Sections 121–140121~140단

Among the animals worth raising are the horse and the ox. It is pitiful to tie them up and put them to hardship, but they cannot be done without, so what is to be done?

The dog is better than a man at guarding and warding off, so one must have one. Yet every house has one, so there is no need to go looking for one to keep.

All other birds and beasts are of no use. The running beast is shut in a pen and put in chains, and the flying bird has its wings clipped and is placed in a cage, so that its grief, longing for the clouds and thinking of the fields and hills, never ceases. If such feelings came upon you and were hard to bear, would a person with a heart take pleasure in this?

To torment a living thing and delight the eye is the mind of Jie (桀) and Zhou (紂). When Wang Ziyou loved birds, he watched them delight in the woods and made them companions of his wandering. He did not catch them and torment them.

It is written, they say, that rare birds and strange beasts are not kept in the country.

Among a man's talents, the first is to be clear in letters and to know the teaching of the sages.

Next comes writing. Even if you do not make it your chief pursuit, you should learn it. It is a help to study.

Next you should learn the art of medicine. It nourishes the body and helps others, and the duties of loyalty and filial piety cannot be fulfilled without it.

Next, archery and riding are among the six arts. You must look into these. The ways of letters, of arms, and of medicine truly must not be lacking. A man who studies them cannot be called idle.

Next, food is a man's heaven. One who chooses flavors well and knows them should be counted a man of great virtue.

Next, handicraft has many uses.

As for the rest, having many skills is what a gentleman is ashamed of. Skill in poetry and song, and a fine touch on strings and pipes, are a deep and hidden way, and lord and subject are said to hold them in high regard; but in the present age, governing the world by these has come closer and closer to folly. It is like gold, which is superior and yet does not match iron in usefulness.

A man who spends his time doing useless things should be called a fool, or a man who does wrong.

There is much that must be done for the country and for the lord, that cannot be helped. You should consider how little leisure is left over.

What the body must provide for, and cannot do without, is first food, second clothing, third a place to live. The great matters among men do not go beyond these three. To be free of hunger and cold, unbeaten by wind and rain, and to pass your days in quiet is the pleasure.

Only, everyone has illness. When illness strikes, the misery is hard to bear. Medical care must not be forgotten.

Add medicine, and to fail to obtain these four is called poverty. To lack none of the four is called wealth. To seek and manage anything beyond these four is called extravagance.

If the four are kept frugally, who would say he has too little?

The monk Zeho (是法) was no disgrace to the Pure Land school, yet he never set himself up as a scholar-master (學匠). He simply chanted the Buddha's name morning and night and passed through the world at his ease, and that is a most desirable way to be.

After I lost someone close, a certain holy man was invited to the service on the forty-ninth day, and his sermon was so fine that everyone shed tears.

After the officiant had gone, those who had listened said to one another, "Today he seemed more holy than ever before." To this a certain man answered, "Say what you like, when he looks that much like a Tang dog." The tenderness of the moment was gone, and it was funny.

Is that any way to praise an officiant?

The same man, urging drink on others, said, "For me to drink first and then press it on someone else is like trying to cut a man down with a sword. It has an edge on both sides, so when I raise it I cut my own neck first, and that is why I cannot cut the other man. If I get drunk first and fall down, surely no one else will drink." Had he tried cutting with a sword? It was very funny.

"When a losing run at gambling has run its course and the man is about to stake all that is left, you must not play against him. Know that the time has come for him to turn about and win again and again. To know that time is what makes a good gambler," a certain man said.

In matters where changing brings no gain, the rule is that not changing is best.

Masafusa, the major counselor, was a man of keen talent and good character, and at a time when the retired emperor was thinking of making him a commander, one of his close attendants said, "Just now I saw a dreadful thing."

"What was it?" the retired emperor asked, and the man said, "I saw through a hole in the middle fence that Lord Masafusa was cutting the leg off a living dog to feed his hawk." At this the retired emperor found him loathsome and hateful, his usual regard for him changed, and Masafusa did not rise in office.

That such a man kept a hawk is unexpected in itself, but the dog's leg is a thing without foundation. The lie is a sad business, yet the heart of the lord who heard such a thing and hated it is most noble.

In general, a man who kills living things, hurts them, sets them fighting, and makes sport and pleasure of it belongs to the company that harms beasts.

When you attend to all birds and beasts, and even the smallest insects, and watch how they are, they think of their young and long for their parents, they pair as husband and wife, they are jealous and angry, they are full of desire, they cherish their own bodies and cling to life; and because they are wholly without wisdom, this is even stronger in them than in men.

How could it not be pitiful to give them pain and take their lives?

To look upon every creature that has feeling and have no heart of mercy is not to be human.

