Hōjōki (The Ten-Foot Square Hut, opening)
日本語版: 方丈記・冒頭
Original Japanese
ゆく河の流れは絶えずして、しかも、もとの水にあらず。
よどみに浮かぶうたかたは、かつ消え、かつ結びて、久しくとどまりたるためしなし。
世の中にある人と栖と、またかくのごとし。
English translation
The current of the flowing river does not cease, and yet the water is not the original water.
In stagnant pools, the floating foam now vanishes, now coalesces, never lingering long.
People and their dwellings in this world are just the same.
Translation: project_procopios contributors (CC BY 4.0). For full translations, see Anthony H. Chambers, Donald Keene, or Yasuhiko Moriguchi & David Jenkins.
Context: 1212 and impermanence
Kamo no Chōmei wrote Hōjōki in 1212, in a tiny ten-foot-square hut (hōjō) on the hillside of Hino, southeast of Kyoto. He was a former court poet who had been passed over for a clerical appointment and had withdrawn from official life.
The book is, in its short span, an early Japanese example of the literary essay. After the famous opening, Chōmei describes the catastrophes that had struck Kyoto in his lifetime: the great fire of 1177, the typhoon of 1180, the famine of 1181–82, the earthquake of 1185. The opening passage frames these disasters: everything passes; nothing endures.
The river metaphor in world literature
The image of the river that flows on but is never the same is a cross-cultural intuition: Heraclitus said something similar in the 6th century BCE ("you cannot step twice into the same river"), though it is unlikely Chōmei knew the Greek tradition. The Buddhist concept of anicca (impermanence) — central to the Heike Monogatari opening as well — is the more immediate intellectual source.
The ten-foot square hut
Chōmei\'s hut, ten feet square (about 3m × 3m), was deliberately the smallest dwelling considered habitable. He furnished it sparely: a biwa (lute), a koto, a few books, a bowl. The literary essay he wrote there became one of the founding texts of the Japanese zuihitsu (essay, "following the brush") tradition.
Suggested reading
- Anthony H. Chambers (trans.), The Ten-Foot Hut (Columbia, 2018).
- Yasuhiko Moriguchi & David Jenkins (trans.), Hōjōki: Visions of a Torn World (Stone Bridge, 1996).