singing in an empty mirror: zen poetics as intersubjective discourse (chapter 1)

bard college, senior thesis, 2021

ONE

Even a Blind Donkey Can See

Most Buddhist scholars agree that the dhyāna (meditation) branch of Buddhism (later known as Ch’an, Zen, Sŏn, and Thien in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam respectively) was established by a South Indian monk named Bodhidharma, in China, around 500 AD, where it spread throughout the continent and crossed every sea until completing its journey in America and Europe, in the late nineteenth century, to become a ‘world religion.’ According to Wu Daoxuan, a T’ang dynasty monk and biographer, Master Bodhidharma was an intense man with bushy eyebrows who, legend claims, ripped off his eyelids (which, upon touching the ground, turned to tea plants) and entered a cave to face a wall and meditate, for nine years, before leaving India to spread his teachings further east—establishing in the course of his travels Shaolin Monastery (a pet project perhaps?)—and dying at the ripe old age of a hundred and fifty. Prior to his influence, meditation was understood in the Taoist sense of the term, that is, as a conservation of chi (vital energy). After his influence, however, it became synonymous with physical stillness and mental concentration, with logical expositions on the relationship between affirmation and negation, with metaphysical interfusions of individuality and universality, with complex categorizations of divergent mental states. Later, it came to stand for the total consciousness of one’s daily affairs. Chang Chung-Yuan, in Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism, seconds this sentiment, stating that “Chinese thinkers [in the seventh century] were ready to go beyond logic, beyond metaphysics, and beyond psychology to a more direct confrontation of reality” (x). Besides being the first patriarch of Ch’an, Bodhidharma was also the twenty-eighth patriarch of Buddhism—a direct descendent in the long line of masters stretching back in antiquity to the time of Siddhārtha Gautama, the historical Buddha—as well as a major proponent of the Advaita (nondual) school of thought, one of the six darshans (orthodox philosophical systems) of Indian Vedānta, which distinguished itself from other philosophical systems by considering reality an expression of śūnyatā (emptiness) rather than a dance of jiva (individual soul) and atman (universal soul). In other words, his philosophy emphasized empirical analyses over dialectical presuppositions. Experience over doctrine. Will over fate. Self over God. It was a radical set of teachings that challenged the spiritual authority of Hindu Brahmins, while preserving the ‘essence’ or ‘heart’ of Siddhārtha’s teachings—the Lankāvatāra Sutra (Descent to the Island of Lanka)—which asserts that all beings possess ‘Buddha-nature,’ that realization of this ultimate truth or reality is enlightenment, and that enlightenment cannot be explained through concepts, words, or books, for it is something beyond the ordinary dualism of ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ meaning it can only be realized via personal experience. The meditation school, according to a passage attributed to the first patriarch in Chingde chongdeng lu (Records of the Transmission of the Lamp), is a “special transmission outside the scriptures pointing directly to the human mind—seeing true nature is becoming a Buddha.” This ‘transmission,’ he claimed, first occurred between Siddhārtha and Kashyapa, master and disciple, in India, when the former held up a flower and the latter smiled, thus becoming the first patriarch of a new religion.

After Bodhidharma’s passing, Zen (禅) remained virtually unchanged until the seventh century, when Master Hungjen, the fifth patriarch, died and a schism occurred between adherents of the Northern school of Shenxiu, which held that enlightenment must be attained gradually, and the Southern school of Huineng, which taught that true wisdom, as undifferentiated, must be attained suddenly and spontaneously. (The southern school eventually became the dominant strand.) According to the Liuzu tanching (Platform Scripture of the Sixth Patriarch), the beef between north and south started when Hungjen, a rather eccentric master with a flair for showmanship, challenged his students to craft a verse expressing their understanding of the teachings, and a novice monk, Lu Hsing-chê, completely outdid the senior monk, Shenxiu, leaving a flabbergasted Hungjen no choice but to transmit the law of the dharma—that is, to confer upon him the authority of the Zen tradition—and name him his rightful successor (since he’d promised the patriarchy to the winner): thus Lu Hsing-chê became Master Huineng the sixth patriarch (Chan 431-32). This occurred in secret so as to protect him from northern dissent. Once the secret got out, though, most monks acknowledged him as their new master. Shenxiu, however, being a sore loser and a bigot against southerners, formed a coup to oust him, but it backfired, since many monks, those who’d witnessed Shenxiu’s tantrums and scheming, reported the news to others across the north, while Huineng returned to the south with his new disciples, where he taught for the next thirty-seven years, declaring, like Siddhārtha, that all beings have Buddha-nature, and that scriptures, temples, mantras, offerings, and prayers are less important than discovering the truth of one’s essence, which contains the power of all dharmas—the ten-thousand things. Like Bodhidharma, Huineng affirmed that humans achieve enlightenment, an unperturbed state of quietude and wisdom, when they free themselves from their superficial attachments to the world. However, he opposed the supremacy of the traditional method of achieving enlightenment—i.e., zuochan or zazen (sitting meditation)—on the grounds that self-mastery doesn’t stem from physical stillness and mental inactivity but, more precisely, from an absence of erroneous conceptions and a conscious engagement with one’s daily affairs. Sitting meditation and scholasticism are worthless if one does not have chien-hsin, that is, experiential knowledge of humanity’s true nature, specifically, the inner workings of the mind. He even went so far as to deny any intrinsic distinction between ‘delusion’ and ‘enlightenment,’ thus championing the Vajracchedikā (Diamond Sutra)—an ancient text about transcending rationality—as a more nuanced understanding of Siddhārtha’s greatest teaching: self-realization. Unsurprisingly, his reformist bent caused an uproar in the Buddhist community, for it implied that monastic life was a path, not the path, that lay people were also capable of achieving enlightenment in a single lifetime, and that past masters had held incomplete understandings of Buddha-nature or had unwillingly conveyed such to their disciples (a failing attributable, perhaps, to the language barrier between the first and second patriarch, to the dialectal differences between the second and third, etc.).

Two centuries after Huineng’s passing, the Southern school split into two sects, Cáodòng zōng (曹洞宗) and Línjì zōng (臨済宗), named after their respective founders—Tungshan Liang-chieh and Linchi I-hsüan. Other than the sectarian apocrypha of their disciples, however, very little is known of Master Tungshan and Master Linchi. Most of what we know is preserved in the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp, the Recorded Dialogues of Ch’an Master Tung-shan Liang-chieh, and the Recorded Dialogues of Ch’an Master Lin-chi, but I think we can glean quite a bit from the popular saying “Tungshan for farmers; Linchi for warriors.” The rake and the sword. In other words, the former appeals to gentle souls and the latter demands a thick skin. Considering the dissimilarity of their teaching methods, it’s easy to see why the above analogies fit: Tungshan emphasized the practice of dăzuòchán/shikantaza (sitting meditation) and ‘silent illumination,’ which involves a quiet awareness of breath and passing thoughts, whereas Linchi preferred the training of contemplative paradox and ‘lightning technique,’ which involves a random barrage of wên-ta/mōndo (question-and-answer sessions) and kwatz/katsu (shouts and/or slaps). These are minor differences, however, since neither distinguished between ‘gradual’ or ‘sudden’ enlightenment but, instead, encouraged disciples to focus on the present moment, that is, to completely engage with life-as-is—which, for monks, meant a one-pointed concentration during their studies, chores, and bodily functions—until the line between ‘secular’ and ‘religious,’ ‘self’ and ‘other,’ ‘true’ and ‘false,’ faded into nothingness, into Void, into the mystery of the Absolute itself. Out of numerous Zen sects, Tungshan and Linchi’s became the dominant ones, according to Frank E. Reynolds and William M. Bodiford, subsuming many others during the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD), until entering Japan, in the Kamakura period (1192-1333), via Myōan Eisai and Eihei Dōgen, both of whom received lineage transmission from Chinese masters in the Línjì (Rinzai) and Cáodòng (Sōtō) sects respectively before establishing monasteries in their homeland. Like Tungshan and Linchi, Master Eisai and Master Dōgen viewed practice and enlightenment as intertwined. They also asserted that the mind cannot be split into parts and that all its activities are functions of Thusness (true reality). However, both felt the need to modify the teachings to accommodate their own culture. Eisai diverged from his Chinese forebears by teaching that monks should defend the state and observe ceremonial rules. His ideas profoundly influenced the warrior class and led to Zen archery, swordsmanship, theatre, poetry, flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony, all of which stressed grace and spontaneity. Dōgen held a more conventional view, though, focusing instead on sitting meditation, scripture, and kōan. As a reformist he strongly criticized the close relationships held between various Buddhist sects and the warrior class, which inevitably caused him some trouble, and created institutions based on Chinese interpretations of the Indian Vinaya. Due to imperial patronage Eisai’s brand of Zen thrived, while Dōgen’s suffered years of internal division. (Sōtō, after numerous reforms regarding scriptural authority, eventually became the more influential of the two.) Japanese Zen, perhaps even more so than its Chinese counterpart, was “interested in facts, not theories, in realities and not those pallid counters for reality which we know as concepts” (ix).

A few decades later, during the Muromachi period (1336–1573), the Gozan (Five Mountains) system of Rinzai Zen flourished in Kyōto—which, in those days, was prime real estate for Buddhist institutions—since having a temple, let alone a system of temples, in the capital city not only entailed constant patronage by the Ashikaga (the shogunal family) but special protection against thieves, ronin, and other classes of scalawag who often got drunk, robbed temples, and beat up monks for fun. Kyōto wasn’t simply the religious headquarters of Rinzai Zen; it was the cultural center of the entire mainland, comparable to what Manhattan is to America today. Outside the refuge of the Gozan umbrella, few Rinzai temples survived; the few that did encouraged humble lifestyles in the countryside, often struggling to feed themselves and to provide necessary accoutrements, though satisfied to practice in a safe environment away from the city. It’s easy to imagine that many disciples viewed rinka (country temples), like Kasō’s Zenko-an, as the last bastions of authentic Rinzai Zen, as many of their brothers and sisters left the community to join the Sōtō sect or the Nichiren, Shingon, Tendai, and Jōdo branches of Buddhism. Monks and nuns in rural monasteries, unlike their urban counterparts, were generally considered the authentic inheritors of Rinzai Zen, since they devoted all of their energy to religious matters. Although a golden age for the arts, the first half of the Muromachi period did not produce many notable Rinzai masters—with the exception of Musō Soseki and Daitō Kokushi, both of whom were outstanding artists and dedicated practitioners of the Way—for most Gozan monks were embroiled in secular affairs, advising the bakufu (shogunate government) in matters of diplomacy and culture, or studying and publishing books on esoteric Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, Taoism, poetry and prose. In other words, they were scholars, politicians, and war advisors-for-hire. Meditation was an afterthought. According to Bodiford, “Gozan monasteries became somewhat vulgarized because of their excessive links with the political world, and consequently they ceased to prosper as the bakufu declined.” This seems like a natural outcome of their corruption and dependency on cultural institutions. In contrast, the Myōshin and Daitōku lineages—also of the Rinzai sect but outside the Gozan system—rose to prominence by maintaining their independence, thus keeping the sect relevant during a rather tumultuous era of Japanese Buddhism. Of the latter lineage belongs Ikkyū Sōjun, without a doubt the biggest influence on the second half of the Muromachi period—a Zen master–artist who combined a special form of the teachings (the Red Thread Path) with a unique mode of personal expression (fūryū) to transcend all distinctions between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious.’ (I will return to this point later.)

Originally of the Kennin lineage (a ‘third rank’ temple in the Gozan system), Ikkyū quickly grew disgusted with the Gozan’s lax atmosphere and hypocritical leadership. He fled Kyōtō for a country temple, for a setting more conducive to practice, where he could learn ‘serious Zen.’ Having been influenced, to some degree, by his upbringing at Kennin-ji, however, he found it difficult to ignore the creative bug buzzing in his heart and was therefore unable to resist the temptation of dipping a brush in an inkstand from time to time. He composed his first slender volume while staying at Saikin-ji, Master Ken’o’s temple. It was a well-crafted but wholly unoriginal product. Like other Gozan poets, his early work was derivative, formulaic, pedantic. However, as he matured in his practice and allowed his creative expression to emanate from a place of individuality and feeling, from pleasure, rather than from universality and learning, from pretense, his verse evolved in much different ways than that of his contemporaries. Joseph D. Parker, in “Attaining Landscapes in the Mind: Nature Poetry and Painting in Gozan Zen,” states that “[i]n the gozan Zen writings [before Ikkyū’s emergence] we find a widespread interest in the mind, as indeed we might expect given the central importance that the mind holds in Buddhist and syncretic religious texts and practice” (254). Prior to Ikkyū’s influence, Gozan poets, most of whom were novice monks, believed personal feelings didn’t belong in poetry; they belonged in diaries, in the hearts of women: poetry was a pedagogical tool. The art of letters, a ‘manly calling,’ wasn’t considered an expression of inner truth but a portrayal of universal ideals. To think of it in any other capacity was to fall sway to ego and desire. This is not to say that Gozan monks didn’t enjoy reading and writing poetry, but that they treated verse as something more precious than art, like a Sanskrit scroll, which seems to contradict Bodhidharma’s conception of Zen as a “transmission outside the scriptures pointing directly to the human mind.” Ikkyū’s early verse, with its plethora of obscure allusions and impressionistic renderings of ‘nature,’ was guilty of such as well, since it imitated the Jin–Wei, T’ang, and Song dynasty poets whose superficial, at times inaccurate, interpretations of Taoist and Zen metaphysics accorded with his own. Jon Carter Covell states that

