ALTHOUGH the Noh play Yumi Yawata ('The Bow of Hachiman') is a work of no great literary or dramatic interest, it does present a treatment of the Shinto deity Hachiman which is important from the standpoint of Japanese intellectual history. Hachiman is commonly identified as the Minamoto clan deity in particular and, by extension, as the god of the warrior clans, the Shinto god of war. But the Minamoto cult in fact represents a comparatively late stage of development in the belief, and to comprehend the Hachiman cult in its entirety one must not ignore the differing conceptions of the god's role which were current in previous centuries. Yumi Yawata is valuable in this context because it demonstrates an attempt during the Muromachi period to reinterpret the faith in terms of those earlier conceptions.

The play contains one great surprise, which it reveals almost immediately. An old man presents a mulberry bow sheathed in a sack to envoys of the emperor attending the Iwashimizu Hachiman shrine festival; the envoys, regarding this as an auspicious sign, wish to unwrap the bow and worship before the god. But the old man protests: 'Wrapping the bow in a sack, Restoring the sword to its sheath, These are the marks of an age of great peace.' This may not seem all that astonishing until one realizes that the play is rejecting the view of Hachiman as a god of war and the military houses. Throughout the work Hachiman is depicted primadly as a deity who ensures a peaceful imperial reign.

The political message is obvious. The editors of the Yôkyoku Taikan comment that the play 'advocates peace in a time of military rule; it lauds the imperial house at a time of shogunal despotism.' Watsuji Tetsurö argues that the call forpeace and the nostalgia for imperial rule evident in Yumi Yawata represent the ethical values of the lower classes, values which were given articulation through the medium of the Noh play. He also notes that the play has no reference to the Minamoto, and he suggests that the view of Hachiman as Ojin is important to the play's pacifistic sentiment. This is an excellent insight, but it requires a more extensive elaboration than Watsuji provides. The present essay will attempt to explore more fully the play's treatment of earlier dimensions of the Hachiman belief. References to those dimensions abound, and the following brief outline of the cult's history should aid in understanding the allusions.

HACHIMAN does not appear in the Kojiki or the Nihongi, and the history of the belief before the Nara period is obscure. One Japanese scholar has studied the traditions of the clans known to be associated with the cult by the early ninth century and has constructed a theory of Hachiman's origins. Briefly, Nakano Hatayoshi believes that the faith was the result of a process of amalgamation of Japanese animistic and Korean shamanistic cults which finally found its center at the Usa shrine in northeast Kyushu toward the end of the sixth century. References to Hachiman appear regularly in the Rikkokushi from the Shoku Nihongi on, and in later historical works, and three major phases in the cult from Nara to early medieval times can be discerned.

During the Nara period, the Usa shrine was the center of Hachiman worship. The pronouncements of its medium had dramatic impact on state affairs in the eighth century; the oracle approving the casting of the Daibutsu in Nara brought great wealth and prestige to the shrine, so that by 749 its officials held court rank higher than those at Ise, and the god itself had been awarded the first rank. DOkyo justified his attempt on the throne in 769 with an alleged oracle from Usa, and there were other instances during the period when the god's will was claimed as grounds for political promotion. The first historical phase of the cult is characterized by the primacy of Hachiman's oracular function.

Heian Japan saw the growth of a more complicated and sophisticated cult. Most significant was the development of the concept that Hachiman was actually a Bodhisattva; the official histories awarded him this title for the first time in 8O9.~ This Buddhist conception led to a view of the god as a protector, a guardian deity, an interpretation which differed significantly from the Nara image of a Hachiman who rendered decisions on matters of state through a medium.

In the mid-ninth century the Iwashimizu Hachiman shrine was established on Otokoyama, south of Kyoto. The myth of its founding relates that Hachiman at Usa revealed to a visiting monk his desire to proceed to Kyoto to protect the emperor. The monk erected a hermitage on Otokoyama, whereupon a great light shone upon the peak, and the emperor and empress had dreams of a purple cloud that descended from the mountain to settle over the palace. Other traditions of the period associate Hachiman with the Nihongi legends of the sovereigns JingU and Ojin. An early Heian myth claimed that Hachiman had revealed himself as the Emperor Ojin during Kimmei's reign. The significance of the identification of Hachiman as Ojin is not entirely clear; one suggestion is that it was an attempt to integrate the god more closely with the imperial institution by making him an imperial ancestor. But it is evident that during this period the god was seen as ensuring the protection of the emperor, and the Heian cult may be identified as the phase in which Hachiman assumed the aspect of a tutelary god.

During the eleventh century the Minamoto clan began its association with the cult and by the time of the founding of the shogunate a new center of Hachiman worship had been established at the Tsurugaoka shrine at Kamakura. As the clan deity of the Genji, Hachiman had developed a warlike aspect and such works as the Azuma Kagami and the Heike Monogatari depict him accordingly. Here Hachiman is labelled the 'god of battles', and prayers with bloodthirsty sentiments are recorded: 'If thy gracious form be purely manifested to us, without doubt the rebels will be put to the sword, and thus do we eagerly anticipate thy help with tears of joy."

