket, and they never stop pining for the clouds and longing for the fields and hills. If you were in their place you would find it unbearable, and how could a person of feeling take pleasure in it? To torment living things for the pleasure of the eye is the heart of a tyrant like Jie or Zhou. When Wang Ziyou loved birds, it was because he watched them enjoying themselves in the woods and made them the companions of his wanderings. He didn't catch them and torment them. "Rare birds and strange beasts are not to be kept in the country," the old books say.⁴⁹

122. Of a man's accomplishments, the first is to understand the classics well and know the teachings of the sages. Next is handwriting: even if you don't make a specialty of it, you should practice it, for it will help with your learning. Next you should study medicine. To look after yourself and help others, and to do your duty to your lord and your parents, you can't do without it. Next come archery and riding, which are among the Six Arts, and you should certainly try your hand at them. Letters, arms and medicine: truly a man should lack none of them, and nobody who studies them can be called an idler. Next, "Food is man's heaven," and a man who knows how to prepare food well should be thought to have a great virtue. Next comes handicraft, which is useful for all sorts of things.

As for anything beyond these, "Many skills are something a gentleman is ashamed of." To be good at Chinese and Japanese verse and gifted at music belongs to the subtlest of arts, and rulers and ministers alike set great store by them, but in the present age, governing the country by these means is starting to look foolish. Gold is the finest of metals, but it can't match iron for usefulness.⁵⁰

123. A man who spends his time doing useless things may be called a fool or a man who has gone wrong. There is much that we must do, whether we like it or not, for our country and our lord, and the spare time left over after that is not much. What a man must work for whether he likes it or not is, first, food; second, clothing; and third, a place to live. The great necessities of human life come to no more than these three. To live quietly, not hungry, not cold, and out of the wind and rain, is happiness. But everyone falls ill, and once illness strikes, the misery of it is hard to bear. We mustn't forget medical care. Add medicine, then, and a man who cannot get these four things is poor. A man who lacks none of the four is rich. To seek and strive for anything beyond them is extravagance. If you are sparing in these four, who will ever be in want?

124. The monk Zehō is not inferior to anyone in the Pure Land school, but he doesn't set himself up as a scholar. He simply calls on the Buddha's name from morning to night and passes his life in peace, and that is how I would like to live.

125. When I lost someone, I invited a certain holy man to preach at the service on the forty-ninth day. His sermon was magnificent, and everyone wept. After the priest had left, the people who had heard him were all telling one another, "Today he seemed holier than ever." One man answered, "Whatever else you say, he certainly looked a lot like a Chinese lapdog." That chilled the feeling, and it was very funny. What a way to praise a preacher!

Someone once said, too, about pressing wine on people, "To drink first yourself and then try to make others drink is like trying to cut someone down with a double-edged sword. When you raise it, it cuts your own head off first, so you can't cut anybody else. If you're drunk and lying on the floor first, nobody will drink." I wonder whether he had tried cutting somebody down with a sword. It was very funny.⁵¹

126. "When someone has lost heavily at gambling and is about to stake everything he has left, you shouldn't play against him. You should know that the time has come when he will start to win, again and again. A good gambler is one who knows that moment," a man once said to me.

127. If changing a thing does no good, it is better not to change it.

128. The Major Counselor Masafusa was a clever and good man, and the Retired Emperor was thinking of making him a General of the Guards. Just then one of his attendants said, "I've just seen something shocking." "What was it?" the Retired Emperor asked. "I looked through a hole in the fence and saw Lord Masafusa cutting the legs off a live dog to feed to his hawk." He was disgusted and took against Masafusa. His manner toward him changed, and Masafusa was never promoted.

It was surprising that a man like him should keep hawks, but the story about the dog's legs was baseless. The lie wronged him; but a sovereign who could turn against a man on hearing of such a thing had a noble heart.

People who amuse themselves by killing living things, or hurting them, or making them fight, are of the same kind as the beasts that tear each other apart. If you watch the birds and beasts closely, even the smallest insects, you will see that they love their children, cling to their parents, keep their mates, are jealous, get angry, are full of desires, look after themselves and cling to their lives, and all of it more intensely than people do, because they live wholly in delusion. How can it not be cruel to make them suffer, or to take their lives? Anyone who can look at a living creature and feel no compassion is no human being.

129. Yan Hui, the favorite disciple of Confucius, made it his aim never to burden others. You should never make people suffer or treat any creature cruelly, and you should never override the will of even the humblest of the common people. Some people enjoy coaxing little children, or frightening them, or teasing and shaming them for fun. To a grown-up, since none of it is real, it is nothing at all, but to a child's mind the fear and the shame and the shock go deep, and are very real indeed. To torment them for your own amusement is not the act of a compassionate heart.

The joy and anger, the grief and delight of grown-ups are all illusions too, but who does not cling to them as if they were real? To hurt a man's heart does him even more harm than to hurt his body. Illness, too, mostly comes from the mind. Few illnesses come from outside. You may take medicine to make yourself sweat and it may fail to work, but let a man feel shame or fear for one moment and he is sure to break into a sweat, which shows you what the mind can do. And there are cases like that of the man who wrote the inscription for the Tower that Touches the Clouds and came down with his hair turned white.⁵²

130. There is nothing better than not to compete, to give way and go along with others, to put yourself last and others first. People who are fond of winning at games want to win for the pleasure of it. They are delighted that their skill is greater. Clearly, then, they will feel no pleasure when they lose. And if you thought of losing on purpose to make the other man happy, there would be no fun in the game at all. To make another man disappointed in order to please yourself goes against virtue. Even friends joking together will trick and deceive one another and enjoy feeling cleverer. That too is bad manners. And so a great many quarrels that last a lifetime start at a party. All of this comes from the fault of loving to compete.

If you want to surpass others, just study, and set out to surpass them in wisdom. For if you study the Way, you learn not to boast of your goodness or compete with your fellows. It is only the power of learning that can make a man turn down a great office or give up a profit.

131. The poor show their courtesy with gifts, and the old with physical effort. To know your own limits, and to stop at once when you cannot do a thing, is what we call wisdom. If others won't allow you to stop, the fault is theirs. If you don't know your limits and force yourself, the fault is yours. The poor man who doesn't know his limits will steal, and the man whose strength is failing who doesn't know his limits will fall ill.⁵³

132. The Toba Road did not get its name after the Toba palace was built. It is an old name. The Record of the Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial says that when Prince Motoyoshi delivered his New Year's greetings to the Emperor, his voice was so splendid that it could be heard from the Great Hall of State as far as the Toba Road.⁵⁴

133. In the Emperor's bedchamber the pillow is placed to the east. The head is generally laid to the east, so as to receive the yang, the light and warming force, and that is why Confucius too lay with his head to the east. In laying out a bedroom, a pillow to the south is also quite usual. Retired Emperor Shirakawa slept with his head to the north. "The north is unlucky," people said. "Besides, Ise lies to the south. How can His Majesty sleep with his feet toward the Grand Shrine?" But when the Emperor worships the Grand Shrine from afar, he faces southeast, not south.⁵⁵

134. A certain Master of Discipline, one of the monks who chanted the services at the Lotus Hall of the Takakura-in, once picked up a mirror and took a good long look at his face, and was so dismayed at how ugly and shocking it was that he began to loathe even the mirror. After that he was afraid of mirrors for a long time and wouldn't even pick one up, and he stopped mixing with people altogether. He came out only for the services in the hall and otherwise stayed shut away, I was told, and I thought that was admirable.

Even people who seem wise judge only others, and don't know themselves. A man who doesn't know himself can hardly know anything else. The one who knows himself, then, is the one we should call wise. People don't know that they are ugly, or that their minds are foolish, or that their skills are poor, or that they are nobodies, or that they are getting old, or that illness is coming over them, or that death is near, or that they have not got far on the Way they follow. They don't know their own faults, and still less do they know what others say against them. But a man can see his face in the mirror, and count his years to know his age. It isn't that he can't know himself; it is that there is nothing he can do about it, so you might say that he is as good as not knowing.

I don't mean that he should change his face or make himself young. But if he knows he is clumsy at something, why doesn't he give it up at once? If he knows he is old, why doesn't he live quietly and take his ease? If he knows his practice is foolish, why doesn't he put his whole mind to it? To mix with people when nobody cares for you is shameful. To go out and serve at court with an ugly face and a slow mind; to mix with the brilliant when you know nothing; to sit among masters with your second-rate skill; to stand among men in their prime with your head white as snow; still worse, to hope for what you can't reach, to fret over what you can't have, to wait for what will never come, to be afraid of people and fawn on them: that is not shame others put on you. You are dragged along by greed and shame yourself. And the reason there is no end to greed is that we don't truly know that the great matter of the end of our lives has already come, here and now.

135. A man known as the lay-monk Major Counselor Sukesue once said to Councilor Captain Tomouji, "Whatever you care to ask me, I'm sure I can answer it." "I wonder," said Tomouji. "Then let's have a contest," said Sukesue. "I don't know the first thing about anything serious," said Tomouji, "so I wouldn't think of asking you about that. I'll ask you about something I'm not sure of among the trifling nonsense of everyday life." "Small matters close to hand, all the better," said Sukesue. "I'll explain anything at all."

The courtiers and ladies in attendance said, "What a delightful contest. You must hold it before the Emperor, and the loser must stand a banquet." It was settled, and the two were brought together before the Emperor. Tomouji said, "There's something I've heard ever since I was a child, but I've never understood what it means. What is the meaning of 'uma no kitsuriyō, kitsu ni no oka, nakakubo reiri gurendō'? I should like to be told."

