[In the following essay, LaFleur explores the role of the Hōjōki in the development of Mahayana Buddhism.]

Should storms, as may well happen,
          Drive you to anchor a week
In some old harbour-city
          Of Ionia, then speak
With her witty scholars, men
Who have proved there cannot be
          Such a place as Atlantis:
          Learn their logic, but notice
How its subtlety betrays
          Their enormous simple grief;
Thus they shall teach you the ways
          To doubt that you may believe.

—W. H. Auden, Atlantis

There is much more than meets the eye in the concluding section of the great classic the Hōjō-ki when its author, Kamo no Chōmei, says of his hermitage that it may be no more than a “poor imitation of that of Jōmyō Koji,” a figure known throughout Buddhist Asia—as Vimalakīrti in India, as Wei-mo in China, and as Yuima in Japan. This chapter will attempt to explicate this reference in the Hōjō-ki, demonstrate why it is fundamental to an understanding of the work as a whole, and draw out its implications for a deepened understanding of the role of Buddhism in the literature of medieval Japan.

On the simplest level, an effort will be made to provide basic information about the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa-sūtra, which the Japanese usually abbreviated and referred to as the Yuima-gyō. It is a key text of the Mahayana and one that was well known to literate Buddhists of East Asia. A brief recapitulation of its contents will be made to compensate in part for a grievance I voiced earlier about the all-too-common practice among scholars of making footnote references to the religious and philosophical texts alluded to in literary works without actually becoming familiar with the texts themselves. These texts often provide insight into the basic structure and meaning of the very literature we attempt to understand. A knowledge of the basics of the Vimalakīrti Sutra is essential because the Hōjō-ki cannot be adequately grasped without an appreciation of the degree to which Chōmei relies on the sutra—not merely to sprinkle his text with arcane or gratuitous allusions but to fit his work into a received tradition that is at once both literary and philosophical.

The intent of the present chapter is ambitious in a further sense: I wish through the analysis of the nexus between the Vimalakīrti Sutra and the Hōjō-ki to demonstrate the lineaments of what I earlier called the emergence of the high medieval in Japanese thought and letters. This emergence, which took place during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, marks a distinct development, deepening, and complication of the Buddhist episteme that commenced some centuries earlier and can be witnessed in the pages of the Nihon ryōi-ki. While this high medieval period evidences a deepening of the penetration of Buddhism into the intellectual and religious experience of the Japanese, it also shows the existence of two somewhat divergent versions of Buddhism in Japan, with all the characteristics of a tension between the two. The following chapter continues this discussion in the context of Zeami's thought and describes the tension in terms of the differences between Buddhism as hierarchy and Buddhism as dialectic. In this chapter, my purpose is only to show that the Hōjō-ki is a complete heir to discussions and intellectual moves that had long before, on the Asian continent, been part of the development of Mahayana Buddhism—moves almost paradigmatically present in the much-acclaimed Vimalakīrti Sutra.

Earlier, when we considered the Hōjō-ki as a prime source for an understanding of the literary topos of the hermit's hut in Japanese literature, a strictly synchronic framework was adopted, eliminating all concern for diachronic and historical development. That was for the purposes of a strictly structuralist kind of analysis. Here that method will be complemented with a much more historical analysis, which considers the Hōjō-ki not in an atemporal context but as a work that reveals its author as dealing seriously with questions, concepts, and formulations characteristic of the high medieval in Japanese history. In contrast to some traditional accounts that tended to view the Hōjō-ki as the major index to the inception of the medieval period in Japan, my view is that it must be seen as evidence that the Buddhist episteme in Japan had entered a new level of sophistication and complexity—a level of complexity that also reflected the influence of developments in Mahayana Buddhism more generally in East Asia.

The figure of the Buddhist layman Vimalakīrti had been a model for Buddhist literati since the Six dynasties period in China.¹ It was thus quite natural that, as a literatus, Kamo no Chōmei found the image of Vimalakīrti sitting in his ten-foot-square hut (hōjō) a fitting exemplar for himself and his aspirations as a man of belles lettres and of religion.

