The Bells of Gion Shōja: The Tale of the Heike, the Fall of the Taira and the Blind Biwa Singers Who Kept It Alive

No single person wrote The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari). It is an epic account, compiled before 1330, of the struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans for control of Japan in the Genpei War of 1180–1185, and it grew out of many versions passed down orally by blind biwa-playing performers known as biwa hōshi. What it is about can be said in one word that the opening lines announce: impermanence. The proud Taira rise to the top of the court and are destroyed, and the tale presents their fall as proof of the Buddhist truth that the prosperous must decline.

A tale with many authors

The title itself needs a short explanation. "Heike" means the Taira family: hei is a reading of the first character of Taira, and ke means family. As for authorship, the monk Yoshida Kenkō offered one theory in his Tsurezuregusa of 1330: a former governor of Shinano named Yukinaga wrote the Heike and taught a blind man called Shōbutsu to sing it. Yukinaga is a plausible candidate, because the text uses a demanding mix of Chinese and Japanese that only educated monks and nobles had mastered. But the style changes from section to section and the story often doubles back, so most readers see it as a collective work, with Yukinaga at most one of the first to put it into writing.

The version most people read today was compiled by a blind monk named Kakuichi in 1371. The work belongs to the gunki monogatari, the war tales, alongside The Tale of Hōgen, The Tale of Heiji and the later Taiheiki.

Sung, not read

It helps to imagine the Heike as something you heard. The biwa hōshi, or "lute priests", were travelling performers who earned a living by reciting to the music of the biwa, a lute; most were blind, and they shaved their heads and wore robes like Buddhist monks. Their style of music is called heikyoku, literally "Heike music". According to tradition, Shōbutsu, a monk of the Tendai school, was the first to sing the Heike, around 1220. Akashi Kakuichi, who lived from 1300 to 1371, gave the narration now accepted as the standard version.

There may have been a ritual side to this, too. Before they sang the Heike, these performers also had roles in spiritual purification and plague prevention, and one theory is that these duties are why they became caretakers of a story about a whole clan wiped out, at a time when people feared the angry spirits of the dead Taira. The tale is episodic and was designed to be told in nightly instalments. That explains why many chapters read like self-contained scenes, each with its own climax.

The famous opening

The first lines are some of the best-known words in Japanese:

祇園精舎の鐘の声、諸行無常の響きあり。娑羅双樹の花の色、盛者必衰の理をあらはす。

In Helen McCullough's translation, the sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things, and the color of the sāla flowers reveals that the prosperous must decline; the proud do not endure, like a dream on a spring night, and the mighty fall at last, as dust before the wind. The four-character phrase jōsha hissui, "the prosperous must decline", comes from the Humane King Sutra. Many Japanese students learn the passage by heart.

The story in three movements

The tale is roughly divided into three parts, each with a central figure. The first belongs to Taira no Kiyomori. He helps Emperor Go-Shirakawa crush rebellions in 1156 and 1159, his clan fills the major offices of state, his daughter becomes the emperor's wife, and more than half the provinces come under Taira control. The tale paints him as arrogant and ruthless. Opponents meet secretly at Shishigatani to plot against him; the plot is betrayed and the conspirators are executed or exiled, among them the priest Shunkan, who is left alone on the island of Kikaijima in one of the work's most painful scenes.

Rebellion spreads. Prince Mochihito calls the Minamoto to arms, the capital is briefly moved to Fukuhara, and Taira forces burn the great temples of Nara. Then Kiyomori falls ill with a fever so fierce that water poured on him turns to flame and smoke; he dies in 1181, and his death becomes the clearest lesson in the fall of the mighty.

The second part centres on the Minamoto general Kiso no Yoshinaka. He crushes a huge Taira army at Kurikara, and the Taira flee the capital with the child Emperor Antoku and the imperial regalia. But Yoshinaka's crude behaviour in the capital makes him a figure of fun, and he is finally killed when his horse is stuck in a muddy field.

The third part belongs to Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a military genius later falsely accused of treachery by his elder brother Yoritomo. He wins at Ichi-no-tani by leading his cavalry down a steep slope behind the enemy, surprises the Taira again at Yashima, and destroys them at sea at Dan-no-ura in 1185. There Kiyomori's widow, holding the young Emperor Antoku in her arms, drowns herself. The last chapter traces how the surviving Taira heirs are hunted down until the line ends.

Scenes everyone remembers

Some episodes stand on their own. At Ichi-no-tani, the warrior Kumagai Naozane overpowers the young Taira no Atsumori, hesitates because the boy reminds him of his own son, and kills him only because other riders are coming; he finds a flute on the body and later becomes a monk. At Yashima, a Taira lady holds up a fan on a boat as a challenge, and the young archer Nasu no Yoichi hits it. These scenes show the other face of the epic: courage and skill, but also pity for the enemy.

Themes: mujō and karma

Two strands run through the tale, the samurai and the Buddhist. On one level it celebrates martial courage and even makes death beautiful, comparing drowned warriors at Dan-no-ura to a brocade of maple leaves on the waves. On another, it is soaked in Buddhist thought, and its central theme is mujō, impermanence: the fleeting nature of fortune. The second Buddhist idea is karma, the belief that actions bring consequences later, which the tale applies to Kiyomori's cruelty and terrible death.

The ending ties these threads together. In the separate closing section known as the Initiates' Book, Kiyomori's daughter Kenreimon'in, mother of Antoku, lives as a nun in a mountain retreat at Ōhara. When the bell of the Jakkō-in sounds, it echoes the Gion bells of the opening, and she dies calling on Amida Buddha. The tale begins and ends with a bell.

History or story?

Readers should treat the Heike as literature, not as a history textbook. The 1371 Kakuichi text is generally thought to be a fictional dramatization of the Genpei War, focused on the ideal warrior as imagined by oral singers rather than on warriors as they really were. That does not make it less valuable. It shows how medieval Japan wanted to remember its wars.

Legacy

The Heike has fed Noh and Kabuki plays, woodblock prints, paintings and haiku, and modern works keep returning to it. Its warrior ideals helped lay the groundwork for what later became bushido. Eiji Yoshikawa published a prose retelling, New Tale of the Heike, from 1950, and English readers can choose among several translations, including Helen McCullough's of 1988 and Royall Tyler's of 2012, which tries to keep the feel of performance. For most Japanese people, the biwa itself still calls up the Heike and the ghost story of Hōichi the Earless.

Learn with the Heike: Japanese words

Japanese	Meaning	Example
諸行無常 (shogyō mujō)	all things are impermanent	諸行無常を感じる。
盛者必衰 (jōsha hissui)	the prosperous must decline	盛者必衰の理。
鐘 (kane)	temple bell	鐘の声が聞こえる。
武士 (bushi)	warrior, samurai	武士の物語。
夢 (yume)	dream	春の夜の夢。

Try this: Write two English sentences about something that once seemed permanent in your life but changed, then read 祇園精舎の鐘の声 aloud.