Awesome Nightfall by Saigyo

Author:Saigyo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

In some sense such poetry, by way of its presentation of a concrete image to the mind’s eye, itself makes the “hard” concepts of religious or philosophical doctrine somehow “soft” and manifest. And, although a topic too vast to be entered into here, the capacity of a single poem to accomplish such deeds fits exactly into something else apparently real and meaningful to Saigyō—namely, the idea that waka poems were themselves a form of Buddhist mantra.

Ironically, although competition, even conflict, was becoming pronounced during the last decades of Saigyō’s life on the institutional level, the official doctrine of the day insisted upon a fundamental unity on the deepest level between beings revered in the temples and the kami worshiped in shrines. And in that sense the ease of Saigyō’s move from Kōya to Ise was both a personalized implementation of this irenic doctrine and, at the same time, a move to put behind himself an institution that seemed to be subverting that very teaching. And Saigyō, deeply disturbed by the growing strife in secular society, would naturally have been disappointed in religious contexts that followed suit and, conversely, drawn to one—in this case the Ise Shrine—that appeared to hold to the pluralistic, bridge-building agenda so important to him. The imagery of the following poem shows Saigyō’s belief in Ise’s capacity for both strength and clarity.

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