Taken from Mahayana texts of which there are Tibetan and Chinese translations and from the extant fragments of the Sanskrit original,² the basics of the text are as follows: Vimalakīrti is portrayed as a layman who lived contemporaneously with Śākyamuni Buddha in India. He was a bodhisattva though he was not a monk. To summarize a key section describing Vimalakīrti's upāya, the sutra says that, although he was a layman, he was free from all attachments to the three worlds. Although married, he lived purely. Although possessing family and retinue, he lived continually as if in a hermitage. Although he ate and drank like others, he delighted really in the taste of meditation. Although he made much money, he took no delight in it. Although he went into the inner palaces to meet the women there, he took his delight in converting them to the Buddha dharma.³

That is the context. The narrative begins when the sutra tells us that Vimalakīrti, in order to use his upāya to teach others, has taken on an appearance of illness. This illness and the news concerning it has brought kings, ministers, officials, and others, numbering thousands, into his hermitage and to his sick-bed. When they come he teaches them about suffering and pain, duḥkha (ku). Śākyamuni Buddha has also heard about his illness, and he wishes to dispatch one of his disciples to inquire after Vimalakīrti's health. One after another he addresses the most revered arhats, monks, and bodhisattvas in his retinue, asking them to visit the pious layman. In wonderful, often humorous, passages of prose each of the famous arhats begs off, recalling how once in the past he was bested by the layman Vimalakīrti in the forensics of Buddhist debate. None feels equal to the task; each is rather pathetically eager to avoid another confrontation with the sagacious, overwhelming layman. In each case it is largely Vimalakīrti's unparalleled way with words—that is, his locutionary, and by extension literary, skill—that intimidates the disciples of Śākyamuni. Finally, however, the Buddha turns to Manjuśri, the one of superior wisdom; Manjuśri agrees to go to visit Vimalakīrti. He is accompanied by 8,000 bodhisattvas, 500 śravakas, and hundreds of thousands of devas.

Vimalakīrti, with his uncanny powers, learns of Manjuśri's visit in advance and does something significant to his dwelling (a hermitage tradition later came to refer to as the original hōjō): he dismisses all his own servants and gets rid of all the furniture except for his sick-bed. With everything gone, he is ready to entertain Manjuśri and the latter's vast retinue. What follows is a command performance, an ongoing dialogue between the two masters of doctrine and dialectic that continues quite delightfully for several chapters. Sickness is, of course, an index to the impermanence of all things. Scholars generally agree, however, that the sutra reaches a climax in the chapter on the nondual. After some of the guests offer their comparatively feeble definitions of nonduality, Manjuśri makes his attempt:

“In my opinion, when all things are no longer within the province of either word or speech, and of either indication or knowledge, and are beyond questions and answers, this is initiation into the non-dual dharma.”⁴

He says then that since all the guests have offered their views, Vimalakīrti's definition is what they all most wish to hear. How does the great layman view the initiation into the nondual?

Vimalakīrti kept silence, saying not a word.

Manjuśri exclaims:

“Excellent, excellent; can there be true initiation into the non-dual dharma until words and speech are no longer written or spoken?”⁵

This is the famed “silence of Vimalakīrti,” the perfect retort, the response that combines form and content so that silence itself ends the duality always implicit in the forensic and dialogic situation. It is a response that has not only wisdom but also wit.

These points were not lost on the sophisticated Buddhist gentry and literati of the Six dynasties in China. They noted that, although in the end Vimalakīrti went beyond words and speech, the move was cleverly made and there was much enjoyable wordplay engaged in on the way to that point. It was not unlike the so-called ch'ing t'an (seidan), or “pure conversation,” so loved by the literati of the period⁶ (conversation described by Arthur Waley as very much like that of “clever undergraduates at our own universities”).⁷ So the Vimalakīrti Sutra had a deep and long-standing appeal to literary people. It was a text in which a layman, not a monk, turned out to be more profound than the Buddhist clergy, all the while turning phrases and making conversational moves that were simultaneously witty and wise.

