Hojoki: disaster, dwelling and doubt about retreat

Flowing water and impermanence

The opening river keeps flowing, yet its water is never the same. Chomei relates that observation to people and their dwellings: lives and houses change even when the capital appears to endure. Impermanence becomes the thread connecting the disasters, his changing circumstances and the retreat.

A life and a literary precedent

Chomei came from a priestly family at Shimogamo Shrine and was active as a poet before taking religious orders and retiring to Hino. Yoshishige no Yasutane’s earlier Chiteiki, an account of a dwelling and retreat, provided a literary precedent; Chomei developed his own experiences and self-questioning within the later work.

Disasters and relocation

Chomei recounts a great fire, a whirlwind, the move of the capital to Fukuhara, famine and an earthquake. Together they portray the insecurity of life in the late Heian capital. The relocation brings political and social disruption into an account that also describes natural calamities.

Mutual care during famine

In the famine account, Chomei describes people giving their desperately obtained food to those they love, so that the more devoted person dies first. This literary observation gives the disaster a human scale: even mutual care cannot guarantee survival. The passage turns insecurity from an abstract theme into a consequence for particular relationships.

Faith and music in the hut

The Hino hut measures one jo on each side, giving the work its title. It is small, but not empty. Chomei places an image of Amida on the west wall, books on poetry, music and rebirth in the Pure Land on a northern shelf, and a koto and biwa nearby. He plays alone for his own enjoyment.

Questioning attachment to retreat

These possessions make retreat a setting for religious practice and artistic pleasure. They also sharpen his final question: can delight in the hut and its quiet become the very attachment he seeks to abandon? He finds no clear answer within himself and ends by invoking Amida two or three times.

Hojoki survives in manuscript copies and later printed editions. Kyoto University holds an early movable-type edition from the Keicho era; the Saga edition displayed by NIJL also dates to the early Edo period. These books show the work’s later circulation. The much earlier Daifukukoji manuscript has sometimes been attributed to Chomei’s own hand, but that attribution remains disputed.