Faith, the Phoenix in the Ashes of Impermanence

It was on the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of the third year of the Angen era — May 27, 1177 according to the Julian calendar — that a fire of unprecedented scale tore through the city of Kyoto, then known as Heian-kyō, the “Capital of Tranquility and Peace.” The nobleman Kujō Kanezane, in his diary Gyokuyo, recorded the devastation caused by the tsujikaze, or fire whirls, that whipped through the city like akuma, those malevolent fire spirits of Japanese folklore. Soon the Kan-In Palace was threatened by the inferno, prompting the Emperor to beat a hasty retreat atop his palanquin. “The sudden departure of the Emperor amid the throes of agitated people must have been caused by a devil,” Kanezane posited, adding that “in these days, fires, robberies, and revolts frequently occur, and the lives of people of all classes including priests and the secular are thrown into disturbance.” The only conclusion to be drawn was that “these are really symptoms of…