Ikkyū’s verses in praise of Chinese poets come the closest of any of his works to the Five Mountain literature. This was a form of intellectual endeavor which preempted most of the fifteenth century’s best trained minds in Japan. However, the gozan metaphors become repetitious; they imitated their Chinese models very closely, but without any of their freshness. The gozan poets usually wrote in four lines of seven ideographs each, as T’ang poets had, but they put little of their actual life experience into their poetry. They sat within temple walls, composing verses about nature, which all came to sound alike. As he grew older, Ikkyū became more individualistic … he always put his own emotions of the moment, his joy and anger, into his verses. (54)

In the formative years before his enlightenment experience, while moonlighting as an artist, it seems he held a conventional view of ‘art’ and ‘Zen’ as being distinct cultural spheres. Post-enlightenment, however, this all changed—the two became indistinguishable. Ikkyū then made art his chosen form of action Zen, his personal mode of portraying life-as-is. Poetry, he felt, should be of reality, not about reality. Thus he documented his joys and sorrows and the wonder of discovering his Buddha-nature in mountains, rivers, animals, monasteries, fish markets, sake parlors, and whorehouses. His work became an expression of “radical intuition,” a simple way of being, according to Chang, without subject or object—“our most unified state of consciousness or pure experience…. [T]his faculty is not limited to the genius; it may be manifested as well in the daily activities of the common man and … innocent child” (ix). Upon infusing his poetics with emotion, with spontaneity, Ikkyū achieved an aesthetic ideal more in tune with the essence of Zen: complete freedom. By depicting the unity not only of the heart and mind but of everything, he affirmed that “anything can be an occasion for … realization at any moment and … [it] can take place in any way” (Chan 428). With him, the categories of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ went out the window. Nothing was sacred or profane, yet everything was wondrous. And ‘delusion’ and ‘enlightenment’ were two sides of that existential wonder. Individual responsibility, then, was the only path to self-realization. All of humanity’s issues stemmed from its ignorance of this fact. This of course was a radical stance, even by Japanese standards, for it seemed to undermine entire centuries of Buddhist philosophy and literature as well as the legitimacy of the monastic institution as a whole. However, I think the Gozan hierarchy deemed it radical only because of its discordancy with convention—that is, a materialistic fifteenth-century Japan—since the sixth patriarch had made a similar claim—eight centuries prior, in China—in his Platform Scripture: “Man’s nature is originally pure [empty]. It is by false thoughts [about one’s nature] that true thusness is obscured” (435). Linchi, in his Recorded Dialogues, also supported this notion when he said that a pure man (a symbol of the sacred) was “no different” than a shit stick (a symbol of the profane) (444). Ikkyū, in his own way, merely restated what every great master before him had: ‘Enlightenment and delusion are matters of perspective; heaven and hell, states of mind. The Way is simple. Conduct your daily affairs with a single-pointed concentration.’ Nothing more or less.

Spiritual establishments aren’t the sole bearers of timeless wisdom. And worldly institutions aren’t the sole blame of humanity’s ignorance. Though they differ by a large degree, mostly by structure or a lack thereof, both contain an equal share of wisdom and ignorance. Charlatans and saints, it seems, ignore societal borders, contradicting our absolutes. In his verse Ikkyū reminded his contemporaries that it was impossible to transcend their false distinctions, to appreciate the cosmos’ internal harmony, without a measure of distance from society. Between the fifth and twelfth centuries, the average Chinese monastic was receptive to the idea of renunciation, of conscious-detachment. In the fifteenth century, however, the average Japanese monastic was not—a culture of spiritual complacency and materialism had permeated the Gozan system over the course of two centuries (which some consider the end of Rinzai’s reign and the start of Sōtō’s)—so Ikkyū, being a rather eccentric reformist, held them accountable in every word and deed—acting out in temples and causing spectacles in public—to highlight their hypocrisy. Yet his strange behavior was more than a case of self-righteousness or symbolic rebuke. As an enlightened master, ‘the last of a dying breed’ in a ‘degenerate age,’ he considered it his duty to represent (for better or for worse) ‘modern Zen.’ He chose honesty over loyalty. The teachings over the establishment. Furthermore, he exemplified what his contemporaries merely romanticized in writing—i.e., he lived according to his whims, not society’s, like the ancient Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist masters before him had once done (or at least claimed to) in spite of all secular and religious consequences. Naturally, his artistic life reflected such sentiments. In one sense, his work is an emancipated form of Zen poetics, a “multi-dimensional space … a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of [another] culture” (Barthes 146). In another sense, however, it is an “anti-theological activity” that never assigns a single secret or ultimate meaning, “an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law” (147). To truly appreciate the rarity of Ikkyū genius, though, it makes sense, first, to understand the cultural milieu that influenced his own; second, to show how his aesthetic impulses complemented or contradicted those of his peers. In this chapter I will explore the ideas/styles of ancient Chinese poets (Qian, Bai, Kang) and show how medieval Japanese poets (Saigyō, Dōgen, Shōchi, Shūsū) imitated or innovated upon such ideas/styles, before of course comparing them to Ikkyū, to determine how he emulates or diverges from the ‘eccentric recluse’ tradition and charts new territory in Zen literature.

Ancient Chinese Poets

According to Tien-yi Li and William H. Nienhauser, Jr., “the first anthology of Chinese poetry, the Shijing (Classic of Poetry), consisted of temple, court, and folk songs and was given definitive form somewhere around the time of Confucius (551–479 BC).” Because of its connections to Confucian thought, the poetry between the Zhao and Qin dynasties (1046–207 BC) was primarily pedagogical—it allegorized ‘the path of right living’ and thus declared, if only symbolically, humanity’s ability to shape its own destiny (in the universal sense of the term). Many of these works, although being a bit antiquarian, were deemed radical by the monarchy, of course, for they placed humans on equal footing with the gods: the idea that people could become awe-inspiring sages or ‘worthies’ in a single lifetime, as well as the insistence that they were teachable, improvable, and even perfectible through communal endeavor, is deeply rooted in this rich heritage; however, it wasn’t until the Han dynasty (207 BC–220 AD), when the concept of ‘individual authorship’ developed, that communal endeavor came to be understood as a complex network of personal endeavors rather than an harmonious acquiescence to the spirit of a collective. ‘Self-cultivation’ overshadowed ‘familial duty’ around 100 BC, when the biographer Sima Qian popularized Laozi’s Daodejing (Classic of the Way of Power) in his Shiji (Records of the Historian). There was of course a political application to Laozi’s teachings; spiritual concerns, however, were the main focus. To be clear, neither Confucius nor Laozi wrote extensively—most of their speeches were recorded and compiled into book form by their disciples—but having their names attributed to their own ideas was a revolutionary development in China, one that inspired later works of literature to assume a highly personalized flair. For that reason, we must acknowledge their influence on East Asian and Zen poetics.

The fall of the Han initiated a short-lived cultural renaissance in the Early Wei (220–265 AD) followed by a long period of political division between the Western–Eastern Jin (265–420 AD) and Late Wei (386–535 AD) with barely four decades of precarious unification in the Sui (581–618 AD), where nothing special happened, until the T’ang (618–907 AD), the golden age of regulated verse and Buddhist poetry. “Despite the social and political confusion and military losses [of the Wei–Jin] … the cultural scene,” according to Li and Nienhauser, Jr., “was by no means dismal. Several influences on the development of literature are noteworthy. [The biggest influence by far,] Buddhism … brought with it religious chants and Indian music, which helped to attune Chinese ears to the finer distinctions of tonal qualities in their own language.” And through this unique amalgamation of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist thought developed a new aesthetic that some poets coined as the ‘eccentric recluse’ genre, following in the same vein as that of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, who staked new territory in the literary landscape by advocating for freedom of individual expression and hedonistic escape from the corrupt court politics of the Early Wei. The Bamboo Grove poems and essays frequently centered on the disparity between the lives of farmers, scholars, warriors, and courtesans (criticisms of the court typically veiled in allegory), hence serving as a model for later writers living in troubled times and searching for new poetic identities.

One such writer was Tao Qian, generally considered one of China’s greatest poets alongside the ranks of Qu Yuan, Ruan Ji, Liu Ling, Wang Wei, Du Fu, and Li Bai. In spite of living in an era of turmoil, he composed elegant verse in a clear, plain style and wrote mainly about the beauty of nature from the perspective of an eccentric recluse. This is one of his untitled gushi (ancient style poems)—the most popular in a series of twelve—translated by Arthur Waley:

I built my hut in a zone of human habitation,
Yet near me there sounds no noise of horse or coach.
Would you know how this is possible?
A heart that is distant creates a wilderness around it.
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,
Then gaze long at the distant hills.
The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day;
The flying birds two by two return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.

Here, Qian paints a rather idyllic scene—i.e., a casual hermit musing on the innate order/harmony of nature, more specifically, humanity’s impulse to understand reality through teleological expressions, analogies, and language. His speaker, “I,” declares the merits of a simple life lived at the margins of society beyond which, he implies, exists the perfect freedom of “we.” Though physically near to others, his heart remains “distant” or undisturbed by the noisy humdrum of culture. To be more precise, he treats nature and culture as two aspects of one reality. Enlightenment, for him, is a melancholy, albeit serene, experience that words cannot explain or “express.” Very much a product of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, I find the poem’s ending especially majestic; in simulating what the content addresses—that is, silence—the final couplet suggests that the speaker (and, by implication, the reader) has attained a sense of inner peace by accepting things ‘as they are’: “In these things there lies a deep meaning; / Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.” Emphasis on the period. Need he say more? The silence speaks for him, embodying its own monologue. A profound sense of gratitude is implied in the overall mood, which, rather than embellishing nature with ornate diction and complicated metaphors, depicts life as simple yet wondrous. Another way to put it is ‘empty’ or ‘perfect’ in itself. Due to a lack of artifice, of ‘artistry,’ we overhear the truth in his heart. To be fair, though, line five does feel a bit overwrought—but not out of place—for its not-so subtle symbolism: ‘overwrought,’ I say, because chrysanthemums are the preeminent insignia of the monarchy, so employing the symbol is way of saying, ‘I am socially inferior to the imperial house, but the imperial house is spiritually inferior to me,’ though it’s not ‘out of place’ because it nestles perfectly between two seemingly disparate images (i.e., the human and natural world). In other words, it eases the poem’s transition from a “human habitation,” “horse,” and “coach” to “hills,” “air,” and “birds,” from society to the wild. Besides critiquing the pitfalls of ‘civilization,’ pointing out the limitations of human enterprises, the image lends the work a measure of urgency, illuminating in its own way the benefits of enjoying nature’s beauty or striving for inner peace; chrysanthemums, whether or not the speaker plucks them, will eventually fall “under the eastern hedge,” meaning death (under) will deny him the security of existence (the eastern hedge). However, because the speaker does pluck chrysanthemums from under the eastern hedge, rather than letting them fall of their own accord, he asserts that self-mastery depends upon the conscious relinquishment of ‘existential security.’ Ego. Self-mastery, then, comes through internal renunciation, not physical distance from society. But everything occurs in its own time. In life, according to a popular Zen phrase, there is nothing but life; in death, nothing but death. Life is short. Death is long. Therefore, we should appreciate the time we have on this planet and partake in the great mystery of being by living in the moment—that is, completely (which should not be understood in its linguistic function, as one half of a dichotomous reduction of human nature: ‘complete/incomplete’). After childhood, after losing our innocence, we must acknowledge the inevitability of death in order to reclaim our past wonder. For the eccentric recluse, that childlike wonder is enlightenment, freedom. Like other great poets Qian’s guilty of the occasional platitude, but, when the emotions behind his words ring true, does it really matter?

Most scholars agree that ancient Chinese poetry reached its ‘zenith’ during the T’ang dynasty. I agree, though only in the sense of quantity. The T’ang, unlike the Wei–Jin or the Sui, produced many superb writers; however, most of those writers did not ‘improve’ upon the past in any significant way. They neither expanded its emotional range nor developed its philosophical substructures. Their contributions, then, can only be credited to form, diction, or, more relevantly, the preservation of popular modes of poetry. Li Bai, one of the two major poets of this era, was a lover of detachment and freedom, who avoided the stately lüshi (new style poems) and reinvigorated the eccentric recluse genre by working within the less formal pailü (open style poems) to sing of love, wine, or friendship. Let’s look at Arthur Waley’s translation of “To Danqiu”:

My friend is lodging high in the Eastern Range,
Dearly loving the beauty of valleys and hills.
At green Spring he lies in the empty woods,
And is still asleep when the sun shines on high.
A pine-tree wind dusts his sleeves and coat;
A pebbly stream cleans his heart and ears.
I envy you, who far from strife and talk
Are high-propped on a pillow of blue cloud.

