Dogen 9: When the Great Buddha Fell to Ash

Having realized, through the ravages of severe illness, that his time in this world was drawing to a close, Taira no Kiyomori (1118–1181) moved to confront his final adversary. In November 1179, he engaged directly with the dictator of the Cloistered Rule (Insei), the Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa (1127–1192), the last remaining menace within Heian-kyo.

In the blink of an eye, the capital was occupied by the Taira clan. The aristocrats within the Cloistered government who opposed the Taira were purged, dismissed, and swept away in a single stroke. Their leader, the Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, was captured and confined at the Toba Palace in the south of Kyoto, placed under strict Taira surveillance, effectively paralyzed. Thus, the shadow dictatorial system known as Insei was declared suspended by Taira no Kiyomori. The struggle for hegemony between the Retired Emperor and the reigning Emperor, a conflict that had persisted for over a century, was brought to a temporary cessation.

However, amidst this triumph, Taira no Kiyomori harbored a profound source of anguish. Just months prior, in August—on the very eve of this upheaval—his eldest son and heir, Taira no Shigemori (1138–1179), to whom he had already transferred the headship of the clan and who possessed every quality requisite for succession, had succumbed to illness and passed away. Having built a golden age in a single generation, Taira no Kiyomori possessed an innate ability to instantaneously discern the nature of talent and the trajectory of the future. In his eyes, there was no leader capable of sustaining the Taira’s prosperity other than Taira no Shigemori. His remaining children appeared unreliable as successors; he could not deem them worthy of steering the helm through the turbulent era that would surely follow his own demise.

Here, Taira no Kiyomori made a drastic declaration, positioning it as his final magnum opus. In June 1180, having suspended the Cloistered Rule and completely suppressed the power structure of Heian-kyo, he announced the relocation of the capital to Fukuhara, in the vicinity of present-day Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture.

Had Taira no Shigemori—who was adept at balancing the Taira clan against Go-Shirakawa and could be considered sympathetic to the Cloistered faction—remained alive, Taira no Kiyomori might have considered governing from Heian-kyo. But with that possibility extinguished, he reasoned that moving the capital to Fukuhara, where the majority of the populace was favorable to the Taira, would offer a significant strategic advantage for building a governance foundation for the new heir, Taira no Shigemori’s younger brother, Taira no Munemori (1147–1185).

However, in the mirror of history, this proved to be a catastrophic failure. It was the symbolic fissure where Taira no Kiyomori’s piercing gaze, which had once read the era with perfect clarity, finally began to blur.

Indeed, the declaration of the move to Fukuhara threw the citizens of Heian-kyo into pandemonium; it is said that the capital became a ghost town of empty houses almost overnight. Simultaneously, the old powers—the aristocracy, the Imperial family, and the monks of Mount Hiei—offered their final, fierce resistance, knowing that if Heian-kyo were abandoned, their hegemony would literally turn to ash. Furthermore, Fukuhara had not been developed with the intent of becoming a capital; it lacked the infrastructure, including transportation networks, to support a metropolis. Consequently, the Fukuhara capital collapsed within six months, and in November 1180, the court was forced to return to Heian-kyo.

This was, effectively, the turning point where the momentum of the times shifted in favor of the old powers. Including the internal rifts within the Taira clan, this failure became a primary factor in the erosion of their centripetal force. For Taira no Kiyomori, who had hitherto solidified his defenses on all sides and constructed the era’s hegemony through brilliant strategy, the failure of this massive undertaking—his final gamble—became a fatal wound.