The Zen rebels: obscure hermits and existential reformers (part 11). Ikkyū Sōjun (part 2)

(“Hell Courtesan and Ikkyu” Kawanabe Kyosai, 1871-89 from www.intojapanwaraku.com) 

To view Ikkyū Sōjun as a purely maverick Zen monk, who had a high sex drive and fraught personality.  Is to trivialize aspects of environmental conditioning – that may or may not have lead to his famed exploits.  Even when referring to the process of his struggle as an illegitimate son of the Emperor Go-Komatsu and a mother that had to abandon him.  May not fully reveal the characteristics of a Zen Monk and poet who later, became a Master and Abbot (1447) of the Daitokuji.   Yet, one cannot overlook the lingering pain of separation from his mother and the knowledge that his father, or the shogun court, would have had him killed at early age –  to which hey perceived, in the paranoia of political struggle within Japan of the time, as a possible threat.  To be a direct aspect, that may have contributed to Ikkyū unique personality.  When at an early age he is drawn to the Otokan (an offshoot of Rinzai Zen)  monasteries, which more akin to rundown huts, to begin his training as a Zen monk.  To remain afar from what he felt was the corruption and Imperial favoritism of Zen in Japan within the 15th Century.  And it is from there, he tries to find a school that he feels he can settle into.  There is, which seems a common trait as viewed throughout the Zen linage of characteristically similar Ch'an and Zen monks/masters and poets from China and Japan – a relentlessness.

But, I wonder if trying to understand what shaped the iconoclastic  Zen Monk, who, from early age under the auspiciousness teaching of the Otokan Zen sect.  May, only glaze upon his personality like  a fumbled psychological profile, as a way of understanding these unorthodox actions of this fascinating Zen 'Master' and poet, which, in Zen terminology should be left to the obscure.  Zen Buddhism, as detailed  from its early stages of the 5th and 6th the Century's in China becomes firmly ingrained in Japanese culture during the 13th Century, with the Zen monasteries officially coming under shogunate control, thus the Five Mountain or Gozan System was firmly put in place. All, essentially, including the Sōtō Zen school, setting the precedence,  if you look at it as purely a structural mechanism of Zen in Japan, was to survive and maintain influence throughout the tumultuous political system of the warring states.  The problem of course, with all philosophical systems (throughout the world) and religious beliefs, is the power struggle to maintain that influence, which unfortunately under human weakness - corruption and favoritism also takes center stage.  Which only reconfirms Zen, in its structure both in China and Japan, that it rises and falls are in sync with the gain and losses of Dynasty's and Shogun control.  All suffering under the imprint of human folly.

Ikkyū, in his twenties, after leaving various Otokan Zen teachers, still unable to find a school that he felt represented the true meaning away from Zen becoming diluted via the Imperial Court.  The famed teacher Kaso, would be his final teacher and the only one that will grant him the inka (which Ikkyū rejected) of Zen enlightenment.  To practice as a Zen Master.  And we see this great satori for Ikkyū  played out in popular culture, even portrayed in a Manga style comic from 1997.   Ikkyu's meditating while sitting on a small fishing boat upon Lake Biwa, which ironically was the same place to which Ikkyu attempted suicide – in his years prior to seeking out his Master.   The Crow cawing in early evening, the sound, for Ikkyu, was the breaking down of all aspects of ones reality.  With that single focus.   He is able to penetrate the mind.    A mind, that has been shaped by his conditioning as a young boy into his adulthood that was able to maintain, albeit troubled, nonconformist mindset.  Even serving as a defiant fixture, rebelling against his Master.  But it is Ikkyū's rejection of Zen, which he embraces in its pure form.  As Kaso, becomes more and more irritated with Ikkyū, favoring a competitive monk named Yoso, certifying the inka to him.  Master Kaso in his dying days, continues admonishing Ikkyū right to the end of the old Master's life.

I feel, Ikkyū maintained this, what may appear a strange relationship with his Master, as a way of respect.  In which his dying Master also understood, that Ikkyū, within his odd and offhand behavior, was representing a true entity of Zen.  To the point, on his Master's final days assigning a heir to his school, was revealed by Master Kaso that the “mad one” (Ikkyū) would succeed him. Which never transpired, upon death, it was Yoso who became the heir to the school.  From that point onward, Ikkyū wanders. This is when we see, in this very human flaw of attaining influence through discourse for favor and power, Zen monks like Ikkyū became the true rebels of the Zen philosophy, reinstating and reaffirming the basic purpose of Zen, which, in all of its manifestation from the early teachings, is the search for meaning to understand the Buddha Nature – although taught that its manifests through the self, it also may never be found.  As there is only the practice. Nothing else. And Ikkyū, as a lone poet and adhere of Zen, captures this meaning, within his own personal flaws, in such a flawless way.  

With the backdrop of the Japanese shogunate system embroiled in its power struggles and ensuring chaos, to which Japanese culture, throughout the Shogun and Imperial rule rely on for stability. Ikkyū begins to not only draw from his nonconformist ways, but he begins to break down aspects of established Zen as a harsh critic. To the point of re-configuring Zen under his own guise. This is where the iconoclastic rebel and Zen poet embraces sex, as not only a human pleasure, but also reinstates it further into understanding the nature of Buddhism and more importantly Zen. From here, in my opinion, Ikkyū possible aware of aspects of Esoteric Buddhism, begins to attach the tantric or the Vajrayana to Zen Buddhism.

Pushing to the forefront, sexuality.