The Hojoki of Kamo no Chomei has been a seminal text in my life. Its first introduction to me when I was in my twenties left a profound stain. I have had it by my side every day since then in that it spoke to the modern wound in my life, the role of a person in or out of society and all that that infers. It is for this text primarily that I am a practicing Buddhist.
For Kamo no Chomei, as for the Buddha, his overriding concern is the immutability of the world and all that exists in it.
The book begins with Chomei’s thoughts on this, invoking a popular image in Japanese Buddhist culture of the floating world which is this illusory life:
Ceaselessly the river flows and yet the water is never the same, while in the pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone, never staying for a moment. Even so is man and his habitation.
A large part of this text is devoted to painting a world in melt-down, an apocalyptic picture of Japan in the age of ‘mappo’ the end of Buddhist law when the world is racked by fires, floods, winds and earthquakes. It seems prescient still in the age I write this.
Observing the world so transfigured leads Chomei to withdrawal from public life and to his formulation of a personal testament:
If one knows himself and knows what the world is he will merely wish for quiet and be pleased when he has nothing to grieve about, wanting nothing and caring for nobody.
This is part of an important pattern, for in so invoking his dismay at the transitory nature of things then retiring to meditate on the state of the world, Chomei is retracing, in word and deed, the life of the Buddha whose similar empirical observations on life, that all is unstable and non-abiding harkens to the very founding of Buddhism itself in Shakyamuni’s renunciation of the world and his subsequent proposal of the Four Noble Truths.
Renunciation, then, becomes the prime thematic locus for Chomei’s struggle to become in the words of John Updike, a thinking, feeling man and happy. His success or failure in his endeavour to ‘give up’ forms the philosophical node to this work.
Kamo no Chomei, so tradition holds, did not take up his rightful position as Lord Warden to the shrine of Kamo in Kyoto and in his disappointment, he retired from the capital, the centre of society, and went to live in the hills. He was a man of belles lettres, an artist-dilettante; refined, well-read, possibly a little bored.
Upon retiring he spent his days with literature, music, rambles in the mountains, taking pleasure in simple country ways in his hut in Ohara; and later in Hino: and, like the tragic ex-empress Kinreimon-in of the Heike Monogatari who had also spent her last days exiled to the mountains, he reflected with a little melancholy on the fickle glories of a past life in the splendid capital.
Chomei is careful to enumerate the new pleasures that do afford themselves in his latter life. He describes in detail his dwelling which is rich in austerity, rather like the classic tearoom. In fact, the inspiration for the archetypal tearoom and Chomei’s house comes from the same source: the bedroom of the celebrated Vimalakirti whose ten-foot square hut is the matrix for the desired life of peace and wisdom.
Chomei’s hut is also moveable, and this is vital to the working of the narrative and its Buddhist gloss. It is constructed with hinges so that at any one time it may be packed up and he can move on rather like a tortoise carrying his home on his back. What this does is mark Chomei out as a man who can adapt, keep on the move. This adaptability is the crux of his story for it becomes the index by which we may come to some reckoning with the law of non-duality.
Those people who remain at the cultural centre–not the fringes–of the capital are, by Chomei’s understanding un-adaptable people. Translated to a philosophical level, those people who stay in one place (in this instance Kyoto) and are not prepared to move on or change are, in Buddhist terms, mired in their own dogma and mind-set: they are ignorant. It is Chomei’s lifetime’s example to prove that the ultimately wise person does not hold to one way, but to many ways; for that is the law of non-duality.
Chomei’s coming to an understanding of the law of non-duality in his ‘memoir’ is through the agency of ‘mujo’.
Mujo is the motto of his tale; it is engraved there on his heart. In mediaeval Japanese life mujo is indeed a ubiquitous theme closely allied as it is to the Japanese sensibility for melancholy when confronted with the ruination of nature and the mutability of life. Mujo is a summary of the Buddhist teaching that nothing lies outside the law of ‘Anitya’ or ‘necessary change’.
Embracing this notion will lead to a freedom of thought and action, an acceptance of the precarious nature of existence and therefore a philosophical indifference to it.
(Mediaeval warriors in Japan were known to go into battle, pennants flying above their heads with the ideogram ‘Mu’ –meaning ‘nothing’–painted on them. They were literally confronting the possibility of their own extinction with the proclamation; What do I care?)
In terms of Chomei’s life mujo can be seen to be expressed in the literary topoi of the hermit’s hut, its mobility and instability, slowly disintegrating around the hermit’s head rather like the poet Saigyo’s leaky, tumbledown grass cottage, or Basho’s House of the Fallen Persimmons with its mouldy paper screens and straw mats.
Embedded in this text the symbol of mujo, that is the hut itself, becomes the arena where the non-dual is sought. For it returns the reader once again to the crucial text of the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra. When Chomei comes to mention Vimalakirti, seemingly in passing, we know his story has come to a major impasse.
For Chomei, the layman Vimalakirti was certainly a heroic figure. But this was not the Vimalakirti the Chinese Buddhists admired–the married layman who was a householder–but the Vimalakirti who presents himself as owner of nothing, as a hut- dweller, again in that climactic chapter of the sutra, Entering the Dharma Door of Non-Duality.
Vimalakirti here manifests this idea of mujo by radically altering his lifestyle, dismissing his servants, reducing his daily needs to the barest essentials and taking to his sick bed, demonstrating through the illness of his own body the impermanence of all things.
Chomei does not choose the householder for his model but the reclusive man who moves deliberately and emphatically out of society and into isolation and solitude.
This is where the notion of non-duality is teased out most, in the in/out, home owner/recluse, city dweller/wanderer equation which Chomei’s experience creates.
