Prevod

Carriages bearing ladies who had come to pay him reverence passed to and fro without a pause. The monk looked a little over thirty and was slender, with drowsy eyes that never met anyone’s gaze. From time to time he said, “Amida Buddha,” and between these utterances only his lips moved, so that he seemed to be silently repeating the Buddha’s name. Every so often he let out something like a sharp sigh and surveyed the faces of the assembled crowd. Eager to catch his eye, the people jostled and pressed against one another, pushing this way and that. Early that morning he had entered the hall, and now the many monks who had gone in before him came walking out in procession. Behind them, in a work cart, rode this monk, dressed in a paper robe and a Buddhist stole. His lips moved as though he were saying something, but he would not look anyone in the eye and from time to time let out a great sigh. The spectators lining his route showered him with grains of rice as thick as hail. Every so often the holy man said, “Why do you do this? It gets in my eyes and nose—I cannot bear it. If you wish to make an offering, put it in a paper bag or something and send it to the place where I have been staying.” The simple-minded rubbed their hands together and worshipped him, but some with a little understanding whispered, “Why does this holy man talk like that? He is just about to drown himself, yet he tells people to send things here and there, and complains that he cannot bear rice getting in his eyes and nose. How strange!” The cart went on until it reached the end of Seventh Avenue. There an even greater crowd than in the city had gathered to pay reverence to the holy man who was going to drown himself; the people outnumbered the stones on the riverbed. When the cart had been drawn up at the river’s edge and brought to a halt, the holy man asked, “What hour is it now?” The monks attending him replied, “It is now late in the hour of the Monkey.” “It is still too early for the appointed hour of my rebirth in paradise,” he said. “Wait a little longer.” Unable to bear the wait, some who had come from far away went home, and the crowd on the riverbed thinned. Those determined to see the affair through remained. Among them was a monk who said, “Can one really fix an hour for rebirth in paradise? I do not understand this at all.” While people were talking in this fashion, the holy man faced west from the bow of a boat and went into the river with a splash. But he caught his foot on a rope beside the boat and struggled there without sinking beneath the surface. When his disciple, another holy man, freed his foot, he fell headfirst into the water and began to choke and splutter. A man who had stepped down into the river to get a better view took him by the hand and pulled him out. Wiping his face with both hands and spitting out the water he had swallowed, the monk turned to his rescuer, rubbed his hands together, and said, “You have done me an immeasurable kindness. I shall thank you for it in paradise.” Then he scrambled up onto dry land. The people gathered there, children among them, picked up stones from the riverbed and pelted him with them. As the naked monk fled down the riverbed, people caught him as he passed and struck him, one after another, until his head was split open. Whether it was this same monk I do not know, but they say that when someone sent melons from Yamato, the accompanying letter was inscribed, “From the former Drowning Holy Man.”