Bai offers a vastly different take on enlightenment than does Qian. Rather than abiding in existential gratitude, his speaker attempts to console himself with thoughts of his late friend—which, at face value, would seem a counterproductive means of achieving solace or a perspective beyond the limitations of ‘self’ and ‘other’ (much like Qian’s speaker, who conflates ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ to achieve a measure of inner peace), except for the fact that it realistically portrays the complexity of the human heart. It is polished and raw. In this graceful elegiac ode, the speaker embraces his emotions as they arise, that is, in the moment, meaning he doesn’t deny them for the sake of sounding ‘sage-like.’ His mental distress is real—it pierces him as deeply as pine needles in the wind. To some degree, his friend Danqui still ‘exists,’ though solely on an abstract level; Bai’s speaker thus acknowledges the emptiness of this absence, while ‘reviving’ its spiritual power through nature: “My friend is lodging high[.]” In other words, Danqui ‘lives in the sky.’ The “Eastern Range” of the speaker’s mind or imagination transforms itself into a boundless field of creation and carries the endless “beauty” of bittersweet memories, like a river, through the “valleys and hills” of the living, of his worldly existence, until quenching the “empty woods” of his heart, which, besides feeling sorrow, feels joy “shin[ing] on high” or returning to the source of life and death, the Void where past and future thoughts coalesce in the present before cancelling each other out. Uniform employment of the present tense validates the sentiment as something urgent and real, but personification—“A pine-tree wind dusts his sleeves and coat; / A pebbly stream cleans his heart and ears.”—treats the environment as a physical manifestation of Danqui’s ‘spirit’ or ‘essence.’ Bai’s brief indulgence in surrealist imagery marks a strong departure from Qian’s aesthetic (which treats nature as an immutable symbol and describes human existence in simple terms) by adding a synesthetic element to the eccentric hermit’s paracosm. It is undeniably poetic, but not ‘Zen.’ If it were, the speaker would filter his pain through a simple expression of things as they are. But he doesn’t. He embellishes nature, gives it human attributes, and in doing so projects extraneous conceptions onto mundane reality. We must ask why the living should “envy” the dead, why the speaker should covet Danqui’s posthumousness. In spite of being painful at times, life is a rare and precious gift; therefore, to suggest that being “far from strife and talk” is a good thing, or even a possibility, is to imply that inner peace resides in seclusion or in death, not among others or in society, which is a travesty, I think, for this mode of thinking not only perpetuates a false dichotomy of ‘delusion’ and ‘enlightenment,’ but, worse, it romanticizes nihilism. For all its surface beauty, its lyrical finesse, the poem (unwittingly) disavows the miracle of existence and thus treats art as an escape rather than an honest engagement: e.g., “high-propped on a pillow of blue cloud.” Gorgeous, yes. Realistic, no. (As far as I know, clouds aren’t blue.) Bai instead merges an elegy, a catharsis, with an ode, a celebration, and represents the boundless quality of inspiration, his friend’s memory, as the potentiality of clouds in the actuality of sky. In other words, he poetically alludes to the boundary between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ in order to question the very substance, or nature, of existence.

Whereas the first poem is conversational and direct, the second is lyrical and indirect. Qian addresses the primal unity of nature and culture. Bai investigates the inherent meaningless of life and the artistic calling. The former champions ‘enlightenment through the body,’ through physical awareness; the latter, ‘enlightenment through the mind,’ through metaphysical inquiry. One envisions the eccentric recluse as a guy who wanders through society in a state of childlike wonder and the other as a person who reminisces/daydreams alone in a forest. Though their aesthetic impulses could not be any more different, both are committed to an art form, a genre, that conveys (either in concrete or abstract terms) something ‘profound.’ Simply put, their poetry contains a definitive message. It teaches and entertains. It challenges our preconceived notions about the human condition and fills the reader with a sense of urgency. But what about when it doesn’t? What can we make of a poetics that doesn’t intend to communicate anything, that offers little more than a catalog of mundane things and phenomena, that denies the reader the satisfaction of a sophisticated aesthetic or philosophy? Is there a difference between poetic emptiness and nothingness, between an expression of self and a stream-of-conscious rant? In the third century, three centuries prior to the advent of Zen, Ji Kang, the Big Kahuna of the Seven Worthies (no relation to Lu Kang from Mortal Kombat), crafted works within the eccentric recluse genre that inspired poets such as Qian and Bai; his works, however—unlike theirs—read like simplified, albeit humane, passages from the Daodejing. (Laoze’s masterpiece addresses the reader with a disembodied, ‘omniscient’ voice that subsumes the individual in the Tao. That, at least, is its conceit.) They retain the individualistic element, the unpretentiousness of the narrative “I,” without descending into idiosyncratic or symbolic extravagances. Moreover, they transform the ‘lofty austerity’ of Daoism into a ‘leisurely immediacy’ that seems to reflect, if not anticipate, the Zen teachings. “Fisherman,” by way of Peipei Qiu, introduces to the literary landscape an eccentric recluse who treats pleasure, natural and unadorned, as the raison d’être of humanity:

Quietly, the water flows in its vastness.

Drifting, my cypress boat now floats, now loafs.

The faint sound of my whistling is carried away by the clean breeze;

I bend to the oars, and the boat rocks.

Putting down the oars and picking up the fishing rod—

I’ll end my year in carefree wandering. (145)

Nowhere in this poem does the speaker tell us, explicitly or implicitly, to seek enlightenment within nature or society (or both). It doesn’t tell us to muse over the relationship between existence and nonexistence. It doesn’t tell us to live any differently than we normally do. In fact, it doesn’t tell us to do anything at all; it simply depicts a moment in the life of a fisherman doing what he does best—fishing. That’s it. Nothing more or less. The title, then, isn’t intended to be allegoric but cartographic, meaning it centers the reader’s focus at the surface level in order to better reflect its contents, like a clear sky in a still lake. There are no secrets to sieve. Things are just as they appear. All is apparent and perfect in itself. If the title were ‘Farmer’ or ‘Warrior’ or ‘Courtier,’ our reading would surely change; in this case, however, our interpretations (no matter how well-intentioned or persuasive they may be) only obscure the natural clarity of the text. In other words, our urge for potential meaning causes us to seek reflections of the self in a place that denies the ego any actual meaning—i.e., the so-called ‘depths of the lake.’ Actual meaning resides at the surface. Thus an incomprehensible reality satisfies the fisherman because it demands nothing of him: what else can he do but enjoy the poetic emptiness of a moment in eternity?

“Quietly, the water flows[.]” Line one defines the natural state of (lake) water as ‘quiet’ and ‘flowing.’ Perhaps this seems obvious, a bit redundant or unworthy of poetry, but that’s the point—a true expression of the Way is a ‘self-evident,’ or ‘unpoetic,’ observation of present reality: water does flow, oftentimes quietly (unless disturbed by outside forces). That is its ‘nature.’ When the speaker does away with artifice and simply depicts things as they are, he implies that everything is perfect in itself. Everything has its own nature. Everything is unique. And since nothing is like anything else, there is no need for simile or metaphor or fancy turns of speech, for literary devices only obscure our perception of the text’s meaning or ‘essence.’ Here, “the water flows in its vastness,” meaning the nature of water reflects the nature of the Tao; its nature, or self-expression, is in effortless and ceaseless harmony with the vast world of which it is an integral aspect. In line two the fisherman’s boat ‘drifts’ in accord with the water’s flow—‘floating’ and ‘loafing’ in the present, in the “now.” The fisherman. The boat. The water. The water holds the boat, the boat holds the fisherman, and the fisherman holds the experience—a threefold expression of the Way. From a scholarly perspective, there isn’t much to work with here. We can, of course, latch onto the specificity of the boat’s substance, “cypress”—which, in the stagnant image reservoir of the average poet, represents ‘mourning’ (death) or ‘longevity’ (life)—though doing so would only highlight an inconsistency in the poem’s thematic consistency (without further elucidating authorial intent). In other words, it would not alter the previously established pattern of ‘direct expression.’ To be clear, I do not think Kang guilty of arbitrariness; the details are important insofar as they establish trust in the reader and lend the work its texture, but they should not be mined for symbolic import, namely, because they don’t have any. Kang’s only intent, it seems, is to accurately document an experience, to portray as realistically as possible a day in the life of a fisherman. Line three breaks the silence with “the faint sound” of whistling, a sound so delicate and brief as to be carried away by a “clean breeze.” Thus, the speaker tells us that it is the nature of sound to travel through air. His whistling then is an outer expression of his inner state, a natural reflection of the Tao. Sound and silence. Yin and yang. They are one in the same. Everything is “faint” or “clean” (empty)—that is, interconnected. In line four he provides a living example of cause and effect: “I bend to the oars, and the boat rocks.” Of course. What else would happen? I think Qian or Bai would view this scene as an opportunity to convey a message of depth or to dazzle us with metaphysical imagery, but not Kang. Instead of situating the ‘action’ in the speaker’s head or depicting the environment as the object of his thoughts, Kang keeps the poem grounded in pure awareness. By “[p]utting down the oars and picking up the fishing rod[,]” the fisherman enacts his divine (mundane) activity, his unique form of meditation or ‘action Zen’ (although he isn’t a Zen master). In essence, he ‘accomplishes’ his goal while participating in its corresponding rituals (i.e., rowing, floating, casting, etc.) Whether or not he catches any fish is irrelevant, so much as he applies a single-minded focus to the effort and ‘forgets his self.’ His actions in lines one through five express the Way in part; his inaction in the final line, however, fully expresses a wordless teaching, for it is devoid of all effort, all pretense, thus making it a complete embodiment of the teachings: “I’ll end my year in carefree wandering.” To forget the self is to find the self. To wander is to live in the present. To be free of care (worries) is to be in tune with human nature. This is the paradoxical, albeit enlightened, state of Kang’s proto-eccentric recluse.

Saigyō & Dōgen

Many Japanese scholars agree that Saeki Mao, also known as Kūkai, the founder of the Shingon (True Word) branch of Buddhism, invented the kana phonetic syllabary sometime between the eighth- and ninth-century, thus facilitating the advent of ‘traditional’ Japanese literature. Prior to his influence, there was no system for transcribing the sounds and grammatical forms of spoken Japanese, so aristocrats and educated monks composed official documents and works of art in kanji (Chinese ideographs). According to Donald Keene, “Private collections of poetry in kana began to be compiled about 880 [AD], and [were] … clearly indebted to the theories of poetry described by the compilers of such Chinese anthologies as the Shijing (Classic of Poetry) and Wen xuan (Selections of Refined Literature), but the preferences they express would be shared by most tanka poets for the next thousand years.” A century after Kūkai’s passing, Ki Tsurayuki, a government official and noted man of letters, compiled the first imperial poetry anthology, the Kokinshū (Collection From Ancient and Modern Times), and enumerated the numerous circumstances that move men to write poetry, hence setting a new standard for waka (ancient Japanese poetics); melancholy, he believed, whether aroused by a change in the seasons or by a glimpse of white hairs, provided a more congenial mood for writing verse than the harsher emotions treated in the pre-kana, Nara period (710–784 AD) anthology Man’yōshū (Ten-Thousand Leaves), which mostly contained sedōka (head-repeated poems) and chōka (long poems) ranging up to a hundred and fifty lines in length and cast in the form of five- and seven-syllable alternating lines followed by a concluding seven-syllable line. With chōka, a ‘masculine’ aesthetic pervaded kana literature: e.g., the death of a wife or child, the glory of the imperial family, the hardships of military service, etc. In other words, it was exuberantly dispassionate. Two-dimensional. Japan, it seems, had yet to find its ‘voice.’ This all changed of course with the flowering of the tanka (short poem), a five-line, thirty-one syllable form, which, in being evocative yet concise, turned out to be the perfect vessel for the new ‘feminine’ aesthetic proposed by Tsurayuki.

Early Heian period (794–1185 AD) kana poetry, or onna-de (woman’s hand), captivated readers with its perceptivity and tonal beauty (features typically overlooked or rejected during a time of armed struggle among provincial military clans); however, many critics considered it superficial—that is, unworthy of criticism—until the late Heian, when a poet–monk named Saigyō composed tanka about nature harkening to the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters)—an early Nara anthology of odes to nature and proto-tanka about the (arguably mythological) ‘history’ of Japan—thus bridging the gap between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ aesthetics, between progressive aristocrats and literate commoners. Regarding its religious significance, however, Saigyō’s work marks an important shift in Zen thought by ‘settling’ one of its most heated debates: ‘The Buddhahood of Plants and Trees.’ William R. LaFleur states that “The history of the … debate in China and Japan reveals … that [plant life], at first the subject of discussion concerning their fitness for possible Buddhahood, in time came to be regarded as themselves models for man in the latter’s quest for enlightenment” (227). Simply put, Saigyō proposed that one’s religious salvation depended, at least to an extent, upon nature, and that the question of the Buddhahood of plants and trees could only be answered post–enlightenment. By completely embracing nature, by appreciating humanity’s relationship to it, people, he argued, could transcend their self-absorbed views and achieve a universal perspective. This of course necessitated a degree of renunciation. In the Nara period most people would have scoffed at the idea of abandoning material or mental attachments and seeking ‘spiritual salvation.’ However, the Heian was a much different time, one of rampant inequality and political upheaval, so individuals readily embraced the yamazato (mountain hermit) ideal and escaped the ‘fleeting world,’ the city, for idyllic countryside retreats. (A contemporary analogy: rich socialites fleeing the Tri-State area during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Their motivation for embracing nature, then, was a bit disingenuous—an inauspicious beginning that would never lead to an ontological awakening. The yamazato ideal, as practiced by Saigyō and his contemporaries, wasn’t intended to be an escapist trend but, rather, an artistic/religious movement that uncovered the ‘true self.’ To some degree, it was a Japanese incarnation of China’s eccentric recluse genre; instead of acknowledging the importance of collective (i.e., Confucian) responsibility or individual (i.e., Taoist) identity, as Chinese poets had in the past, the new school of Japanese poets rejected all societal obligations and prescribed modes of expression, thus giving way to an aesthetic approach more in tune with alternative Zen practices. The iori (monk’s hut) or sōan (grass hut) became, if only symbolically, the new temple or monastery par excellence—a concrete representation of the ‘nature/culture’ dichotomy. Although Saigyō considered it the perfect setting for ‘natural meditation,’ he did not preclude the possibility of appreciating nature or achieving enlightenment in society; in fact, he viewed lengthy retreats as excessively austere indulgences in one’s ego. (Even Siddhārtha, after years of ascetic practices, observed that self-flagellation does little more than destroy the body while caressing the self.) The real purpose of a retreat was to develop a ‘flower-and-moon-enchanted’ sensibility that carried over into civilization: enlightenment, at least for him, was an artistic (in this case, a hyper-observational and ever-present) way of being.

