Apr 21 1996
Yoshida Kenkou and the Tsurezuregusa
Yoshida Kaneyoshi
was born sometime around the year 1283 into a family of hereditary
Shinto diviners. His considerable facility with poetry led to
an early position in the Kamakura court, where he served as a
steward to Horikawa Tomomori. Later, around 1313 and for reasons
unknown, he opted for the life of a Buddhist monk and changed
his name to the more religious-sounding Kenkou. An active poet,
he belonged to the traditional and conservative Nijou school
of poetry, and was later praised as one of the “four
deva kings” of the Nijou
school. It is not, however, his poetry for which he is best well
known, but rather a collection of essays known as the Tsurezuregusa,
or Essays in Idleness.
Tsurezuregusa
is a collection of zuihitsu, or “random
jottings,” and is considered
along with Sei Shonagon’s
Pillow Book to be one of the earliest examples of this
uniquely Japanese literary genre. The essays themselves, numbering
243 in all, vary considerably in length from a single sentence
in some cases to a handful of pages in others. They cover a broad
range of topics, and include anecdotes, observations, and reflections
on nature, humankind, and the path to enlightenment. His comments
on etiquette and style have especially endured, and he is credited
today with defining or elucidating much of what is considered
“Japanese.”
Most importantly, the work not only provides the reader with
a glimpse of life in medieval Japan, but also into the mind of
the author himself.
The work reveals a sensitive and
refined man who, though bound on the one hand by his status as
a Buddhist monk to lead the solitary life of a recluse, finds
it difficult to truly separate himself from the court and his
contemporaries, for which his interest is keen. Instead of leaving
the capital and all of its worldly trappings behind to live high
in some mountain retreat, he chose instead to reside on the fringes
of Heian-kyou, where much of society and his previous existence
was readily accessible to him. Kenkou delights in relating amusing
stories about court figures and their antics. In many cases,
though, perhaps to imply that there was in fact some distance
between himself and the actual participants or events he details,
he qualifies the anecdotes with a trailing “I
am told” or “…it
is said”. It is clear,
however, that he was in fact very active in some court circles,
especially those related to poetry, and that much of the information
he imparts could have been obtained first hand.
Similarly, he demonstrates an interest
in the endurance of court protocol and custom, and numerous essays
are offered almost as reminders of how something or other had
been traditionally done, and therefore should be done.
These pieces are sometimes accompanied by laments that the people
of his day no longer remembered the proper method or precedent
when dealing with particular situations. He wrote:
Nobody is left who knows the proper
manner of hanging a quiver before the house of a man in disgrace
with His Majesty. Formerly, it was the custom to hang a quiver
at the Tenjin Shrine on Gojou when the emperor was ill or when
a general epidemic was rampant.
Kenkou existed in a world of great
political flux, and the nostalgia that he feels for earlier, perhaps
more stable times often through. He seems particularly vexed
by the evolution of conventional speech away from forms he considered
traditionally appropriate. This was especially true in cases
where ritual speech had been corrupted into truncated, less formal
forms. An active poet since his youth and a member of the conservative
Nijou school, it should come as no surprise that innovation
and novelty held little appeal for him.
His knowledge of court customs was
thorough, and numerous essays are simply informative commentaries
on specific court practices of the time. Examples of this type
include detailed descriptions of the orientation of bed and pillow
in the emperor’s bedchamber,
the manner in which cords should be attached to loops on boxes,
and the means by which a person should be restrained prior to
being flogged. One has to wonder what purpose these were intended
to serve, if other than only to illustrate these practices for
the benefit of subsequent generations. If nothing else, they
represent Kenkou’s fascination
with such matters and perhaps reflect his belief that the world
was in a state of decay (mappou). As this degeneration
seemed to him to be characterized by the neglect of ritual and
tradition, it is possible to conclude that his transcription of
the customs of his time and those of previous generations had
an archival objective.
Kenkou’s
preoccupation with the court and worldly pursuits is quite at
odds with his status as a monk and recluse, and he seems unwilling
to fully embrace the ascetic lifestyle as, for example, Kamo
no Choumei did decades earlier when he became a priest. One
wonders why he took the tonsure in the first place if the hermitage
was not a way of life he personally favored. Even in his essays
about other monks he speaks of them more as an outsider than a
kinsman, and only a handful of his essays can be described as
expressing singularly Buddhist principles. The answer may be
found in some of the pieces, though, where he indicates that the
transition from public life to one of solitary contemplation of
The Way is incumbent upon men in their twilight years, and that
it is unseemly for the aged to mingle with the young, or priests
with society. Kenkou’s daily
rounds, conversely, brought him often into contact with other
people and the noteworthy events of their lives. This kind of
contradiction is not at all uncommon in the work, and some scholars
contend that the format itself, short essays written over an indeterminate
period of time, lends itself to such inconsistency. I am inclined
to agree with that assumption simply because doing otherwise requires
one to ignore the fact that our opinions evolve with time and
are wholly relative to the situation at hand. Still, reading
in the same hour two passages that begin “Nobody
begrudges wasting a little time”
and “A man who wastes
his time doing useless things is either a fool or a knave”
may give one pause for thought about the capriciousness of his
ideology.