Nevertheless, the reasons for the sutra's appeal to Kamo no Chōmei may be significantly different from those that explain its appeal to the Chinese. The overwhelming appeal to the Buddhist gentry of China lay in the fact that Vimalakīrti was not a monk but an ordinary householder who, nevertheless, possessed all the virtues and attainments of the best of the monks and, in fact, surpassed them. As both Richard Mather and James D. Whitehead have pointed out, this internalizes the household-departure (ch'u chia, shukke) and makes the Vimalakīrti Sutra an Indian text that legitimizes being a good Confucian householder while “leaving” home mentally—a very convenient mode of being Buddhist for those who do not wish to cease being Confucian.⁸ Interesting in this connection are interpolations into the Chinese text of references to filial piety as among the virtues possessed by Vimalakīrti. The reason for the appeal of this sutra in China is undoubtedly related to its portrayal of Vimalakīrti as a pious layman, a man still in his household.

Kamo no Chōmei, I would argue, read the sutra quite differently; he was, after all, more interested in reclusion than householding. The point in the narrative which kindled his interest was not early on where Vimalakīrti is presented as holy while in the household, in gambling houses, in government offices, and in the chambers of beautiful women. On the contrary, for Kamo no Chōmei the story of Vimalakīrti began to fascinate and become meaningful at the point where Vimalakīrti demonstrates the impermanence of all things by manifesting (even if as an upāya) illness in his own body, and then moves into a habitation from which he eventually dismisses all his servants and companions and reduces what he needs for life to the very barest of essentials. The Vimalakīrti admired by Chōmei is not the householder who has inner detachment but the one who moves deliberately and emphatically out of society and into isolation and solitude. It is not Vimalakīrti as householder but as recluse (inja) that Chōmei chooses as his model. He admires not the layman's mansions but his hōjō. His reading of the sutra is strikingly different from that of the Six dynasties literati, and he puts it to a very different though equally sophisticated use.

An important essay on the Hōjō-ki was published in 1974 in the Japanese literary journal Bungaku. Professor Imanari's Motoaki's essay is entitled “Ren-in Hōjō-ki no ron.”⁹ This is an intentionally provocative title since Professor Imanari insists that the Hōjō-ki is a profoundly Buddhist work by an author who preferred to be called Ren-in rather than Kamo no Chōmei since the final words of the Hōjō-ki are, “[This was written] by the śramana named Ren-in in his hermitage on Toyama Hill” (“Sōmon no Ren-in, Toyama no iori ni shite, kore o shirushu”). Needless to say, not all the critics have agreed with Professor Imanari that we need to drop our references to Kamo no Chōmei and call him by his clerical name instead.¹⁰

The point of the essay is more than the Hōjō-ki's authorship, however; it is that the structural affinities between the Hōjō-ki and the Vimalakīrti are deep. I have some reservations about the extent to which Imanari pushes the similarities and so will discuss only those I find especially convincing. I do agree with him that the reference to the sutra is more than an allusion; it provides the key to the intentionality and the structure of the Hōjō-ki.¹¹

Imanari finds the theme of the Hōjō-ki, namely that of mujō, especially well articulated in the following section of the sutra, although the metaphors are found throughout Buddhist literature:

This body is like a mass of foam which is intangible. It is like a bubble which does not last long. It is like a flame, the product of love's thirst. It is like the banana plant [bashō] which has a hollow center. It is like an illusion produced by inverted thoughts. It is like a dream … a shadow … an echo … a floating cloud … lightning.¹²

Not in itself convincing, this is immediately followed by something more important according to Imanari:

[This body] is ownerless for it is like the earth. It is egoless since it is like fire. It is transient like the wind. It is not human for it is like water. It is unreal and depends on the four elements for its existence. It is empty, being neither ego nor its object.¹³

Imanari finds this immediate reference in the Hōjō-ki to the four elements (shidai) (earth, fire, wind, and water) significant, and he concludes: “The first half of the Hōjō-ki is a context in which Ren-in (Kamo no Chōmei) vividly describes the way humans are afflicted by the four elements in and through the concrete phenomena of the era in which Chōmei himself lived.”¹⁴ Thus, the gale and fire of the third year of the Angen, the typhoon of the fourth year of the Jisho, the famines and pestilences of the Yōwa, and the earthquake of the second year of the Genryaku era are all not only vividly described in the Hōjō-ki but also lead Chōmei to state overtly the theme that is the organizing principle of the first half of the work: “Of the four great elements, three—water, fire, and wind—are continually causing disasters, but the fourth element, the earth, does not normally afflict man.”¹⁵

The second half of the Hōjō-ki stands in stark contrast to the first: in it Chōmei depicts in intimate detail his small hermitage, the joys he knows while living in it, and the solitude that is so deep, he says, that “even without intending to keep the Buddhist precepts, they are not easily broken when one lives so far from society.”¹⁶ Here, he claims, is a life worth living, and it is possible because his hermitage or hut is designed to be impermanent and is therefore totally unlike the habitations built by men dwelling in illusion in the city.

