Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai. Donald Richie
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them as portents.
Nor were we wrong to, for we had divine proof. According to the Buddhist faith, we would pass through three ages—we had, in fact, already done so. First had been the era when there was divine law and enlightenment; then came the period when the laws existed but there was no more enlightenment; and, finally, this time, when the law itself dissolves and there is no enlightenment because we have fallen away in the far reaches of time from the Lord Buddha's example. Radiating from so long ago, his divine light can no longer reach us.
As to just when these latter days of the law were supposed to have begun there was disagreement. Chinese priests from long ago are said to have calculated that they were beginning even back then, but our own clergy seem to have early moved this unhappy era as far forward as possible. Even so, more recent clerics were eventually forced to conclude that the latter days could not be held off much longer. That, indeed, they were now upon us. Should anyone keep to Buddha's precepts, they lamented, he would be as rare as a tiger in the marketplace.
Our church in making this pronouncement proved it. A belief in the three stages of the law is itself doctrine. We of this degenerate third age—mappō—can no longer experience enlightenment, for the law says that we cannot. And now, as I write, with the dissolving of even this law within the law, the world indeed turns dark.
To live at the end of things is to prefer the sunset to the sunshine, to view each birth with pity and each death with satisfaction: we grow more expectant of failure than success; we prefer our petty known to the great unexpected; and we hover near our hearth now that it is about to flicker and die.
How singular I now find our fears. We had expected devastation and ruin, but these in our minds took the forms of conflagration and earthquake. Yet it was not these that destroyed our world, but something quite different from what we could have imagined.
As I look now from my retreat, I see that a whole new world has taken the place of ours: new ways of thinking, of acting; few of our cherished beliefs observed; gone our superstitions and our fears, gone too our solaces.
* * *
In order to explain the onset of mappō, the downfall of the Taira, and the consequent vanishing of our world, I must now return to that story which I have neglected in following the anecdotes of my own fortunes.
Only a year after the Heiji War, the Minamoto lost their leader. Lord Yoshitomo in exile was slaughtered naked in his bath by one of his own men, one presumably in the pay of the capital—the Taira, the Fujiwara, or some imperial agency.
His head was exhibited in the capital. And there I viewed for the last time my former commander. Here was the man who had fought against his brother and killed his father, led a great coup and almost succeeded. I stared at that empty face—the hair loosened for the fatal bath, the fine ash used for washing still whitening one ear, the features holding that oddly expectant expression that decapitated heads often carry—and wondered if, had he lived, the Minamoto might have sooner won. We used to joke about this. When something displeased us Taira we would say: Oh, if Yoshitomo had never taken that bath.
Lord Kiyomori would not have appreciated our joke. He understood the danger that still-living Minamoto members represented. This was the reason for his policy of extermination. It began directly after the final battle, as I have recounted, with the decapitation of the eldest son. They say that he wept—the youth, not Kiyomori—because he was to be beheaded rather than allowed to kill himself in proper military fashion. These tears were cherished by the vanquished for a quarter of a century.
Kiyomori would not have wept. He was a great leader with great ambitions who looked after his own people and must, for that reason, exterminate the enemy. Though he is now, in this Kamakura world of the Minamoto, regarded as a great villain, Kiyomori was but doing his duty. He thought the killings a necessity.
Ah, but history is now merely the Minamoto version or, rather, the Hōjō version of the Minamoto version, now that that family rules us. The ballad makers here have Yoshihira not only refusing to weep but also seeking to confront his executioner. Ah-hah, he cries, it is you who will behead me. Well, get on with it, for if you do not do it right my head will fly up and bite your face. What? asks the warrior whose duty it is to behead him: How could a severed head bite my face? And Yoshihira says: Just do it right or in a hundred days I will kick you to death. And so the head was sloppily decapitated and just one hundred days later the decapitator was kicked to death by his horse—who was really, you see, Yoshihira's divine incarnation. And so on.
So, Kiyomori knew that killings were a necessity. This is what he had Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa told, that this continued chopping off of heads was part of national security. After a time, however, the decapitations ceased. It was becoming impolitic for Kiyomori to continue, since the sight of blood—at least in such quantities—was becoming repellent now that peace was at hand. Also, head chopping was time-consuming. Our lord was required to be present at each execution and he could no longer spare the time, what with the press of those other administrative duties upon which the prosperity of the Taira now rested.
Twenty-five years later it was said that he stopped too soon. If he had but persevered, then the Taira might have ruled forever. Executions are indeed necessary, but when he halted, two of the enemy's sons were left alive. The elder, Yoritomo, thirteen when his father was killed, was sent to—of all places—the eastern provinces where his own father had ruled. Though the officers there were now all newly appointed by Kiyomori and hence Taira, the people themselves—soldier and peasant alike—were all Minamoto, and it was upon these that, when old enough, Yoritomo worked. The youngest son—Yoshitsune—was kept in the capital. Again this was not wise, but he was only one year old at the time and infants are not thought dangerous.
Lord Kiyomori's reasons for such uncharacteristic restraint remain obscure. Now it is said that he fell in love with the boys' mother, a beautiful lady, who became his concubine upon the understanding that her sons' lives be spared. Perhaps, but that would have been unlike Kiyomori, for it is impossible to imagine the man ever falling in love. His only stipulation was that the boys become priests—as though that would ensure their pliability. He need only have looked to the priests of Mount Hiei to have seen that war and devotion are scarely incompatible. And, even if Kiyomori had his reasons for sparing the infant, what could possibly have been those for leaving the elder boy, Yoritomo, alive?
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