In LeFleur’s translation of Saigyō’s tanka #1026—

This storm’s wet fury

hurls down from the peaks to my hut;

but it’s water itself

that right now is my only friend:

drops dripping in the gaps and pauses. (242)—

the speaker, an inja (recluse), relays an experience he’s had in nature, in his hut, during a severe rainstorm, which he refers to as a “wet fury,” as if it were sentient. For him, it’s a brief moment in the fluidity of presentness, in the beauty of the ultimate Buddhist absolute. For us, however, it’s a conceit, a literary photograph of a static moment. The only indicators of time are “[t]his” and “now”; of human presence, “my.” (Both are necessary, of course, for they not only orient us to the inja’s position in space–time but keep the work from venturing too far into abstract terrain.) Other than that, the language seems about as sparse as a smattering of grass blades on a sandal sole. The speaker says nothing, and therefore betrays nothing, of his personality; he simply tells us that a storm “hurls down” from mountain peaks, that he meditates on the sound of water droplets. With the exception of some personification in lines one, two, and four, and the ambiguity of line five (“gaps and pauses”), it’s a mostly straightforward affair, a quiet ecstasy that ends as quickly as it begins. Though Saigyō doesn’t go so far as to label the experience an ‘epiphany’ or an ‘awakening,’ I think it fair to read it as such, since the subtext suggests that the recluse—in spite of his ego-oriented language, his use of the genitive adjective “my”—lives in ‘harmony’ with nature: alone, but not lonely, he’s content with being “friend[s]” with “water.” In other words, he’s amorphous, liquescent—that is, free of human attributes and prone to ‘go with the flow.’ The speaker seems to deny any real distinction between nature and culture, implying that he is the storm, the peak, the hut, the rain, and thus functions as nature’s voice or mind; nature, as his body (which is not to say that either lacks autonomy, only that they share a synergetic relationship as dual-aspects of a single reality). They are one. This, I think, explains the poem’s ‘empty’ resonance, the underlying sense that its emotional registers spring from a source beyond the human heart, or that they somehow animate the environment itself. We can credit Saigyō’s anthropomorphic bent to indigenous Shinto influences, but the content which it adorns, the proverbial ‘unity of the micro- and macrocosm,’ closely reflects the teachings of Taoism and Zen, where one’s ‘loss of self’ unveils their ‘original face.’ There is, without a doubt, some echoes of Qian, Bai, and Kang here, though the poem’s structure—i.e., one-sentence, three clauses (thesis, antithesis, and resolution)—expresses the inherent unity of humanity and nature with an ease that theirs lacks. Moreover, it places emphasis, the entire weight of the experience, on the very last line, like the rainstorm descending on the speaker’s hut: “drops dripping in the gaps and pauses.”

Saigyō ends the poem in a brilliant synthesis of sound and sense. Alliteration. Check. Ambiguous capping phrase. Check. Wordless transmission of Zen import. Triple check. Here, sextuple alliteration (drops dripping … gaps and pauses) simulates the auditory experience of water hitting a surface. We hear each syllable as a droplet, a nanoexplosion punctuating the silence. According to LeFleur, though, the original language—taema taema ni—conveys the opposite of its sound; it is an “inverse onomatopoeia,” meaning the line sounds like gently falling water but, in terms of signification, means ‘interstices,’ ‘lulls,’ ‘gaps,’ and ‘pauses.’ Oddly enough, the text never employs the kana for ‘raindrop.’ Instead, it complicates natural associations (e.g., rainstorm = water = droplets) by opening, in the first line, with an unsettling image and closing, in the last line, with one of tranquility or, to be more precise, emotional/physical/mental stillness. In other words, it transitions between two extremes, from tempest to silence. There are gradations between turbulence and placidity, between confusion and clarity, between action and inaction, of course, but the trajectory should be clear: the storm comes and goes, dissipating into the literal and figurative void from whence it came, while the recluse marvels at it all. Unlike Kang’s work, this one provides enough space for an allegorical reading to situate itself within (not ‘behind’ or ‘under’) the work’s apparent reading without understating or hyperbolizing it, as Qian and Bai’s do respectively. It is a simple reverie and metaphysical inquiry. However, it doesn’t convey significance through layers of exo- or esoteric interpretations, through symbols, but through the relationship of language (diction) and silence (white space: the locus of dissonance and harmony). This is just a fancy pants way of saying that the poem embodies, and therefore expresses, the Zen ideal of ‘emptiness’—an antonym, rather than a synonym, for ‘nothingness’—which defines all sentient and insentient things as devoid of an independent, solid, or unitary self. Reality, then, is a compound of manifold parts that exists in a state of continual flux, a product of infinite causes, meaning everything in the universe is open, momentary, and interconnected. In other words, the Self is a fabrication. The inja, as I’ve already said, denies the false dichotomy of ‘self/other,’ but the ambiguity of his capping phrase—“gaps and pauses”—confirms his mastery of the Zen teachings. Just as a rainstorm fluctuates between deluges and drizzles, so too does the human heart. All dualities (e.g., happiness/sadness, sound/silence, life/death, etc.) form two aspects of a mutually-dependent whole; one aspect cannot exist without the other, for both occur simultaneously. Thus, the wholeness of any experience remains ever-present to those who achieve, if only momentarily, a state of complete awareness. To experience true freedom from the sway of things and phenomena, however, one must maintain said state of awareness and allow it to permeate his or her daily affairs. The most simple and natural way to do this, according to Saigyō, is through an aesthetic appreciation of nature, for our environment bridges the gap between the relative and absolute, the individual and universal. Though he doesn’t make it explicit, we can imagine the recluse’s moss-covered hut, in great disrepair, leaking on him as he brushes his verse on a tattered piece of paper. Each droplet is, for him, a reality-in-miniature of the storm, which is a reality-in-miniature of the world, which is a reality-in-miniature of the universe. (For the record, I am neither a quantum physicist nor mechanic.) The holes in the hut and the breaks in the storm depict ‘nonexistence,’ while the hut and raindrops represent ‘existence.’ Their shared relationship defines emptiness. Moreover, the moments prior to and after the poem’s composition represent the speaker’s past and future states of nonexistence; those during its composition, his present state of ‘existence.’ However, such temporal distinctions are strictly representational, for, in reality, they stem from the perspective of a false observer—that is, a self who thinks of existence and nonexistence as distinct states of reality or points in space–time. Through the interplay of sound and silence, Saigyō reverse-engineers this dichotomous impulse and thus expresses the essence, the shared nature, of all compounded things as impermanent, formless, and timeless.

Unlike Confucian and Taoist poets of ancient China, Zen poets of Kamakura Japan crafted works, which, in one way or another, asserted that ‘everything exists in a state of perpetual entropy and renewal.’ They did so not as a means of pushing an ideological agenda but of emphasizing the preciousness of existence–nonexistence, of space–time, reality. There is, without a doubt, an ethical dimension to this—it’s impossible to deny—yet I’ve come to find that it can only be understood, and therefore appreciated, in an aesthetic context. (Most Buddhist branches, especially Zen, discourage ‘moralizing’ and ‘blind faith’; practitioners are encouraged to question the teachings, including the master, until they begin to understand things for themselves, to apply that understanding to the world at large. In other words, they must learn to think and act for the ‘right reasons’—that is, if those reasons make sense with one’s experience—which of course excludes anything that comes out of books or pulpits.) One must observe the concrete, physical aspects of Zen poems before meditating on their abstract, metaphysical contents (i.e., summary must precede interpretation); it is only by understanding the relationship between them, however, that one can transcend their limitations. With a sense of irony we can liken the experience of reading to the Zen path itself, which progresses from the concrete to the abstract to something more nuanced than any inherent ‘is/isn’t’ construct. Ethics and aesthetics, then, like all dualities, form two aspects of a greater whole. In the nondiscriminatory mind of emptiness, one’s subjectivity and objectivity merge and true empathy arises. The Zen master thus loses his or her Self in order to gain a boundless perspective, one that benefits all beings. To recapitulate: from wisdom comes compassion, and from compassion, an even greater wisdom—the ability to accept humanity’s limitations and the world’s imperfections, to see the relative and absolute beauty of life-as-is. Although Saigyō’s tanka captures a brief moment of enlightenment (or a deepening of such), it restricts the reader’s experience to the ‘natural world’ and therefore denies them a practical means of worldly application necessary for the purposes of a complete transmission, or intersubjective link, between speaker and reader, master and disciple. In other words, it’s difficult for the average reader to share in the recluse’s experience, since most laypeople and monastics—then or now—cannot relate to sitting in a hut, while a storm rages outside, and meditating on the interplay of sound and silence. Therefore, no matter how elegant and understated the poem may be, its sentiments are romantic. Abstruse. They appeal more to the reluctant master, the poet’s poet, than they do the eager disciple, the aspiring poet.

Saigyō’s work epitomizes a Zen master’s ‘wandering period’ (the post-enlightenment years prior to teaching), whereas Dōgen’s characterizes a Zen master’s ‘dragon period’ (the post-enlightenment years spent teaching). The former, a Rinzai philosopher–poet, leads with the heart; the latter, a Sōtō poet–philosopher, the mind. The stylistic differences between them seem to parallel the ‘show vs. tell’ debate in literary circles today. Of course, it’d be unfair to say that they don’t do a little bit of both. I acknowledge that. I also acknowledge that they, like all artists, are imperfect creatures and therefore inclined to rely on one mode more than they do the other. (Every artist has a default mode of expression, yet great artists distinguish themselves by toggling between modes.) Shrewd Saigyō ‘shows’ more than he tells. Direct Dōgen ‘tells’ more than he shows. Both convey the wisdom of emptiness (i.e., reality as a state of perpetual entropy and renewal) through various poetic devices and do so, it’s assumed, out of an overwhelming sense of compassion. That’s clear. But who has the more effective form of self-expression, communication—that is, which of the two possesses the widest range of feelings and accesses the deepest levels of thought? Perhaps it’s relative or dependent upon the reader’s receptivity to the teachings. Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that Master Dōgen imparts fundamental lessons about reality from a teacher’s, rather than artist’s, perspective. In other words, he carefully considers the relationship between poet and reader. (This makes sense considering that he emphasized the importance of sutras and scholasticism throughout his life.) In his work he challenges his predecessor’s conception of enlightenment by pointing out how it assumes a causal relationship between nature and humanity, and thus perpetuates the ‘delusion/enlightenment’ construct, implying that our nature is ‘impure’ and that we must somehow ‘purify’ it through practice; however, he also shares the same artistic fault as Saigyō: an overreliance on natural imagery that widens rather than closes the gap between religious and secular life.

This will make more sense as we progress. For now, let’s check out Stephen Heine’s translation of Dōgen’s “Original Face”:

In spring, the cherry blossoms

in summer, the cuckoo

in autumn, the moon

in winter, unmelted snow

how pure and clear are the seasons! (105)

Goodbye inja—we shall miss your endearing naivety, your tender tales of self-romance! Your timely passing leaves us with nothing but the unadorned face of nature. No self, no other. Just ‘things-as-they-are’: cherry blossoms in spring; cuckoos in summer; moonlight in autumn; and unmelted snow in winter. Nature, the poem tells us, is “pure and clear.” Everything occurs in its proper time and place. So what. It’s obvious, isn’t it? According to Dōgen, it is and it isn’t. It is because we tend to treat the seasons as literal expressions of entropy (death) and renewal (life), the ‘four stages of existence’ (i.e., spring/birth, summer/sickness, autumn/old age, and winter/death). And it isn’t because the seasons are figurative expressions of emptiness; they function, in other words, as symbolic markers of space and time, self and other, existence and nonexistence, enabling us to perceive distinctions where none exist, and thus provide a convenient means of defining/controlling nature (rather than living in harmony with its ‘inherent perfection’ and realizing it is as our own). Though the truth manifest in nature is always apparent, we don’t always see it, for the ego, the limiting perspective of ‘I,’ blinds us to the reality of our shared essence. Change. Impermanence. Emptiness. In reality, nature isn’t as inherently neat, as teleologically evident, as we may think. Observe, for instance, Heine’s interpretation of Dōgen’s intent, his adherence to the ambiguity of the original text: structurally, each season is ‘confined’ within its own line and situated to the left of a caesura/comma, while its corresponding elements, the material nouns, are situated to the right; syntactically, however, the seasons and said corresponding elements ‘break out’ of those formal confines to create an indistinguishable whole, a single sentence, that accurately portrays the singular essence of reality, which expresses itself in mutual-dependency between carbon matter (cherry blossoms, cuckoos, and the moon) and natural phenomena (seasons). Form, then, in the poetic sense of the term, represents the urge to control or ‘order’ experience, whereas the caesura represents the dichotomous, ‘disordered’ mind. Because the former is an effect of the latter’s cause, the symbolic collapse of the caesura, or the unification of the poem’s left and right flanks, simulates the enlightened being’s mental transcendence of karma or ‘cause and effect.’ Heine could’ve inserted periods or semicolons at each line break and guided the pacing and interpretation of the text, the reading experience, but he didn’t, for doing so would’ve diminished the range of his subject’s mind by oversimplifying the intricacies of interdependence and denying the spaces between seasons, the ‘inter-seasons.’ To be clear, Dōgen doesn’t romanticize nature; he merely employs its imagery as a powerful instrument of theoretical deconstruction, meaning he treats it as mimetic or representational of reality only insofar as to highlight its emptiness.

