隔てなく蓮の宿を契りても
君が心や住まじとすらむ
君が心や住まじとすらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Hedate naku hachisu no yado o chigirite mo
kimi ga kokoro ya sumaji to suramu - English Translation
-
Though you promise us
one lotus dwelling with no
wall set between, your
own heart, I think, will never
settle and be clear in it
- Meaning
- Though you promise us one lotus dwelling with nothing set between, your heart, I think, will never settle there or be clear.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Suzumushi
The Third Princess answered Genji's poem with this one. Vow what he likes about a shared lotus, she says, his heart will not come to rest there—she does not take his words at face value. She was a nun now and had no intention of meeting worldly feeling. Afterward Suzaku urged her to move to the Sanjo residence he had made over to her, but Genji, unwilling to let so young a wife go, would not agree. Nothing eased where she was.
"With no wall set between" is having nothing stand between two people. "One lotus dwelling" takes up his lotus leaf and lotus seat and makes the flower of paradise a house to live in. "Will never settle" is a negative supposition, and the verb also sounds the word for running clear, so that his heart will neither rest nor be pure. She receives his Buddhist vocabulary unchanged and then doubts the vow itself: a short poem with a firm refusal set inside it.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- If the wind that blows and gathers to the flute's own bamboo is the same, then let it be handed down to a root that runs long ages
- We had promised each other one same lotus seat, and yet how sad this day is, when the dew upon the leaf is parted in two
- Autumn in general I have come to know as a hard thing—and even so, what I cannot shake off is the bell cricket's voice
- Of your own accord you turned away and left this lodging in the grass, and still the bell cricket's voice has not grown old in the least