#byakuren hijiri

Go granny, go granny, go granny go! To find your long-lost little brother.

But first, some context:

As noted in Byakuren’s UFO profile, her younger brother Myouren was a legendary monk (白蓮の弟、命蓮は伝説の僧侶であった). His legends consist primarily of the three stories depicted in the Shigisan-engi picture scrolls (also found in the Uji Shui Monogatari and the Kohon Setsuwashu).

Shigisan (Mount Shigi) is where Myouren did all his stuff. More specifically, he was at the Chogosonshi Temple, which supposedly got its name after Myouren faith-healed the emperor in one of the three stories. Incidentally, the first story involves a flying storehouse. Sound familiar?

Here’s a good English translation of the Uji Shui Monogatari version. Yes, the flying storehouse is the one in UFO. Yes, Byakuren’s “Flying Bowl”, “Purple Cloud”/”Cloudy Way in Purple”, and “Star Sword Apologetics” spellcards are all further references to the stories. (More on Star Sword in another post.)

And yes, Byakuren is our little old unnamed nun from Shinano. She mentions this to Kanako in SoPM Part 1.

So Byakuren traveled from Shinano to Shigisan. How far is that?

To be fair, medieval Shinano Province covered pretty much all of today’s Nagano Prefecture, but that’s still a minimum of ~300 km using modern routes, and could easily have been 100 km longer a thousand years ago.

Why is this significant? Well, Byakuren’s UFO profile says she didn’t start learning Buddhist magic from Myouren until she was old (白蓮は、年老いてからその弟に法力を学んだ), and didn’t get her physical buffs until after he died. The Uji Shui Monogatari version doesn’t specify how long she waited in Shinano, but the scroll version has the text 廿余年 = over 20 years. So she left Shinano as an old hag with nothing but medieval medical care and the occasional hired hand to protect her on a 400 km journey over unpaved mountainous terrain. A Kanagawa University analysis of the scrolls also says that “her attire can be regarded as very common attire for women unused to long journeys.“

In short, Byakuren was going to either find her brother or quite literally die trying.

She clearly wasn’t afraid of death at this point, so why did she suddenly become terrified of it after her brother passed away?

Perhaps this was the first time she had ever watched a younger family member die? But average early Heian life expectancy was 30 years, and she spent 20 just waiting for Myouren back in their tiny Shinano backwater, so it’s nearly impossible for her to have not already watched younger relatives die.

A better explanation requires us to consider the nature of her relationship with Myouren:

Although Myouren abandoned his sister without a second thought, she kept him in her heart for over 20 years and eventually gambled her life on the insanely unlikely odds of ever finding him again. All she gets for her trouble is “wtf I wasnt expecting you, how’d you even get here,” which you’d think would bother her just a little, but no, her only concern is how cold Myouren must be on the mountain. Here, have the painstakingly handmade fukutai I traveled 400 km to give you!

It’s a classic case of codependency: her brother barely cares about her, but her entire world revolves around him. So when her UFO profile says that the grieving Byakuren became terrified of death, this strikes me as not so much fear of dying as fear of going into an afterlife and/or next life without Myouren. Pure Land Buddhism wasn’t a thing yet so they couldn’t just pray to Amitabha to be reunited in Sukhavati, and it was generally believed that women couldn’t be reborn there anyway. As long as she’s alive, her brother can at least live on in her memories. Does that sound like clinging? Maybe even attachment?

As the Buddha might say, Byakuren’s attachment to her brother is the root of all her suffering.

One more HM take, because why not:

I get that HM sets up Byakuren and Miko to be each other’s arch-nemeses, but can we take a moment to note that the person both of them are most hostile towards is actually Mamizou?

Miko especially, and to be fair, the hostility was a foregone conclusion given that Mamizou mockingly impersonated her to her face.  

貴様……！ (yes, that’s “kisama”)

二度と私の真似など出来ぬ様にしてやろう！

I will ensure that you can never mimic me again!

Pretty sure the only way to do that is to beat Mamizou to a pulp, which is Miko’s point. And even the greenest weeb knows exactly how rude “kisama” is.

There was a popular tumblr post some years ago that among other things tried to spin Miko’s “let us forget about my earlier rudeness” (先ほどの非礼は水に流そう) as her apologizing to Mamizou. Idk, if someone called me a bastard and threatened my life, immediately changed their tune when they wanted something from me, and then asked me to pretend their nastiness never happened without even offering a “sorry”, I wouldn’t see it as an apology so much as a shameless attempt to manipulate me. And Mamizou’s reaction of “We’ll see…” (そうじゃな……) suggests she feels similarly.