The lay-monk Major Counselor was stuck at once. "That is mere nonsense, and not worth discussing," he said. "But I said from the start that I knew nothing of deep matters," said Tomouji. "We agreed that I would ask you about nonsense." And so the lay-monk Major Counselor lost, and had to pay his forfeit with a lavish feast, they say.⁵⁶

136. When the physician Atsushige was in attendance on the late Cloistered Emperor and the Emperor's meal was brought in, he said, "If Your Majesty will ask me about each of the dishes now being served, I will tell you from memory how it is written and what its virtues are, and you may check them against the herbal. I won't make a single mistake." Just then the late Rokujō Inner Minister came in and said, "I'll take the chance to learn something too. First, the character for 'salt': what radical does it have?" "The earth radical," the physician answered. "You've already shown us the extent of your learning," said the Minister. "That will do. I have no wish to hear more." Everyone burst out laughing, and the physician withdrew.⁵⁷

Sections 137–174

137. Must we look at the cherry blossoms only at their peak, and at the moon only when no cloud dims it? To long for the moon while looking at the rain, or to stay shut up indoors with the blinds down and not know how the spring is passing, is still more moving and full of feeling. Branches just about to bloom, and a garden strewn with fading blossoms, are more worth seeing. In the prefaces to poems you will find "Written on going to see the blossoms and finding them already scattered," or "Written when something prevented me from going to see the blossoms." Are these worse than "On seeing the blossoms"? It is natural to grieve when the blossoms fall and the moon sinks, but only a very insensitive person would say, "This branch and that one have shed their flowers. There's nothing worth seeing now."

Whatever the thing, it is the start and the finish that delight us. And the love of men and women: is it only a matter of being together? To think of a love that ended without your ever meeting, to grieve over promises that came to nothing, to spend long nights alone, to think of a lover far away beyond the clouds, to remember the old days in a house gone to ruin and overgrown with weeds: that is what it means to have a taste for love.

Rather than the full moon shining cloudless and gazed at across a thousand miles, the moon you have waited for until near dawn is far more moving: pale and bluish, glimpsed among the cedar tops deep in the mountains, or hidden behind a passing cloud that brings a shower. And when it glitters on the leaves of an oak or a chinquapin, as if they were wet, it goes right through me, and I wish I had a friend of feeling with me, and long for the capital.

Should we look at the moon and the blossoms only with our eyes? In spring, to think of the blossoms without leaving the house, and on a moonlit night to think of the moon without leaving one's room, is very comforting and delightful.

A person of quality never seems too taken with anything, and enjoys things in an offhand way. It's country people who enjoy everything so heavily. Under the cherry blossoms they push and squeeze their way up close, stare without taking their eyes off them, drink wine and compose linked verse, and in the end they thoughtlessly break off a great branch. They dip their hands and feet in a spring, they get down and leave their footprints in the snow, and they never look at anything from a distance.

The way people like that watched the Kamo Festival was quite something. "The procession is very late. There's no need to sit in the stands until then," they said, and they drank and ate and played go and backgammon in a room at the back, and left someone to keep watch in the stands. When he called out, "Here it comes!" every one of them scrambled up in a frantic rush, leaned out past the blinds until they nearly fell, pushed and shoved, and stared so as not to miss a thing, saying "Look at this!" and "Look at that!" about everything. When it had passed they said, "Till the next lot," and went down again. All they wanted, I suppose, was to see the show.

The really distinguished people from the capital dozed and hardly looked at all. The young and the junior ones went to and fro on their errands, and those sitting behind didn't lean over the people in front in that unsightly way. Nobody struggled to see. It was all elegant, with hollyhock leaves hung everywhere, and before full daylight carriages drew up quietly, and you wondered whose they were, and guessed this one and that, and sometimes knew one from the ox-driver or the servants. It was never dull to watch them coming and going, some charming, some splendid, all different.

As evening came on, the carriages that had stood in rows and the people packed in everywhere went off who knows where, and soon there were only a few left. When the jostle of the carriages was over, the blinds and mats were taken down from the stands, and before your eyes everything grew desolate, and you were moved to think that this is how the world goes. Watching the avenue is what watching the festival really means.

Many of the people passing to and fro in front of the stands were people I knew, which taught me that there aren't so very many people in the world after all. Even if I were not to die until every one of them had gone, I wouldn't have long to wait. If you fill a big vessel with water and make a tiny hole in it, the drops may be few, but if it leaks without stopping it will soon be empty. Of all the many people in the capital, not a day can pass without someone dying. Is it only one or two a day? There are days when many are carried out to Toribeno or Funaoka or other fields and hills, but no day when none is. The coffin makers can't make them fast enough to keep any in stock. Neither youth nor strength makes any difference: the hour of death comes when we least expect it. That we have escaped it until today is a rare and wonderful thing. Can we think of the world, even for a moment, as a place to take our ease?

When you set out stones in the game of the stepchildren, you don't know which stone will be taken, but you count and take one, and the others seem to have escaped. Then you count again, and take another and another, and in the end it seems that none of them escapes. A soldier going into battle knows that death is near, and forgets his home and forgets himself. It is very foolish for a man who has turned his back on the world to amuse himself quietly with his stones and his garden pool in his grass hut, and think that all this has nothing to do with him. Will the enemy, impermanence, not come pressing into the quiet depths of the mountains? To face death there is the same as to advance into battle.⁵⁸

138. When the festival was over, someone said the hollyhock leaves were no use any more and had all those on the blinds taken down. It seemed tasteless to me, but since it was done by a person of quality, I thought perhaps it was the right thing. But then the poet Suō no Naishi wrote:

	I hang them in vain,
	and I long in vain,
	these hollyhock leaves
	withering on the blinds,
	now that we never meet.

Her family collection says that she wrote it about the withered leaves on the blinds of the main room. In the preface to an old poem we find, "Sent tied to a withered hollyhock leaf." And The Pillow Book says, "Things that make you long for the past: a withered hollyhock leaf," which is a lovely and tender thought. Kamo no Chōmei, too, wrote in his Tales of the Four Seasons, "On the jeweled blinds the hollyhock lingers after the festival." When they wither of their own accord, it's sad enough. How could anyone throw them away without a trace?

The pomanders of sweet flag that hang by the curtained dais are changed for chrysanthemums on the ninth day of the ninth month, they say, and so the sweet flag should stay there until the time of the chrysanthemums. After the Biwa Empress Dowager died, Ben no Menoto found withered sweet flag and pomanders still hanging inside her old curtained dais, and wrote a poem saying that she had hung up the roots out of season. Gō no Jijū answered with a poem that said, "the sweet flag is still here," though the one who slept there was gone.⁵⁹

139. The trees I would like to have at home are the pine and the cherry. The five-needled pine is good too. Single cherry blossoms are best. Double cherries used to grow only in the old capital at Nara, but these days they are everywhere, I hear. The cherries of Yoshino and the Cherry of the Left in the palace are all single. Double cherries are freakish things, very fussy and contorted. You could do without planting them. Late cherries are dreary too, and it's unpleasant when they get insects.

Of plums, the white, the pale pink, the single ones that bloom early, the double red ones with their lovely scent, all are delightful. "Late plums bloom along with the cherries and are thought less of. They're outshone, and wither clinging to the branch, which is depressing. The single ones that bloom first and scatter first have a quick spirit, and I like them," said the Kyōgoku Middle Counselor, the lay-monk, and so he planted single plums close to his eaves. Two of them are still there, I believe, on the south side of his house at Kyōgoku.

Willows are delightful too. The young maple leaves in the fourth month are lovelier than any flower or autumn leaf. The orange tree and the katsura are best when they are old and big. Of plants, I like the kerria, the wisteria, the iris and the pink. In a pond, the lotus. Among autumn plants, the reed, the pampas grass, the bellflower, the bush clover, the maiden flower, the thoroughwort, the aster, the burnet, the sedge, the gentian and the chrysanthemum, the yellow chrysanthemum too, the ivy, the kudzu vine and the morning glory, all of them not too tall, on a small fence, not too thick. Other plants that are rare, with ugly-sounding Chinese names and flowers you aren't used to seeing, I don't care for at all. It's generally people of poor taste who make a fuss over anything rare and hard to come by. We could do without such things.⁶⁰

140. To leave wealth behind when you die is something a wise man does not do. If he has hoarded worthless things, it shows poor taste, and if they are good things, it's sad to think how much he must have cared about them. If there is a great deal, it's worse still. It is an ugly sight when people say "I should have that!" and quarrel over it afterward. If you mean to leave something to someone, you should give it to him while you are alive. Apart from the things you need every day, it is best to own nothing at all.

141. The Venerable Gyōren of the Hidenin was by birth a man of the Miura clan, I believe, and a warrior without equal. Once a man from his home country came to visit and said in the course of their talk, "You can rely on what a man from the east says. The people of the capital make fine promises, but there's nothing behind them." The holy man answered, "You may think so, but I have lived in the capital a long time and know them well, and I don't think their hearts are any worse. They are all gentle and kind by nature, so they find it hard to refuse flatly whatever someone asks, and can never bring themselves to say no to anything, and so they agree out of softness. They don't mean to deceive, but they are mostly poor and can't do what they would like, so naturally many of their promises aren't kept. The men of the east are my own people, but the truth is they have no tenderness and little feeling. They are just blunt, and say no from the start, and that's the end of it. And because they are prosperous and well off, people rely on them."

He explained it so well. I had thought this holy man, with his rough voice and his country accent, could hardly understand the finer points of the sacred teachings, but after that one remark I thought much more of him, and I understood that it was because he had this gentleness in him that, among so many, he had been chosen to run a temple, and did it some good.⁶¹

142. Even someone who seems to have no feelings will sometimes say a fine thing. A fearsome-looking rough warrior from the east once asked the man next to him, "Do you have any children?" "Not one," the other said. "Then you can't know the deeper feelings of the heart. I'm afraid you must have a hard and unfeeling heart. It's through your children that you come to know every kind of tenderness." There's a lot of truth in that. Without the bonds of family love, would there be any compassion in the heart of a man like that? Even a man who never cared for his parents learns what they felt for him once he has children of his own.

It is wrong for a man who has left the world, and owns nothing at all, to look with contempt on people tied down by family, who fawn on others for everything and are full of ambition. Put yourself in their place, and you will see that a man would surely forget his shame, and even steal, for the sake of parents he dearly loves, or for his wife and children. And so, rather than tying up thieves and punishing nothing but crimes, I would rather see the world governed so that nobody in it goes hungry or cold. "When people have no steady livelihood, they have no steady heart." Men steal when they are desperate. If the country is badly governed and people suffer from cold and hunger, there will be no end of criminals. To make people suffer, drive them to break the law, and then punish them for it is a pitiful business.

