Miyazawa wrote his Proem poem The Hard Keyura Jewels… (1922) as a supplement to his first collection, Spring and Asura (1924). While the first two lines or so of the manuscript seem to be missing, the poem clearly expresses the central philosophy of Miyazawa’s life and art: the bodhisattva ideal.

The keyura jewels (yoraku, in Japanese) of this poem stand for bodhisattvas, who are often depicted as wearing them. In the first stanza, the clause “[t]he hard keyura jewels hang straight down” suggests not only the fall of innocent creatures (an animistic metaphor for the hard jewels in the poem) but also the noble, unbending determination of the bodhisattvas who, like those who jump into the water to save the drowning, forsake their heavenly existence to save the sentient beings who are drowning and suffering in the lake—a metaphor for our worldly experience (or Asura status as unsaved beings).

The phrase “angels’ cries” in the second stanza might appear to carry Judeo-Christian implications, but the original word, ten’nin (heavenly beings), together with “keyura jewels” indicates Miyazawa’s primarily animistic/shamanistic and Buddhist sensibilities.

In this and the third stanza, the speaker, who opens the poem in the objective third person, further distances the reader from those who fall and drown by asking if the reader has heard their cries and by saying that the reader will merely pity them. However, the fourth stanza, because it starts with the word but, suddenly and forcibly turns around this indifferent bystander’s viewpoint into that of the very sufferers drowning in the icy lakes, “biting” the bitter salt water.

The agony of the drowning is skillfully intensified by paradoxical expressions such as “the water is so cold that it tastes hot” and “so bitter it seems tasteless.” The fifth, penultimate stanza, rather than depicting the physical sensations of the drowning, moves into the minds of the fallen: “did I fall in this lake? / Is it possible that I should have fallen?”

The last stanza sums up the point of the poem by revealing that those who have fallen are none other than ourselves, and that some of us willingly fall (i.e., forgo our own salvation), following the bodhisattva ideal. In fact, the speaker explains, “I have told you this / not to prevent you from falling, / but so [that you will fall, and that] you’ll swim across it [the lake] when you fall”—which suggests that we are all potentially bodhisattvas as well as “fallen angels” or, according to the Buddhist term, Asura.

The poem’s last two sentences (“and the strongest fall by their wish / and then soar with others”) take us back, through a Möbius band–like twist, to the opening lines, thereby exemplifying the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal, by which bodhisattvas constantly and endlessly go between nirvana (salvation, innocence) and samsara (fallenness, experience) like the blue illumination of “the karmic alternating current lamp” that “flickers busily, busily / with landscapes, with everyone / yet remains lit with such assuredness” (Proem to Spring and Asura).

Categories: Japanese Literature, Literature

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