Meanwhile the worst thing Miko says to Byakuren is just the same old “Buddhism is for political manipulation” spiel from SoPM, and this time Byakuren gently dismisses it with “Isn’t it a shame? That a monk and a Taoist see things so differently” (悔しいんでしょ？僧侶と道士の評価が段違いで). Likewise, Byakuren’s worst is just accusing Miko of using “evil spells,” or saying she feels “an ominous aura“ from Miko in her win dialogue against Miko. Contrast this with what Byakuren says in her win dialogue against Mamizou:

茶釜に変身しても良いんですよ？ 永遠に

Why don’t you transform into a kettle? Forever.

Y i k e s. Anyone who thinks Byakuren’s been nasty to Miko has clearly never seen what “nasty” from Byakuren actually looks like. She’s fairly civil to Mamizou in all their story dialogue, so this is a bit of a surprise unless you consider that TD and SoPM confirm Mamizou as nothing more than a nuisance at the temple, and also that perhaps Byakuren finally caught word of Mamizou impersonating her to pick fights.

As penance for memeposting, here’s an actual HM take:

Something that seems to be pointedly ignored by the fandom (both Japanese and western) is how much HM indicates that Byakuren is a much better “parent” to Kokoro than Miko is. 

For starters, Byakuren’s ending is the only pre-Mamizou ending in which Kokoro generates her own hope instead of depending on an external source. In Reimu and Marisa’s endings, Kokoro uses their hope; in Miko and Koishi’s endings, Kokoro uses Miko’s mask (it’s implied in Koishi’s ending but the Eng translation is a little off); in Nitori’s ending, Kokoro uses one of Nitori’s masks. (Ichirin and Futo’s endings seem to be before all the other endings and don’t involve Kokoro getting new hope or a new mask.)

As much as we all love to imagine Miko as a doting parent, HM suggests she’s the kind of parent who plops her kid in front of a screen with some snacks and lets YouTube do the rest. Kokoro never even appears in Miko’s ending, and what’s worse, Futo’s ending says: 

新しい希望の面を手に入れたこころは、これからどうなっていくのだろう。こればかりは神子にも布都にも判らなかった。それがあんな事になろうとは。

What would happen to Kokoro now that she had the new mask of hope? Only this did neither Miko nor Futo know. That such a thing would happen.

Leave the parenting to YouTube and eventually your kid will be “parented” by Elsa and Spiderman. Not that Miko knows or cares, as long as the kid isn’t causing her any problems. Eventually Miko just outright states that she’ll turn Kokoro back into a tool in the final battle of Kokoro’s route. A docile screen zombie is the perfect child for someone who’s got more important things to do.

In stark contrast to all this is Byakuren’s ending, where Kokoro comes directly to Byakuren for advice:

Having a one-on-one conversation with the kid where you actually listen to her questions and concerns is generally considered better parenting than pacifying her with a mindless addiction, and the proof is in Kokoro’s response:

「いやあ、希望が湧きます！」

[…] その結果、内から希望が湧いてきたようだ。こころは自らの希望で新たな希望の面を作りだした。

“Oh wow, that fills me with hope!”

[…] As a result, it seems hope welled up from within her. From her own hope, Kokoro made a new mask of hope.

It’s no coincidence that the only other mention of Kokoro’s “hope from within” is by Mamizou in Kokoro’s route. By now it should be common knowledge that Mamizou does the most for Kokoro’s personal growth, so it’s significant that her endgame for Kokoro is the same as Byakuren’s. As cute as it is to picture Miko and Byakuren vying for Kokoro’s affection, HM strongly implies that Miko sees Kokoro as more of a nuisance than a person, whereas Byakuren’s ending directly states that Byakuren “was endlessly interested in seeing [Kokoro’s] real face.” In HM, Byakuren is second only to Mamizou in terms of how invested she is in Kokoro’s personal growth. Miko comes in a distant third, if that.

m4gun98:

Byakuren Hijiri

聖白蓮(super long hair ver.)

m4gun98:

Byakuren Hijiri

聖白蓮

hijiri byakuren

bijiri hyakuren

turbobyakuren:

byak watercolor practiceeeeeeeeee