donned a double outer dress of dark gray mourning and tucking up her long skirts put the Sacred Jewel under her arm and the Sacred Sword in her sash. She took the Emperor in her arms and said, “Though I am but a woman, I will not fall into the hands of the enemy. I will accompany our Sovereign Lord. Let those of you who will, follow me.” She moved softly to the gunwale of the vessel.
The Emperor was seven years old that year but looked much older than his age. He was so lovely that he seemed to shed a brilliant radiance about him, and his long black hair hung loose far down his back. With a look of surprise and anxiety on his face he asked the Lady Nii, “Where are you going to take me?”
She turned to the youthful sovereign, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and answered, “Perhaps Your Majesty does not know that he was reborn to the Imperial throne in this world as a result of the merit of the Ten Virtues practiced in former lives. Now, however, some evil karma claims you. Turn to the east and bid farewell to the deity of the Great Shrine of Ise and then to the west and say the nembutsu, that Amida Buddha and the Holy Ones may come to welcome you to the Pure Western Land.[1] Japan is small as a grain of millet, but now it is a vale of misery. There is a pure land of happiness beneath the waves, another capital where no sorrow is. It is there that I am taking my Sovereign.”
She comforted him, and bound up his long hair in his dove-colored robe. Blinded with tears, the child sovereign put his beautiful little hands together. He turned first to the east to say farewell of the deity of Ise and then to the west to repeat the nembutsu. The Lady Nii took him tightly in her arms and with the words, “In the depths of the ocean is our capital,” sank with him at last beneath the waves.
THE FORMER EMPRESS BECOMES A NUN
Kenreimon’in, the former Empress, went to Yoshida at the foot of Higashiyama and entered the cell of a monk called Keiei. It was old
- ↑ The nembutsu is an invocation to Amida Buddha practiced by members of the Jōdo (Pure Land) sect.
