Michi no be no chiri ni hikari o yawaragete kami mo hotoke no nanoru narikeri - Senzai Wakashu(English Translation & Meaning)

道の辺の塵に光を和らげて
神も仏の名告るなりけり

Roma-ji: Michi no be no chiri ni hikari o yawaragete kami mo hotoke no nanoru narikeri
English Translation: Softening its light
to mingle with the dust
along the roadside,
the Buddha takes the name
of god, and so it is
Meaning: Softening its light until it mingles with the dust of the roadside, the Buddha, I see, is what takes the name of god.
Commentary: Book Twenty Shinto Poems 1259

Headnote: "Composed as a poem on the gods when the emperor called for a hundred-poem sequence"
He composed this as a poem on the gods when he called for a hundred-poem sequence. Softening its light to the dust of the roadside, the Buddha too takes the name of god, he says. Drawing on the teaching that the Buddha softens his radiance and mingles with the dust of the world to save beings, he states plainly the belief that the gods are forms the Buddha has provisionally taken and named. The sequence is the Kyūan Hundred-Poem Sequences.
The author, "Poem of Retired Emperor Sutoku," is a composition of Sutoku, the first son of Emperor Toba, who became the seventy-fifth emperor. He loved poetry, called for the Kyūan Hundred-Poem Sequences and commanded the compiling of the Shika Wakashū. Defeated in the Hōgen Disturbance, he was exiled to Sanuki and died there.
Together with the preceding poem, 1258, it sings of the Buddha manifesting as a god; that poem treats the place where the god descends, this one the Buddha softening his light to become a god. The next poem, 1260, comes from the same hundred-poem sequence.

First line, "michi no be no": "by the roadside," the everyday world where people live.
Second line, "chiri ni hikari o": "chiri" is the dust of the world and "hikari" the light of the Buddha's wisdom, working in the "light" and "dust" of the phrase about softening light and mingling with dust.
Third line, "yawaragete": "softening the light," a native rendering of the phrase "softening the light."
Fourth line, "kami mo hotoke no": "no" marks the subject, "the god, too, is what the Buddha."
Fifth line, "nanoru narikeri": "nanoru" means to call oneself by a name, "nari" is the copula and "keri" an exclamatory auxiliary of realization.
Author: Retired Emperor Sutoku
Source: Senzai Wakashu
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