名人伝 English

A man named Ki Sho, living in the capital city of Kantan in the state of Cho, resolved to become the greatest archer in the land.

In searching for someone worthy to serve as his master, he could think of no one in the present day who could rival the renowned marksman Hi Ei when it came to the bow.

It was said that this expert could hit a willow leaf at a hundred paces, every single time.

Ki Sho traveled all the way to seek out Hi Ei and entered his school.

Hi Ei commanded the new pupil first to learn not to blink.

Ki Sho went home, crawled under his wife's loom, and lay flat on his back there.

His scheme was to stare unblinking at the treadles of the loom as they moved rapidly up and down just past his eyes.

His wife, not knowing the reason, was greatly alarmed.

For one thing, she objected to being peered at by her husband from such a strange angle and in such an odd posture.

Ki Sho scolded his reluctant wife and forced her to keep weaving.

Day after day he continued his training in non-blinking, maintaining this peculiar posture.

After two years, even when the swiftly shuttling treadles grazed his eyelashes, he ceased to blink at all.

At last he crawled out from beneath the loom.

By now he had reached the point where he would not blink even if the sharp tip of an awl were jabbed at his eyelid.

Even if sparks suddenly flew into his eyes, or a cloud of ash billowed up before him without warning, he never so much as batted an eye.

His eyelids had altogether forgotten how to employ the muscles that close them, and even at night, in deep sleep, Ki Sho's eyes remained wide open.

When at last a small spider spun its web between his very lashes, he finally felt confident and reported this to his teacher Hi Ei.

Hearing this, Hi Ei said:

Merely not blinking is not yet sufficient for me to teach you the art of shooting.

Next, learn to see.

When you have grown skilled in seeing—such that you can look upon the small as though it were large, and the faint as though it were plain—come and tell me.

Ki Sho returned home once more, found a louse in the seam of his undergarment, and tied it to one of his own hairs.

This he hung in the south-facing window and spent the entire day staring at it.

Every day he fixed his gaze on the louse hanging in the window.

At first, of course, it was nothing more than a single louse.

Two or three days passed and it remained just a louse.

However, after ten days or more had gone by, it seemed to him—though perhaps it was only his imagination—that it had grown ever so slightly larger.

By the end of the third month it clearly appeared to be the size of a silkworm.

The scenery outside the window where the louse hung gradually changed with the passing seasons.

The warm spring sunlight that had shone so cheerfully gave way at some point to the fierce glare of summer, and just when geese had been crossing the clear autumn sky high above, already sleet was falling from a cold and ashen sky.

Ki Sho patiently went on gazing at the proboscis-bearing, itch-inducing little arthropod that dangled from the tip of a hair.

As dozens of lice were replaced one after another, three full years swiftly passed.

One day he suddenly noticed that the louse in the window looked to him as large as a horse.

Ki Sho slapped his knee in triumph and went outside.

He doubted his own eyes.

People appeared to him as tall towers.

Horses were mountains.

Pigs looked like hills; chickens appeared as castle turrets.

Ki Sho bounded back into the house with joy, faced the louse by the window once more, nocked an arrow of Sakuho on his bow of Enkaku horn, and fired—the arrow pierced clean through the louse's heart, yet the very hair to which it was tied remained uncut.

Ki Sho went at once to his teacher's side to report this.

Hi Ei leapt up and struck his chest, and for the first time cried, "Magnificent!"

And praised him.

Then, without delay, he began to transmit to Ki Sho every last secret and mystery of the art of archery.

Having spent five years on the fundamental training of the eyes, Ki Sho's improvement in skill was astonishingly swift.

Ten days after the transmission of the inner secrets had begun, Ki Sho tried shooting a willow leaf at a hundred paces and already hit his mark every single time.

After twenty days, he drew a powerful bow with a brimming cup of wine balanced on his right elbow—not only was his aim unerring, but not a drop of wine stirred in the cup.

After one month, when he attempted rapid fire with a hundred arrows, as the first arrow struck the target the second arrow flew true to lodge in the nock of the first, and without a moment's pause the tip of the third arrow bit firmly into the nock of the second.

Arrow followed arrow and each shot overtook the last, so that the tip of every following shaft was buried in the nock of the one before, and none of them ever fell to the ground.

In the blink of an eye, a hundred arrows were joined as one, and the last nock, stretching back in a straight line from the target, appeared still to hold the bowstring in its notch.

Hi Ei, watching from the side, could not help crying out, "Splendid!"

And said so.

After two months, Ki Sho came home and quarreled with his wife; in order to frighten her, he nocked an arrow on his lacquered bow, drew it taut, and shot at his wife's eye.

The arrow clipped three of his wife's eyelashes and flew away on the other side, yet the woman who had been shot did not notice it at all, and without so much as blinking she continued to berate her husband.

Indeed, the speed of his arrows and the delicacy of his aim, by virtue of his supreme art, had truly reached this level.

Ki Sho, having nothing more to learn from his teacher, one day had an unworthy thought.

