The Zen rebels: obscure hermits and existential reformers (part 13). Ikkyū Sōjun (part 4)

(Images from https://terebess.hu/)

Ikkyū Sōjun skeletons probably holds more of a key or insight into this iconoclastic Zen monk‘s process of understating the Zen principles.  As he also fused his own rebellion against the Zen establishment using sex.  And it was also death, which resonated in such an obvious imprint on him as he wandered the countryside.  As discussed, Ikkyū, in his later years, witnesses the horrors of a nation at war with its self, the toppling of Shoguns, the various regions battling for control.  Famine and diseases.  All effecting the poor and destitute.  He was captivated by the skeleton, its form and what he believed represents within a Zen perspective.  And in a dream like state he recalls his conversations with the skeletons:

 “...All things emerge from the “emptiness.” Being  formless it is called “Buddha.” The Mind of Buddha, the  Buddhahood, the Buddha in our minds, Buddhas, Patriarchs, and  Gods are different names of this “emptiness,” and should you not  realize this you have fallen into the Hell of ignorance and false  imagination. According to the teaching of an enlightened man, the  way of no return is the separation from Hell and rebirth, and the  thought of so many people, whether related to me or not, passing  through reincarnations one after another, made me so melancholy,  I left my native place and wandered off at random,   I came to a small lonely temple. It was evening, when dew and tears   wet one’s sleeves, and I was looking here and there for a place  to sleep, but there was none. It was far from the highway, at the foot  Skeletons of a mountain, what seemed a Samadhi Plain. Graves were many,  and from behind the Buddha Hall there appeared a most miserable  looking skeleton, which uttered the following words:
       
 “The autumn wind           
Has begun to blow in this world;           
Should the pampas grass invite me,           
I will go to the moor,           
I will go to the mountain.           
What to do           
With the mind of a man           
Who should purify himself           
Within the black garment,           
But simply passes life by.”

This is the beginning of Ikkyū Sōjun's skeleton painted series with accompanying text.  Very much written in the Zen Buddhist pose, but very unique to Ikkyū's description of the dead, not essentially reincarnated in Buddhist karmic continuation, but rather a reanimation of form that has been stripped down from its material body – the biology.  To which Ikkyū viewed and saw constantly in his wanderings, was the skeleton, that neither had a male of female distinction.  This fascinated Ikkyū:

“...I went into the hall and spent the night  there, even lonelier than usual, unable to sleep.  Around dawn, as I dozed off a bit, in a dream I went  out behind the hall, and saw a crowd of skeletons all  acting in different ways, just like people in the world.  As I watched with a sense of wonder, some skeleton came up and said:

When it passes without a memory, this worthless body becomes a dream.         
If you divide the way of enlightenment  into Buddhas and Karma,  how can you enter the true path?           
As long as it travels the road of life in the present for a while, the corpse in the fields seems elsewhere.” 

When I look at Ikkyū's skeleton series, it reminds me of the French materialist philosopher and physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie (D1751) more so his "Man a Machine (1747)" philosophy, for its time when the Christian church divided the idea of man up into dual parts, a body and a soul.  It was a risky notion to suggest that the human being is machine like, in coordination with a mind.   It is this fascination with the body complex, the structure of human anatomy which Ikkyū also had.  And Zen, wittingly in its non-intellectual way in understanding the nature of existence, chooses not to create an unnecessary duality between body and mind, yet, Ikkyū', in my opinion, maybe in his own iconoclastic Zen Buddhist way separated, while at the same time bridged the dual aspects of the consciousness and the machinery of the body (similar to Julien Offray), breaking down to what is left when the human being dissolves into the Earth.  The structures underneath, although not entirely  a deterministic viewpoint,  Ikkyū saw the human as organized aspects via its skeleton structure – but reconciling a dilemma that yes we are machinery, in this fleeting and limited lifespan.  So therefor to not become attached to its bodily existence.  The skeleton offers a way of understanding that the bases of human existence is fundamentally infused with the consciousness, but as mentioned are separate, yet the same.    That even Ikkyū's skeleton phantom rejects the idea of self and body: 

“You must think it true; when the breath stops and the skin of the body comes apart, everyone turns out like this your body cannot live forever. A sign of how long is your time are the pines of Sumiyoshi planted before. Give up the mind that thinks there is a self; just go with the wind driving the floating cloud of the body, and come this way.  You want to live indefinitely, to the same age; you would really think so this is the same frame of mind. Since the world is a sleepless dream, in vain do people start awake upon seeing this.”  

Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481) died at the age of 87