If an ontological awakening occurs when one lets go of logic—i.e., the urge to rationalize, to categorize, to control—unpeeling layers of ego, of cultural conditioning, until nothing of the Self remains, then the Zen teachings must be illogical (but not senseless). Intuitive. Experiential. (I understand the irony of explaining intuitive processes through inference, yet find it unavoidable in the context of waxing philosophic on an anti-philosophy.) Zen recognizes two primary paths of ‘illogical wisdom’: the Sōtō and Rinzai sects. Sōtō’s ideal method of enlightenment is known as ‘silent illumination’ (inner stillness through shikantaza). This is much different than Rinzai’s ideal method of enlightenment—‘lightning technique’ (total consciousness through kōan, mōndo, and katsu). Considering Dōgen’s sectarian leaning and pedagogical intent, the title of his poem hints not only that our essence is ‘empty,’ but that our enlightenment occurs naturally, internally, without external interference, because we are “pure [free of distinctions] and clear [always apparent]” like the seasons. Enlightenment, for him, “is not a static substratum beyond or beneath temporal phenomena” but a state of conscious engagement with the material and immaterial aspects of being–time, of emptiness (Heine 140). Nature, then, to use his example, doesn’t have to ‘achieve’ enlightenment, for it is perfect in itself: cherry blossoms bloom and fall in the spring; cuckoo birds mate in the summer; the moon glows in autumn; snow blankets the grass in winter—mundane symbols of sentient and insentient existence, beings and forces that do not deny their reality, that act only according to their essence. We, too, can reclaim our innate equilibrium, coexisting among ourselves and our environment, by realizing and accepting the truth about enlightenment: our essence cannot be sullied, only our perception of it. Free of cultural influence, the enlightened human exercises his or her illogical wisdom and experiences life, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ from a ‘transcendent perspective.’ Present but detached. The poet alludes to his freedom from the limiting ‘I’ when he soliloquizes without the aid of pronouns, recessing the speaker (in the traditional sense of the term) in order to educe that which cannot be conveyed through language—an approach similar to Saigyō’s, except that it intentionally denies the reader the satisfaction of a human presence. Hence, there is no given narrative, no self-expression of action or inaction, no transition from delusion to enlightenment. No past, no future. Instead, we are thrust into the ecstasy of being, the mundane sublimity of the present, the “primordial unity … [the] absolutely inseparable, twofold aspects [i.e., ‘being’ and ‘time’] of the selfsame reality [i.e., ‘being–time’]” (Heine 41).

However undeniably beautiful and profound Kamakura aesthetics may be, they are—at least according to Zen standards—flawed, for their lack of secular symbols, of ‘living examples,’ gives the impression that one must leave society to become a sage, a master of self. (I say ‘impression’ because neither Saigyō nor Dōgen ever intended to be read in that way: they never advocated for reclusion, for any antisocial behaviors or lifestyles; however, their poetic works failed to refute such—perhaps for the sake of avoiding the ol’ ‘affirmation/negation’ trap—and thereby left a lot of room for misinterpretation.) This notion is anathema to the teachings. So I think I summon every great Zen master here by asserting that the truth can be realized anywhere, that it comes from within, not without, and that enlightenment transcends age, sex, race, nationality, and geography because it is infinite and all-pervasive. Like matter and thought, it cannot be created or destroyed—only accepted or denied. Experienced. As we see, Japan’s interpretation of the eccentric recluse genre gave way to the inja’s ‘flower-and-moon-enchanted’ sensibility, which evolved between the late-Heian and early-Kamakura to birth the haiku, in turn influencing every realm of the arts; but its seasonal references quickly became stale and formulaic, in spite of being illuminated through a Buddhist lens. (For every Bashō we have a thousand katsuro.) Although Dōgen dispenses with Saigyō’s illustrative extravagances, recessing the speaker to bring the reader ‘closer’ to nature, his work—as I’ve mentioned above—sets up an equally restrictive dichotomy by not foreclosing the possibility that the secular (‘deluded’) and religious (‘enlightened’) worlds evince mutually-exclusive continuums. To address readers of all capacities Zen needs a poetics that simulates the mutual-dependency of reality (i.e., ‘delusion–enlightenment’) through the interplay of content and form. This of course necessitates a harmonization of secular and religious imagery: that is, a perspective encompassing sake parlors and temples, whorehouses and monasteries, lumberyards and mountains, fish markets and rivers, poems and clear skies. Everything and nothing.

Gozan Culture & Ikkyū

Zen’s transplantation from China to Japan cannot be explained in simple syncretic terms, for the leaders of every generation refracted the teachings through their own cultural and individualistic lenses. They did not, however, corrupt the ‘light’ or essence of those teachings: thus the Lankāvatāra and Vajracchedikā Sutras remain foundational to this day. (Though their authorship remains dubious, we can think of them as primary sources and their accompanying commentaries as secondary or tertiary sources—that is, educational yet nonessential works.) As we’ve already discovered the texts themselves are less significant than the living teachings and their experiential aspects. They aren’t scriptures or ‘holy books’ in the typical sense of the term but ‘spiritual road maps’ pointing out different paths to enlightenment; at the end of the day, though, it is up to the individual to ‘get in the car and drive.’ (Zen masters keep the top down and the pedal to the metal.) After all, what good are book smarts without common sense? The teachings must be applied in real life, otherwise they remain impractical. Abstract. Useless. Perhaps that is why the masters speak about devotional and pedagogical literature—e.g., ethics, metaphysics, criticism, etc.—in less-than-reverent tones, emphasizing (sitting, walking, working) meditation as the sole means of achieving non-discriminatory wisdom. Richi (prāxis) over hosshin (theōria). They may be right to do so, yet we as artists must ask: where do the arts come into play? Aren’t they meditative practices, too? In my opinion, poetry, unlike other art forms, holds a unique position in the history of Zen for two main reasons: one, for its autobiographical function, its accuracy and efficacy as psychological profile; two, for its intersubjective function, its ability to transcend linguistic limitations while transmitting emptiness through language—i.e., the ‘written’ and ‘spoken’ word. Sutras convey ideas about mutual-dependency. Poems do so as well, but they have the added benefit of communicating those ideas in the performative, rather than constative, space between ‘text’ (intellect) and ‘expression’ (experience). In other words, the former’s static, intralogical, whereas the latter’s fluid, interlogical. By subduing the logical mind, by highlighting its inadequacies, Zen poetics, to an extent, aims to alter the psychophysiological constitution of the reader, to ‘darken the self’ in preparation of the enlightenment experience, the universal vision of the ‘dharma eye.’ They function as daily praxes, as perfect expressions of emptiness, simulating in the midst of their composition, as well as in their enactment, the ubiquitous flux of all dualities. This is, irrespective of personal style, the creative realm of Saigyō and Dōgen.

I want to be clear at this point and assert that I am not charting a linear progression in Ch’an/Zen poetics, or implying that the tradition has ‘evolved,’ moving from superficial to profound modes of expression; rather, I’m emphasizing that it’s changed externally under the pressure of individual influence while maintaining its shared, experiential core: Zen poetry—if I may speak of it as a cross-cultural phenomenon—truly manifests in the dissonance of the individual and universal, for it is a collective dialogue, not a phalanx of monologues, among egoless individuals. Languages and rituals and modes of expression change over time, yet the essence of the teachings (unlike the teachings themselves) does not: it is immutable. Thus trends in the art world rarely reflect those in the institution. Sutras, to simplify the above, merely record and convey the teachings, but poems express their essence. They offer examples of the ‘universal in the individual’ instead of allegorizing the ‘individual in the universal.’ They evoke an emotional response, transmitting a sense of urgency necessary to embody the teachings. They fill the experiential hole that pedagogical literature leaves in the reader. Powerful poems, in other words, achieve a balance between self-expression and instruction, while weak poems tend to favor one over the other. Major voices stand out from minor ones simply because they distinguish themselves from those of antiquity (in spite of their allusions to past masters). Minor voices, on the other hand, do not; they merely assume the conceit of being antiquity’s echo. However, we can only understand this phenomenon from the perspective of modernity. From this history it’s clear, as Bloom suggests in “The Necessity of Misreading,” that “[i]nfluence, substituting for ‘tradition,’ shows us that we are nurtured by distortion, and not by apostolic succession. [It] exposes and de-idealizes tradition, not by appearing as a cunning distortion of tradition, but by showing that all tradition is indistinguishable from making mistakes about anteriority” (103). In my opinion, there are exceptions to this rule. A strong poet’s ethos, for instance, is a profound distortion of tradition, since it misinterprets the cultural trappings of anteriority, while inheriting its timeless pulse, the present—that is, the conscious urge to engage with a past reality combined with the unconscious urge to achieve a ‘postmodern sublime.’ If the ideal Zen poem achieves a balance between the individual and universal, then the greater the poet’s experiential achievement, the greater his or her artistic achievement (assuming the master has an equivalent reserve of literary talent). Instead of linking large swaths of history, then, comparing and contrasting zeitgeists, it may make sense to narrow the scope, to consider similarities and differences among contemporaries, to understand how an appreciation of perspectival dissonance not only distinguishes Ikkyū from his Gozan peers, establishing his genius over their talent, but promotes the intersubjective fluidity between ‘speaker’ and ‘reader.’

According to Parker “[Gozan] monks were aware of counterarguments to their own beliefs in the religious significance of [Zen] culture, including important differences between their lives and those of the classical solitary recluses, as well as beliefs that artistic activity was not religious” (256). This of course refers to institutional outliers whose work the mainstream, until recently, disregarded as ‘unsophisticated.’ ‘Sophisticated,’ that is, commercially successful, poets tended toward allegoric extravagance and metaphysical themes. That influential Gozan bunjinsō (poet–monks) were members of the literati, of yūsha (friend societies)—artist enclaves who not only imitated but sold works in the Chinese court and recluse traditions—implies that the institution was more interested in creating/preserving culture than in seeking the Way, that they lived vicariously in the so-called ‘golden age of Zen,’ the T’ang dynasty, through poetry. Outwardly, they may have professed otherwise; inwardly, though, as we can see in their ‘art,’ they did not actually embody the teachings: by conveying Zen ideals through a depersonalized mode of expression, they merely wrote about the truth and unwittingly perpetuated the ‘secular/religious’ dichotomy. In other words, the majority of works produced during this time were superficial, nothing at all like those they mimicked, and, even worse, antithetical to an enlightened lifestyle. To be fair, though, some of them do contain stunning imagery, echoing the sublime through sophisticated devices and paradoxical locutions. Most of them do reveal a treasure trove of erudition. One would be hard-pressed to deny them their curatorial, if not intellectual, due. Nevertheless, I find their abstract, impersonal nature off-putting, for they often read like strings of non sequiturs, allegorical fragments unglued from their Zen context and pieced together for dramatic effect. It’s easy to get caught up in the razzle-dazzle, the exotic scenery and self-assured voice, but after multiple readings the gimmick wears thin, transparent, like old silk—elegant from a distance, yet gauzy up close. Take, for instance, Parker’s translation of Daigu Shōchi’s jueju, “Response to Hoshi Minchō’s ‘Small Cottage by a Mountain Stream’,” typically considered one of the three best (Gozan) works of the early Muromachi period:

Blue peaks and layered mountains overlook azure streams.

Who has escaped the world to make this hidden abode?

If it is Wang [An-shih]’s grass hut, then this is the side of Chung-shan mountain.

If it is Tu [Fu]’s brushwood gate, then this is west of the Chin River. (242)

Such verses form the medieval Japanese equivalent of fan fiction—a response to a landscape painting that itself responds to another work, in this case, the eighth chapter of The Transmission of the Lamp (an allusion to a mysterious exchange between the reclusive monk Lung-shan and Master Tung-shan Liang-chieh). Had Shōchi, a highly influential abbot, composed this work during the era in which he alludes, we’d label him an ‘artistic genius’ on par with Qian, Bai, and Kang. Unfortunately, for him, he did not; he could not, it seems, get out from under the Chinese shadow looming over him (which is not the same as suggesting the work is wholly meritless, but unoriginal). The first line expresses the teachings through corresponding images, parallel depictions of ‘things as they are.’ It implies that we can find a lesson in everything, since truth continually manifests itself in the ten-thousand things. Still peaks and flowing streams. Mountains up high, streams down low. Here, blue represents the shared emptiness of peaks and streams, of appearances, while peaks and streams, entities, represent unique forms of emptiness. In other words, the combination of one adjective (modifier) and two nouns (subjects) captures the ‘universal in the individual’ and the ‘individual in the universal.’ Moreover, the verb “overlook” reemphasizes, through directional parallelism, the speaker’s appreciation of an unadorned reality—blue mountains overlooking azure streams. Heaven overlooking earth. ‘As above, so below.’ No personification or figurative language, no subtext. Things are what they are the way they are. And our preconceived notions about existence do not change this reality, he implies, in the second line, when he asks, “Who has escaped the world to make this hidden abode?” This is a rhetorical question: we can never ‘escape’ the world of the living (except posthumously); we can, however, enter the “hidden abode” of enlightenment—which, paradoxically, isn’t ‘hidden’ but ubiquitous, ever-accessible—through a complete engagement with mundane reality. Nature, then, for him, doesn’t represent anything but itself. Beyond all conceptualization, it expresses its essence, its inherent beauty, without effort, conscious or otherwise.

