The Great Bodhisattva Pass, Book 21: Ignorance

A sword offered as a farewell gift brings a dangerous brightness back to Tsukue Ryūnosuke. Traveling through mountain darkness, he crosses paths with wanderers whose music and talk offer very different ways of meeting the world. Benshin and Shigetarō leave their benefactor’s house, while a brazen scheme involving a lord’s favorite sends pursuit along the highways.

Elsewhere, political ambition, intimate letters, unsettling recollections, and religious arguments draw familiar lives into new combinations. The narrator turns from popular entertainment to Buddhist stories, from practical calculation to questions of attachment and spiritual blindness. Comedy and danger continue side by side.

This complete English translation preserves all thirty-eight sections of the twenty-first book of Nakazato Kaizan’s epic, including its full songs, literary quotations, letters, notebook entries, and narrative digressions. Its title invokes the Buddhist ignorance that obscures understanding, a concern explored through action, argument, and the uncertain inward lives of the travelers.