How, then, should we be good to the people? If those above stop their extravagance and waste, care for the people and encourage farming, there can be no doubt that those below will benefit. The man who does wrong when he has as much food and clothing as anyone else: that is the man we should call a real thief.⁶²

143. When people tell you how beautifully someone died, it would be enough to say, "He was calm, and his mind was clear." But foolish people add some strange and wonderful sign, and praise his words and actions to suit their own tastes, which I suspect is not what the dead man himself would have wanted. This great matter cannot be judged even by a buddha come among us in human form, or measured by the most learned scholar. If you yourself have nothing to reproach yourself with, it doesn't matter what others see or hear.

144. Once, when the Venerable of Toganoo was going along the road, a man washing his horse in the river was calling out, "Ashi, ashi!" telling the horse to lift its foot. The holy man stopped. "How holy! This man must be reaping the fruit of the good he did in some former life. He's chanting 'A-ji, A-ji.' Whose horse is that? I'm so deeply moved." "It belongs to the Fushō, sir," the man said. "How wonderful! The letter A, unborn from the beginning! What a blessed meeting this has been." And he wiped away tears of joy, they say.⁶³

145. The Imperial Guardsman Hata no Shigemi said of the North Guard Shingan, the lay-monk of Shimotsuke, "That man has the look of someone who will fall from his horse. He had better be very careful." Nobody thought there was much in it, but Shingan did fall from his horse and was killed. People thought that the remark of a man who had mastered his art was like the word of a god. When someone asked him, "What was the look you saw?" he said, "He had a very loose seat in the saddle, and he liked spirited horses that rear. That's why I said it. When have I ever been wrong?"

146. The Abbot Myōun of Mount Hiei met a physiognomist and asked him, "Do I by any chance face danger from weapons?" "Indeed you do, sir," the man said. "What sign do you see?" "You are a man in no danger of being wounded, and yet the thought has occurred to you, and you ask. That itself is the sign of the danger." And in the end the Abbot was killed by an arrow.⁶⁴

147. The idea that a person who has had moxa burned on many places is unclean for the Shinto rites was thought up recently. It is not found in the law books or the old regulations, I'm told.

148. A person over forty should have moxa burned on his body at the point called the Three Leagues, or his blood will rush to his head. He should certainly do it.⁶⁵

149. Never hold a young deer's horn to your nose and sniff it. There are tiny insects in it that go up the nose and eat the brain, they say.

150. People who are learning an art often say, "I won't let anyone know until I've got good at it. It will be much more impressive if I practice in private and then come out when I'm accomplished." But people who talk like that never master a single art. The man who joins the experts while he is still a raw beginner, doesn't mind being criticized and laughed at, keeps at it with a straight face, and works at it may have no natural talent; but if he doesn't stand still, doesn't take liberties, and keeps on year after year, he will in the end get further than a man who has talent and doesn't work. He will reach the rank of a master, his skill will mature, people will acknowledge him, and he will win a name without equal.

Even the masters of the land had a reputation for incompetence at first, and had terrible flaws. But if a man follows the rules of his art faithfully, takes them seriously and does not do as he pleases, he will become an authority in his day and a teacher to all. That is true in every art.

151. Someone once said, "If you haven't become good at an art by the time you are fifty, give it up. There's no future left to practice for. People can't laugh at what an old man does, but it's pointless and unsightly for him to keep mixing with the rest. The seemly and desirable thing is to stop doing all those things and have time to spare. To spend your life busy with worldly affairs is the mark of the lowest kind of fool. If there is something you want to know about, you may study it and ask about it, but once you have the gist of it, stop, when you are no longer in the dark. Best of all is to have wanted nothing in the first place, and stop."

152. The Venerable Jōnen of the Saidai-ji, bent at the waist and white of eyebrow, looked truly a man of great virtue. When he went to the palace, the Saionji Inner Minister said, "What a holy look he has!" and seemed to be full of reverence. Lord Suketomo saw this and said, "It's just that he's old." A few days later Suketomo had someone lead a shaggy dog, shockingly old and decrepit, with its fur falling out, to the Inner Minister, with the message, "This one has a very holy look."

153. When the lay-monk Major Counselor Tamekane was arrested and led off to Rokuhara surrounded by warriors, Lord Suketomo saw him near Ichijō and said, "How I envy him! That is how I would like to be remembered for having lived in the world."⁶⁶

154. This same Suketomo was once sheltering from the rain in the gateway of the Tō-ji temple, where a group of disabled people had gathered. Their hands and feet were twisted and bent and warped backward, and they were misshapen and strange in every way. He thought, "Each of them is a unique curiosity, well worth treasuring," and stared at them. But soon the pleasure wore off, and they seemed ugly and repellent to him, and he thought, "Nothing is as good as something plain and ordinary." When he got home he thought, "This fondness of mine lately for potted trees, and my hunting for ones with strange twists and bends to please my eye, is the same as treasuring those deformed people." He lost all pleasure in them, and dug up all the trees he had growing in pots and threw them away. That was quite understandable.

155. A man who wants to get on in the world must first understand timing. Things out of their proper season grate on people's ears and go against their feelings, and they don't succeed, so you must learn to recognize the right moment. But falling ill, giving birth and dying are the only things that pay no attention to timing, and are never put off because the moment is wrong. The great business of being born, living, changing and dying, the real business, is like a raging river in flood. It never stops for a moment, but presses straight on. And so, whether it concerns the Way or the world, when there is something you are determined to carry through, you must not wait for the right moment. You must not make this and that preparation, or hold back your feet.

Spring does not end and then summer come, or summer end and then autumn arrive. Spring is already bringing on the feel of summer, and in summer autumn is already on its way, and autumn turns cold at once. In the tenth month there are mild days like a little spring: the grass turns green and the plum trees put out buds. When the leaves fall from the trees, it isn't that they fall first and then the buds come. The buds are swelling underneath and can't be held back, and so the leaves fall. Because what is coming is already being made ready underneath, the change happens very fast. Birth, old age, sickness and death come on even faster than this. The four seasons still have a fixed order. The hour of death does not wait for its turn. Death does not come at us from the front. It is already behind us, closing in. Everyone knows that death is coming, and yet, while they are waiting for it without much urgency, it comes before they know it. It is like the tide, which fills in from the shore while the tidal flats still stretch far out to sea.

156. When a new minister holds his grand banquet, it is the custom to borrow some suitable mansion for it. The Uji Minister of the Left held his at the Higashi-Sanjō palace. The Emperor was living there at the time, but because the Minister asked for it, the Emperor moved elsewhere. Even without any particular family connection, it is the old usage to borrow the palace of a Retired Empress, or some such place.⁶⁷

157. If you pick up a brush you will want to write something, and if you pick up a musical instrument you will want to make it sound. Pick up a wine cup and you think of wine; pick up the dice and you think of gambling. The mind is always moved by what it touches. You should never indulge in bad amusements, even for a moment. If you glance at a single line of the scriptures, you will find yourself taking in the passages before and after it, and you may suddenly mend a fault of many years. If you had not opened the book just then, would you ever have known? That is the benefit of contact. Even if no religious feeling arises in you at all, if you sit before the Buddha and take up your rosary and the sutra, good deeds will be done of themselves even while you are slacking, and if you sit on the meditation bench with your mind still scattered, you will fall into a state of meditation without knowing it.

The outward act and the inner truth are not two things in the first place. If your outward form doesn't stray from the Way, the inner realization will surely ripen. You mustn't insist that you have no faith. You should look up to these things and honor them.

158. Someone once asked me, "What do you make of the custom of throwing away the last drop in the wine cup?" "It's called gyōtō," I said, "the congealed part, so I suppose it means throwing away what has settled at the bottom." "No," he said. "It's gyodō, the fish path. You leave a little in the cup to rinse the place where your lips touched."⁶⁸

159. "The knot called a mina-musubi gets its name because the threads, knotted one over another, look like the little shellfish called a mina," a certain great lord told me. It is wrong to call it a nina.

160. "It's not good to say that you 'nail up' the name tablet over a gate. Lord Yukitada, the lay-monk of the Second Rank, used to say you 'hang' it. 'Nailing up' the stands for a procession is not good either. 'Nailing up' an awning is the usual thing, but you should say 'set up' the stands. To say 'burn' a fire rite is wrong too; you say 'perform' it, or simply 'do' the fire rite. And to say gyōhō for a ritual, with a clear h, is wrong. You should say gyōbō," the Seikan-ji Archbishop told me. There are a great many things like this in our everyday speech.⁶⁹

161. People say the cherry blossoms are at their height a hundred and fifty days after the winter solstice, or seven days after the spring equinox, but seventy-five days after the first day of spring is rarely wrong.

162. A temple servant at the Henjō-ji had been feeding the birds on the pond every day for a long time. He scattered food right into the hall, and left one door open, and countless birds went in. Then he went in himself, shut the door, and caught them and killed them one after another. The noise was terrible, and a boy cutting grass heard it and told people. The village men came running and went in, and there among the wild geese flapping about in panic was the monk, knocking them down and wringing their necks. They seized him, and the village handed him over to the Police Commission. He was put in prison with the birds he had killed hung round his neck. This happened when the Major Counselor Mototoshi was Chief of the Commission.

163. There was an argument among the diviners about whether the character for tai in Taishō, the name for the ninth month, should be written with the dot or without it. The lay-monk Morichika said, "In the Konoe Regent's house there is a diary written on the back of a divination report in the hand of Yoshihira, and in it the character is written with the dot."⁷⁰

164. When people meet, they are never silent even for a moment. There is always talk. And when you listen to what they say, it is mostly useless chatter. Idle rumor and judgments of other people's rights and wrongs do much harm and little good to speaker and listener alike. And while they are talking, neither of them realizes that it is useless.

165. A man from the east mixing with the people of the capital, a man from the capital going east to make his fortune, a monk of the exoteric or esoteric schools who has left his own head temple and mountain: all these, living among people whose ways are not their own, are an unsightly thing.

166. When I watch the things people busy themselves with, it seems to me like making a buddha out of snow on a spring day, preparing ornaments of gold and silver and jewels for it, and planning to build a hall and a pagoda to house it. Could you wait until they were built and install it properly? While we think of a man's life as still there, it is melting away from underneath, like the snow, and all the while he goes on planning and waiting for a great many things to be finished.

