‘Hojōki’ Explores Impermanence and Desire
‘Hojōki’, by Kamo No Chōmei, reviewed.
‘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.
Chōmei describes how fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and droughts destroy cities, making even the most robust house fragile and impermanent. But he also discusses a more emotional, everyday kind of fragility, arising from social life. The poor man is envious, he says; the rich man always worried. Those without power fear the powerful, while the powerful lust after more. Worldly life, Chōmei says, brings clinging and craving. And clinging and craving are the root of human misery. The less we want, and the less we own, the less we suffer. And so, despite Chōmei’s poverty and isolation, he is content.
Worldly life, Chōmei says, brings clinging and craving. And clinging and craving are the root of human misery.
The theme of Hōjōki is impermanence, what Buddhists call anicca. It is one of the three marks of existence in the Buddhist tradition, the others being dukkha (suffering) and anatta (non-self). It is connected to the second of the Noble Truths, that the cause of pain is desire. It is because nothing lasts that desire is fruitless. Whatever we hold on to or yearn for changes or vanishes, making us unhappy. Nothing lasts. Acting as if that were not the case dooms us to suffer. Impermanence also connects to personhood — or, as Buddhists believe, the ultimate lack of it. If anything changes, then there is no solid enduring ‘thing’ that we can call ourselves. When I say ‘I’, I am just applying a label to a continuous stream of thoughts.
Hōjōki is a wise little book that reminds us that change is the basic fact of existence. We can slow things down or speed things up, but we cannot stop them, any more than we can stop the sun from shining. Freedom can be found in having and wanting little, since whatever we come to have will turn out not to be what we thought it was, and if it does, then it will not keep us happy for long. By limiting our desires we can accept our present conditions and, in time, come to appreciate them.
