returning to innocence

Ikkyü 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, shuddering at the…frantic hustling for donations:

Yoso 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, Ikkyü revealed his passion for a blind girl, an attendant at the Shuon’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, Ikkyü’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

I was like an old leafless tree until we met green buds burst and blossom

now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you

Ikkyu

poems translated by stephen berg in crow with no mouth

prose introduction by lucien stryk

wikkyu

🪷

mobilize and focus your energy

transcend every thing

You should spend twenty or thirty years doing dispassionate and tranquil meditation work, sweeping away any conditioned knowledge and interpretive understanding as soon as it arrives, and not letting the traces of the sweeping itself remain either. Let go on That Side, abandon your whole body, and go on rigorously correcting yourself until you attain great joyous life. The only fear is that in knowing about this strategy, the very act of knowing will lead to disaster. Only when you proceed like this will it be real and genuine practice.

…But tell me, where were the ancestral teachers of Zen operating? It’s evident that the unique transmission outside of doctrine was not a hurried undertaking. They looked to the void and traced its outline: each and every one penetrated through from the heights to the depths and covered heaven and earth. They were like lions roaming at ease, sovereign and free. When they were empty and open, they really were empty and open, and when they were close and continuous, they really were close and continuous.

Although it is just this one thing that we all stand on, ultimately you yourself must mobilize and focus your energy. Only then will you really receive the use of it.

Yuanwu

zen letters