167. When a man who practices one art attends a gathering of some other art, he will often say, "If only this were my field, I wouldn't be sitting here just watching," or at least think it, but it seems to me very bad form. If you envy someone his skill in an art you don't know, it's enough to say, "How I envy you. Why didn't I ever learn?" To bring out your own learning and compete with others is like a horned beast lowering its horns or a fanged beast baring its fangs.

For a human being, it is a virtue not to boast of one's goodness and not to compete. To be superior to others is a great fault. A man who thinks himself superior to others, whether in rank or in talent or in the glory of his ancestors, may not say so aloud, but he is guilty of a great deal in his heart. He should be careful and forget it. It is only this conceit that makes a man look a fool, gets him disparaged by others, and brings disaster on him. A man who has truly mastered an art sees his own faults clearly, so he is never satisfied with himself, and in the end he never boasts of anything.

168. When an old man has an outstanding talent for something, and people say, "When he is gone, whom will we ask?" he speaks well for old age, and his life has not been for nothing. All the same, if he has let none of it lapse, it looks a little poor, as if to say, "He spent his whole life on this one thing." It would be better for him to say, "I've forgotten it now." Even when a man knows a thing well enough, if he talks about it carelessly and at length, people will think that perhaps his learning isn't so great after all, and he is bound to make mistakes too. If he says, "I don't know it for certain," people will think him all the more a real master of his art. Worse still is having to sit and listen while someone tells you, with a knowing look, about something he doesn't understand, when you can't contradict him because he's your senior, all the while thinking, "That's not right." It's miserable.

169. Someone told me, "The word shiki, meaning 'the form' of things, was not used before the reign of Emperor Go-Saga. It has come into use only recently." But Ukyō no Daibu, who served Empress Kenrei-mon'in, wrote, speaking of how she went back to live in the palace after Emperor Go-Toba had come to the throne, "The form of the world had not changed at all, and yet..."⁷¹

170. It is not good to go calling on people for no particular reason. Even if you go on business, you should leave as soon as the business is done. It's very tiresome when someone stays a long time. When you are sitting with someone, there is a great deal of talk, you tire yourself out, your mind gets no peace, everything else is held up, and time is wasted, which does neither of you any good. It's not good to show that you are annoyed either. When you don't feel like company, it's better to say so frankly.

It is another matter when someone you would like to sit with, someone of like mind, is at leisure and says, "Stay a little longer. Let's take it easy today." We should all have Ruan Ji's "blue eyes" for such a person. It is very nice when someone comes for no reason at all, has a leisurely talk, and goes home. And it's a delight to get a letter that says nothing more than "I haven't written to you for a long time."⁷²

171. In the shell-matching game, a player who ignores the shells in front of him and looks around, even under people's sleeves and knees, has the ones in front of him snapped up by somebody else. A good player doesn't seem to be reaching out for shells far away, and only takes the ones near him, but he gets a great many. When you set up a stone in the corner of the go board and flick another at it, you will miss if you watch the stone you are aiming at. If you look closely at your own hand and flick your stone straight along the star point nearest you, you are sure to hit the target.

In everything, don't look outward for what you want. Just put right what is close at hand. Lord Qingxian said, "Do good, and don't ask where it will lead." The way to keep the country in order may be the same. If a ruler is careless at home, acting lightly and willfully and in disorder, distant provinces are sure to rebel, and only then does he look for a plan. It is as the medical books say: "A man who lies down in the wind and the damp and then begs the gods to cure him is a fool." A ruler does not see that if he relieves the suffering of the people in front of him, shows them kindness and keeps to the right way, his influence will spread far. When the sage-king Yu went out to conquer the Sanmiao tribes, it did less good than when he took his army home and ruled with virtue.⁷³

172. When we are young, our blood is hot and runs over, our hearts are moved by everything, and our desires are many. We put ourselves in danger and break as easily as a ball of jade set rolling. We love beauty and spend our treasure, then throw it all away and turn into shabby monks in mossy robes. Our fighting spirit is high and we quarrel over things. We feel shame and envy, and what we like changes from one day to the next. We drown ourselves in love and lose ourselves in our feelings. We risk a whole life for one bold deed and lose it, and long to be one of those who threw their lives away, with no thought of keeping safe and living long. We let our hearts be drawn by our passions and become a story people tell for generations. It is in youth that we ruin ourselves.

The old have less vigor. Their spirits weaken, they grow mild and careless, and nothing moves them very much. Their hearts are naturally calm, so they don't do pointless things, they look after themselves and have no worries, and they think about not being a nuisance to others. The old are better than the young in wisdom, just as the young are better than the old in looks.

173. Very little is known for certain about Ono no Komachi. How she looked in her decline is described in a book called Tamatsukuri. Some say it was written by Kiyoyuki, but it appears in the list of works by the Great Teacher of Mount Kōya. The Great Teacher died early in the Jōwa years, around 835. Was Komachi in her prime after that? It is still uncertain.⁷⁴

174. They say that a dog that is good with a small hawk will become no good for small hawks once it has been used with a big one. It is true enough that one should go for the great and give up the small. Of all the many things people do, none has deeper savor than delighting in the Way. That is the truly great matter. A man who has once heard the Way and set his heart on it will give up every other occupation. What else would he work at? Even a foolish man cannot be worse than a clever dog.⁷⁵

Sections 175–216

175. There are many things in the world I can't understand. Whenever there's an occasion, the first thing people do is offer wine, and they think it fun to make people drink by force. I can't see why. The drinker's face shows it's more than he can bear. He frowns, he watches for a chance to pour it away when no one's looking, he tries to escape, and they catch him and hold him back and make him drink and drink. A dignified man turns into a madman before your eyes and makes a fool of himself, and a perfectly healthy man becomes a gravely sick one and falls flat without knowing which way is up. On a day that should be a celebration, it's appalling. Until the next day his head aches, he can't eat, he lies there groaning and remembers nothing of the day before, as if it belonged to a former life, and he neglects important business, public and private, and causes trouble. To put a man through that is unkind and bad manners too. Won't someone who has been through such misery feel resentful and bitter? If we heard that in some other country there was a custom like this, unknown in our own, we would think it strange and incredible.

It is distasteful even to watch it happen to other people. A man you thought thoughtful and refined laughs and shouts with no restraint, talks too much, his cap askew, his cords undone, his robe hitched up above his shins, careless of everything, and you wouldn't know him for the man he usually is. A woman pushes back the hair from her forehead and, with no shame at all, throws back her head and laughs and clings to the hand that holds the wine cup. The vulgar ones pick up a snack and shove it into someone's mouth, and eat themselves, which is unsightly. They all sing and dance, shouting at the tops of their voices, and some old monk is called on, and he bares his dark, dirty shoulders and twists himself about so that you can't bear to look, and the people who enjoy watching him are as repellent as he is. Then one man tells you, embarrassingly, all about his own splendid achievements, another weeps drunken tears, and the servants curse each other and fight, and it is all shocking, frightening, shameful and wretched. In the end they grab things they shouldn't touch, fall off the veranda, fall off their horses or out of their carriages, and hurt themselves. Those who don't ride stagger along the avenue and do unspeakable things against the earthen walls and under the gates. An old monk in his surplice, leaning on a little boy's shoulder and staggering along, mumbling things nobody can make out, is a pitiful sight.

If doing such things brought some benefit in this world or the next, there would be nothing to say. But in this world it leads to many mistakes, loses you money and brings on illness. They call it the chief of a hundred medicines, but every disease starts with wine. They say it makes you forget your sorrows, but a drunk man remembers his past sorrows and weeps. As for the next world, it destroys a man's wisdom and burns up his good roots like fire, increases his evil, breaks every precept, and sends him down to hell. "Whoever takes up wine and makes another drink it will be born without hands for five hundred lives," the Buddha taught.

But for all that I find it so distasteful, there are times when it is hard to do without. On a moonlit night, on a snowy morning, or under the cherry blossoms, to bring out the wine while talking at leisure adds to every pleasure. On a dull day, when a friend drops in unexpectedly and we have some together, it is a comfort. It's very nice when, from behind the blinds of some great house where you are not on familiar terms, sweets and wine are passed out to you, in a gracious way. In winter, in a cramped room, to roast something over the fire and sit face to face with close friends drinking a good deal is great fun. On a journey, at an inn or out in the hills, to say, "What shall we have with it?" and drink sitting on the grass, is delightful too. It's very nice when someone who suffers badly from drink is pressed and takes a little. And I'm pleased when some great man singles me out and says, "Have another. You're not drinking much." I'm pleased too when someone I've wanted to know turns out to be a drinker, and we become fast friends.

And after all, a drinker is an amusing creature, and you forgive him a lot. When he has worn himself out drinking and is sleeping late, and the master of the house slides the door open, he panics, and with a dazed face and his thin topknot sticking out, he grabs his clothes, without even getting them on, clutches them to him and runs off trailing them, his skirts hitched up, his skinny hairy shins showing from behind, and it is funny and suits him perfectly.⁷⁶

176. The Black Door room is where Emperor Kōkō, after he came to the throne, used to do the cooking that he had done for himself in the days when he was an ordinary man, for he never forgot those days and kept it up. It is called the Black Door because it was blackened by the smoke of his firewood.⁷⁷

177. Once at the palace of Prince Munetaka in Kamakura there was to be a game of kickball, but it had rained and the ground was still wet, and they were wondering what to do when the lay-monk of Oki, Sasaki, brought a whole cart of sawdust as a gift. It was spread all over the ground, and the mud gave no more trouble. "How thoughtful of him to have saved it up!" everyone said admiringly. When someone told this story, the Yoshida Middle Counselor said, "Hadn't they any dry sand ready?" and I was embarrassed. The sawdust I had thought so splendid was a common and odd thing to use. It is the old usage for the man in charge of the ground to have dry sand ready.⁷⁸

178. Some servants of a certain house, who had seen the sacred dances at the Hall of the Sacred Mirror, were telling someone about it. "So-and-so was carrying the Sacred Sword," they said. One of the ladies of the palace heard this and said quietly, "When the Emperor goes to another hall in the palace, it's the sword from the Day Chamber that is carried." I thought that was admirable. She was an old lady-in-waiting of high rank, I believe.

