Motometemo kakaruhachisuno tsuyuooite ukiyonimatawa kaerumonokawa

English Translation

Though I sought it out
this dew upon the lotus
am I to leave it
and to the bitter world here
return once more? Never so

Meaning

Having sought out dew such as this upon the lotus, how could I turn back again into the bitter world?

Commentary

34 At the Temple Called Bodai

Having gone to worship at the temple called Bodai, where the Eight Lectures on the Lotus Sutra were being held to form a bond with the Buddha's teaching, the author received word from someone urging her to come home quickly, saying how empty things were without her. She wrote this poem on the underside of a lotus leaf and sent it back. The service, she adds, was so solemn and moving that she felt she could stay on at the temple forever, and nearly forgot the impatience of the one waiting for her.

The text names neither who sponsored the service nor who accompanied her, and the person who sent the letter is left simply as "someone."

The place is the temple called Bodai, the time the days of the Eight Lectures.

The immediate occasion is the message telling her to hurry back. Her reply was written not on paper but on the reverse of a lotus leaf.

After sending the poem she does not stir from the temple; held there by the solemnity of the service, she says she could almost forget the person waiting in the world outside. The text records no reply from the other side.

The poem appears in the personal collection of Sei Shōnagon and was taken into the Buddhist section of the Senzai Wakashū.

The first line establishes at once how rare this place is: dew one would go out and seek. The second and third lines point to the dew lying on the lotus leaves before her and, at the same time, to the Lotus service itself; the dew is both a thing seen and a figure for the moistening of the Buddha's teaching, and it links directly to the act of writing the reply on a lotus leaf. The verb for leaving something behind shares its sound with the verb for dew settling, so that scene and action fold into one another.

In the fourth line the world is called bitter and wearisome, set against the purity within the temple walls. The closing line is a rhetorical question: could I go back? — meaning that she will not, and pushing the summons straight back at the sender. The whole poem is a refusal that turns its own reason into a declaration of the value of the service, and in very few lines the section holds together both the emotion of the ceremony and the distance between it and ordinary attachments.

Author

Sei Shōnagon

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other