Professor Imanari, however, does not stop with a neat division of the Hōjō-ki into two parts—life in society contrasted with life in reclusion, the calamities in society contrasted with the peace in the mountains, the great houses of the wealthy contrasted with the small hut of the priest or hermit. Using the Vimalakīrti Sutra as the key to the work, he calls attention to the last paragraphs of the Hōjō-ki:

Now the moon of my life has reached its last phase and my remaining years draw near to their close. When I soon approach the three ways of the hereafter what shall I have to regret? The Law of Buddha teaches that we should shun all clinging to the world of phenomena, so that the affection I have for this hut is some sort a sin, and my attachment to this solitary life may be a hindrance to enlightenment. Thus I have been babbling, it may be, of useless pleasures, and spending my precious hours in vain.

In the still hours of 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 Vimalakīrti while my merit is not even equal to that of Suddhipanthaka, the most stupid of the followers of Buddha?¹⁷

Professor Imanari sees as significant Chōmei's recognition that his attachment to his hut and to his solitude may be a new version of illusion. Moreover, he holds that at this point in his narrative Chōmei is very much aware that his decision to lead a life of reclusion has divided the world into two parts, secular society and the life of religious reclusion. “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 Vimalakīrti … ?”¹⁸ Chomei's awareness that he has divided the world into two is significant according to Imanari because the question of entry into nonduality (funi hōmon) is the doctrinal and narrative climax of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, the point at which the sagacious layman answers with his long-remembered silence.

It is important to note the adroit harmony in the Vimalakīrti Sutra between the fact that Vimalakīrti is a layman and a bodhisattva—rather than a monk—and the fact that the central doctrine discussed is the entry into the nondual. This harmony comes about because the Mahayana had early made the point (against the so-called Hinayanists) that the idealization of the life of the monk (śramana) or arhat had led both to an unnecessary separation of Buddhism from society and to an unfortunate bifurcation of reality into secular and sacred zones. The way into the nondual, in Mahayanist terms, involved more than just a critique of the world-separated life of the reclusive arhat; in philosophical terms, however, this critique arose because of the Mahayana impulse and drive to overcome all dualisms. Vimalakīrti symbolizes success on both counts: he has enlightenment while still in the world as a layman, and he has the sagacity to counter the discriminating, dualizing intellect's questions with a profound silence. The sutra demonstrates the nondual not only by Vimalakīrti's silence but also by his leading of a lay life. There is great literary skill in the composition of the sutra, a subtle reinforcement of points in various ways.

Much of the literary finesse of the final section of the Hōjō-ki lies in the way it handles a central paradox. Chōmei explicitly compares his own situation in life with that of Vimalakīrti and bemoans the fact that his very attachment to his reclusive life in his hut may be a “hindrance to enlightenment.” At least in print, he identifies himself with the foolish arhat Suddhipanthaka rather than with the wise bodhisattva Vimalakīrti. It is as if he has slipped back onto the lower level of the Hinayana, with its blind insensitivity to the fact that even homo religiosus can be very attached to his own specifically religious ways and so lose the whole point of the Buddhist teaching. After having spent many pages to portray in vivid contrast the difference between the worldly life of the householder in the city and the life of the recluse on the mountainside, in the final section of his work Chōmei suggests that he is nothing more than a rather miserable and unenlightened śramana on Toyama hill, someone who personally had not been able to advance beyond the rather limited and naive insights of the Hinayanist tradition.

