Yoshida Kenkō - Essays in idleness and Hōjōki

In a period roughly spanning the twelfth to fourteenth centuries in Japan, a vibrant and complex literary culture flowered from Buddhist teachings and practice. This book contains the two prose works that were the finest embodiments of that culture, and that still rank among Japans great classics.

The men who wrote these works were tonsured monks, who had formally dedicated themselves to the practice of the Buddhist Way; they were not, however, attached to any monastery, and one of them (Yoshida Kenk, 12831350) was actively involved in the social sphere of the capital (present-day Kyoto). In their different ways, these men belonged to a niche that gave them access to two contrasting worlds the mundane and the religious while allowing them to escape the more arduous demands of both. The freedom of their situation, along with its inherent tensions, was at the heart of the literature that they and others like them produced.

Buddhism in Japan had a long tradition of solitary practice for those who chose to distance themselves from the often intensely political world of the monasteries. The most impressive of these hermit ascetics were considered holy men, and accorded almost saintly status. Tales of their wisdom and the severity of their ascetic practice circulated among both monks and laity. They represented one extreme of the non-monastic Buddhist practitioner; the other was the figure of the lay monk or shami (translated here as novice), who chose to take the tonsure as a means to retire from active engagement with the world, often in response to increasing age or to a setback in his career, but who frequently remained at home and continued to have limited dealings with the world. Such a gesture could be calculated or impulsive, sincere or merely formal.

Between the two extremes, and sometimes tending now towards one and now the other over the course of a life, was a wide range of men (and occasionally women) who went by a variety of titles, but generally fitted somewhere within the concept of the recluse monk, or tonseisha. These people, who inhabited a fluid realm in which they were largely their own master and could live as they wished, were the men who produced what is commonly called the literature of reclusion, whose two finest prose examples are Hjki and Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa).

Kamo no Chmei (c.11551216) provides us in Hjki with the quintessential figure of the literary recluse. He has built for himself a tiny hut, exactly large enough to contain the essentials for life, in a remote place far from the distracting presence of others, where the peace and beauty of the natural surroundings are conducive to calm contemplation. His life is one of utmost simplicity. Prominent on the wall are two Buddhist images, with a sutra (a Buddhist scripture) placed on the altar before them, where he performs his religious devotions. The only other contents of the hut, apart from his bed of bracken, are a shelf that holds a few carefully chosen books (a religious tract, poetic anthologies and musical treatises) and two musical instruments. He divides his time, as the spirit takes him, between performing his devotions and reading the sutras and playing his instruments and reading or composing poetry. Despair at the sufferings of this world has led him to choose this life, but he is by his own admission a happy man.

The hermit-aesthete of Hjki is consciously following a venerable lineage reaching back to ancient China, some of whose finest poets belonged to this tradition of reclusion. In the Japan of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Chmei chose to live like this, his more immediate models were other Japanese non-monastic monks, of his time or earlier, who combined pursuit of a spiritual calling with an equal dedication to the arts, most particularly that of poetry. They are sometimes referred to as