On Reprimanding Hachiman Chapter17
In the reign of Emperor Heizei, Hachiman declared in his oracle: “I am Great Bodhisattva Hachiman, the guardian of Japan. I vow to guard and protect a hundred rulers.” Now people say that the eighty-first sovereign; the eighty-second, the Retired Emperor of Oki; the eighty-third, the eighty-fourth, and the eighty-fifth sovereigns were all dethroned,35 and it would appear that the remaining twenty some sovereigns will likewise be abandoned to their fate. It seems, they say, that Hachiman’s vow has ceased to be effective.
My own estimation of the matter is this. When Hachiman vowed to guard and protect a hundred rulers, he meant that he would guard and protect a hundred persons who were upright rulers. In his vow, Hachiman says: “I will take up my residence on the head of an upright person, but I will not abide in the heart of a person who is fawning and crooked.” It is like the moon, which casts its reflection in clear water but will not do so if the water is muddy.
A true ruler is a person who does not speak lies. The General of the Right [Minamoto no Yoritomo] and the Acting Administrator [Hōjō Yoshitoki] were men who did not speak lies. They deserve to be counted among the hundred rulers, the upright persons upon whose heads Great Bodhisattva Hachiman dwells.
There are two kinds of uprightness. One is the uprightness of those in the secular world. The character for king or ruler unites heaven, humankind, and earth.36 The three horizontal lines represent heaven, humankind, and earth respectively, and they are joined together by a single vertical line. A true ruler is one like the Yellow Emperor,37 a ruler who stands at the center and acts as the lord of heaven, lord of humankind, and lord of earth.
The Retired Emperor of Oki in name was ruler of the nation, but in action he was a man who spoke lies, a wrongdoer. The acting administrator was in name a subject of the ruler, but in action he was a great ruler, a man who spoke no lies, the kind upon whose head Great Bodhisattva Hachiman vowed to dwell.
Notes
35. The eighty-first sovereign refers to Emperor Antoku, who, still a child at the time, drowned in 1185 during the sea battle at Dannoura in which the Taira clan met their final defeat at the hands of the Minamoto clan. The eighty-second, the eighty-third, the eighty-fourth, and the eighty-fifth sovereigns refer to the three retired emperors, Gotoba, Tsuchimikado, and Juntoku, and the reigning emperor Chūkyō, respectively. In 1221, they joined in an attempt to overthrow the military government in Kamakura, but their forces were defeated by those of the Kamakura regent Hōjō Yoshitoki, under the leadership of his eldest son, Yasutoki. Chūkyō was deposed; Gotoba was exiled to the island of Oki; Tsuchimikado, to Tosa Province; and Juntoku, to Sado Island.
36. The character for king is 王, which is pronounced ō.
37. A reference to Huang Ti, one of the legendary Three Sovereigns of ancient China. According to Records of the Historian, among other major contributions to civilization, he initiated the art of medicine.