There is obviously something tongue-in-cheek about all this. After all, Chōmei is implying that, although he has not been able to escape the Hinayanist attachment to the eremitic life, he really has no problem understanding the meaning and the implications of the Mahayanist principle of nonduality. Therefore, although his attachment to his hut is a “hindrance to enlightenment,” he is perfectly lucid about what it is that differentiates his mode of life from that of the great Vimalakīrti. His way of life is different from that of the sagacious bodhisattva, but, when it comes to an understanding of the meaning of nonduality, Chomei really makes no apologies for himself. Perhaps in his posture there is even the idea that he is so knowledgeable about the nondual that he has been able to pass beyond the bodhisattva's hackneyed rejection of the reclusive life and find the freedom once again to lead such a life. This time, however, it is not on the basis of a naive “Hinayanist” rejection of the world but, rather, on the basis of a Mahayanist realization that an understanding of the nondual ought to imply the possibility of a negation of the usual bodhisattva's negation of the arhat ideal. Chōmei has returned to the eremitic life but suggests that he has done so for very subtle reasons and with an understanding that is deeply grounded in the basic direction of Mahayana thought.

The Hōjō-ki is a very sophisticated work not only in its literary execution but also in the understanding of the Mahayana that it demonstrates by subtle twists and turns. The Buddhism in it is not really parallel to the simple reclusive ideal of the early Buddhist sangha in India; it has been developed and refined through centuries of Indian and Chinese Mahayanist thinking about the relationship of Buddhist ideals to worldly realities, of nirvana to samsara, and of religious to mundane vocations. Chōmei's move into, and depiction of, his hermitage is not a simple act of world-flight based on a perception of society as doomed and corrupt. Rather, it evidences a very dialectical understanding of Buddhism, one that is based on critiques and strategies that had arisen earlier in the Mahayana. In this way it is a clear example of a type of literature that I have called the high medieval in Japanese history.

Notes

1. Richard B. Mather, “Vimalakīrti and Gentry Buddhism,” and Paul Demiéville, “Vimalakīrti en Chine.”

2. T. 11. 519-588.

3. My summary.

4. Charles Luk, The Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, p. 100.

5. Ibid.

6. Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, 1:93 ff. Martin Collcutt tells how the T'ang practice of referring to the retreat of a Buddhist dignitary or lay scholar recluse as a fang-chang (hōjō) was based on a tradition according to which the pilgrim Wang Hsuan-t'se passed the ruins of a small cottage while in India. He was told that it was in this modest building that Vimalakīrti had debated Manjuśrī in the presence of thousands. Amazed, he measured the foundations and found them to be ten feet square. Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan, p. 197. Kamo no Chōmei would appear to be tapping this tradition of the lay recluse when referring to his own hut as a hōjō; another tradition, both in China and Japan, used the term to designate the quarters of a Ch'an, or Zen, abbot of a monastery.

7. Arthur Waley, “The Fall of Loyang,” p. 50.

8. Mather, “Vimalakīrti”; James D. Whitehead, “The Sinicization of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra.”

9. Imanari Motoaki, “Ren-in Hōjō-ki no ron.”

10. See, for example, the discussion in Itō Hiroyuki, Chūsei no inja bungaku, p. 107 ff.

11. Imanari, “Ren-in Hōjō-ki no ron,” p. 121.

12. T 475.539.b. Trans. mine.

13. Ibid. Trans. mine.

14. Imanari, “Ren-in Hōjō-ki no ron,” p. 122.

15. Kamo no Chōmei, “Hōjō-ki,” p. 33. Trans. mine.

16. Ibid., p. 43. Trans. mine.

17. Ibid., p. 44. Trans. mine.

18. Ibid.

Bibliography

Collcutt, Martin. Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Imanari Motoaki. “Ren-in Hōjō-ki no ron.” Bungaku 42, 2 (1974):115-127.

Itō Hiroyuki et al., eds. Chūsei no inja bungaku. Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1976.

Luk, Charles, trans. and ed. The Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra. Berkeley and London: Shambala, 1972.

Mather, Richard B. “Vimalakīrti and Gentry Buddhism.” History of Religions 8, 1 (August 1968):60-72.

Waley, Arthur. “The Fall of Loyang.” In The Secret History of the Mongols. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964.

Whitehead, James D. “The Sinicization of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra.” Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions 5 (Spring 1978):3-51.

Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972.