Tanomoshi na mi ni sou tomo to narinikeri taenaru nori no hana no chigiri wa

English Translation

How firm a thing, this:
it has become a friend that
goes at my own side—
the bond I have with the Law
of the wonderful Lotus.

Meaning

What a support it is: it has become a friend that goes beside me, this bond with the flower of the wonderful Law.

Commentary

Section 18 The Fever: The Exchange with Tameko

Toward the end of the third month she is taken with what may be the recurrent fever that usually afflicts children, and it comes back every other day, twice in all. Feeling strangely wilted through and through, she rises before dawn on the day it should have come a third time, and before the Buddha, with her whole mind fixed, she reads the Lotus Sutra. Whether by virtue of that or not, the fever leaves her without a trace. Just then there is a courier for the capital, and while sending news of this home she writes also to the Gon-Chunagon: that under the sky of a journey, in a forlornness close to danger, it must be by the power of the Law that her life has been held here until today. A poem goes with it. The lady, alarmed, sends her answer at once. Then, finding the power of the sutra deeply venerable, Abutsu-ni sets down one more poem.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Gon-Chunagon is the daughter of Tamenori, the former Captain of the Right Watch, and serves in the household of Omiya-in; since Tamenori was a son of Tameie and a younger brother of Tameuji, she is a granddaughter of Abutsu-ni's late husband. Since her poem of enquiry at the beginning of winter, and through the exchange of practice poems in spring, she has continued to write, and the correspondence goes on here. The prose has called her a woman who gives herself to poetry without distraction.

Late spring of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, after the reply from the capital had come.

The poem was made because the power of the sutra seemed to her deeply venerable; the prose says only that, and does not mark it as an answer to the letter.

With this poem the passage on the fever ends, and the prose moves to the beginning of the fourth month, when she writes summer poems to the same Gon-Chunagon.

Recovery is received as the gaining of a bond with the Law. The first line ends in an exclamatory particle and opens the poem in gladness: what a support. The second line calls the sutra a friend who stays at one's side, a way of speaking of a text as a person, and for someone alone under a traveller's sky it means that something has been found which does not leave. The auxiliary in the third line marks a realisation, the surprise of finding that this had come about without her noticing. The fourth line names the wonderful Law, the Lotus Sutra, and the flower of the closing line is the sutra figured as a blossom. The word for bond is the same as in the prayer to the god of binding in Mino, "Mamore tada chigiri musubu no kami naraba tokenu urami ni ware mayowasade"; there it was the bond by which a god was asked to settle a suit, and here it is a bond with the Law. The closing line ends on a noun and stands by inversion, so that what the support is comes last. Where the two poems before it were built out of shore words — the salt-folk, the smoke, the fire — this one is built out of Buddhist words alone, and the change of key marks it as a solitary poem standing outside the exchange.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other