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Japan Times
15-03-2025
- General
- Japan Times
Divine authority and mortal desires in the turbulent 14th century
'In all things I yearn for the past.' It's a defining phrase, of a man and his book — the man, a literary monk named Yoshida no Kenko (1283-1350); the book, his classic miscellany 'Tsurezuregusa' ('Grasses of Idleness'). His monkish vows drew him out of the world; his literary vocation and his aristocratic ancestry and inclinations drew him into it. He hovered on the edge, a less than thoroughgoing recluse. He wrote: 'They speak of the degenerate, final phase of the world, yet how splendid is the ancient atmosphere, uncontaminated by the world, that still prevails within the palace walls.' Within those walls reigned the emperor — Emperor Go-Daigo from 1318 to 1339, Kenko's peak years — and the question immediately arises: How can the seat of rule be 'uncontaminated by the world'? It can't be. The emperor did not rule. He reigned. To rule was human, to reign merely divine. So it had been for a century and a half — actually far longer, though earlier it had been courtiers who had exercised power in the emperor's name; now it was a bakufu , a military government. An imperial succession dispute in the mid-12th century had drawn to opposing sides warrior clans marginalized until then by ruling courtiers whose power lay not in arms but in dance, music, poetry, calligraphy, handsomeness and very high birth. From the death struggle that followed, the Minamoto clan emerged supreme. Japan was reborn, a land now of warriors and war, a samurai land. Bakufu headquarters in remote Kamakura showed the court in Kyoto — the 'uncontaminated world' — outward deference, honoring its divinity but warning it in effect to stick to its traditional arts and ceremonies. Power would lie elsewhere. Power was contaminated and contaminating. Human, not divine, hands would wield it — the shogun's, not the emperor's.
Japan Times
15-02-2025
- General
- Japan Times
‘The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty'
The very title is beguiling: 'Tsurezuregusa' — literally, 'Grasses of Idleness.' A celebration of idleness! There are 'grasses' in all of us whose soil is idleness. In it they grow. Deprived of it they wither. Yet it's a busy world — true now, true 700 years ago when a monkish aristocrat, or aristocratic monk, named Yoshida no Kenko (c. 1283-1350) 'left the world' and penned his classic volume. It was written between 1330 and 1332. This was not, says Donald Keene in the introduction to his translation, 'a propitious time for a work of reflection and comment.' Very far from it, as we'll see shortly. There were many ways and degrees of 'leaving the world.' Men and women oppressed by commotion and turmoil around them and within them — oppression heightened by a sense of the sheer futility of it all, the perceived unreality of this transient dreamlike soap-bubble world in which we are born to no purpose and die for no reason — took Buddhist vows, shaved their heads, donned drab monkish or nunnish robes and withdrew to monasteries, nunneries or hermitages, there to 'lose themselves in prayer,' either enduring, more or less serenely, their live burial, as it must have seemed to their more worldly contemporaries, or awakening to real life, whose meaning and essence are not to be found in this life of birth and death from which only prayer can free us.
