The very title is beguiling: “Tsurezuregusa” — literally, “Grasses of Idleness.” A celebration of idleness! There are “grasses” in all of us whose soil is idleness. In it they grow. Deprived of it they wither. Yet it’s a busy world — true now, true 700 years ago when a monkish aristocrat, or aristocratic monk, named Yoshida no Kenko (c. 1283-1350) “left the world” and penned his classic volume.

It was written between 1330 and 1332. This was not, says Donald Keene in the introduction to his translation, “a propitious time for a work of reflection and comment.” Very far from it, as we’ll see shortly.

There were many ways and degrees of “leaving the world.” Men and women oppressed by commotion and turmoil around them and within them — oppression heightened by a sense of the sheer futility of it all, the perceived unreality of this transient dreamlike soap-bubble world in which we are born to no purpose and die for no reason — took Buddhist vows, shaved their heads, donned drab monkish or nunnish robes and withdrew to monasteries, nunneries or hermitages, there to “lose themselves in prayer,” either enduring, more or less serenely, their live burial, as it must have seemed to their more worldly contemporaries, or awakening to real life, whose meaning and essence are not to be found in this life of birth and death from which only prayer can free us.