AN ACCOUNT OF MY HUT
[Hōjōki] by Kamo no Chōmei
“An Account of My Hut” was written in 1212, the same year as the death of Hōnen, the great leader of Japanese popular Buddhism. There is a deeply Buddhist tinge to the work, a Buddhism quite unlike the intellectual, aesthetic religion which Kūkai had taught. The new Buddhism—and this work—was pessimistic, as was not surprising in view of the disasters which befell Japanese society in the late Heian Period. The author, Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216), describes in this work some of the calamities which he personally witnessed; he does not allude, however, to the fighting between the Taira and the Minamoto which also ravaged the country. In such terrible times men often turn to religion as he did, and his account of the life he led before and after “abandoning the world” is still very moving.
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The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings It might be imagined that the houses, great and small, which vie roof against proud roof in the capital remain unchanged from one generation to the next, but when we examine whether this is true, how few are the houses that were there of old. Some were burnt last year and only since rebuilt; great houses have crumbled into hovels and those who dwell in them have fallen no less. The city is the same, the people are as numerous as ever, but of those I used to know, a bare one or two in twenty remain. They die in the morning, they are born in the evening, like foam on the water.
Whence does he come, where does he go, man that is born and