179. The Venerable Dōgen, a monk who had been to Song China, brought back a complete set of the Buddhist scriptures and housed it at a place called Yakeno, near Rokuhara. There he lectured especially on the Śūraṅgama Sutra, and he named the temple Nālandā. That holy man said, "There is a story, said to come from the Governor-General Ōe, that the great gate of the Nālandā temple faces north. But it is not in the Records of the Western Regions or Faxian's account or anywhere else I have seen. I can't think what learning Ōe based it on, and I doubt it. The Ximing temple in China faces north, of course."⁷⁹

180. The sagichō is the burning of the mallets used for the New Year ball game, which are brought out from the Shingon Hall to the Shinsen-en garden and burned there. When people chant, "In the pond where the Law is fulfilled," they mean the pond in the Shinsen-en.

181. "In the children's song 'Fure fure konayuki, tanba no konayuki,' 'Fall, fall, powder snow, powder snow of Tanba,' the snow is called powder snow because it looks like rice that has been husked and sifted. 'Tanba' is a mistake for 'tamare,' 'pile up,' so it should be 'Pile up, powder snow.' And it should go on 'on the fences and in the forks of the trees,'" a learned man told me. Perhaps it has been sung that way since long ago. The Diary of Sanuki no Suke says that when Emperor Toba was a small boy he said this when it was snowing.

182. When the Shijō Major Counselor Lord Takachika had dried salmon served at the Emperor's table, someone said, "Surely something so common should never be served to His Majesty." The Major Counselor answered, "If salmon were a fish not served to the Emperor, that would be one thing. But salmon is served, so what can be wrong with dried salmon? Isn't dried sweetfish served?"

183. An ox that gores people has its horns cut, and a horse that bites people has its ears cut, as a sign. If a man doesn't mark them and they injure someone, the owner is to blame. A dog that bites should not be kept. All of these are offenses, forbidden by law.

184. The mother of Tokiyori, Governor of Sagami, was called the nun Matsushita. Once, when she was expecting the Governor to visit, she was patching the sooty paper sliding doors herself, cutting round only the torn places with a little knife and pasting new paper over them. Her brother Yoshikage, Lord of Akita Castle, was helping to get things ready that day, and he said, "Let me have that, and I'll get one of the men to do it. He's good at that sort of thing." "I'm sure the man couldn't do better work than this old nun," she said, and went on patching one square at a time. "It would be much easier to repaper the whole thing," Yoshikage said again. "Won't it look unsightly, all patchy like that?" "I mean to repaper it properly later myself," she said, "but today I'm leaving it like this on purpose. It's so that the young man will see it and take the lesson that things should be used with only the torn parts mended."

That was remarkable. Thrift is the foundation of good government. She was a woman, but her heart was one with the sages'. Truly, they say, the mother of a man who governed the whole country was no ordinary person.⁸⁰

185. Yasumori, Governor of Mutsu and Lord of Akita Castle, was a horseman without equal. When a horse was led out for him and it jumped the threshold with its feet together, light as a feather, he would say, "This horse is too high-spirited," and have the saddle moved to another. If a horse stretched its legs out and knocked against the threshold, he would say, "This one is dull, and will make mistakes," and would not ride it. Would anyone who didn't know his art be so cautious?

186. A horseman called Yoshida told me, "Every horse is stronger than you are. You must understand that a man can never match his strength against a horse. Before you ride a horse, look it over well and find out its strong points and its weak ones. Next, look to see whether there is anything dangerous about the bit and the saddle and the harness, and if anything worries you, don't gallop that horse. A man who never forgets these precautions is what we call a horseman. This is the secret of the art."

187. In any art, a professional, even an unskilled one, will always beat a skillful amateur when the two are matched; for the one is careful, never slackens and never treats his art lightly, and the other just does as he pleases. This is true not only of the arts and crafts but of behavior and of care in general. To be clumsy but careful is the root of success; to be clever but willful is the root of failure.

188. A man had his son made a monk and told him, "Study and learn about cause and effect, and earn your living by preaching sermons." The son did as he was told and set about becoming a preacher, and the first thing he did was learn to ride a horse. "I don't own a palanquin or a carriage," he thought, "and when I'm invited to lead a service and they send a horse for me, it would be awful to have a loose seat and fall off." Next, "When the service is over and they offer me wine, the patron will be disappointed if the monk has no talents at all," so he learned to sing popular songs. As he grew more accomplished at these two arts, he wanted to get better and better at them and worked hard, and he grew old with no time left to learn to preach.

It isn't only this monk. Everyone in the world is like this. While we are young, we have it in mind to make a name for ourselves in all sorts of ways, to accomplish great things, master an art, study, all plans for a long future, but we think life is long, and keep putting things off, and spend the months and days caught up in whatever is right in front of us. Then we have done nothing in any of it, and we are old. We never become masters of anything, our lives don't turn out as we hoped, and though we regret it, we can't get the years back, and we go downhill like a wheel rolling down a slope.

And so, among the things you would most like to do in your life, think carefully about which matters most, decide on the first one, give up the rest, and work at that one alone. In the course of a day, or of an hour, when many things come at you, you should do whichever is of even a little more use, give up the rest, and hurry on with the great matter. If you hold on to everything in your heart and won't give any of it up, you will never get a single thing done.

It is like a man playing go, who never wastes a move, and keeps ahead of his opponent by giving up the small to gain the large. It is easy to give up three stones to gain ten. It is hard to give up ten to gain eleven. You should go for the side that is better, even by one stone, but when you have ten, you hate to lose them, and it's hard to trade them for stones that are not many more. If you want to keep these and take those too, you will end up getting nothing there and losing everything here.

Suppose a man living in the capital has urgent business in the Eastern Hills and has already got there, and then he realizes that going to the Western Hills would do him more good. He should turn round at the gate and go to the Western Hills. But he thinks, "Since I've come this far, I'll see to this business first. No day has been fixed for the other, so I'll go back and decide about the Western Hills later," and so a moment's slackness becomes a lifetime's. That is what we should fear. If you are determined to get one thing done, you must not grieve if other things fall apart, or be ashamed when people laugh at you. Unless you give up everything else for it, you will never accomplish the one great thing.

Once, in a large company, someone said, "There is something called the masuho pampas grass, and the masoho pampas grass. The holy man of Watanabe knows the secret tradition about it." The monk Tōren, who was there, heard this, and though it was raining, he said, "Has anyone got a straw raincoat and hat? Lend me them. I'm going to the holy man of Watanabe to learn about that grass." "You're in too much of a hurry," people said. "Wait till the rain stops." "What a terrible thing to say!" he answered. "Does a man's life wait for the rain to clear? If I die, or the holy man dies, can I ask him then?" And he ran out, went to him and learned it, so the story goes, and I think that was splendid and rare. "Be quick, and you will succeed," says the book called the Analects. We ought to care about the one great matter of our salvation the way he cared about that grass.⁸¹

189. You mean to do something today, but something else urgent comes up first and takes up the whole day. The person you are expecting can't come, and someone you weren't counting on turns up. What you were relying on falls through, and only what you never expected comes off. The thing that was going to be a nuisance turns out to be no trouble, and the thing that should have been easy is very hard. Day after day, things never go the way you thought they would. A whole year is like that, and so is a whole life. Then, just when you think that all your plans will go wrong, some of them happen to come out right, so that it's harder still to be sure of anything. To understand that nothing is certain is the only thing that is true and never wrong.

190. A wife is something a man should never have. I like to hear that a man "always lives alone." When I hear that someone "has married into such and such a family," or that he "has taken a woman into his house and lives with her," I think much less of him. People will suspect, unkindly, that he has settled on some ordinary woman and thinks her wonderful, and that's why he lives with her. And if she is a fine woman, they'll think, "He must dote on her and worship her like his own private buddha. Just the sort of thing you'd expect." Worse still, and very sad, is a woman who runs the household well. When children come along and she makes much of them and dotes on them, it's depressing. And when the husband is dead and she becomes a nun and grows old, it is dismal even after he has gone.

Whatever the woman, if you see her morning and night, you will come to find her tiresome and hateful. And it can't be much of a life for the woman either, left hanging halfway. If a man lives apart and visits her now and then, it can be a bond that lasts unbroken through the years. If he drops in unexpectedly and stays the night, it will always be something fresh.⁸²

191. It is a great pity when people say that things lose their beauty at night. The glitter, the ornaments and the colors of everything are at their best only at night. In the daytime plain, sober clothes will do, but at night bright, gorgeous costumes are lovely. People's looks, too, are at their best by lamplight, and a voice heard in the dark, when the speaker is careful how he speaks, is attractive. Scents and music, too, are lovelier by far at night.

It is very nice when, on a night with nothing special happening, someone comes to the palace late, looking neat and well turned out. Young people who notice each other pay no attention to the hour, so it is just when you would think it safe to relax that you should look your best, everyday or formal. It is pleasant to see a handsome man wash and comb his hair after dark, and a lady, late at night, slip away, take up a mirror and make herself up before she comes out again.

192. Even when you visit the shrines and temples, it is best to go at night, on a day when no one else is going.

193. When a stupid man sizes up others and thinks he knows how wise they are, he will never be right. When a dull man who happens to be quick and clever only at go sees a wise man who is poor at this game and decides that he is not as clever as himself, or when a master of some craft sees that other people don't know his craft and thinks himself superior, that is a great mistake. The monk who studies only the texts and the Zen master who only sits in meditation each size the other up and think the other inferior, and both are wrong. One should not compete over, or pass judgment on, what lies outside one's own sphere.

194. A man of real understanding never makes the slightest mistake in judging people. Suppose someone makes up a lie and spreads it about to fool people. One person believes it simply and is fooled exactly as the liar intended. Another believes it so deeply that he goes further and adds lies of his own to it. Another doesn't think about it and pays no attention. Another feels a little doubtful, half trusting it and half not, and turns it over in his mind. Another doesn't think it true, but decides that since people say so, perhaps it is, and leaves it there. Another nods wisely and smiles as if he had guessed all sorts of things, but understands nothing at all. Another guesses it, and thinks, "Ah, so that's how it is," but still wonders whether he may be wrong. Another claps his hands and laughs, "There's nothing in it at all." Another sees through it but doesn't say he knows, and acts as if he didn't, making no fuss about what is perfectly clear to him. And another understands the liar's purpose from the start, isn't fooled for a moment, puts himself in the liar's place and helps him along.

