This body of mine
is no great loss, and even
so, to think it ends—
that the firewood should burn
through at last is a sad thing
- Meaning
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This body of mine is no great loss, and even so, to think that it ends—that the firewood should burn through at last is a sad thing.
- Commentary
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Part Two: Minori
Since the grave illness of the earlier chapter, Murasaki no Ue had never truly recovered. She asked again and again to be allowed to take vows, and Genji, unwilling to be parted from her while she lived, would not permit it. She therefore resolved to dedicate the thousand copies of the Lotus Sutra she had long been having written, and the rite was held on a grand scale at her own Nijo residence. On the tenth of the Third Month, under a sky bright with blossom, both the Akashi lady and Hanachirusato came. Feeling that this would be her last meeting with them, she sent each of them a poem of farewell. This one was for the Akashi lady.
"No great loss" is a way of speaking humbly of oneself. "To think it ends" is knowing this is the last of it. "The firewood should burn through" rests on a line of the Lotus Sutra about a fire going out when the wood is gone, and it means the end of a life. Some readers hear in "this body" the word for fruit as well, calling up the sutra's gathering of fruit and firewood. Using the language of the scripture as the occasion requires, she looks at her own death quite steadily.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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