Karmic bond

In Religion and Theater today we looked at the Noh Play "Atsumori (敦盛)." It tells the story of Kumagai, a military man who had to kill a young enemy - he only discovered how young when he pulled off Atsumori's helmet to behead him and found he was a youth of fifteen or sixteen ... an astonishingly fine warrior. He says: I would like to spare you, but as you can see, my allies are coming along with a large force. You will die by my hand, but I will earnestly pray for your soul. After the battle Kumagai renounces the world, becoming a priest.

The play opens with the priest Rensei meeting a grass- cutter on the shore where Atsumori is buried, and we only slowly find out that the priest was once Kumagai - and the grasscutter is really the ghost of Atsumori. At one point, before the identity of either has been revealed, the two together speak the bodhisattva vow:

If I should attain Buddhahood,
in all the worlds in the ten directions
if sentient beings will call my name,
I will accept them all, rejecting none.

Since I was primarily focusing on the religious content of the play, I noted that this moment shows that their concern has broadened beyond the reconciliation of enemies in war to a general compassion for all suffering beings. But when some students read the play in class today, I saw something more in it. After Atsumori appears in his full splendor and accepts the prayers of Kumagai and the play nears its end, he says:

In the end, reborn,
together
on the same lotus flower.
The priest, Rensei, lotus-born,
no longer is
the enemy.

(the lotus flower is in the Buddha Amida's western paradise), and I understood for the first time: this is not just a play about the reconciliation of enemies and the particularly strong bond between adversaries in military combat. It's not just a play about Amida's power to overcome all human divisions. It's a love story.