An Account of My Hut (Hōjōki)

A short prose work finished in 1212 by Kamo no Chōmei, a poet who had failed to inherit his family's post at the Kamo shrine and later took Buddhist vows. It opens with an image now famous in Japan: the flowing river never stops, yet its water is never the same, and people and their houses are like the foam on its surface. Chōmei then describes disasters he witnessed in the capital: a great fire, a whirlwind, the sudden moving of the capital, a famine and an earthquake. Each shows how foolish it is to pour effort into houses and status. He tells how he moved into ever smaller dwellings, ending in a portable hut about ten feet square in the hills at Hino, and describes his simple life there: music, poetry, walks and the turning seasons. In the closing lines he turns on himself, asking whether his love of the hut is itself an attachment the Buddha would reject.

In a few dozen pages it offers a clear, honest meditation on impermanence and simple living, including its own doubts about whether retreat from the world is enough.