Ikkyu: Crow With No Mouth. Stephen Berg

died when Ikkyū was thirty-five, and the bereaved monk, who at the darkest moment of mourning had been close to suicide, began an endless round of travel, lasting the remainder of his life. He could not settle anywhere, and his behavior, even in those bawdy times, was thought scandalous. He never pretended to be saintly, took his passions as a natural part of life, frankly loved sake and women. After a disappointing day he would rush from the temple to a bar, wind up at a brothel. After which there was often a crisis of self-doubt, if not guilt. At such moments he went to his hermitage in the mountains at Joo:

      ten years of whorehouse joy I’m alone now in the mountains

      the pines are like a jail the wind scratches my skin

      Ikkyū also had a hermitage in Kyoto which he called Katsuroan (Blind Donkey Hermitage), and often stayed at Daitokuji. But increasingly, to the point of anguish, he became disgusted with worldly carryings on at the main temple, shuddered at the business side of its affairs, and felt intense enmity toward Kasō’s successor, Yōsō. Twenty years his senior, Yōsō represented all Ikkyū despised in Rinzai practices of the day, among them frantic hustling for donations:

      Yōsō hangs up ladles baskets useless donations in the temple

      my style’s a straw raincoat strolls by rivers and lakes

      ......................................................

      ten fussy days running this temple all red tape

      look me up if you want to in the bar whorehouse fish market

      In 1471, when seventy-seven, Ikkyū revealed his passion for a blind girl, an attendant at the Shūon’an Temple at Takigi. He wrote poems about their affair, some farcical, some very moving. He was self-conscious at the oddness of an old Zen monk falling for a young woman, but they spent years together, Ikkyū’s feeling for her growing in intensity:

      I love taking my new girl blind Mori on a spring picnic

      I love seeing her exquisite free face its moist sexual heat shine

      ...............................................................

      your name Mori means forest like the infinite fresh

      green distances of your blindness

      When Ikkyū reached the age of eighty-two, far steadier, much becalmed, he was made abbot of Daitokuji, and often expressed childlike wonderment at his elevation, given his unorthodox behavior throughout his long life, to a position so lofty. Though he appeared to revel in his unexpected role, he was often away from Daitokuji, mostly at his beloved Shūon’an Temple where he died in 1482, at eighty-eight.

      While it may be that Ikkyū is best known in the Zen world as a sort of rake, always spitting in the face of orthodoxy, madly carrying on as freest of the free, most of his poems are concerned with Zen, revered to this day by Zennists. Among the best-known of such poems are two based on the concepts “Void in Form” and “Form in Void” as given in the Hridaya (Heart Sutra), one of the major sutras of Buddhism and of great importance to the Zen sect:

      VOID IN FORM

      When, just as they are,

      White dewdrops gather

      On scarlet maple leaves,

      Regard the scarlet beads!

      ..........................

      FORM IN VOID

      The tree is stripped,

      All color, fragrance gone,

      Yet already on the bough,

      Uncaring spring!