Shōchi-san probably should’ve ended the poem as a couplet, as two loosely connected monostichs, but the demon of convention compels him to tack on another—an arbitrary move that creates an aura of redundancy. Personally, I find his ‘transition’ between the first and second couplet cringe-worthy: the first addresses the ‘false self’ (“Who”) in simple, clear language; the second, the ‘true self’ (“this”), in ornate, allusive verse. The former shares an experience, adding an insight that complements and complicates it, whereas the latter hops on the dais, exhibiting, as an overly formal addendum, a wealth of erudition (i.e., the reference to Wang An-shih and Du Fu, the scholar and the poet respectively) and technical proficiency (i.e., parallel caesuras, anaphora, cataphora). The first half of the poem, the artistic half, ‘shows’ more than it ‘tells,’ and the second half, the academic half, ‘tells’ more than it ‘shows.’ Simply put, one’s breathless and the other’s blustery. Both couplets aim to transcend the limiting ego-consciousness, the dualistic impetus, to read as a unified whole, yet function more as self-contained units, as thesis (individual) and antithesis (universal), without resolution (emptiness). They combine to form that rare schizophrenic poem that makes us question the veracity of the poet’s awakening. But I’ll leave that alone and instead focus on structure and content. If we keep in mind that the work is a commentary to Minchō’s shigajiku (hanging scroll landscape painting), an image of a hermit’s hut nestled between a mountain and a stream, then we can see Shōchi intended to depict a literary portrait, or abstract, of an enlightened master, not a self-portrait—critically speaking, a rather artsy-fartsy move for a Zen master. Though the poem holds prominence as a subtle commentary on the eccentric recluse/inja genre, it is one of many works dedicated to “Small Cottage by a Mountain Stream,” thus making it a product of apostolic succession rather than unique distortion. In other words, no matter how ‘well-written’ or ‘sophisticated’ it may be, it can be so only within the confines of a stale enterprise; unoriginal, by definition, it serves a valuable historical function—reflecting institutional trends or values through universal (external) knowledge—while impeding a religious application—refracting experiential trends or values through individual (internal) wisdom—necessary to acknowledge, let alone breach, the fourth wall. Furthermore, shigajiku commentaries seem to distinguish religious from secular life, to hierarchize nature over culture, by focusing, like Saigyō, on the hermit’s (literal and figurative) place within his environment, or by removing, like Dōgen, the hermit from his environment. They tend to rely too heavily upon tradition. Sometimes, in reading Gozan literature, it feels as if poet–monks overcompensated for their lack of genuine practice, their worldly saturation, with an idealized Zen aesthetic harkening to an imaginary past. ‘If only I’d lived back then,’ their poems murmur with an audible sigh. That, at least, is what the subtext suggests while the text proclaims its lofty ideals: enlightened beings neither dwell in the past nor fantasize about the future. They live spontaneously in the present and in so doing avoid discriminating between likes and dislikes. For them, every side of “Chung-shan mountain” and the “Chin River” is the ‘right side.’ Physical location is irrelevant. Conscious engagement is everything. I, for one, find it a bit ironic, then, that Shōchi employs reclusive/religious imagery at the expense of worldly/secular imagery; an unbalanced composition overall, his work’s structural and communicative flaws, I’d argue, reflect those of the institution (if we may think of it as archetypical of the Gozan’s corpus). His allusions to Wang An-Shih and Du Fu feel like placeholders in a repurposed kōan, lazy grasps at sophistication that amount to nothing more than another ‘mountains and rivers’ cliché, another weak entry in the long, prestigious line of Chinese imitations, rather than, as they should be, bridges between dualities, between reclusive and worldly, religious and secular, symbols.

Perhaps it’s unfair to treat a small handful of artists—no matter how influential—as the ‘collective spirit’ of an entire institution, of two-hundred-plus years of Japanese culture, for doing so seems to deny a rich panoply of voices its due. (History has a habit of favoring the few.) However, in this case, it’s difficult not to, since purple and red robed monks, the Gozan hierarchy, heavily edited and at times omitted, from official compilations, the ‘radical’ and ‘amateurish’ works of black robed monks and rinka abbots, those of little to no status, to preserve the so-called ‘dignity and character’ of Rinzai Zen. Gozan leaders, in other words, wittingly and unwittingly created an old boy network that promoted a romanticized, diluted, Zen aesthetic because it was commercially and politically expedient to do so: wealthy laymen and government officials favored ‘complex’ (intellectual/masculine) over ‘simple’ (emotional/feminine) works. They preferred a classical over modern ethos, an idealistic over realistic portrayal of the teachings. Simply put, classical Chinese Ch’an was in vogue; modern Japanese Zen was not. And Gozan leaders aimed to please. If they didn’t, their patrons would’ve disappeared and left them to support themselves. They would’ve really had to live the austere lifestyle that they romanticized in verse. To be fair, the institution was more complicated than it sometimes appears. Daigaku Shūsū, for instance, a very influential abbot, serves as an example of a poet, with an unpopular aesthetic, who passed the gauntlet unscathed, either because he was genuinely respected in the art community or because his high status served as a buffer against potential critics. (During his brief tenure as chief abbot, he often enjoyed the honor of composing the first verse on new shigajiku.) Regardless of the reasons why his work survived, we must nevertheless contend with it because it is a conspicuous outlier in the Gozan corpus. In his jueju “Response to Daishū Shūchō’s ‘Distant Thoughts Across Rivers and Skies’,” translated by Arthur Waley, he weighs in on the ‘reclusive vs. worldly’ debate and offers an unromantic, yet accurate, depiction of the Zen path—

In recent years men of character do not prefer the mountains;

Many speak of the ‘great recluse’ who resides at court.

This solitary hut of bamboo rafters beneath a towering pine:

What gentleman has made his residence near this watery inlet? (252)—

which, at first glance, seems opinionated and judgmental, but, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a string of objective statements ‘clinched’ with a question that feels both rhetorical and forthright. Historical context aside, it’s quite an enigma—a powerful, albeit subtle, mix of empty registers from the mind of an elder statesman. (I say ‘mind,’ not ‘heart,’ because it sings with downturned eyes, as if reciting a plagiarized piece before an unknowing crowd. No one would call it ‘liberating,’ ‘rapturous,’ ‘sublime,’ etc. It lacks personality.) Beside Shōchi’s purple verse, it’s brown sackcloth. But outer garments matter less than what they conceal, for a dragonstone lies beneath the humble exterior. Thematically, stylistically, linguistically, there’s nothing extravagant or gratuitous about the piece, except maybe the not-so subtle allusion to Po Chü-i’s eight-century marvel “The Half-Recluse,” but it does, more importantly, join the chorus of past masters. We must of course consider the tremendous debt it owes its predecessor. Before getting into that, though, I’d like to examine what the text is saying and how it’s saying it, since these factors, in my opinion, are more relevant to my claim at the moment. In line one the ‘disembodied speaker’ asserts that times have changed, that “men of character [Zen monks] do not prefer the mountains.” This would seem to imply that they prefer society—i.e., courts and temples. Line two should, ideally, support this notion and maintain the tenor of the original text; instead, Waley makes it sing off-key and complicates the simple reading, the logical interpretation, by enclosing “great recluse” in scare quotes, thus adding an element of sarcasm to a uniformly stoic delivery. The tonal conflict here suggests a more refined, quiet ethos than that revealed by Shōchi’s crude bombast: in highlighting the inherent connection between dualities and preferences, it explores the prospect of a view beyond the extremes of nature and society, reclusion and immersion, glorification and profanation. It asks, ‘Why should an enlightened master prefer one place over another? Shouldn’t he or she be more adaptable, fluid—abiding nowhere but within the Void of daily existence?’ (Shōchi asks us nothing, tells us nothing, and thus teaches us nothing except what not to do. Why? Because he fails to consider the practical relationship between master/speaker and disciple/reader: he does not engage with us or even himself, only the aesthetic limitations of the form. He ‘oversells and underpays.’) In spite of its understated style and lack of ambition, then, the piece achieves a higher purpose than that of the previous one by expressing the Way through negation—not by talking about it or presuming to through the close proximity of foreign texts, but by actively facilitating a dialogue between history and philosophy, art and religion. Negation, however, is only one half of the tail side of the mutual-dependency coin. It does not exist without its Siamese twin: affirmation. Shūsū, in the first couplet, critiques his peers by refuting the reclusive/worldly dichotomy, but fails to offer us the reclusive–worldly monochotomy. He suppresses his personality and thus neglects his own experience.

The interplay of structure and content is key to unlocking the poem. Rather than inserting a lyrical description of the landscape in the first couplet, as custom dictates, Shūsū inverts the ‘natural’ order, rendering it in the second couplet—a rather unconventional move that challenges entire generations of Zen thought by questioning nature’s soteric value. In other words, he reignites a centuries old debate. However, he doesn’t take sides in the debate, as we would expect him to, but instead plays off the ambiguity of “gentleman”; within the form’s newly extended (or, from a purist perspective, distorted) parameters, we cannot tell whether the speaker, a high-ranking monk, identifies with the subject or not, if the question he poses is rhetorical or forthright, and must therefore assume neither (negation) or both (affirmation), which, in refuting all logic, suggests a paradox in tune with the Zen ideal of complete freedom. This ‘positionless position’ implies the transcendence of ego: beyond a static sense of self, an enlightened individual lives in perfect harmony with his or her surroundings, recognizing the interdependency of all sentient and non-sentient beings. There’s no intrinsic difference, in other words, between a recluse, monk, or lay person. Monks, however, benefit from trafficking between reclusive and worldly surroundings, ‘realms’ or “residence[s],” and therefore experience, in varying degrees, their unity. This is hinted at by the aforementioned structural inversion as well as the juxtaposition of wild and domestic images (e.g., “mountains” and “court”; “pine” and “hut”). ‘Our religious and secular lives comprise dual aspects of a single reality,’ the poem says, evoking the apt metaphor of an “inlet,” that is, a narrow passageway between two peninsulas. ‘Do not immerse yourself in one more than the other. Embrace both equally.’ Po Chü-i once said something similar, though with much more panache: “The great recluse lives in market and court; / The small recluse hides in thickets and hills… / Far better to be a half-recluse, / And hermitize in a liaison job!” Unlike Shūsū, though, he offers a middle path between extremes, between things both “great” and “small,” the worlds of “market and court” and “thickets and hills,” and moves beyond affirmation and negation to consider non-affirmation and non-negation, the head side of the mutual-dependency coin. ‘Liberation is fun,’ he says. ‘Don’t take life too seriously.’ Such individuals are rare. They ‘fit in’ anywhere, with anyone, because their non-actions (e.g., silences, thoughts) and actions (e.g., sounds, deeds) mirror those of the universal. We would not be mistaken to think the “half-recluse” a synonym for an ‘enlightened being,’ as the term expresses the mental fluidity necessary to embrace present reality, since he or she can be likened to the proverbial glass—which is neither half full nor half empty, but both—an inseparable flux of potentiality, tĭ, 體 (reality revealed in non-action), and actuality, yòng, 用 (reality manifested in action). The half-recluse, then, is an autonomous human being fully conscious of the perspectival dissonance between the individual and universal. Rather than viewing the eccentric recluse/inja genre as an emotional spate or intellectual pose, as an opportunity to depict beauty or capture sublimity from a mythic ‘outsider’ perspective, we may benefit from considering it through a non-dualistic ‘insider’ lens: Zen poetry achieves its potent—i.e., timeless, cross-cultural—form of expression through a unique balance of sentiment and experience.

The responsibility of a Zen master–poet is to guide disciple–readers toward a deeper understanding of the teachings, to transmit emptiness according to his or her linguistic and extralinguistic capacities. Gozan poets, at least in their verse, often failed to properly articulate or express a profound meditational experience—a ‘flower-and-moon-enchanted’ sensibility or ‘practice–realization,’ like Saigyō or Dōgen respectively—either because they omitted personal sentiments and experiences, or because they favored one at the expense of the other. Their poetic stinginess, in essence, hindered the tradition’s diffusion. Most East Asian scholars consider the Muromachi period an ‘artistic renaissance,’ second only to the T’ang dynasty, due to its prodigious output: if quantity were the sole measure of an era’s glory, then I’d have to agree; however, as I mentioned earlier, we scrutinize quantity under the light of quality, not the other way around. In spite of its overwhelming influence, then, the Gozan corpus makes a minor contribution to Zen art—overall, a pretty vacuous affair, like the post-aught fame of Paris Hilton. (I’m being generous here.) History proves that the majority of timeless, cross-cultural works do not manifest in the midst of zeitgeists but in the subtle transitions between them—that is, when one generation of thought asserts its independence, no matter how mythic or illusory, over ‘tradition’ and thus creates a new mode, or modes, of expression (i.e., ethos). In other words, strong poets do not recreate the proverbial wheel. They merely keep it spinning. Ikkyū, however, is a rare exception to this rule, since he innovated in the midst of a ‘dark age’ (in the qualitative, not quantitative, sense) of Japanese Buddhist literature; he changed the color of the wheel, so to speak, adding fresh layers of vermillion to what had become, over many centuries, a rather lackluster surface, communicating Zen ideals through an emotionally resonant, earthy voice (which many Buddhists, then and now, misinterpret as the desirous indulgency of a ‘disgraced’ poet–monk): his oeuvre evinces a quantum leap in Zen poetics, one comparable to the shift from the industrial revolution to information age. We therefore cannot credit his work, as we can with that of others, solely to the time in which he lived. He is, like everyone else, a ‘product of his environment,’ but to a much lesser extent. It is difficult to account for this phenomenon, for a poet of this caliber. Perhaps something more is at play. (Genius—a vague concept Bloom unsuccessfully rescued from charges of ‘elitism,’ ‘exceptionalism,’ ‘canonical cronyism,’ etc.—comes to mind.) Aesthetic genius, I argue, is quantifiable, though not through the limiting means of an Aristotelian ‘either/or’ logic or Freudian dialectic presupposing the existence of a tripartite ego-consciousness; it can only be measured by its adherence to a rubric of communicative efficiency—through perspectival harmony (the individual and universal), structural coherence (potentiality and actuality), and thematic accord (sentiment and experience), i.e., the sum of the poet’s ‘essence’—the extensity and intensity with which he or she transmits non-discriminatory wisdom. To truly appreciate the significance of Ikkyū’s contribution to Zen poetry and Japanese art, to understand how he collapses the fourth wall between speaker and reader, we must focus on the point where he breaks with tradition and his contemporaries. I find the creative dissonance of the pre– and post–enlightenment years, the early and later works, quite telling in this regard, since it evinces a lifelong conflict with tradition that cannot be attributed to a radical shift in social consciousness: the Muromachi period, although defined by great political unrest, was a time of cultural stagnation and yes-manism. (Japan had been increasingly isolating itself from the rest of the world and stressing the importance of a ‘hive mentality.’) To understand this dynamic, to envision an aesthetic that influenced the nation well into modernity, and to do so in the midst of a complacent, rather mediocre, era is nothing less than astounding.