Yan Hui's resolve was not to put others to trouble. In general, in the matter of tormenting people and abusing things, you must not take away even the will of the lowest of the people.

There are also those who deceive and frighten small children, shame them with words, and find it amusing. A grown person thinks nothing of it, since none of it is real, but to a child's heart the fear and shame and dismay go to the bone, and the feeling must be truly keen. To torment a child and find it amusing is not the heart of mercy.

The joy and anger and grief and pleasure of grown people are all empty as well, yet who is not caught by the look of things as real?

To wound the heart harms a person even more than to break the body.

Illness too is often taken in through the heart. Few illnesses come from outside. Drinking medicine to bring on a sweat is sometimes of no effect, yet one moment of shame or fear will always make a man sweat. Know that this is the work of the heart.

There is more than one case of a man who wrote the placard for the Lingyun Pavilion (凌雲閣) and turned white-headed.

There is nothing better than not contending over things, bending yourself and following others, putting your own person last and others first.

In games of every kind, the man who loves a contest does so for the pleasure of winning. He delights in his own skill being the greater. So it is plain that losing will seem to him no pleasure at all. If he meant to lose and make the other man glad, all the pleasure of the game would be gone.

To make another feel put out in order to comfort your own heart goes against virtue.

Even jesting among close friends is a matter of measuring and deceiving another and taking pleasure in your own greater cleverness. This too is against propriety. So it is that many quarrels begin at a merry gathering and end in a long resentment. All of this is the fault of loving to contend.

If you would surpass others, let it only be by study, and wish your wisdom to surpass theirs. For if you learn the Way, you come to know that you must not boast of your goodness or contend with your fellows.

To decline high office and to throw away profit is the strength of study, and of nothing else.

The poor man makes a courtesy of his goods, and the old man makes a courtesy of his strength.

To know your own measure and stop at once when a thing is beyond you is what should be called wisdom. If this is not allowed you, the fault is another's. To press on by force without knowing your measure is your own fault.

The poor man who does not know his measure steals; the man whose strength has failed and who does not know his measure falls ill.

The Tsukurimichi at Toba is not a name given after the Toba Palace was built. It is a name from long ago.

The voice of Prince Motoyoshi offering the New Year's greeting was so remarkable that it carried from the Daigokuden as far as the Tsukurimichi at Toba. So it stands in the Ribuoki (李部王記), they say.

In the imperial bedchamber the pillow faces east. In general you should lay your head to the east and receive the yang breath, and for this reason Confucius too laid his head to the east. In the furnishing of a sleeping hall a southward pillow is common as well.

Retired Emperor Shirakawa slept with his head to the north. "The north is to be avoided. Also, Ise lies to the south. What are we to make of his turning his back on the Great Shrine?" people said.

But when he worshipped the Great Shrine from afar he faced southeast, not south.

At the Hokkedo of Retired Emperor Takakura there was a samadhi monk, a master of discipline of some name or other. One day he took up a mirror and looked long at his face, and he felt such bitter grief at how ugly and wretched his own form was that even the mirror became hateful to him. From then on he feared mirrors for a long time and would not so much as take one in his hand, and he had nothing at all to do with people. He took part only in the services of the hall and shut himself away. Hearing of it, I thought it a rare thing.

Even a man who seems clever measures only the affairs of others and does not know himself. There can be no reason by which a man who does not know himself knows what is outside him. So the man who knows himself should be called the man who knows things.

He does not know his face is ugly, nor that his heart is foolish, nor that his skill is poor, nor that he counts for nothing, nor that he has grown old, nor that illness has come upon him, nor that death is near, nor that the way he practices falls short, nor the wrong in his own conduct. Still less does he know how others blame him.

Only, the face is seen in a mirror and the years are known by counting. It is not that he does not know his own case, but since there is nothing to be done about it, one might say it is the same as not knowing.

This is not to say, change your face and make your years young again. If you know you are unskilled, why do you not withdraw at once? If you know you have grown old, why do you not take your ease in quiet? If you know your practice is foolish, why do you not set your mind on it?

In general it is shameful to move among people without being loved by them. To go out and serve with an ugly face and a backward mind; to mingle with men of great talent while knowing nothing; to take a place among the skilled with a skill you cannot manage; to stand beside men in their prime with a head of snow; and still more to hope for what is beyond you, to grieve over what cannot be had, to wait for what will not come, to fear others and flatter them — this is not a shame that others give you. It is being dragged by a greedy heart and shaming yourself.

Greed does not stop, because a man does not know for certain that the great matter of the end of life has already come, here and now.

A man known as Sukesue, the lay-monk major counselor, met Tomouji, the consultant and middle captain, and said, "Whatever you may ask me, is there anything I could not answer?"

