Questions and Answers on the Object of Devotion Chapter11-4

Questions and Answers on the Object of Devotion Chapter11-4

———————————-（continued from Chapter11-3)———————————-

The fifteen ceremonies, which I mentioned earlier, include the one-character gold-wheel ceremony, the ceremony of the four heavenly kings, the ceremony of the wisdom king Immovable, the Great Awesome Virtue ceremony, the ceremony of the wheel-turning king, the ceremony of Wish-Granting Wheel, the ceremony of the wisdom king Craving-Filled, the ceremony of the Buddha Eye, the ceremony of the six characters, the ceremony of the boy Diamond Pounder, the ceremony of the Honorable Star King, the ceremony of the wisdom king Great Commander, and the ceremony of the Protection Sutra. The purpose of the ceremonies is to overpower all those who act as enemies of the nation or enemies of the ruler, to call away their lives from them, and to send their spirits to the pure land of Secret Solemnity.²⁶ And those who performed them were none other than Jien, chief priest of the Tendai school, and the administrators of priests and other high-ranking priests of Tō-ji, Ninna-ji, and the Jōjū-in hall of Onjō-ji, forty-one eminent persons, as well as various assistant priests, over three hundred persons in all.

With such ceremonies, such celebrants, and such an age of such emperors and retired emperors, how could the imperial forces have been defeated? Even if they had not been victorious, how could they have been defeated so quickly and in such a shameful manner? I dare say that no one but I understands the reason.

For the ruler of a nation to attack one of his subjects is like a hawk seizing a small bird. Even if the ruler should in the end suffer defeat, one would expect the defeat to come only after one or two years, or after ten or twenty years. Yet in this case the attack began on the fifteenth day of the fifth month and ended in defeat on the fourteenth day of the sixth month, a period of barely thirty days or more. And the Acting Administrator Yoshitoki did not know beforehand that such an attack would take place, so he had no time to offer up his own prayers for victory or to make other preparations.