Sections 141–160141~160단

The holy man Gyoren of Hiden-in was, in his lay surname, a certain Miura, they say, and a warrior without peer.

A man from his home country came and, in the course of talking, said, "It is the men of the East whose word can be relied on. The men of the capital are good only at answering, and there is no truth in them."

The holy man said, "You may well think so, but I have lived long in the capital and grown used to what I see, and I do not think the hearts of the people here are the poorer. Because they are gentle in heart and full of feeling all round, they find it hard to refuse flatly what others ask of them, they cannot cut anything short with words, and out of weakness of heart they give their assent. They do not mean to deceive, but they are people of small means who cannot do as they wish, so of themselves many things do not come out as intended. The men of the East are of my own country, but truly they have no grain of feeling in them, they are poor in sentiment and stiff through and through, so from the first they say no and have done with it. They are prosperous and well supplied, and so others can rely on them." He laid it out with reason.

This holy man had a voice somewhat crooked and rough, and I had thought he would hardly weigh the fine principles of the sacred teaching. After this one speech I held him in quiet awe. That among the many it is he who keeps and governs the temple must be because he has this gentle side, and there is benefit in that as well.

Even one who seems to have no heart will say a good word.

There was a rough man of the East, fearsome to look at, who sat beside another and asked, "Have you children?" "I have not one," came the answer. "Then you will not know the pity of things. I fear you must have a heart without feeling, and that is a fearful thing. It is through a child that one comes to know all the sorrows of the world." It was a thing that might well be so.

Except by the way of love and attachment, would there be mercy in the heart of such a man? Even one with no heart for filial care comes to know a parent's mind once he has a child.

A man who has left the world and is unhampered in everything may see a man bound by many ties, fawning on all sides and deep in his wants, and despise him utterly. That is wrong. If you enter into that man's heart and think, then for a parent who would truly be pitiable, for a wife and children, he might forget shame and even steal.

So rather than binding thieves and punishing only their wrongs, it would be better to govern the world so that the people of the world are not hungry and not cold.

When a man has no settled livelihood he has no settled heart. A man in extremity steals. If the world is not governed and there is the suffering of freezing and starving, offenders cannot cease. To torment people and make them break the law, and then to punish them for it, is a pitiful business.

Then how is one to be kind to the people? Stop the extravagance and the waste above, comfort the common people and encourage farming, and there can be no doubt that there will be profit below.

A man whose clothing and food are as good as other people's, and who still does wrong — he is the one who should be called a true thief.

When I hear people tell how splendid someone's last hours were, it would be a thing of quiet depth if they said only, "He was calm and not disordered." But foolish people fasten strange and singular appearances onto it, and praise the words he spoke and his bearing in the direction they themselves like. I feel this is not even in keeping with what the man himself intended in his ordinary days.

This great matter cannot be settled even by a manifest incarnation (權化), nor measured even by a scholar of wide learning. If there is nothing amiss in oneself, it is not a thing to hang on what others see and hear.

As the holy man of Toganoo was passing along the road, a man washing a horse in the river said, "Ashi, ashi," which is to say, "Feet, feet."

The holy man stopped and said, "How holy! Here is a man in whom an old bond has opened. He is chanting aji, aji — the letter A (阿字). Whose horse is this? It seems to me too holy for words." "It is the horse of his lordship the fusho (府生)," the man answered.

"What a splendid thing this is. It is the letter A, unborn from the first (阿字本不生). I have made a joyful bond," he said, and wiped away tears of feeling, they say.

Hata no Shigemi, an imperial escort (御隨身), said of Shimotsuke no Nyudo Shingan of the Hokumen, "This is a man with the look of one who will fall from his horse. Take the greatest care." It seemed no true thing at all, and then Shingan fell from his horse and died.

People thought that this one surpassing word was like a god's.

So when someone asked, "What look was it?" he said, "He had a peach for a seat — he could not stay on a horse — and he was fond of unruly horses. That is the look I spoke of. When have I ever spoken wrong?"

Myoun, the chief abbot, met a physiognomist and asked, "Is there perhaps a calamity of weapons (兵仗) for me?" The physiognomist said, "Truly that sign is upon you."

When he asked, "What sign is it?" the man said, "Yours is not a body that need fear wound or harm, and yet you have idly turned your thoughts this way and asked. This is already the omen of that danger."

And indeed he was struck by an arrow and died.

That having moxa burned in many places brings defilement to the rites of the gods (神事) is something people took to saying only in recent times. It is not to be found in the codes and ordinances, they say.

A man past forty, if he does not apply moxa to his body and burn at the sanri point, will have times when the breath rises to his head. He should certainly take moxa.

One must not hold deer antler velvet to the nose and smell it. There are tiny insects in it, they say, and they enter by the nose and eat the brain.

A man who means to master an art seems always to be saying, "While I am not yet good at it, I will not let people know of me by halves. To practice quietly until I have it, and then come forward — that would be a thing of quiet depth." But a man who says this masters not one art.

The man who, while he is still stiff and clumsy, mixes with those who are good at it, who is not ashamed though he is mocked and laughed at, and who goes on unruffled and keeps at it — such a man, though he has no natural gift for it, does not get stuck in the way and does not take it lightly, and as the years go by he comes at last to the rank of a master, above the gifted man who does not apply himself. His virtue ripens, others acknowledge him, and he gains a name without peer.

Even the masters of the realm had at the start a name for being unskilled, and faults past all excuse. But because those men kept the rules of the way correctly, held them in high regard, and did not run loose, they became the learned men of the age and teachers to ten thousand people. In every way it is the same.