As he pondered to himself at that moment, he concluded that now there was no one with a bow who could match him, save his own teacher Hi Ei.

To become the greatest archer in the land, he would have to remove Hi Ei no matter what.

While he was secretly watching for an opportunity, one day he happened to encounter Hi Ei coming toward him alone in the open fields.

Ki Sho resolved in an instant, reached for his arrow and took aim—Hi Ei sensed what was coming and likewise took up his bow in response.

The two shot at each other in turn; each time, the arrows met in mid-air and both fell to the ground.

That the fallen arrows raised not even the faintest dust was surely because the skill of both men had entered into the realm of the divine.

Now, when Hi Ei's arrows were exhausted, Ki Sho still had one remaining.

Pressing forward with a surge of confidence, Ki Sho released that final arrow—but Hi Ei, in a flash, snapped off a branch from a nearby wild briar and knocked the arrowhead aside with the tip of its thorn.

In Ki Sho's heart, as he understood that his reckless ambition had been thwarted, there arose at that instant a sudden shame of conscience—the kind that would surely never have occurred had he succeeded.

As for Hi Ei, the relief at having escaped the danger and his satisfaction at his own skill caused him to forget entirely any hatred for his adversary.

The two rushed toward each other and embraced in the middle of the field, and for a time were lost in the beautiful tears of master and pupil.

(Judging such an episode by today's moral standards would be beside the point.

When the gourmet Duke Huan of Qi sought a delicacy he had never yet tasted, his cook Yi Ya steamed his own son and offered it to him.

The sixteen-year-old boy who would become the First Emperor of Qin visited his father's beloved concubines three times on the very night his father died.

Such are the times these stories come from.)

Even as they wept in each other's arms, Hi Ei thought it extremely dangerous should the pupil ever conceive such a scheme again, and concluded there was nothing better than giving Ki Sho a new goal to redirect his spirit.

He spoke to this dangerous disciple and said:

I have already transmitted to you everything there is to transmit.

If you wish to plumb the deepest mysteries of this art still further, go west and climb the treacherous slopes of Taiko, and scale the very peak of Mount Kakuzan.

There you should find old Master Kan Yo, a great authority on this discipline without equal throughout all of history.

Compared to the Master's technique, our own archery amounts to little more than child's play.

The one you should take as your teacher now can only be Master Kan Yo.

Ki Sho immediately set out heading west.

His teacher's words—that before this man their own skill would be little more than child's play—stung his pride.

If that were truly so, then his aspiration to become the greatest in the land was still a very long way off.

Impatient to find out whether his art really amounted to child's play and wishing above all to meet this person and measure himself against him, he pressed onward along the road with all haste.

Tearing his feet and wounding his shins, climbing sheer crags and crossing plank bridges, after one month he at last arrived at the summit he had been seeking.

The one who met Ki Sho—who had arrived all eager and wound up—was a terribly decrepit old man with eyes as gentle as a lamb's.

He must have been over a hundred years old.

His back was so bent that his white beard trailed along the ground even as he walked.

Thinking the other man might be deaf, Ki Sho announced his purpose in a loud, hurried voice.

When he had explained that he wished to have his skill appraised, he was so impatient that he did not even wait for a reply, but immediately unstrapped from his back the bow of Yokan hemp-cord and took it in his hands.

Then, fitting a flint-tipped arrow to the string, he took aim at a flock of migratory birds flying high across the sky at that very moment.

At the release of the string, five large birds at once fell beautifully, cutting through the blue sky.

"You can manage reasonably well, it seems," said the old man with a gentle smile.

"But that, in the end, is what might be called shooting-that-shoots. It would appear, my good man, that you have yet to know non-shooting-that-shoots."

Leading the disgruntled Ki Sho, the old hermit brought him to the edge of a sheer cliff about two hundred paces away.

At his feet the rock face dropped away like a literal folding screen for a thousand fathoms, and a mere glance at the stream below—visible as a thread far, far down—was enough to induce instant vertigo.

The old man strode briskly up onto a precarious stone jutting halfway out into the void from that precipice and, turning back to Ki Sho, said:

"Well then."

"Could you show me that same feat once more, here on this stone?"

There was no retreating now.

When Ki Sho stepped onto the stone in the old man's place, the stone gave a faint lurch.

As he forced himself to summon his courage and tried to nock an arrow, a small stone happened to roll off the edge of the cliff.

When his eyes followed it on its way down, Ki Sho found himself involuntarily prostrate on the rock.

His legs trembled and shook; sweat flowed down to the very heels of his feet.

The old man laughed and extended his hand to help Ki Sho down from the stone, then stepped up onto it himself and said, "Shall I show you then what shooting truly is?"

Ki Sho, his heart still pounding, his face pale, quickly gathered himself and said:

"But what will you do for a bow?"

"A bow?"

The old man was empty-handed.

"A bow?"

The old man laughed.

"So long as you need a bow and arrows, you are still in the realm of shooting-that-shoots."

"For non-shooting-that-shoots, neither a lacquered bow nor a Shukushin arrow is needed."