The tale of the feat of Nasu no Yoichi at the battle of Yashima in the final stages of the Gempei War is the locus classicus for the identification of Hachiman as a god of war." When BashO recalled this tale during a visit to the Hachiman shrine at Kurobane, he was reviving the memory of an aspect of Hachiman which had developed in the early medieval period.' This may be characterized as the martial aspect of Hachiman.

TURNING again to Yumi Yawata, one finds allusions to each of these phases. The animistic dimension of the faith is revealed most clearly in the concluding passage which proclaims that 'even the sound of the wind in the pines' is a manifestation of the god's body. The idea that Hachiman 'renews even the color of plants' reflects the underlying meaning of the shrine's spring festival. Pervading the play is the animistic conception of the holiness of the mountain.

Allusions to the early oracular role of Hachiman are relatively few. Accepting the bow, the envoy inquires whether the gift was the old man's own idea or was rather inspired by an oracle of the god. Indignantly the man replies that it was indeed the god's decree that he present a bow. When the old man reappears as the nochi-jite, the god of the Kawara sub-shrine, he recalls an oracle of Hachiman which is traditionally ascribed to the Nara period: 'Before foreign lands, our land; before foreign peoples, our people.'

Conspicuously absent in the play is the martial aspect of the god. The playwright makes no reference to the Tsurugaoka shrine or the Minamoto cult, and through this deliberate oversight he creates an image of the god which denies the deity's military function. Although there are allusions to Jingfl's conquest of Korea, these are balanced by longer passages on the reign of Ojin, a pacific sovereign under whom 'The country was rich, the people prosperous, all under heaven was at peace.' The fundamental tension in the play arises from the negation of the god's martial aspect. References to Hachiman's bow in the title and in the first scene create martial overtones, and the theme is briefly sounded in the Jingu sections. But in fact the war god theme is most notable for its absence, and its very absence constitutes a counterpoint to the primary motif of the play.

These lines express the true theme of the play. The work presents an image of Hachiman in his tutelary aspect; this is the Heian conception of the god, and that most closely associated with the Iwashimizu shrine and the protection of the emperor. Near the end of the play Hachiman is revealed as a Bodhisattva, the symbol of profound and eternal compassion. But the Bodhisattva is seen as having a political function: not only does he release living beings, but he protects the emperor as well.

An important element in the development of the theme is the play's use of time. In the first section the old man explains the meaning of his gift to the envoys:

'In the August Reign of the Gods, the world was pacified with the mulberry bow and arrows of artemisia.' The series of legends which follows is ordered in chronological sequence descending from the age of the gods, the primordial time of origins. The age of the Chou, the time of human emperors in Japan, the reigns of JingU and Ojin, the era of Kimmei, the founding of the Iwashimizu shrine—the recital of this sequence of historical eras is an attempt to unite the primordial time with the present age. In the end, the shrine festival itself is transformed into an event of the divine age—the festival is a re-enactment of the gathering of the gods which lured Amaterasu from the heavenly rock cave.

Through the celebration the peace and order of the age of the gods are again restored on earth. The present time is a divine era: 'Truly, truly, in the Age of the Gods, in our own age, the sign of the god's favor is manifest.' Mircea Eliade's assessment of the meaning of religious festivals applies accurately to the Hachiman festival of the play: 'To reintegrate the sacred time of origin is equivalent to becoming contemporary with the gods, hence to living in their presence. Man desires to recover the active presence of the gods; he also desires to live in the world as it came from the Creator's hands, fresh, pure, and strong."

To recapitulate, Yumi Yawata presents an interpretation of the god which emphasizes its tutelary aspect. All other phases of the cult are subsumed under the god's guardian function. Although the play was written in Muromachi times and set in the thirteenth century, its view of Hachiman denies the contemporary association of the god with the ruling military house. It rather dramatizes an earlier conception of the deity, portraying a Hachiman who is intimately linked with the imperial institution. The sentiment of imperial loyalism in the play constitutes part of a larger trend, and Wilhelm Gundert points out that throughout the Noh literature it is the emperor rather than the shogun who is the focus of allegiance.

Yet the work expresses a desire for an age more perfect than the reign of any historical emperor. The play's specific attempt to recover the earlier meaning of Hachiman must be seen as part of its larger effort to recapture the peace of the earliest time, the age of the gods. In this sense Yumi Yawata presents an excellent illustration of the intention of Shinto worship in the Muromachi period.

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The texts consulted in translating this Noh play were Sanari KentarO, ed., Yökyoku Taikan, v, pp. 3221—35, and Tanaka Makoto, ed., Yökyoku-sha (Nihon Koten Zensho, 80), Asahi Shimbunsha, 1957, in, pp. l03—8.'~ The stage directions are abridged in the translation.

In the first part of the play the ancient Japanese reading of the god's name, 'Yawata', is used; in the latter part it is given the 5mb-Japanese reading 'Hachiman. It may also be noted that the title of the work contains a play on words, combining yumi and ya into yum~ya, or 'bow and arrows'.