Tomouji said, "How would that be?" and the other said, "Then let us make a wager." Tomouji said, "I have not learned even a scrap of the serious matters, so there is nothing for me to ask about. I shall ask about something uncertain among idle, trifling words."

"All the more, then. Anything as shallow as that I shall make clear for you," he said. At this the close attendants and the ladies of the household said, "This is an amusing wager. Since you are at it, you should contend before His Majesty. The loser shall provide the meal." So it was settled, and they were called together before His Majesty.

Tomouji said, "I have heard it since I was small, but there is something whose meaning I do not know. What is the sense of the words 'uma no kitsuryo kitsu ni no oka, nakakubo reiri gurendo'? I should like to hear it." At this the lay-monk major counselor was stopped short and said, "This is idle nonsense, not worth speaking of."

"From the first I said I do not know the deep ways. It was settled that I would ask about idle words," said Tomouji. And so the lay-monk major counselor lost, and the forfeit laid on him was a grand one, they say.

The physician Atsushige was in attendance before the late retired emperor when the meal was brought in. He said, "If you will ask me about the various dishes now being brought in, both their characters and their properties, I shall recite the answers from memory. Compare them with the Bencao. I shall not misstate a single one."

At that very moment the late Inner Minister of Rokujo came in and said, "Arifusa will take the chance to learn something too," and then asked, "First of all, the word for salt — which radical does it have?"

"It has the earth radical," Atsushige answered. "The measure of your learning is already plain. That will do for now. There is nothing more I care to know," said the minister. A roar of laughter went up, and Atsushige withdrew.

Are blossoms to be seen only at their height, and the moon only when nothing veils it? To long for the moon while facing the rain, to stay behind lowered blinds and not know where the spring has gone — these too are moving and full of feeling. Branch tips just about to bloom, a garden where the petals have fallen and withered: these are the places with much to see.

In the headnotes (詞書) of poems as well there are such lines as "I set out to see the blossoms, but they had already fallen and passed," and "Something hindered me and I did not go." Are these any less than saying, "Having seen the blossoms"?

It is natural enough to grieve that the blossoms fall and the moon sinks, yet it is the particularly stubborn sort of man who says, "This branch and that branch have both fallen. Now there is nothing worth seeing."

In all things it is the beginning and the end that are interesting. Is the love of man and woman only a matter of meeting and seeing each other? To think of the sorrow of never having met, to lament a promise that came to nothing, to pass the long night alone, to send your thoughts to a distant sky, to remember old days in a house grown over with reeds — that is what it is to know love.

More moving than gazing at the flawless full moon a thousand leagues away is the moon you wait for until near dawn, deep in feeling, pale green in color, showing between the trees at the cedar tops of a deep mountain, and the moment it hides among the drifting clouds after a passing shower. When it glitters on the leaves of chinquapin and white oak, wet as they look, it goes to the bone, and you wish for a friend who understands, and the capital comes to mind with longing.

Are the moon and the blossoms to be seen with the eyes alone? In spring you can think of them without leaving the house, and on a moonlit night from within the bedchamber, and that is a most reassuring and pleasant thing.

A person of quality does not seem wholly given over to it, and even his delight is offhand. It is people from the back country who enjoy everything so thickly. They twist and press up under the blossoms, watch without turning their eyes away, drink, make linked verse, and in the end break off a great branch without a thought. They dip their hands and feet in the spring and step down into the snow to leave their tracks. There is nothing they look at from a distance.

The way such people watched the festival was very strange. "The procession is very slow in coming. Until then the viewing stand is of no use," they said, and in a room at the back they drank and ate and played go and sugoroku, having left someone on the stand. When that person called, "They are passing!" they scrambled up fighting one another as though their hearts would burst, pushed the blinds out until they were ready to fall, jostled each other, watched so as not to miss the least thing, said this and that about every little matter, and when the procession had gone by said, "Until the next one passes," and went back down. They must only want to see the things.

Among the people of the capital, the dignified ones doze and hardly watch at all. The young and the lesser servants stand and sit as their duties require, and those attending behind their masters do not lean out in an unseemly way. No one strains to see.

Somehow it is graceful with hollyhock hung here and there, and before it is fully light the carriages that draw up in secret rouse your curiosity; and as you guess whether it is this person or that, you see that among the oxherds and servants there are faces you know. To watch the many kinds of people passing to and fro, amusing and dazzling, leaves no room for boredom.

Toward dusk the carriages that stood in rows, and the people who sat packed with no space between, have gone off somewhere. Before long they thin out, the clatter of the carriages ends, the blinds and the mats are cleared away, and the place before your eyes grows lonely. That is when the way of the world comes home to you, and it is moving.

