The Tales of the Heike by Burton Watson

Author:Burton Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/Asian/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Till you shaved your head, you hated me.

Now I rejoice you’re launched on the path of Truth, firm as a catalpa bow.

Yokobue replied with this poem:

I shaved my head, but what was there to hate?

There was no blunting your keen resolve, firm as a catalpa bow.

Yokobue lived at the Hokke-ji nunnery in Nara. But perhaps because of the burden her memories imposed on her, she died not long afterward. When Priest Takiguchi received word of this, he devoted himself with even greater zeal to his religious duties. His father forgave him for his act of disobedience; all those who knew him greatly trusted and respected him; and he came to be known as the saint of Kōya.

This was the man on whom Koremori now called at Mount Kōya. When Koremori had known him in the past in the capital, he had been dressed in an unfigured hunting robe and tall black hat, his clothing neatly arrayed, his sidelocks smoothed: a young man in the prime of life. But now that he had renounced the world, though not yet thirty, he had the lean, wizened look of a monk of advanced years and was attired in a deep-dyed black robe and surplice of the same color. Koremori could only envy someone whose heart was so fervently dedicated to the path of religion. Had he been in the bamboo grove where the Seven Sages of the Jin dynasty resided or on Mount Shang, the retreat of the four white-haired recluses of the Han, he could not have been more impressed.

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