[In the following excerpt, Ury provides background for the Hosshinshū.]

In the last decades of the twelfth century Japan was ravaged by earthquake, famine, pestilence and civil war. The burden of these repeated disasters, both natural and man-made, fell doubtless most heavily on the common people, but among the sufferers were also members of the aristocracy, little able to withstand or comprehend fully the forces of social upheaval that threatened their wealth, authority and even physical safety. Men of all degrees turned to religion in increasing numbers. Not a few men of the upper classes sought refuge from the uncertainties of existence in the capital by escaping into Buddhist eremitism, for which Japanese religious and artistic tradition furnished ample precedent. Of these recluses perhaps the most famous are the poet Saigyō (1118-90), whose life, as well as tanka, the haiku poet Bashō was to take as model, and Kamo no Chōmei¹ (1153-1216), poet, musician and unsuccessful office-seeker, who is best known today for his Hōjōki, a brief memoir (formally classified as a zuihitsu) which describes the tranquility of retirement in his hermit's hut and contrasts with it the terrors of secular life. In the final sentences of the Hōjōki, the author makes a disclaimer of any real piety for himself, and the reader may well be led to believe that Chōmei's seclusion was motivated as much by judicious assessment of his chances for preferment at court as by religious conviction, but the disclaimer itself may be disingenuous: the Hōjōki, despite its apparent simplicity, is a self-conscious literary production in which the author's depiction of himself in his retirement could scarcely escape being shaped by the romantic image of the carefree and negligent Taoist recluse, so familiar to well-educated Japanese of the time through Chinese poetry.

To Chōmei is also ascribed a work of genuine Buddhist piety entitled the Hosshinshū. The Hosshinshū is a collection of setsuwa, that is, brief tales or anecdotes recorded informally and, as a rule, with little attempt to achieve literary distinction. Its standard text (rufu-bon) consists of 102 such tales, divided into eight chapters (maki). Almost all of the stories, in conformity with the intent stated in the author's preface, are set in Japan;² they recount legends, often about identifiable historical figures, which illustrate how and why the precepts of religion are to be observed. The order of the stories is governed very roughly by topic,³ although there seems often to be no particular reason for the order in which topics make their appearance. The stories include exempla of ōjō (rebirth in Paradise); tales of Buddhist ascetics who mastered the arts of the Taoist immortals; tales of religious suicide, of the evils brought on by ambition, of precociously pious children; warnings against impurity with women, against dependence on worldly good fortune, against tricks played by demons pretending to be Buddhas, and against jealousy; stories about noblemen who abandon household life to enter religion; illustrations of Buddhist notions of filial piety, as well as of virtuous behavior of foster-parents; and stories that argue that music and poetry, if approached in the proper spirit of devotion, may also be ways to enlightenment. Most important, however, are the tales of men who have sought seclusion from worldly life and its distractions, and who have fiercely guarded that seclusion either by flight or, if need be, by deliberately seeking the ridicule and contempt of their fellow men. It was stories such as these that fixed the association of Chōmei with the Hosshinshū in the minds of the Japanese of subsequent generations.

The earliest reference to Chōmei as author of a work of this title occurs in 1222, but the extent to which such a work should be identified with the present text is highly questionable. Perhaps because they are compilations of so many brief and often unrelated items, setsuwa collections, even more than most ancient texts, have been vulnerable to emendation and supplementation. Thus it is the rule rather than the exception for such books to present problems which may never be definitively solved regarding their ultimate attribution and the stages of their growth. The original state of the Hosshinshū is unclear, but there seems to be general agreement among Japanese scholars that the earliest portions are likely to be found among the initial chapters. Yanase Kazuo has suggested tentatively that, while the seventh and eighth chapters are most certainly a later addition, the first six chapters of the present text may be descended from a six-chapter original with comparatively little alteration.⁴ Scholars also agree that if—as seems not unlikely—the work is indeed from Chōmei's hand, it is most probably a product of his last years. Whoever the author was, he was a skillful and somewhat dogged homilist who frequently drives home the moral of a story or group of stories by appending essay-like comments. Various though the contents are, the message of the book as a whole is clear: on account of the impermanence of life and the imminence of death man has no recourse but to trust in salvation by Amida Buddha. Yet doctrinally the book seems somewhat old-fashioned for its time, for it emphatically denies a cardinal tenet of the new popular Amidism: that even those whose lives and thoughts are sinful will be saved by Amida if only they call on his name. Those who will be saved, it teaches, are men and women whose inheritance of good karma, however slight, leads them to endeavor to awaken within themselves the bodhi-mind. It is by this alone that they will encounter Amida's grace; it is this awakening of the heart that is the hosshin of the title.

At its worst, the Hosshinshū can be read as a dreary recital of men's names and their reasons, none very novel, for leaving secular life; at its best, it burns with a regard for the purity of the inner self, and this has been a sometimes faint but always distinct motif throughout Japanese religious history.⁵

Notes

1. For a translation of Chōmei's important work on poetics, as well as a brief account of his life, see Hilda Kato, ‘The Mumyōshō of Kamo no Chōmei and its Significance in Japanese Literature’, in Monumenta Nipponica, XXIII (1968), pp. 321-429.

2. Those that are not (almost all appear in the final two chapters) can be assumed to be later additions to the book.

3. See Robert E. Morrell, ‘Tales from the Collection of Sand and Pebbles’, in Literature East and West, XIV [1970], pp. 251-63, for a description of the associative ordering of anecdotes in a setsuwa collection.

4. For as clear as possible a summary of the conflicting views (‘agreement’ may be too strong a word to use) on the textual history of the Hosshinshū as well as for Yanase's own views, see Yanase Kazuo, Kamo no Chōmei no Shin Kenkyū (Tokyo, 1962), pp. 243-98.

5. In this regard, see the interesting article by Hori Ichirō, for which the stories here translated might well function as specific illustrations, ‘On the Concept of Hijiri (Holy Man)’, in Numen, V (1958), pp. 128-60, 199-232. I have throughout rendered hijiri as ‘holy man’; ‘saint’ is used by some translators.