Reflecting the Past Har var d East Asian Monogr aphs 433
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The Water Mirror
operates. To repeat, the earlier Mir- rors promote the recognition of the existence of a principle of karmic causation and thus emphasize histories in which events are connected and are not arbitrary. The Water Mirror , in contrast, seeks to persuade the reader of the existence of a historical arc that not only explains the past 45. Komine, Setsuwa no gensetsu , 349. On the present kalpa , see Kaneko e t al., Mizukagami zen chūshaku , 23. Komine also sees the four- kalpa view in The Great Mirror ( Setsuwa no gensetsu , 348–49). The position I take here is somewhat diff erent from that in my earlier work, in which I concurred with Komine’s argument (Brightwell, “ Mirror of China ,” 278–80). 106 Deviant by Design but also extends into the future and thus guarantees that the end of the world is not imminent. The Water Mirror is promoting a definite and specific pattern. This change can be interpreted as signaling a basic realignment vis- à -vis the historiographic enterprise of Mirror writing and the cosmological framework supporting it. It is no longer desirable or sufficient to uncover or establish the existence of a relationship between past and present. Hence, there is no need for a recursive experience of the past. Instead, The Water Mirror offers a guarantee that the world is not ending—but to do that, it must implicitly look forward as well. Tadachika is attempting to persuade his readers that there is a larger pattern that can be seen across the entire trajectory of Japanese history, on the one hand, and a linear narrative that reinforces the idea that time moves unidirectionally along a single path, on the other hand. As a result of this clearly defined road, history’s future course can likewise be inferred. Here, then, is a shift in the nature of what a Mirror is supposed to demonstrate. While the narrators of both of the earlier Mirrors explicitly say that they are explaining how things have reached their current states, The Water Mirror offers basic indicators for where the world is headed. Through a vision clearer than that suggested by the subtleties of karmic causality, the reader is made to understand that there is a path for the past and the future that is both larger (in its kalpa orientation) and also more specific and immediate (in its guarantee that things are not going to improve any time soon). What it “models” is diff erent: the earlier Mir- rors tell their readers how they have arrived at the present, while The Water Mirror offers the reader a prognosis for the future. Reading Tadachika’s work as one that simultaneously employs two diff erent but mutually reinforcing temporal scales does not require a dra- matic shift in medieval understandings of the nature of time itself. Rather, it suggests an intimate connection between the narrative struc- turing of temporal progression and the historiographical imperatives to which diff erent authors subscribed. 46 Admittedly, Tadachika never explic- 46. This is not entirely dissimilar to Hayden White’s notion of emplotment, in which the form of a work determines how one is to interpret it ( Metahistory ). Like White, I see a connection between structure and readerly experience, which inevitably informs interpretation. However, for me, this is not dictated by genre. |