Even in a joke among fools, a man who understands will see all these different reactions plainly, from what people say and from their faces. And when a truly enlightened man looks at us in our delusion, it must be like looking at something in the palm of his hand. But one should not apply guesses of this kind to the teachings of the Buddha.

195. A man going along the Koga causeway saw someone in a quilted under-robe and wide trousers holding a wooden statue of the bodhisattva Jizō down in the water of a rice field and carefully washing it. He was watching, puzzled, when two or three men in hunting cloaks came along. "There you are, sir," they said, and led the man away. It was the Koga Inner Minister. When he was in his right mind, he was a fine and distinguished gentleman.⁸³

196. When the sacred palanquin of the Tōdai-ji's guardian god was being carried home from the Wakamiya shrine at the Tō-ji, the nobles of the Minamoto clan attended it. This same Koga lord was a General of the Guards then, and was having his men clear the road ahead with warning cries. The Tsuchimikado Chancellor said, "Is it proper to cry the warning in front of a shrine?" "The conduct of the guardsmen is a matter for the families that bear arms," was all the General answered. Later he said, "That Chancellor has read the Hokuzanshō, but doesn't know what the Saikyūki says. Because the god's attendants, the evil demons and spirits, are to be feared, there is good reason to cry the warning especially at a shrine."⁸⁴

197. The term "fixed number" is used not only for the monks of the various temples. The Engi Regulations speak of "the fixed number of palace maids." It seems to be a general term for officials whose number is fixed.

198. Besides the "nominal assistant governor," there was also a "nominal clerk." It is in the Seiji Yōryaku.⁸⁵

199. The Hōin Gyōsen of Yokawa told me, "China is a country of the ryo mode, and has no ritsu notes. Japan is a country of the ritsu mode alone, and has no ryo notes."⁸⁶

200. The kuretake bamboo has narrow leaves and the kawatake broad ones. The bamboo near the palace drain is kawatake, and the clump planted toward the Jijū-den is kuretake.

201. Of the two grave posts that say "Commoners Withdraw" and "Dismount," the one farther out is "Dismount" and the one inside is "Commoners Withdraw."⁸⁷

202. There is nothing written anywhere to say that the tenth month should be avoided for Shinto rites because it is called Kannazuki, "the month without gods." There is no authority for it in any text. Perhaps it got the name because none of the shrines hold festivals in this month. There is a story that in this month all the gods gather at the Grand Shrine of Ise, but there is no basis for it. If it were so, the tenth month would be the special month for festivals at Ise, and there is no such custom. There are many precedents for Emperors visiting the shrines in the tenth month, though most of them are precedents of ill omen.

203. The procedure for hanging a quiver at a place under imperial censure has died out, and nobody knows it now. When the Emperor was ill, or the country was generally in turmoil, a quiver was hung at the shrine of the god of Gojō. The Quiver God at Kurama is also a god at whose shrine a quiver was hung. When the quiver carried by an officer of the Police Commission was hung at a house, nobody could go in or out. Since this custom died out, these days a seal is put on the door instead.

204. When a criminal was to be beaten with the rod, he was tied to the flogging frame. But nobody knows any longer what the frame looked like, or how he was tied to it, I'm told.

205. The oaths taken on Mount Hiei calling on the Great Teacher as witness were begun by Archbishop Jie. The law books say nothing of oaths. In the sage reigns of old, no government business was ever conducted by sworn oaths. The practice has spread only recently. Also, under the statutes, flood and fire bring no ritual pollution, but a thing put inside a vessel may be polluted.⁸⁸

206. When the Tokudaiji Minister of the Right was Chief of the Police Commission, a meeting of the Commission was being held at the middle gate when an ox belonging to an officer called Akikane broke loose, came into the office, climbed up onto the Chief's dais, and lay there chewing its cud. Everyone said it was a grave portent and that the ox should be sent to a diviner. But when the Minister's father, the Chancellor, heard of it, he said, "An ox has no judgment. It has legs; where wouldn't it climb? You can't take a poor officer's wretched ox away from him just because he happened to come to work on it." He had the ox returned to its owner and the mat it had lain on replaced. And nothing bad happened at all. "If you see a portent and don't treat it as one, the portent will undo itself," they say.

207. When the ground was being leveled to build the Kameyama palace, they found a mound where a great many large snakes lay coiled together. People said they were the gods of the place, and reported it. When the Emperor asked what should be done, everyone said, "If they have held this ground since ancient times, they cannot simply be dug up and thrown away." But that same Minister alone said, "What curse could creatures living on the Emperor's land lay on him for building his palace? The gods and spirits do no wrong. There is nothing to fear. Just dig them all up and throw them out." The mound was broken up and the snakes were thrown into the Ōi River. And there was no curse at all.

208. When tying the cord of a sutra scroll, it is usual to cross the cord over from top and bottom, like a sash tied across the shoulders, and pull the head of the loop out sideways from between the two strands. When the Archbishop Kōshun of the Kegon-in saw a scroll tied that way, he untied it and had it done again. "This is the modern style," he said. "It's very ugly. The proper way is simply to wind the cord round and round, and tuck the end of the loop in from top to bottom." He was a man of the old school who knew about such things.

209. A man who was disputing someone's rice field lost his suit, and out of spite he sent men to cut the crop and take it. On their way there they started cutting every field along the road. "These aren't the fields he's disputing. Why are you doing this?" someone asked. "We have no right to cut that one either," the men said, "but since we're on our way to do wrong anyway, why not cut wherever we like?" Their logic was very amusing.

210. People say only that the yobukodori, the "bird that calls its young," is a bird of spring, and nothing anywhere tells us clearly what bird it is. In a certain Shingon book, there is a rite for calling back the souls of the dead that is to be performed when the yobukodori calls. This bird is the nue. In a long poem in the Man'yōshū, the line "on a long spring day when the haze is rising" goes on to mention the nue bird. The nue bird, then, sounds as if it fits what is said of the yobukodori.⁸⁹

211. You should rely on nothing at all. Fools rely deeply on things, and so they end up resentful and angry. Don't rely on power: the strong fall first. Don't rely on wealth: it is easily lost in a moment. Don't rely on talent: even Confucius was not given his chance. Don't rely on virtue: even Yan Hui had bad luck. Don't rely on your lord's favor: you can be put to death quickly. Don't rely on your servants obeying you: they may turn against you and run away. Don't rely on people's goodwill: it is sure to change. Don't rely on promises: few of them are kept.

If you rely neither on yourself nor on others, you will be glad when things go well and not resentful when they go badly. If there is plenty of room to your left and right, nothing will block you; if there is plenty of distance before and behind, nothing will hem you in. When you are cramped, you are crushed and broken. When you use your mind narrowly and harshly, you clash with things and quarrel and are broken. When you are broad and gentle, not a hair of you is hurt. Man is the most spiritual of all things between heaven and earth. Heaven and earth have no limits. Why should man's nature be any different? When you are broad and generous and never run up against your limits, joy and anger do not hinder you, and things do not trouble you.⁹⁰

212. The autumn moon is beautiful beyond words. Anyone who says the moon is always like that, and can't tell the difference, is a very sad case.

213. When putting charcoal into the brazier in the Emperor's presence, you don't use the tongs. You tip it straight in from the earthenware dish, so you must take care to heap it so that it won't tumble out. When a Retired Emperor went to Iwashimizu, an attendant wearing the white robes of purification was putting charcoal in with his hands, and an expert in court precedent said, "On a day when you are wearing white, there is nothing wrong with using the tongs."

214. The piece of music called Sōfuren, "A Wife Longs for Her Husband," did not get its name because a woman pined for a man. It was originally Sōfuren, "The Lotus of the Minister's Mansion," and the characters were confused because they sound the same. It was the music of Wang Jian of the Jin, a minister who planted lotuses at his house and loved them. That is why a minister's house is called "the lotus mansion." The piece called Kaikotsu, too, is really Kaikotsu, "the Uighurs." There was a powerful barbarian nation called the Uighurs, and after these barbarians submitted to the Han, they came and played the music of their country.⁹¹

215. Taira no Nobutoki, when he was old, told me this story of the old days. "One evening the lay-monk of Saimyō-ji sent for me. I said, 'Right away,' but I couldn't find a proper robe and was fumbling about, when another messenger came and said, 'Haven't you got a robe? It's night, and it doesn't matter what you wear. Just come quickly.' I went in a limp old robe, just as I was. He came out with a wine flask and some earthenware cups. 'I sent for you because it's dull drinking this wine by myself,' he said. 'But there's nothing to eat with it. Everyone will be asleep by now. Go and look wherever you can, and see if there's anything that will do.' I took a paper torch and searched every corner, and on a shelf in the kitchen I found a little earthenware dish with a scrap of bean paste stuck to it. 'This is what I've found,' I said. 'That will do nicely,' he said, and he cheerfully drank cup after cup and was in high good humor. That's how things were in those days."⁹²

216. When the lay-monk of Saimyō-ji went to worship at the Tsurugaoka shrine, he sent a messenger ahead to the lay-monk of the Left Stables, Ashikaga, and called on him on the way. The way his host entertained him was this: with the first round of wine, pounded abalone; with the second, shrimp; with the third, rice cakes; and that was all. The company was the host and his wife and the Archbishop Ryūben, who sat on the host's side. Then the lay-monk said, "I've been looking forward to the Ashikaga dyed cloth you send me every year." "I have it ready," Ashikaga said, and had his women make up thirty pieces of cloth in various colors into robes then and there, and sent them to him afterward. A man who saw it all was alive until quite recently, and told me about it.⁹³

Sections 217–243

217. A certain millionaire said, "A man should put everything else aside and devote himself entirely to getting rich. If you're poor, there's no point in being alive. Only the rich are men. If you mean to get rich, you must first of all train your mind, and the training is this. Settle yourself in the conviction that human life lasts forever, and never for a moment think about impermanence. That is the first precaution.

"Next, never satisfy every want. While a man is in the world, his wishes, for himself and for others, are without number. If you follow your desires and try to get everything you want, you could have a million in cash and it wouldn't stay with you for a moment. There is no end to wants, and there is an end to money. You cannot serve limitless wants with limited money. When a want stirs in your heart, recognize that an evil thought has come to destroy you, guard yourself against it in fear, and don't spend so much as a coin on the smallest need.

