‘Hōjōki': On Impermanence
‘Hōjōki’, by Kamo No Chōmei; Penguin Classics, 2013.
‘On flows the river ceaselessly, nor does its water ever stay the same.’ So opens Hōjōki, a profound prose-poem and key text in Japan’s ‘literature of reclusion’. Its author, Kamo no Chōmei, has left the the Imperial Court and built himself a hut just big enough to contain the basics of life. From here, surrounded by natural beauty, he contemplates the transience of things.
Written in 1212, during an especially volatile spell in Japanese history, Hōjōki (translated variously as An Account of My Hut, The Ten Foot Square Hut, or Record of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut) is barely thirty pages long and packs within its slender frame a whole record of calamities – fires, famines, earthquakes, social upheaval. The author reflects on these mishaps and the changes he perceives in nature. Change, he concludes, is the only constant.
‘On flows the river ceaselessly, nor does its water ever stay the same.’
That line about the river sets the tone. And from there he writes in a way that tends more towards the curious than the elegiac, though there is an undertow of wistfulness that makes itself felt at times. Here is a man who has seen cities crumble and classes rise and fall, and through it all nature has remained utterly indifferent. Fittingly, he recounts each calamity as though relating the items on a shopping list. Drama is for the court. He simply observes.
This makes up the first of three movements. After we have learned of fires sweeping the capital, whirlwinds pulling houses into the sky, and the sickly stench of famine victims piled up like logs, the essay takes a personal turn as Chōmei recounts his slow withdrawing sigh from public life, moved by despondency as much spiritual yearning. In the third act he comes to his hut, a glorified shed constructed of thatch and bamboo. Here he plays his biwa and watches the seasons change. His is in a sense a kind of self-imposed exile; but it is equally. a form of liberation. If the world will fall apart, why cling to it? The wise man has little and wants less.
Chōmei recounts his slow withdrawing sigh from public life, moved by despondency as much spiritual yearning.
It would be far too facile to call Hōjōki a call to arms for hermits or introverts or – worse – those who think themselves ‘above’ the worldly. Chōmei strikes a more ambivalent note. He mourns the transience of life, which tells us has yet to accept it whole-heartedly. But he is getting there. His hut, humble as it is, is both retreat from pain and lens through which the quiet, constant, unseen beauty of the world can be refracted. ‘My hut is so small,’ he writes, ‘that there is no place to put a guest – but all the more room to be alone.’ He isn’t bitter, for now he has clarity. Clarity, which is the quality of being unclouded by the ego, is far easier to attain when one is not around other egos. After all, a self to be a self requires other selves.
Thematically, this is a modest exercise in mujo, or impermanence, a Buddhist concept often quoted and seldom grasped. Chōmei does not explain it: he illustrates it. The setbacks, mishaps and calamities he recounts are literal and lethal fires and famines in whose wake comes the truth that nothing, no matter how solid-seeming, will endure. Not cities, not standing, not even suffering – everything changes. To see this so clearly that we feel it, to feel it so strongly we believe it – this is to accept the world as it is. And with acceptance comes freedom. ‘Thy will be done,’ says the Christian. ‘Trust in Allah,’ says the Muslim. Accept everything, and peace follows.
Sadly, reader, it is beyond the scope of this review to concern ourselves with the paradox that acceptance does not preclude attempts ar conscious change, and is thus not a kind of quietism that says (for example) that we should shrug our shoulders at those so keen to trash the planet. On that point, there is an unmistakable ecological consciousness in Hōjōki. Pablo d’Ors, in his Biografía del silencio, notes that the insight that ‘you and I are one same, sole thing’ leads logically to a greater appreciation for the natural world, which manifests no longer as something to be used, but something indivisible from ourselves. Chōmei mourns the cruelty of human ambition – tearing down forests, building unsustainable cities – and contrasts it with the quiet, self-sustaining rhythm of his life in the hut. He gathers water, cuts wood, observes the moon. His world is small, but he is wide awake in it. The hut acts as a metaphor: it is impermanent, unobtrusive, adapted to its surroundings.
Chōmei mourns the cruelty of human ambition – tearing down forests, building unsustainable cities.
Still, I said Chōmei has not reached the end of his spiritual journey, and accordingly he is not entirely without his vanities. There is a distinct tone or moral superiority in his detachment, a smugness that runs like an undertow beneath his words. He has, after all, chosen this life: he was is not ground down by hunger or made a martyr of political flux. He is a man of letters who has opted out, as it were, and he writes of it with the kind of stylised humility of the monk who has not quite shed his old identity as a poet. His austerity is both real and curated. Yes, he has few possessions; but we imagine him arranging them just so, then describing their placement with poetic restraint.
It is easy to set Hōjōki alongside Thoreau’s Walden, owing to the authors’ shared praise of simplicity. The comparison flatters both; for Thoreau never quite left society, and Chōmei never quite condemned it. Yet where Thoreau harangues, Chōmei observes, and where Thoreau constructs a cabin to prove a point, Chōmei builds a hut because the city has half burned down and whatever arises in its place will one day crumble; too. They share an ascetic’s sensibility, but only Chōmei seems at peace.
Thoreau never quite left society, and Chōmei never quite condemned it.
Yes, if we were to put on our glasses and our practical shoes, we could find limits to Hōjōki. Its brevity, both a strength and weakness, leaves much unsaid, perhaps too much. We glimpse the author’s despair but not his struggle. This is the end, or the near-end, of his journey, and so says nothing of the obstacles met along the way: the ‘arid face’ of the spiritual journey, as d’Ors puts it, or St John of the Cross’s dark night of the soul: the boredom, the doubt, the despair. There is more than a hint of studied and privileged withdrawal to it all, too, by which I mean that Chōmei can approach his reclusion like a man taking retirement. His detachment is lucidly expressed and sincere, but he walks away in part because he can.
But I am nitpicking. For Hōjōki is a powerful and elegant account of renunciation. It distills an experience of loss into a handful of pages and finds, in that compressed experience, something true: that things change and that, given this, it is senseless and irrational to cling and crave. To do so is to end up disappointed, because that to which we cling or crave will not always be what it was when we clung to or craved it, if we even manage to hang onto it, and neither will we. Faced with this, what are we to do? Doubtless our answers will vary; but at any rate Chōmei’s was to leave the city, build a hut, and watch the river flow ceaselessly on, its water never staying the same.