Directly above them, at an extreme height in the sky, a single kite was lazily tracing circles.

Kan Yo gazed up for a while at the form that looked no larger than a sesame seed, then fitted an unseen arrow to a formless bow, drew it back to the full moon, and released it with a soft twang—and behold, the kite dropped from the sky like a stone, not even beating its wings.

Ki Sho shuddered with awe.

He felt as though only now, for the first time, had he glimpsed the true depths of this art.

Ki Sho remained with this aged master for nine years.

What kind of training he underwent during that time, no one can know.

When he descended the mountain after nine years, people were startled by how Ki Sho's face had changed.

His former fierce and competitive countenance had vanished somewhere, replaced by a face utterly without expression—like a wooden doll, like a fool.

When he paid a visit after so long to his old teacher Hi Ei, however, Hi Ei took one look at this face and exclaimed in admiration:

"Now at last you are truly the greatest master in the land."

"The likes of us cannot even approach your feet."

The capital of Kantan welcomed Ki Sho back as the greatest archer in the land and seethed with anticipation for the wondrous feats that would surely soon be displayed before their eyes.

Yet Ki Sho showed no inclination whatsoever to respond to these expectations.

No—he would not even reach for a bow.

The bow of Yokan hemp-cord he had carried with him into the mountains appeared to have been discarded somewhere along the way.

When someone asked him the reason, Ki Sho replied languidly:

"The highest action is non-action; the highest speech departs from words; the highest shooting does not shoot."

The citizens of Kantan, extremely quick to understand, immediately nodded in agreement.

The master of the bow who touched no bow became their source of pride.

The less Ki Sho touched a bow, the more his reputation for invincibility was proclaimed far and wide.

Various rumors spread from mouth to mouth among the people.

Every night, past the third watch, an unaccountable sound of a bowstring being plucked could be heard on the rooftop of Ki Sho's house.

It was said that the spirit of the Way of Shooting dwelling within the master, while its host slept, would slip out from inside his body and stand guard through the night to ward off evil spirits.

A merchant who lived near his house declared that one night, high in the air above Ki Sho's house, he had clearly seen Ki Sho himself, seated on a cloud with a bow in his hand—a rare sight—matching skills against two great archers of antiquity, Gei and Yoyuki.

At that moment, the arrows loosed by the three masters each trailed a pale bluish light across the night sky before disappearing between the stars of Sanshuhu and Tenrousei.

There was also a thief who confessed that when he had tried to break into Ki Sho's house and set his foot on the wall, a single shaft of killing intent came rushing directly from the silent interior of the house and struck him squarely in the forehead, so that he involuntarily tumbled back outside.

From then on, those who harbored wicked hearts would detour around a wide radius of ten cho in all directions from where he lived, and wise migratory birds no longer flew over the sky above his house.

In the midst of fame that rose up like great clouds, the master Ki Sho grew slowly old.

His heart, having long since parted from the bow, seemed to enter ever more deeply into a realm of austere detachment and inner stillness.

His wooden-doll face lost still more of its expression, he spoke ever more rarely, until at last it became doubtful whether he was even breathing.

"Already, I no longer know the distinction between self and other, or the difference between right and wrong. My eyes seem to me as my ears, my ears as my nose, my nose as my mouth."

Such were the words the aged master left as his reflection in his later years.

Forty years after he had taken his leave of Master Kan Yo, Ki Sho passed from the world—quietly, as quietly as smoke.

Throughout those forty years, he never once mentioned archery.

Since he did not even speak of it, there could be no question of any activity involving bow and arrow.

Of course, as a writer of fables, one would dearly love to give the old master one final grand exploit here and thereby make plain the reason a true master is truly a master—yet at the same time it is impossible to distort the facts recorded in the ancient texts.

For indeed, of his later years, all that is handed down is that he transformed the world through inaction alone, aside from the following strange anecdote.

This anecdote appears to belong to one or two years before his death.

One day, the aged Ki Sho was invited to the home of an acquaintance, where he noticed a certain object.

He was certain he had seen it before and recognized it, but he could not for the life of him recall its name, nor think of what it was used for.

The old man asked the master of the house.

What was this thing called, and what was it used for?

The host, thinking his guest must be joking, gave a sly, playing-dumb sort of smile.

Old Ki Sho grew earnest and asked again.

Still the host smiled ambiguously, looking uncertain what to make of his guest.

When Ki Sho asked the same question a third time with a perfectly grave expression, astonishment appeared at last on the host's face.

He stared fixedly into his guest's eyes.

Having confirmed that his guest was neither joking nor out of his mind, and that he himself had not misheard, the host showed a consternation bordering on terror, and stuttering, cried out:

"Good heavens—can it be that you, Master—you, the peerless master of archery throughout all the ages—have utterly forgotten the bow? Ah—even its name, even what it is for!"

For some time afterward in the capital of Kantan, it is said that painters hid their brushes, musicians cut the strings of their lutes, and craftsmen were ashamed to take up their compasses and squares.

(December, Showa 17)