Chomei once had a life at the heart of the city. He occupied a geographical and cultural centre. Worldly events there caught up with him and so he ‘necessarily changed’ his life so that he came to occupy the fringes of society. The example of his life sets up a tension, a dichotomy between the two kinds of life, the two ways of living. He suggests that, paradoxically, the one living at the heart of society, the teeming centre which appears almost hyper-real is in fact living an illusion; whilst the recluse, by separating himself from it, by seeking non-attachment to worldly power and position is in fact living more really, more intensely and closer to the Buddhist path which is unburdened and therefore enlightened.
However, Chomei’s is not an uncomplicated life, and this duality is soon called into question by summoning up, appropriately, the spirit of Vimalakirti, that very witty and eloquent (actually silent) speaker for the law of non-duality;
In the still hours of the dawn I think of these things and to myself I put these questions: ‘Thus to forsake the world and dwell in the woods, has it been to discipline my mind and practice the law of Buddha or not? Have I put on the form of a recluse while yet my heart has remained impure? Is my dwelling but a poor imitation of that of the saint Vimalakirti while my merit is not even equal to that of Suddhipanthaka the most stupid of the followers of Buddha?
By questioning himself ruthlessly like this at the end of his narration, Chomei throws the whole example of his life into crisis. This is until we understand, as Chomei no doubt finally came to understand, the nature of the paradox and the redeeming wisdom locked within it.
In describing his hut Chomei also makes mention of a small shrine to Amida, the doors of which are adorned with two bodhisattvas, one of whom is Fugen. The presence of Fugen can be no accident as it calls into question once more the entire problem of the position of a respectable person within society.
The contrast between the household life and the out-of-household life is a basic one in the Buddhist monastic community. Much philosophical debate centres on these two apparent oppositions. A monk or nun would take up the second position. The layperson, the first. In the model of Vimalakirti however the reader sees the options conflated. He is both a householder and a renunciate simultaneously.
In Japanese culture the relationship between these two seemingly opposing lifestyles is often explored through the relationship between monks and courtesans. The monk and the courtesan, although appearing to occupy different ends of the social spectrum hold a surprisingly similar view in relation to the householder. Both have renounced the householder’s way of life and in their dealings with the world are to a large extent transients (as in the roles of priest and prostitute reversed and conflated in the painting scroll by Harunobu and the poem of Yeats). Now here is Chomei with a literal symbol of this same conflation in his home in the form of Fugen who, as I have described, in his manifestation as the Lady Eguchi, is characterized as having a deep understanding of the idea of mujo and non-duality stemming from her experience of the boudoir.
This may be seen as the first layer of wisdom in this book. To break with the spurious security offered by the household located within the city is to break with an attachment to illusory permanence, comfort and peace.
‘Seeing truth is leaving home’ proclaims the Zen Bloodstream Sermon, reminding us of the example of Buddha as he set out on the path of enlightenment, an example any monk or nun must emulate if they are to join the Buddhist community, the Sangha.
But in breaking with the householder’s life within the city has Chomei really released himself? Is he in fact a recluse at all? This is the question he ends up asking himself and he leaves it dangling in the air.
It is up to us to answer it.
Chomei sees himself as a man of letters with a propensity to philosophy. By evoking the name of Vimalakirti and the symbol of Fugen Bosatsu he is leaving clues which help us to answer his rhetorical question. Chomei goes to great lengths to fit his lifestyle in to the grand tradition of the hermit-sage whose principal belief is non-attachment, only to ruin it all by admitting his fondness for that frugal lifestyle. But it is that very admission which is ultimately Chomei’s salvation and which works to form the nugget of pure wisdom at the heart of the book.
Chomei’s admission to his failure shows that he is human, and in the end his humanity is what we love him for. It is what redeems him.
Chomei tries to be of the world but not in it. Of course he cannot. But by demonstrating that he is making a statement through the example of his life of the law of non-duality.
Just as Vimalakirti, though a layman, is a bodhisattva, Chomei too, though retiring from official religious duties is a bodhisattva and his life’s summation is the knowledge that paradoxically, the bodhisattva attains enlightenment not in the Pure Land but on earth, in the mess and mire of human life.
Chomei first saw that moving away from the city and out of society was good in that it implied non-attachment. Yet in his hermetical state he became attached to the very principle of non-attachment itself. Therefore, moving into an innocent, bucolic state has not necessarily meant the antithesis to remaining in society. What it has granted Chomei is the peace and opportunity to discover this odd wisdom.
The omnipresent symbol of the hut as a representation of mujo is at the last count solely the means for receiving this new knowledge. It is keeping on the move that has brought wisdom for it is the equivalent of holding to not one view but many. The constant moving and adaptability in moving–this not-staying-in-one-place-ness-is at the heart of the non-dual and Zen.
Chomei’s life is the most beautiful Zennish paradox of all. By falling in love with not-falling-in-love; by wrongfully clinging to not clinging, he comes across to us as ultimately human, even if a little foolish: but then, only in the way of Lear’s foolish fond old man.
By falling in love with his hut, with the wisteria that grows beneath it, the hills that lie beyond him, Chomei has been able, in the words of La Fleur, to pass beyond the bodhisattva’s hackneyed rejection of the reclusive life and find freedom once again to lead such a life.
We leave Chomei at the end of his story at a crossroads. The implications of his living with a moveable ten-foot square hut allow him to ask that question which pitches his lifestyle into crisis. But the question is, as La Fleur suggests, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It is knowledge of the non-dual that makes it so, which provides the liveable solution for that crisis. Acknowledging ‘necessary change’, he has achieved composure.
And so, the reader leaves Kamo no Chomei as a man who may continue his stay as a hermit, who may take up the life of a wanderer, or who may even return to the big smoke that is Kyoto.
But in the ‘perpetual light’ of Buddha, well, it does no longer matter.