I will explain what I mean through an explication of two jueju from Ikkyū’s Kyounshu— Covell’s translation of “Daily Work (#285)” and Messer & Smith’s translation of “Ode to the Brothel (#144).” (The former represents the pre–enlightenment years, whereas the latter represents the post–enlightenment years.) We’ll start with the earlier text:

Daily work means thinking about meditation,

Pulling the bow, or shooting the barbarian.

Kill the Buddha! Kill the Patriarchs!

The Devil has lost this convert. (37)

Although conventional in diction and structure, and lacking in depth, a youthful Ikkyū distinguishes himself from the Gozan herd with a wide, albeit uncontrolled, tonal range. He’s a natural in that sense. The poem’s disembodied but ever-present source, the ‘ghostly’ speaker, which whispers in the white noise of lines one through three, until announcing itself in the “this” of line four, sounds equally contemplative, as it does snarky, with an ethos evocative of the ancient Chinese masters preserved in kōan collections—i.e., Pi-yen lu/Hekigan-roku (Blue Cliff Records) and Wu-men kuan/Mumon-kan (The Gateless Gate)—many of whom were known for their eccentric behavior and unorthodox views. This is a provocative stance for a Zen poet–monk to take, especially one of no influence, but it is nonetheless a posture, an honest experiment in falsus animus that attempts to enact or embody a foreign voice, and achieves such, though only at the level of language and style, not ethos, thus making it a wholly unoriginal product; a stereotype constituted, in Barthesian parlance, by a “necrosis of language,” meaning the poet’s ‘indifference’ (to his art’s original nature as language) reveals the ugly machinations of his ideology (borrowed in this case) and, worse, muffles any emotional resonance emitting from his instinctual style, while undermining the aftereffects of his ‘authority’ (that is, his ability to express emptiness, to bridge the gap or develop a relationship between speaker and reader). In other words, persona writing, although well-intentioned, is an inherently ‘dishonest’ mode of writing that, no matter how well executed, obliterates the original substance, or tone, of the poet’s voice, thereby inviting the reader to question the authenticity of its content, its ‘lived experience.’ Ikkyū, then, in aping the words and attitude of an ‘eccentric Zen master,’ shows an understanding of theory as well as a misunderstanding of application (a substantive privation easily overlooked in more traditional lyric modes); his attempt to dazzle readers through the sheer will of raw talent merely highlights the profundity of his inexperience as a child prodigy and neglected genius-in-making. The first couplet mimics the piousness of a ‘good monk,’ criticizing, in line one, Sōtō’s emphasis on ‘silent illumination’ (which he characterizes as “thinking about meditation”) before championing, in line two, Rinzai’s emphasis on ‘lightning technique’ (which he describes as “[p]ulling the bow, or shooting the barbarian”) as a means of asserting the latter’s ‘expediency’ and, by implication, ‘supremacy’ over the former. It’s an unenlightened sentiment, however, since true masters—emotionally, if not physically—transcend secular loyalties. They may, in respecting tradition, acknowledge the pedagogical merits or flaws of each sect, but their personal form of expression should subsume them, like a sword forged from the raw material of plundered ordnance.

The first couplet reveals a swordsman who handicaps himself by wielding his blade with one hand instead of gripping it with both, in essence, rendering it an extension of his arm rather than his whole body or inner being. Ikkyū’s perspective at this point is that of a senior monk, an advanced student. Hence he reduces “[d]aily work” to thoughts and actions, not realizing the other half of the equation—that is, non-thinking and non-action—and thus fails to adequately express the Way of meditation and archery, of mundane existence, which, as I’ve mentioned throughout this chapter, reveals itself only through a one-pointed concentration: enlightened beings don’t think about meditation while meditating, they just meditate—likewise with their daily affairs, their chores and studies, since these, too, are forms of meditation. They don’t pull and release the bow (theorize about the teachings); they pull and release themselves with the bow (manifest the teachings). They neither shoot the barbarian (forsake tradition) nor miss the barbarian (venerate tradition), but become the barbarian (revitalize tradition or perpetuate its essence). (FYI: Ancient Chinese monks referred to Bodhidharma, the first Patriarch of Zen, as ‘The Barbarian from the West.’ Perhaps they found it endearing in the same way American drill sergeants do ‘maggots’….) Saying otherwise implies a false separation between subject and object, individual and universal. What truly makes the poem special, in my opinion, that which echoes the genius of later works, is the transition from the first to second couplet, where a conventional exposition of the teachings turns into a ‘direct address’ of the reader—a subtle shift simulating the fluidity of a master’s practice–realization and teaching methods (e.g., clarifying, obscuring, removing, mirroring, etc.). The proverbial line between peace and wrath seems too thin to persist as a barrier between opposing emotions. Simply put, the shift brings enough attention to itself for us to question the distinctiveness of all emotional states. Call me crazy, but the manic volley feels so organic here that it makes one wonder if mental illness, like physical illness, isn’t more ‘normal’ than we care to admit, and if sanity’s anything more than an ideal, since much of the human condition, of social encounters and pacts, revolves around mating rituals and resources, which, in our participation of and yearning for, often give way to turbulent emotions. (Zen focuses, in part, on the management of those emotions.) ‘Don’t be attached to anything and you’ll be free of everything,’ the subtext says in a line by line cascade of registers—whisper, murmur, shout, and hush. It’s a powerful crescendo. I’m ambivalent about Ikkyū’s manner of achieving this effect, though, for it’s the product of an affect rather than a pure expression (lived experience), the third line borrowing heavily from a kōan preserved in Chüan 11 of The Transmission of the Lamp:

…Linchi left Master Huang-po [his teacher] and arrived at the Pagoda of the Bear’s Ear [the place where Bodhidharma was buried]. The director of the pagoda asked him to whom he would first bow, the [First] Patriarch [of Zen] or the [historical] Buddha [Siddharthā]?

‘I will bow to neither,’ was Linchi’s answer.

‘What hostility is this that exists between Buddha and the Patriarch and you, O sir, that you do not want to bow to either of them?’

Waving his wide sleeves, Linchi left the pagoda. (Chang 120)

By refusing to bow to the statues of Bodhidharma and Siddharthā, Linchi (Rinzai) expresses his transcendence of the discriminatory mind, of negation and affirmation; he conveys the same message in two ways, employing tĭ through sound (i.e., “I will bow to neither”) and yòng through silence (i.e., “waving his wide sleeves”) in order to ‘kill’ his idols and demonstrate his mastery. To be clear, Ikkyū, like the founder of his sect, harbors no hostility against ancient masters, and thus exhibits no malice toward them, when he says, figuratively, “Kill the Buddha! Kill the Patriarch!”, for his ‘profane’ language merely conveys a sense of urgency necessary to overcome material and immaterial attachments, secular and religious inhibitions. Awakening, then, is a personal enterprise; tradition, like any other attachment, an obstacle on the path to enlightenment. Or, at least, it can be. Nevertheless the seemingly arbitrary presence of the Rinzai allusion suggests that he understands the theoretical significance of Zen, of emptiness, yet fails to express its linguistic application—that is, to provide literary evidence of an experience similar to Rinzai’s—because the encoded sentiment of the text, the kōan’s ‘message,’ remains foreign to him: his current mode of expression lacks authenticity inasmuch as the stylistic flair or ease with which he conveys his understanding is not his own. (The poem, like its Gozan peers, draws an invisible line between ‘thought’ and ‘feeling.’) Ideally, his mode of expression and style should reflect/influence each other. But that is just an ideal at this point, as his ethos and personality seem to clash more than they harmonize (something we know only in relation to later works). To be clear about the unclear, Ikkyū tries to demonstrate his independence from tradition … by mimicking Rinzai’s style. How ironic that this contradiction should elude him!

The second couplet reveals a swordsman who lacks the will to slay his idols, a highly talented individual who has yet to discover his own genius. More pertinently for us, however, it provides an early example of Ikkyū’s experimentation with free indirect discourse—an important, though unsuccessful, experiment that evinces an attempt to not only embody the teachings, to convey its essence through language, but to consider the tenuous relationship between speaker and reader. Free indirect discourse, it seems, is his reflexive mode of linguistic articulation, or self-expression, his natural remedy for logic’s poison. For him, art isn’t a matter of intellect, of intent, but of instinct, chance. We don’t overhear his work so much as it overhears us; while assuming the pose, the conceit, of an enlightened being, one whose every utterance echoes being–time, he unconsciously reverberates our own misgivings about Zen. The internal conflict here is palpable. Tonally, he juxtaposes two extremes, a shout and a hush, but fails to blend them—that is, to find, or reconcile, the shared meaning of those contrasting sounds (thus making the lines feel like non-sequiturs). Line four superficially coheres with line three through an invocation of Rinzai’s nickname, “The Devil” (known as such for his harsh disposition), yet fails, as I just mentioned, to provide evidence of tĭ or yòng, thereby undermining the climax, the crescendo, of the entire composition. That being said, the final line—“The Devil has lost this convert”—feels like a breezy poeticism on par with that of its Gozan peers. Like the lines preceding it, it assumes a style, a voice, untethered by experience, conveying its sentiments through an impersonal mode of expression. (Convention denies the first-person pronoun and, with it, any inkling of authority). At this point it’s impossible to tell if the informal discourse of the preceding line continues or shifts into a more formal, subjective, discourse. Perhaps it does a little bit of both. Maybe “[d]evil” is synonymous with maya (illusion)—more specifically, passion. ‘I have transcended my desires,’ the speaker claims in a stiff superhero voice, his black robes billowing in the wind like a cape. ‘Since being enlightened, I’ve ended my bromance with Rinzai and put on my big boy pants. I’ve become my own master.’ So he’s beyond the sway of influence now. Sure, sure. But we must ask, in spite of our awe that things hold together, How did we go from the ‘ills of influence’ to ‘the ills of desire’ in the space of a single line break? In my humble opinion Ikkyū’s lack of personal depth stems from his misinterpretation of mutual- dependency, emptiness. I will now bend him over my knee and spank him three times (since he’s yet to earn the shippei stick): one, “lost” (a synonym for ‘delusion’) cannot be employed without “found” (a synonym for ‘enlightenment’), for doing so affirms the notion of ‘acquired enlightenment’ (lost and found/before and after), while denying that of ‘original enlightenment’ (lost–found/before–after), which is the same as treating reality as two states of being (‘delusion and enlightenment’) instead of one (‘delusion–enlightenment’); two, “this” should never be used in the spatial sense (e.g., in reference to a self), only in the temporal sense (e.g., in reference to a moment), for doing so affirms the existence of a static identity or transcendental soul, while denying that of a fluid identity or ephemeral body, which is the same as treating reality as two aspects of being (‘substance and appearance’) instead of one (‘substance–appearance’); and, three, there is nothing to “convert” to (or from), only to ‘realize,’ to ‘express,’ to ‘be.’ Enlightened beings don’t distinguish between the sacred and profane. They don’t run from their demons. They embrace them. Although the agility of Ikkyū’s self-expression, the freedom of his innate music, gives the impression that he’s enlightened, it’s obvious, upon serious scrutiny, that he’s a bloviator—albeit an extraordinarily talented one—overestimating his powers of thought and hiding behind a façade, an ideal of ‘excellence,’ because he’s yet to discover the value in cultivating his imperfections. He’s still a slave to the secular distinctions of a novice monk—i.e., ‘acquired enlightenment’ (Rinzai) and ‘original enlightenment’ (Sōtō)—and the romantic lore of spiritual transformations, namely, those beyond the bounds of space–time. Self-mastery, though, as he eventually learns, demands nothing more than a willingness to shift one’s perspective in accord with one’s present reality.

We don’t usually encounter a Zen master’s juvenilia. It’s a rare treat, then, to study Ikkyū’s development as a poet–monk, since doing so allows us to know/feel the innerworkings of his unique ethos and to see reflections of ourselves in him. Like us, he, too, was a tremendously flawed human being. He experienced turbulent emotions and succumbed to the intoxicating sway of his desires. He made mistakes. That he was unashamed to admit this, even to embrace it, in his later works, serves as a testament to his personal integrity and his dedication to (future) readers. At great expense to his reputation (then and now), he chose uncomfortable truths over comfortable lies. Transparency over opacity. Honesty over mystery. What distinguishes him from his contemporaries, however, beside a unique emotive range, is his modal polyphony. Every poem unveils manifold voices, perspectives—all of which, without feeling forced or artsy, complement and contrast as they resonate on the page—thus making it impossible to separate his emotional intelligence from his spiritual pleasure from his aesthetic genius, as we see in the following verse:

Beautiful woman, cloud and rain, love’s deep river.

