Introduction
25
while not going so far as to explicitly identify a “principle” in
The Great
Mirror
, have nonetheless insisted on a worldview in it that subscribes to a
greater logic.
60
The earliest
Mirrors
advocate a notion of history as driven by karmic
causation. This is not a new notion in eleventh-century Japan, and how it
works is accessibly explained by the monk Ky
ō
kai (or Keikai, dates un-
known) in Japan’s oldest surviving collection of Buddhist
setsuwa
(exhor-
tative tales), the
Nihon ryōiki
(Record of Miraculous Events of Japan, circa
822): “That which withers not is the seed of evil. That which is invisible is the
root of good. Yet the speed with which recompense for evil comes is like
water reflecting as a mirror: once you look into it, the reflection appears.
The swiftness with which the reward for good arrives is like a valley echo-
ing a call. Once you yell out, there is inevitably a response. Retribution in
this age is exactly like this.”
61
To paraphrase Ky
ō
kai, historical events are a
case of reaping what one sows. While evil may temporarily lie hidden, it will
invariably result in payback. One may not see or understand the origins of
favorable karmic recompense, but they necessarily exist, because karma
governs all events. And much like Ky
ō
kai’s work, the early
Mirrors
seem to be
primarily concerned with demonstrating that there is indeed an underlying
cause-and-effect logic to the progression of the events they recount.
However, with the increasingly serious unrest that eventually culmi-
nates in the Genpei War, the
Mirror
narrators become ever more preoc-
cupied with the question of the specific fate of the world. And the histories
they relate grow to articulate more clearly—if not consistently—the impli-
cations of living in the final age of the dharma, the last stage in “a three
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