"Next, if you think of money as a servant to be used, you will never escape poverty. Fear it and honor it like a lord or a god, and never use it as you please.

"Next, even if you are shamed, never be angry or resentful.

"Next, be honest and keep your promises strictly.

"A man who keeps these rules and pursues profit will find wealth coming to him the way fire goes to dry wood and water runs downhill. When your money piles up and never runs out, you won't indulge in banquets, music or women, you won't decorate your house, and though you never satisfy a single want, your heart will always be at ease and happy."

Yet people seek money in order to get what they want. Money is valued because it fulfills wishes. To have wishes and not fulfill them, to have money and not use it, is to be exactly like a poor man. What pleasure is there in that? His rules seem to me to mean only that a man should cut off all his human wants and not mind being poor. Rather than make a pleasure of satisfying desire, better to have no money at all. Rather than make a pleasure of washing a boil, better not to have boils. At this point there is no difference between rich and poor. The highest stage of enlightenment is the same as the lowest. Great desire is like no desire.⁹⁴

218. Foxes bite people. At the Horikawa mansion a servant had his foot bitten by a fox while he was asleep. At Ninna-ji, at night, three foxes leaped on a lowly monk who was passing in front of the main temple and bit him. He drew his dagger and fought them off, and stabbed two of the foxes. One he killed, and the other two ran away. The monk was bitten in many places, but came to no harm.

219. The Shijō Middle Counselor told me, "Tatsuaki is a great man in his art. He came to see me the other day and said, 'It's very foolish of me, and terribly presumptuous, but I have privately come to think that there is something a little odd about the fifth hole of the flute. The reason is this. The kan hole gives the Hyōjō note, and the go hole, the fifth, gives the Shimomu note, and between them lies a semitone, Shōzetsu. The jō hole gives Sōjō, and after a semitone, Fushō, comes the shaku hole, Ōshiki. After that comes a semitone, Rankei, and then the chū hole, Banshiki. Between the chū and the roku holes lies Shinsen. In this way each interval skips a semitone. Only the go hole has no semitone between it and the jō hole, and yet it is spaced the same as the others, so it sounds bad. And so when you play that hole, you must always draw your lips back from it. If you don't, it won't be in tune with other instruments. It's rare to find anyone who can play it properly.'

"That was very penetrating and very interesting. This is what they mean when they say the old masters fear the young ones."

Another day, Kagemochi told me, "The mouth organ is tuned before you play it, so all you have to do is play. With the flute, you tune each note with your breath as you play, so for every hole there are the traditions handed down by word of mouth, and on top of that a man's natural gift, and he must put his heart into it. That is true of every hole, not just the fifth. It's not simply a matter of always drawing back. If you play badly, none of the holes will sound well. A master can bring them all into tune. If the notes don't match the other instruments, the fault lies with the man, not the instrument."⁹⁵

220. "In everything, outlying places are vulgar and boorish, but the dance music of the Tennō-ji temple is a match for the capital's," I said. And a musician of the Tennō-ji answered, "The music at our temple is better tuned than anywhere else, and the instruments sound beautifully together. The reason is that we still tune by the standard of Prince Shōtoku's day, which is the bell in front of the Hall of the Six Hours. Its tone is the very center of the Ōshiki mode. Because the pitch rises and falls with heat and cold, we take as our guide the tone between the Nirvana service in the second month and the Prince's memorial service. That is our secret. From that one tone we tune every other."

Every bell ought to sound in the Ōshiki mode. It is the mode of impermanence, the sound of the Hall of Impermanence at the Jetavana monastery. When the bell of the Saionji temple was to be cast in the Ōshiki mode, it was recast many times without success, and in the end one was found in a distant province. The bell of the Hōkongō-in also sounds in the Ōshiki mode.⁹⁶

221. "In the Kenji and Kōan years, around 1280, on the day of the Kamo Festival, the police runners used to wear strange decorations: they made horses out of four or five rolls of dark blue cloth, with wicks for the manes and tails, and fixed them to robes painted with cobwebs, and walked in the procession explaining what poem it all illustrated. We saw it all the time, and it seemed to us really amusing," some of the old law clerks of the Police Commission still say today. These days the decorations grow more extravagant year by year. The runners load themselves with all sorts of heavy things, have someone else hold up their left and right sleeves, don't even carry their own halberds, and go along gasping for breath, which is a sorry sight.⁹⁷

222. When Jōganbō of Takedani went to the palace of Empress Higashi-Nijō-in, she asked him, "For the souls of the dead, what service brings the greatest benefit?" "The Mantra of Light and the Hōkyōin dhāraṇī," he answered. His disciples said to him afterward, "Why did you say that? Why didn't you say that nothing is better than calling on the Buddha's name?" "It's our own school," he said, "so I would have liked to say so. But I've never seen a sutra that says plainly that calling on the Buddha's name for the dead brings great benefit. If she had asked me where it says so, what could I have answered? That's why I named the mantra and the dhāraṇī, which have a sure scripture behind them."⁹⁸

223. The Tazu Lord's childhood name was Tazu-gimi, "Little Crane." It is a mistake to say he was called that because he kept cranes.

224. The diviner Arimune, the lay-monk, came up from Kamakura and called on me. As soon as he came in he scolded me. "This garden is far too big and empty. It's shocking, and it won't do. A man who knows the Way works at planting. Leave one narrow path, and make all the rest into a vegetable plot." It's true that leaving even a little ground unused does no good. One should plant things to eat, and herbs for medicine.

225. Ō no Hisasuke said that the lay-monk Michinori chose the most interesting movements from the dances and taught them to a woman called Iso no Zenji to dance. He had her wear a white robe with a short dagger in her sash and a man's tall cap on her head, and so they called it the man's dance. Zenji's daughter, called Shizuka, carried on the art. This was the origin of the shirabyōshi. They sing of the origins of buddhas and gods. Later Minamoto no Mitsuyuki wrote many of the songs. Some were composed by Retired Emperor Go-Toba himself, and he had them taught to Kamegiku, they say.⁹⁹

226. In the time of Retired Emperor Go-Toba, Yukinaga, a former Governor of Shinano, had a name for learning. He was called on to take part in a debate on the New Music Bureau poems, and forgot two of the Seven Virtues of the Dance, so he was nicknamed "the Five-Virtue Boy." It upset him so much that he gave up his studies and left the world. The Archbishop Jichin kept people with some talent about him, even servants, and looked after them, and he gave this Shinano lay-monk a living.

This lay-monk Yukinaga wrote The Tale of the Heike and taught a blind man called Shōbutsu to recite it. He wrote about the monks of Mount Hiei with particular splendor. He knew all about Yoshitsune and wrote about him in detail, but he seems not to have known much about Noriyori, for he left out a great many things about him. For the fighting and the arts of bow and horse, Shōbutsu, who came from the east, asked the warriors himself and had Yukinaga write down what they said. The blind lute priests of today imitate Shōbutsu's natural voice.¹⁰⁰

227. The Hymns for the Six Hours of the day and night were put together from passages of the sutras by a monk called Anraku, a disciple of the Venerable Hōnen, who used them for his devotions. Later a monk called Zenkanbō of Uzumasa set them to music and made them into chant. That was the beginning of the nembutsu said in a single breath. It started in the reign of Emperor Go-Saga. The Hymns in Praise of the Rites were also begun by Zenkanbō.

228. The Shaka Nembutsu at the Senbon temple was begun in the Bun'ei years, around 1270, by the Venerable Nyorin.

229. A fine craftsman, they say, uses a knife that is a little dull. Myōkan's knife did not cut very well.¹⁰¹

230. There used to be an uncanny creature in the Gojō palace. The Tō Major Counselor told me that some courtiers were playing go in the Black Door room when somebody raised the blind and looked in. "Who's that?" they said, turning round, and there was a fox, kneeling like a person and peering in. "It's a fox!" they shouted, and it panicked and ran away. It must have been an inexperienced fox that made a mess of its disguise.

231. "The lay-monk Steward of Sono was a carver of fish without equal. At someone's house a splendid carp was brought out, and everyone wanted to watch the Steward carve it, but they hesitated, thinking it might be awkward to ask him straight out. The Steward, being the man he was, said, 'I have been carving a carp every day for a hundred days lately, and I mustn't miss today. Let me have the honor of carving this one.' And he carved it. Everyone thought it very fitting and charming of him." When someone told this story to the lay-monk Chancellor of Kitayama, he said, "That sort of thing I find extremely tiresome. It would have been much better if he had said, 'If there's no one to carve it, let me have it, I'll carve it.' Why talk about a hundred days of carp?" I was told this, and was very amused.

To be plain and unpretentious is generally better than to be charming by contrivance. When entertaining a guest, it is all very well to make the occasion seem to have come about by some pleasant chance, but it is best simply to bring things out for no particular reason. When you give someone a present, too, to give it without any occasion, and say simply, "I'd like you to have this," shows real goodwill. To pretend you're reluctant to part with something so that he'll ask you for it, or to make it a forfeit for losing a game, is tiresome.¹⁰²

232. People ought to look as if they had no learning and no talent. A certain man's son, a not unattractive young man, was talking to someone in front of his father and quoted from the Chinese histories. It sounded clever, but I thought he needn't have done it in front of his elders.

Another time, at someone's house, they had sent for a lute so as to hear a lute priest recite, and one of the frets had come off. "Make one and fix it on," said the host. A man among the guests who looked quite respectable said, "Is there an old ladle handle?" I looked, and saw that he had grown his fingernails long. He must play the lute. But the blind priest's lute wasn't worth such a fuss, and it was embarrassing to see him trying to show that he was an expert. "Ladle handles are made of himono wood, they say, and it's no good," someone told me afterward. A young man can look good or bad over the smallest thing.

233. If you want to avoid all faults, there is nothing like being sincere in everything, courteous to everyone without distinction, and sparing of words. That is good in anyone, man or woman, old or young, but when a young and good-looking person speaks graciously, it is especially unforgettable and charming. All faults come from acting familiar, playing the expert, looking pleased with yourself, and making light of others.

234. When someone asks you something, it's not good to give him an answer that leaves him confused, as if you thought it foolish to tell him plainly because surely he must know already. He may know and ask because he wants to be sure. And there must be people who really don't know. If you tell him clearly, you will seem a sensible person.