Old Zen Pavilion Monk, up in the pavilion singing.

I have such refined passion for hugging and kissing.

My mind doesn’t say: the world is a fire, give up your body. (Messer & Smith 29)

Unlike the earlier work, there’s nothing conventional about this one; it evinces a wide tonal range, like its predecessor, yet concentrates that range through a lyric intensity typically unachieved in regulated verse. It exudes the power of a Zen master’s freedom, the spontaneity of the ‘mirror mind.’ Although confined by the two-dimensional space of the page, Ikkyū paints a vivid enough picture—a motion picture?—to freely leap into the third-dimension of the reader’s mind–body complex, his or her psychophysiological constitution. Simply put, his poetry smashes its own ‘frame’ (i.e., the fourth wall). Before appreciating this effect, however, we must first understand, through a micro-/macro-analysis, how content and structure influence each other in order to create it. Every line, for instance, situates itself with an imperial sweep, asserting its own value while regulating the whole—the content of which stands in stark contrast to that of “Daily Work.” Rather than talk around the controversial subject of sex or, to be more precise, fornication, whether through allusion or preaching, Ikkyū (the ‘speaker’ no longer functioning as an intermediary between poet and reader) directly addresses it. He not only addresses it but takes things a step further by gratifying his fervor, his sensual nature, and composing a ‘transgressive cadenza,’ a yin–yang of sacred and profane elements. O, the humanity! It’s funny and tragic and sublime. We can picture him wandering across a torch-lit bridge, entering a brothel in his monastic robes (he, unlike his peers, kept his on until the ‘holy moment’), discussing private matters with the madam over a warm cup of sake, bowing to a giggling, yet intrigued, woman before following her upstairs, to a private room, to revel in his, ahem, action Zen. (FYI: Some of his disciples held that he reserved special affection for the least popular geishas—that is, the heavy-set, the weathered, and unagreeable—not because he pitied them, but because he genuinely found them more interesting than their conventionally attractive coworkers. After all, they were outcasts like his mother, like him. Many will disagree, I’m sure, but his relationship to women was very progressive; by openly associating with women, especially those whom society considered disgraceful, he essentially treated them as equals and thereby violated Muromachi Japan’s strict code of conduct—specifically, its patriarchal system—since women, in those days, were regarded as little more than property. We can therefore consider him the first Zen master feminist….) Typically, we think of the ‘oldest business’ as an ‘impure’ enterprise, as something demeaning of women and unworthy of religious men; however, it’s clear by the first line that he does not subscribe to this ideology, for the relations he shares with women are as consensual and affectionate as any formed through nuptial harmony: when “love’s deep river” flows, literally and figuratively, between two people (in this case, a poet–monk and prostitute) the act of intercourse becomes a powerful expression of mutual-dependency or emptiness—a physical means of merging a symbolic ‘self’ (man) and ‘other’ (woman). Neither men nor women can procreate by themselves. Both genders are therefore necessary to preserve the human species, which would surely end if everyone became a monk or nun and refused to do the ‘horizontal shuffle.’ The physical unity of masculine and feminine energies thus embodies the interplay of ‘being’ and ‘nonbeing,’ ‘life’ and ‘death.’ Everything and nothing. Moreover, the penetrative act consummates an emotional bond (i.e., love: unconditional attentiveness to another’s wants and/or needs), a social epoxy as precious, ubiquitous, and ephemeral as “cloud[s] and rain” (traditional symbols, in Buddhist literature, of a deluded mind). According to Ikkyū, through proper understanding, our ardent desires, myriad ‘delusions,’ do not obscure the clear skies of our enlightenment. Sex, then, for him, is a natural rite, a path of self-sacrifice (not -denial), no different, in intent or outcome, than the improvisatory flow of shared song or dance. Our most potent art form may in fact be ‘the way of orgasm’: many monks deny it its due, choosing instead to (figuratively) make love to rocks and trees, but not Crazy Cloud aka Dream Boudoir the “Old Zen Pavilion Monk.” Nope. He’s … different. ‘If you’re looking for a true master,’ he says through rubicund cheeks, ‘you’ll find him in Kyoto,’ “up in the pavilion singing.” His words may seem vulgar, gratuitously erotic, until of course we ask ourselves: what else should one do in a brothel, in a beautiful ‘pavilion,’ but ‘sing’ (a double dysphemism)? Does such an act differ in any significant way than others that require our total awareness, our loving attention—e.g., daily activities such as gardening, cooking, writing, etc.? Ikkyū isn’t trying to be scandalous at all. He’s simply conveying life-as-is and sharing a lived experience with the reader. According to Master Kiangsi Tao-i, “All our daily activities—walking, standing, sitting, lying down—all response to situations, our dealings with circumstances as they arise: all this is Tao” (Chang 130). By expressing his sensuality, instead of suppressing it, Ikkyū transcends the religious/secular dichotomy; sharing his entire being with another human makes his mind and body fade into a brief moment of eternity. In the midst of coital bliss—something akin to tantric meditation—he transcends the dualistic impetus, hence reconciling the individual and universal in toto: thus the ‘little death’ reminds him of The Big One, while imbuing him with a sense of urgency necessary to live fully (in the qualitative and quantitative sense), to find ‘heaven on earth.’

The transition between the first and second couplet is, at least to my eye and ear, both seamless and jarring. It coheres as much as it disrupts. Content informs structure while structure informs content. Both are employed to their total capacity, though in service of a perfectly imbalanced composition. I find this noteworthy because we, as modern readers, are often inclined to take the close relationship or creative intimacy between creator and creation for granted, meaning we usually, though not always, treat the poem as a reflection of the poet’s heart and mind. We hold that poets become themselves through their poetry, that poems cannot be detached from their poets. (For scholars of medieval and classical verse, ‘The Death of the Author’ holds minimal sway. Fiction’s a different story, however, an expanding universe currently lorded over by the grinning ghost of Barthes et al.) To be fair, though, and speak only for myself, I first read “Old Zen Pavilion Monk” as another one of Ikkyū’s many personae—another nickname like Jun, Blind Donkey, Bed-wetting Imp, etc.—until arriving at the “I” in line three and realizing I was wrong (yet also right). But let’s clarify this elegant prattle. “Pavilion Monk” has two dimensions, three if we include its combined effect on the reader; being half-sobriquet half-allusion, tĭ and yòng, it juxtaposes first and third person pronouns (i.e., “I” and “Pavilion Monk”) to highlight the mutual-dependency or emptiness of the individual and universal. In communing with paradox, then, Ikkyū claims he is at once himself and the ancient monk who, according to an old kōan, became enlightened after stopping to adjust his legging strap and hearing a woman singing from the balcony of a wine pavilion: “Since you are heartless[/mindless] already, I too will stop” (Messer & Smith 24). ‘Life is short and sweet; death, long and bitter. Let’s forsake our false distinctions, our regrets and aspirations, our costumes and masks, and live solely in the here and now.’ Like the original Pavilion Monk, he too became enlightened through the relationship of sound and silence; however, he, unlike his more modest precursor, was a loyal customer, sustaining a love of sake parlors and brothels well into his autumn years, which suggests he viewed them as a means, rather than an end, to conscious living. In other words, ‘unsavory’ locales provided him more opportunities to deepen his enlightenment than ‘wholesome’ settings ever could, so he decided to take advantage of them, to enjoy his practice–realization, to be human. Why should we deprive ourselves of pleasure? The body, he declares, is a natural vessel of the teachings, no less worthy of praise than the mind. Life brings change. As we mature our thoughts develop in tandem with our experience; our interiority becomes less egocentric (assuming one’s chemically-balanced). However, we tend to develop our emotional intelligence (i.e., compassion: a feeling unrestricted by, yet still sensible of, personal consideration) at the expense of our physical intelligence, our spiritual pleasure. What a waste of Mother Nature’s gift—warm, moist, pulsing flesh! Ikkyū captures this sentiment best when he sings, “I have such refined passion for hugging and kissing.” It seems he’s a dirty old devil who’s forged his sword in the flowery flames of passion’s kiln. Shame eludes him. As well it should. If the world’s a ‘burning house of desire,’ as Siddharthā once suggested in his famous parable “The Loving Father and Three Sons”—a brief exposition, alluded to in the last line, of the master (father) and disciple (son) relationship—then the only appropriate response is to immerse ourselves in that reality and burn with a spiritual passion. We must “[c]ompletely turn toward death” and feel “released from everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing in [us]” because “[Zen] is not the cessation of action, but rather penetration directly into action: it is thus that we fulfill the process of self-realization” (Camus 59; Chang 129). The first couplet expresses yòng, whereas the second expresses tĭ. Both, however, merge in the “I,” thematically and structurally, suggesting that the point of awakening isn’t to escape from the human condition but to accept it on nature’s terms—that is, to transmute individual passion into universal compassion. ‘To embrace every aspect of your animal existence is to be enlightened.’ This isn’t a poetics of romantic nihilism (Qian, Bai, and Kang) or soteric environmentalism (Saigyō and Dōgen), five stylistic variations of the same ethos (i.e., escapism); it’s a poetics of ‘absurd freedom/passion’ (Camus’ coinage, not my own) insofar as it refuses to offer the reader an inhuman consolation. Hence Ikkyū’s art is “born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. It is lucid thought that provokes it, but in that very act that thought repudiates itself. It will not yield to the temptation of adding to what is described a deeper meaning that it knows to be illegitimate” (Camus 97). The road to excess, as Blake once suggested, leads to the palace of wisdom. Individual truth is universal truth. There is no higher meaning than that contained in the material body. According to the master, love’s deep river makes life worth living. To experience the truth, the whole truth, an absurd truth beyond purpose and reconciliation, we must baptize ourselves in its incendiary stream.

“If the nature of art is to bind the [universal] to the individual … it is even truer to judge the greatness of the absurd writer by the distance he is able to introduce between these two worlds. His secret consists in being able to find the exact point where they meet in their greatest disproportion” (Camus 138). By unifying the individual and universal, which is possible only when the work feels deeply personal yet relatable, a truly absurd writer collapses the fourth wall between poet and reader. On one level, Ikkyū’s art pushes against the tendency to diminish the individual (for the sake of achieving a collective ideal) and, on another, expresses the universal through a wide range of emotions (rather than an abundance of sophisticated ideas/literary devices). According to John Stuart Mill, in “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,”

[t]he difference … between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind, is that, in the latter, with however bright a halo of feeling the thought may be surrounded and glorified, the thought itself is always the conspicuous object; while the poetry of a poet is feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its expression. In the one, feeling waits upon thought; in the other, thought upon feeling. The one writer has a distinct aim, common to him with any other didactic author: he desires to convey the thought, and he conveys it clothed in the feelings which it excites in himself, or which he deems most appropriate to it. The other merely pours forth the overflowing of his feelings; and all the thoughts which those feelings suggest are floated promiscuously along the stream. (14)

Ikkyū—at least by this standard—has a “naturally poetic mind[/heart].” Rather than subordinating his feelings to his mind, as logic dictates, he lets his emotions influence his thoughts and method of conveyance. This is a much different approach than that exhibited by his contemporaries, many of whom, due to social pressures and the mistaken belief that enlightened beings do not, or should not, experience emotions, eradicated all traces of feeling from their work. (Saigyō and Dōgen, unlike the Gozan poets, convey emotion, yet do so through symbolic association, structural variation, and sonic texture—the combined effect of which feels like an overflowing of sensation from the communal reservoir of lived experience; however, their method of conveyance yields the fruits of mental labor, of craftsmanship, rather than emotional range or depth, genius. Such effects, in other words, are affects.) Instead of transmitting his experience though the material totality of nature, as most Zen poets do, he employs the more expedient, albeit controversial, means of spiritual eroticism by treating passion as a legitimate expression of the Way, and thereby challenges closed systems of thought and morality at odds with the abject—i.e., symbols of death: everything related to sexuality, criminality, abnormality, etc.—which the Gozan institution/aristocracy certainly was, since it promoted the ideal of a homogenous, ‘virtuous,’ society to the laity/underclass, while secretly experimenting with its opposite behind closed doors. Simply put, he acknowledges the reality of human imperfection and institutional hypocrisy by embracing it in his art. According to Michael Ryan in Literary Theory, “excess … must be restrained if a culture of repression and an economy of limited utility is to operate successfully. This notion applies also to language, since an excess of possible meanings must be repressed if logic and reason are to use it successfully to establish meaning and truth” (70). Ikkyū’s oeuvre undoubtedly challenges logic, the way we establish meaning or truth through the construct of language, because it presents—if not champions—the material ‘excess’ of an ‘alternative’ lifestyle; moderated by a unique ethos, however, it cannot be considered gratuitous or frivolous, for it conveys, through an organic amalgam of content and form, as well as through a seamless blend of emotionally resonant images and cadences, the nondiscriminatory wisdom inherent in his absurd passion. Ikkyū is a genius because he identified Muromachi Japan as another repressive, superficial culture and did so (sort of like Duchamp or Warhol) at a time when no one else had thought to, meaning he started an artistic revolution that altered the way we think of art as well as the human condition. Modernity still reflects the influence of his radical intuition.