In addition to his observations
of the court and customs, much of Kenkou’s
work could be said to serve as a guide to gentlemanly behavior.
The collection is punctuated with essays that describe in varying
degrees of detail how a man was expected to act under certain
circumstances or in general, and many attempt to define in no
uncertain terms the kinds of ambitions that were meritorious.
He seems especially critical of those who pursued monetary gain:
What a foolish thing it is to be
governed by a desire for fame and profit and to fret away one’s
whole life without a moment of peace. Great wealth is no guarantee
of security. Wealth, in fact, tends to attract calamities and
disaster…It is an exceedingly stupid man who will torment himself
for the sake of worldly gain.
Equally denigrated are the uneducated
and boorish, whose antics provide Kenkou with ample examples of
what the “well-bred”
man should never do. He paints a picture of the ideal man as
being quiet, self-effacing, generally sober, and, most of all,
a person of refined tastes. Though less harsh in his treatment
of common people than was Sei Shonagon in her Pillow
Book, Kenkou does not afford them much in the way of leniency.
They seem as caricatures, propped up idiotically in front of
the reader to serve as an antithesis to Kenkou’s
idealized, elevated man:
The man of breeding never appears
to abandon himself completely to his pleasures; even his manner
of enjoyment is detached. It is the rustic boors who take all
their pleasures grossly. They squirm their way through the crowd
to get under the trees; they stare at the blossoms with eyes for
nothing else. they drink sake and compose linked verse; and finally
they heartlessly break off great branches and cart them away.
When they see a spring they dip their hands and feet to cool
them; if it is the snow, they jump down to leave their footprints.
No matter what the sight, they are never content merely with
looking at it.
I think these entries may ultimately
add to the popularity of the work because they serve as a kind
of handbook for proper behavior and etiquette, which it may be
argued are given a great deal of importance in Japanese society
relative to others. The Japanese reader is presented with very
clearly articulated ideas about what it is to be properly Japanese.
In some cases Kenkou eschews metaphor or example completely and
simple describes what is appropriate when, for example, calling
on someone at their home: “It
is most agreeable when a visitor comes without business, talks
pleasantly for a while, then leaves.”
In the same direct fashion he cautions the gentleman in numerous
essays not to indulge in ostentatious displays of knowledge or
ability:
A man should avoid displaying deep
familiarity with any subject. Can one imagine a well-bred man
talking with the air of a know-it-all, even about a matter with
which he is in fact familiar? The boor who pops up on the scene
from somewhere in the hinterland answers questions with an air
of utter authority in every field. As a result, though the man
may also possess qualities that compel our admiration, the manner
in which he displays his high opinion of himself is contemptible.
It is impressive when a man is always slow to speak, even on
subjects he knows thoroughly, and does not speak at all unless
questioned.
There are numerous entries of this
sort, and they stand out from the rest, I think, because they
are so utterly timeless. The passage above is just as true today
as it was in his time, and it is this quality that makes the work
endure. As such, even the contemporary reader can find in the
Tsurezuregusa much that can be applied to his or her life
today. In this area Kenkou’s
brilliance is clearly displayed, and his place in Japanese history
as a gifted philosopher justified.
More than simply an authority on
matters of etiquette and grace, though, Kenkou is also regarded
as having had much to do with the development of the Japanese
for nature and artistic style. The importance he attaches to
an awareness of the impermanent, the incomplete, and the irregular
have shaped the Japanese collective consciousness more than we
may ever know. The Tsurezuregusa shows us that for him
the suggested was superior to the conspicuous, and beginnings
and endings to the central experience. The natural world was
his favorite canvas for ruminations of this kind, and the examples
he uses are vividly drawn in images familiar to any Japanese.
It is interesting to note that it is here that Kenkou’s
Buddhist ideology is best represented. So much of beauty lay
in its ephemerality, he reminds us, and this perception has as
its roots the Buddhist concept of mujou, or impermanence.
Cherry blossoms are loved for their brevity, for example, and
for how they suggest the finite nature of our own existence and
that of all things. Surely this way of looking at the natural
world existed in Japan long before Kenkou put his brush to ink,
but his words offer a unique expression of its fundamental ideas.
It is therefore regrettable how few of the pieces in the Tsurezuregusa
are devoted to observations of the natural world, but from those
available we do find that he had cultivated the recluse’s
eye for nature even though he had not put any great distance between
himself and the urban hub of Heian-kyou.
Yoshida Kenkou became a monk and
set his feet upon The Way, but his path was one that never carried
him too far from the society and company of others he loved so
much. Somehow he was able to fuse the courtier and the recluse
into a single entity that found in that union a keener insight
into the world than either might have achieved alone. That he
was generous enough to record his thoughts we can be grateful,
and in the pages of his legacy we find a window into his heart,
his mind, and his world.
The Tsurezuregusa is a classic of Japanese literature. It is a collection of zuihitsu (lit. random jottings), a genre unique to Japan, and was written in the early part of the 14th century. This paper discusses it and the author, Yoshida Kenkou.