When someone hasn't yet heard some news and you, because you know it, write to him only, "What a shocking thing about So-and-so," so that he has to write back and ask what happened, it is disagreeable. Even something everyone has known for ages can sometimes be missed, so what harm is there in telling him so that nothing is left unclear? This sort of thing is done by people who don't know how to behave.

235. In a house that has a master, strangers do not walk in as they please. Where there is no master, passersby wander in freely, and creatures like foxes and owls, not kept off by the presence of people, move in as if they owned the place, and weird things like tree spirits appear. A mirror has no color or shape of its own, and so all kinds of images come and are reflected in it. If a mirror had color and shape, nothing would be reflected. Empty space can hold things. When all kinds of thoughts come and float up in our minds as they please, perhaps it is because there is no such thing as a mind. If the mind had a master, all these things would not come crowding into our hearts.

236. In Tanba there is a place called Izumo, where a branch of the Great Shrine of Izumo has been set up and splendidly built. It belongs to someone called Shida, and one autumn he invited the Venerable Shōkai and a great many other people. "Come along, let's go and worship at Izumo. I'll treat you all to rice cakes." He took them all there, and they worshiped and were filled with deep faith.

The stone lion and the stone dog in front of the shrine had been set up facing away from each other, back to back. The Venerable was deeply moved. "How wonderful! The way these lions stand is most unusual. There must be some profound reason for it," he said, with tears in his eyes. "Gentlemen, don't you notice what a remarkable thing this is? I'm surprised at you." They were all struck by it. "It really is different from anywhere else. We must tell people about it when we get back to the capital." The Venerable was still more curious, and he called over a priest of the shrine who looked older and as if he might know something. "There must be some tradition behind the way the lions of this shrine are placed. I should very much like to hear it." "Oh, that," the priest said. "Some naughty boys did it. It's a disgrace." And he went up to them, set them back the right way round, and went off. The Venerable's tears of emotion had been wasted.¹⁰³

237. Whether things put on a willow tray should be laid lengthwise or crosswise must depend on the thing. "Scrolls and such are laid lengthwise, and tied down with a paper string passed through the gaps between the slats. An inkstone too is best laid lengthwise, so that the brush doesn't roll off," said the Sanjō Minister of the Right. But the fine calligraphers of the Kadenokōji family never lay anything lengthwise, even for a moment. They always place things crosswise.

238. The guardsman Chikatomo once wrote down seven things to boast of. They were all about horsemanship, and nothing very much. Following his example, I have seven things to boast of myself.

First. I was going about with a crowd of people looking at the cherry blossoms, when near the Saishōkō-in we saw a man galloping his horse. "If he gallops that horse once more, it will fall and he'll come off. Just watch," I said, and we stopped. He galloped it again, and when he reined in, the horse went down, and the rider fell headlong into the mud. Everyone admired me because what I'd said came true.

Second. When the present Emperor was still Crown Prince and was living at the Madenokōji palace, I had some business at the room where the Horikawa Major Counselor, who was in attendance, had his quarters. He had volumes four, five and six of the Analects open in front of him. "Just now His Highness wanted to look up the passage that says 'I hate the way purple displaces vermilion,' and he looked in his copy but couldn't find it. He has told me to search more carefully, so I'm looking for it." "It's in volume nine, at such and such a place," I said. "Oh, wonderful!" he said, and took it in to the Prince.

A thing like that is nothing, a child could do it, but the people of old boasted of the slightest things. Retired Emperor Go-Toba once asked Lord Teika whether it would be bad to have both "sleeve" and "sleeve-end" in the same poem. Teika answered, "There is the poem

	Is it a sleeve-end
	of the grass of the autumn fields,
	the plumed pampas grass,
	that it seems a sleeve
	waving to call me?

so what could be wrong with it?" And he made a great point of writing down that "to remember the model poem at that very moment is a blessing of the gods of poetry, and a great good fortune." The Kujō Chancellor, Lord Koremichi, too, listed some quite ordinary points in a petition for office, and boasted of them.

Third. The inscription on the great bell of the Jōzaikō-in was drafted by Lord Arikane. Lord Yukifusa was making the fair copy, to have it transferred to the mold, when the lay-monk in charge brought out the draft and showed it to me. There was a line, "Seeing the evening off beyond the blossoms, its voice is heard a hundred li." I said, "The rhyme seems to be on the yang and tang rhymes. Isn't 'a hundred li' a mistake?" "How lucky I showed it to you!" he said. "This will be to my credit." He sent word to the author, and the answer came back: "It was a mistake. It should be corrected to 'several lines.'" But what can "several lines" mean? Perhaps he meant "several paces." I'm not at all sure.¹⁰⁴

Fourth. I was making the pilgrimage to the three pagodas of Mount Hiei with a crowd of people, and in the Hall of Constant Practice at Yokawa there was an old tablet inscribed "Ryūge-in." The monk of the hall told us with great ceremony, "There has always been a doubt whether it was written by Sukemasa or by Yukinari, and it has never been settled." I said, "If it's Yukinari's, it will have an inscription on the back. If it's Sukemasa's, it won't." The back was thick with dust and full of insects' nests and looked filthy, but they swept and wiped it clean, and we all looked, and there were Yukinari's rank and office and name and the year, clear as could be. Everyone was delighted.¹⁰⁵

Fifth. When the holy man Dōgen was lecturing at the Nālandā temple, he forgot the Eight Calamities and said, "Can anyone remember them?" None of his pupils could, and I called out from behind my screen, "Aren't they such and such?" He was very impressed.¹⁰⁶

Sixth. I went with Archbishop Kenjo to see the rite of the holy water at the palace, and before it was over the Archbishop left, but his Bishop was nowhere to be seen even outside the guardroom. He sent the monks back to look for him. "There are too many monks there who look just like him, and we can't find him," they said, and came out after a very long time. "Oh, how annoying! You go and find him," the Archbishop said to me, and I went back in and came out with him straight away.

Seventh. On the fifteenth of the second month, on a bright moonlit night, late, I went to the Senbon temple to hear the service. I went in at the back and sat by myself, my face well hidden, listening, when a graceful woman, whose figure and scent were finer than anyone's, made her way in and sat leaning against my knee, so close that her perfume would cling to me. I thought this awkward and edged away, but she moved closer again, just as before, so I got up and left.

Some time afterward, an old lady-in-waiting from a certain palace remarked in the course of some idle chatter, "I thought very poorly of you once, for being such a man without any feeling. And there is someone who resents you for being so cold." "I haven't the least idea what you mean," I said, and that was the end of it. I heard later that on the night of the service someone of rank had recognized me from her private box, had a maid dressed up and sent out, and said, "If you get the chance, say something to him. Then come back and tell me how he behaves. It will be fun." It was a trap.¹⁰⁷

239. The fifteenth night of the eighth month and the thirteenth night of the ninth both fall under the lunar mansion of Ro, the Bond. Because this mansion is clear and bright, they are good nights for enjoying the moon.¹⁰⁸

240. When the seaweed gatherers' eyes are everywhere on the Bay of Secrets, and the watchmen are thick on Dark Mountain, the love that finds a way to visit in spite of them has many moments of deep feeling and much that is hard to forget. When the parents and brothers give their consent and the girl is simply taken into the house as a wife, it must be very embarrassing.

A woman who finds it hard to make a living in the world will say, "If a current invites me, I'll go," and take any man who is well off, though he may be an old monk who is no match for her, or some uncouth fellow from the east. The go-between makes each side out to be charming, and the man brings home a woman he doesn't know and who doesn't know him, which is a dismal business. What can they find to talk about? If they had to make their way to each other "through the thickets of Mount Tsukuba," and could talk together about the bitter months and years of it, there would be no end to what they could say. Any match that strangers have arranged is bound to bring much that is unpleasant and disagreeable.

Even if she is a fine woman, a man of low rank, ugly and getting on in years, will be thought less of: "Why would she throw herself away on a creature like him?" And sitting across from her, he will feel ashamed even of his own reflection, which is a sorry thing. A man who cannot imagine himself standing under a hazy moon on a night fragrant with plum blossom, or making his way home through the dew on the palace grounds under the dawn sky, had better give up love altogether.¹⁰⁹

241. The full moon does not stay round for even a moment; it soon begins to wane. People who don't pay attention may not notice that it changes so much in a single night. An illness grows worse in just the same way, never standing still, and death is soon near. But while the illness is not yet acute and a man is not yet facing death, he is used to thinking that life goes on as usual, and he means to do a great many things while he lives and then practice the Way at his leisure. Then illness takes him and he stands at death's door with not one of his wishes fulfilled. There is nothing to be said. He regrets all the months and years he wasted and vows that if he recovers this time and lives, he will work day and night and get this and that done without fail. But soon he grows worse, and dies out of his mind and in confusion. Most people are like this. Everyone should take this to heart, and quickly.

If you mean to fulfill your wishes first and turn to the Way afterward when you have time, your wishes will never run out. In a life that is like an illusion, what is there to accomplish? All wishes are delusions. When a wish comes into your mind, recognize that your deluded mind is leading you astray, and don't act on any of it. When you let go of everything at once and turn to the Way, there will be no hindrance and nothing to be done, and your body and mind will be at peace for good.

242. What drives us forever, pulled this way and that by what goes against us and what goes our way, is nothing but pain and pleasure. Pleasure means what we like and love, and there is no end to our pursuit of it. The first thing we desire is fame. There are two kinds of fame: a name for conduct and a name for talent. The second is lust, and the third is the pleasure of food. All other wishes put together are nothing next to these three. They arise from seeing the world upside down, and bring endless trouble. It is best not to seek them.¹¹⁰

243. When I was eight years old, I asked my father, "What is a buddha?" My father said, "A buddha is what a man becomes." I asked again, "How does a man become a buddha?" My father said, "By following the teachings of the buddhas." I asked again, "And who taught the buddha who taught him?" He answered again, "He too became a buddha by following the teachings of the buddha before him." I asked again, "Then what kind of buddha was the very first buddha, who started the teaching?" And my father laughed and said, "I suppose he fell from the sky, or sprang up out of the ground." "He pressed me so hard I couldn't answer," he told everyone, and enjoyed it very much.