To have watched the great road is to have watched the festival. Among the crowds passing back and forth in front of the viewing stands there were many faces I knew, and by this I understood that the number of people in the world is not so very great.

Even if it were settled that I must die only after all these people are gone, that time would come before long.

Put water in a great vessel and bore a thin hole in it, and though the dripping is slight, if it leaks without pause the water will soon be gone.

With so many people in the capital, there cannot be a day when no one dies. Would it be only one or two a day? At Toribeno and Funaoka and the other fields and hills there are days when many are carried out, but there is no day when none are. And so those who sell coffins have no time to make them up and set them aside.

Death does not wait on youth, nor on strength, and it comes when you do not expect it. That we have escaped it until today is a rare wonder. Can you think of the world as leisurely even for a moment?

When the game called mamakodate is made up with sugoroku stones and they are set out in a row, you cannot tell which stone will be taken; but once you have counted along and taken one, the rest seem to have escaped. Yet count again, and as you skip along taking this one and that one, it turns out that none of them escapes.

A soldier going out to battle knows that death is near, and so he forgets his house and forgets himself. To sit in a grass hut with the world behind you, quietly enjoying the water and the stones, and to think that this is something you hear of as happening to others, is very foolish. Even deep in the quiet mountains, will the enemy called impermanence not come pressing in? Facing death there is the same as advancing onto the field of battle.

When the festival has passed, the hollyhock left behind is of no use — so saying, a certain person had all of it taken down from the blinds. It seemed to me a flat and joyless thing, but since it was done by a person of quality I thought perhaps it was right.

Yet Suo no Naishi wrote,

Hung there for nothing at all — the withered hollyhock leaves on the blind that has grown old along with them

and that too, it is written in her family collection, was composed on the withered hollyhock leaves caught on the blind of the main room.

In the headnote of an old poem as well there is, "Sent with it fastened to a withered hollyhock." And in the Pillow Book, the line "Things that make the past dear: withered hollyhock" is a most fond and happy thought. Kamo no Chomei too wrote, in his Tales of the Four Seasons, "On the beaded blind the hollyhock of after the festival has stayed."

Even when it withers of itself it is like this. How then could you clear it away and leave no trace?

The kusudama (藥玉) hung on the curtained bed is changed for chrysanthemum on the ninth day of the ninth month, they say, and so the sweet flag should be left until the time of the chrysanthemum.

After the Biwa empress dowager passed away, someone saw the withered sweet flag and kusudama still inside the old curtained bed, and Ben no Menoto said, "The root out of its season still hangs there," to which Ko no Jiju replied, "And yet the sweet flag grass is still with us."

The trees you would want at home are the pine and the cherry. Among pines the five-needle pine is good too. For blossoms, the single-petaled are best.

The double cherry was once found only in the capital at Nara, but of late they say it has grown common in the world. The blossoms of Yoshino and the Sakon cherry are all single. The double cherry is an odd thing. It is fussy and twisted. You need not plant it. The late-blooming cherry is dreary as well. One troubled by insects is unpleasant too.

As for plum, the white and the pale red single blossoms that open early, and the layered red plum with its splendid scent, are all good. "The late plum blooms at the same time as the cherry, is less noticed, is overshadowed, and withers clinging to the branch; it is a sad thing. The single plum that blooms first and falls is brisk and fine." So said the lay-monk middle counselor of Kyogoku, and he planted single plums close to his eaves after all. On the south side of the Kyogoku house two of them seem to stand even now.

The willow is fine as well. The young maple of about the fourth month is more splendid than any blossom or autumn leaf.

For the orange and the katsura, in either case an old, large tree is good.

For plants: kerria, wisteria, rabbitear iris, pink. In the pond, the lotus. For autumn plants: reed, silver grass, balloon flower, bush clover, maiden flower, thoroughwort, aster, burnet, karukaya grass, gentian, chrysanthemum, the yellow chrysanthemum too, ivy, kudzu, morning glory.

In every case it is good that they are not too tall, and not thick on a small fence.

Anything besides these — the ones rare in the world, the ones with Chinese-sounding names that are hard on the ear, the ones whose flowers are unfamiliar — are not dear at all. In general, whatever is rare and hard to come by is what ill-bred people make much of. You may well do without such things.

To die and leave goods behind is what a wise man does not do.

To have hoarded up poor things is mean, and fine things make you think how the owner's heart was set on them, which is a fleeting thing. A great fussy heap of them is worse still.

It is unseemly when there are people who say, "I shall have it," and quarrel over it afterward. If you mean to leave something to someone later, you should hand it over while you are alive.

There are things you cannot do without morning and evening, but beyond those it is best to have nothing at all.