A certain man says: an art in which one has not come to mastery by the age of fifty should be given up. There is no road ahead in which to strive and learn. The doings of an old man others cannot even laugh at, and for him to mix with the crowd is unbecoming and ugly to see.

On the whole, to stop all one's undertakings and have leisure is pleasant to the eye and to be wished for. To be caught up in worldly affairs and pass a whole life at it is the mark of an utter fool.

What you wish to know you may learn and hear; but once you know the drift of it, you should stop without lingering. Best of all is to have no wish from the start, and so to have done.

Jonen Shonin of Saidaiji, his back bent and his brows white, came to the palace with the look of one whose virtue had truly ripened.

The Inner Minister of Saionji said, "Ah, what a holy air there is about him," and reverence showed in his face. Lord Suketomo saw this and said, "It is that he has grown old."

On a later day he had a shaggy dog brought in, wretchedly aged and its hair worn away, and said, "This one's air seems holy to me," and presented it to the Inner Minister, they say.

The lay monk Tamekane, the Major Counselor, was seized, and the warriors surrounded him and took him off to Rokuhara.

Lord Suketomo saw this near Ichijo and said, "Ah, how enviable. What one has to remember of a life in this world should be like that."

This same man was sheltering from the rain at the gate of Toji, and maimed folk were gathered there. Their hands and feet were twisted and bent back, no part of them sound and all of them strange, and seeing them he thought, "Each one is an oddity without peer. They are most worth loving," and he watched them closely.

But soon the interest in it was spent, and they seemed to him ugly and oppressive, and he thought, "There is nothing like what is simply plain and not strange."

After he had gone home he thought, "All this while I have been fond of potted trees, seeking out ones oddly bent and twisted to please my eyes, and that was the same as loving those maimed folk." The pleasure went out of it, so he had all the trees he had planted in pots dug up and thrown away.

It was a thing that might well be so.

A man who would follow the world must first know the right moment. A thing done out of order grates on people's ears and goes against their hearts, and that thing does not come about. He must be mindful of such times.

Only falling ill, bearing a child, and dying take no account of the moment, and do not stop because the order is bad.

The true great matter — arising, abiding, changing, ceasing, and passing on — is like a fierce river swollen and flowing. It does not halt even for a moment; it goes straight on.

So in the true way or in worldly things alike, what you mean to carry through to the end is not a matter for talk of the right moment. There must be no casting about this way and that, and no halting of your feet.

It is not that spring wanes and then summer comes, or that summer ends and then autumn arrives. Spring at once hastens on the air of summer; from within summer autumn is already passing through; autumn turns cold straight away; and the tenth month has the weather of a little spring, when the grass grows green and the plum sets its buds.

Even the falling of the leaves is not that they first fall and then the buds come. It is that the leaf cannot bear the swelling that pushes up from below, and so it falls. Because the air that comes to meet them is made ready beneath, the order in which they wait and receive it is very swift.

The passing on of birth, age, sickness, and death is swifter yet than this. The four seasons at least have a fixed order. The hour of death does not wait for the order.

Death does not come from in front. It has long been pressing close behind. All people know that there is death, and yet they do not wait for it with any urgency, and it comes before they are aware.

The tideland out at sea stretches far away, and yet the tide fills in from the shore.

For a minister's great banquet (大饗) it is the common thing to ask leave of a suitable house and hold it there.

The Minister of the Left of Uji held his at Higashi Sanjo-dono. The place was in use as the palace, and because he asked for it the imperial progress went elsewhere.

Even with no particular connection, to ask the loan of the residence of a nyoin (女院) and the like is old usage (故實), they say.

Take up a brush and something gets written; take up an instrument and you mean to make it sound. Take up a cup and you think of wine; take up the dice and you think of gambling.

The heart always comes on at the touch of things. Not even in play, and not for a moment, should you take up an unwholesome amusement.

Glance at a single line of the sacred teaching and somehow the writing before and after it comes into view as well. All at once the errors of many years may be mended. Had you not opened this book just now, would you have known this thing? This is the profit of what one touches.

Even when the heart does not rise at all, if you are before the Buddha and take up the beads and take up the sutra, then in the midst of your idleness good works are performed of themselves; and with a scattered heart, if you sit on the meditation seat (繩床), you will be in meditative stillness before you know it.

Practice and principle are not two things from the first. If the outward form is not at odds with it, the inward realization must ripen. One should not insist that there is no faith in it. One should look up and hold it in reverence.

"How do you understand the throwing away of what is at the bottom of the cup?" a certain person asked.

"It is called gyoto (凝當), so is it not the throwing away of what has congealed at the bottom?" I said. "It is not so," he said. "It is gyodo (魚道). You leave a little of the flow and rinse the place your mouth has touched."

"What is called minamusubi is so called because thread knotted over on itself resembles the shellfish called mina," a certain exalted person said. To say "nina" is a mistake.

"To say that a tablet on a gate is 'struck' seems not good. The lay monk of the second rank of Kadenokoji said 'to hang a tablet.' To say that a viewing stand for a spectacle is 'struck' seems not good either. 'To strike an awning' and the like is the ordinary thing. Of a viewing stand one should say that it is 'built.' 'To burn the goma' is bad as well. One says 'to perform it' or 'to do the goma.' In 'gyoho' too, to pronounce the character 'ho' clear is bad; it is pronounced voiced." So the Seikanji Sojo said.

Among the words we use every day there are many just like these.