What a Friend We Have in Jizōs 11

Just as there were three parts to The Tale of the Heike, there were also three themes. The first and central theme was that of the Buddhist law of impermanence, well captured in its eminent opening passage.

   ‘The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of 
     all things; the color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the 
     prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like 
     a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust 
     before the wind.’ 

The second theme was another Buddhist concept. Karma. The idea that every action has consequences that become apparent later in life helps us to deal with the problem of both moral and natural evil. Dishonourable acts will eventually bring inevitable suffering. This can be seen clearly in the cruelty of Kiyomori, repaid by the painful illness that kills him. Similarly, Yoshitsune's title, Hōgan, provided his legacy in the Japanese term Hōgan-biiki, ‘sympathy for a tragic hero,’ although too late to benefit him while he was alive.
The third and final theme is the ideal of the cultivated warrior. The term for warrior in the The Tale, uruwashii, was written with kanji that combined the characters for bun literary study and bu military arts. The pen and the sword in accord. The balance and harmony between exterior patterns, or beauty, and interior essences, or substance, came to symbolize the character of Taira and Minamoto samurai, who became models for the educated warriors of later generations, and the proper and mature form of the Japanese man of arms. By the Edo period, Japan had a higher literacy than central Europe. In The Tale of the Heike, the image of the Japanese warrior in literature came to its such full maturity that if warriors hadn’t aspired to or followed this ideal, there would have been no cohesion in future samurai armies. 
In the space of a few years Yoritomo went from being a fugitive, hiding from his enemies inside a tree trunk, to being the most powerful man in the land. In the end he had triumphed over his rival cousins, who had sought to steal clan control from him, and over the Taira. Yoritomo established the supremacy of the warrior samurai caste, and the first Bakufu, at Kamakura, beginning the feudal age in Japan that lasted until the mid-19th century. At the end of the Genpei War, in its form of government, in its behavioral ideals, and in its mythology and legends, in all three had the samurai prevailed.