Nani bakari fukaku mo arazu yo no tsune no Hie o toyama to miru bakari nari

English Translation

It is not so deep
not deep at all, this place — it
is merely that here
one looks on Hiei itself
as one of the outer hills

Meaning

It is not deep at all. It is only that from here one looks on Hiei — the Hiei everyone speaks of — as an outer hill.

Commentary

43 The Sound of the Adze

The holy man Eshū had a fence put up in front of the place he was using as his cell. On the shavings the carpenters left he wrote "Magaki suru Hida no takumi no tatsukioto no ana kashigamashi nazo ya yo no naka", said he would go off into the deep mountains to practise, and left. Some time later, asked where in the deep mountains he had shut himself away, he answered "Nani bakari fukaku mo arazu yo no tsune no Hie o toyama to miru bakari nari". He was at Yokawa. That is the whole of the section.
Eshū is the priest of the forty-second section, where he serves a woman as her exorcist and becomes the subject of talk. Yokawa is a part of Mount Hiei, one of the three precincts together with the eastern and western pagodas.
The setting is after his withdrawal into the mountains. The prose reveals that the place was Yokawa.
What prompted the poem was being asked where in the deep mountains he had shut himself away.
The section closes with the poem and with that note about Yokawa. The man who left complaining of the world's noise is here answering the question of where he went.

The first line denies that it is deep at all — a denial of the very thing he announced when he left.
What he calls the Hiei everyone speaks of is the mountain known to all as a place of practice.
The word for an outer hill means a hill near the villages, not one far in; it is the opposite of a deep mountain. From here, he says, even Hiei looks like one of those.
The closing keeps to that measured statement. By declining to call the place deep, and saying instead that Hiei lies nearer than he does, he conveys the depth exactly. The poem answers modestly and tells us he is a long way in.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other