Excerpt: January 02, 2020. THE ZEN REBELS: OBSCURE HERMITS AND EXISTENTIAL REFORMERS (PART 23). ZEN MYTHS: "THE HELL COURTESAN” (PART 2). A.Glass 2020
"...Unaware of the disposition of this particular monk, she offers Ikkyū a vegetarian meal, in which Ikkyū rejects only to request instead fish and sake. At that point Jigoku realizes something is amiss, as she begins to try and tempt Ikkyu, to see if he would be like the others that have come before her. She then summons a group of girls to be sent to Ikkyū, Jigoku then kneels behind a rice paper screen, to see if he is tempted and his character swayed towards her expectations. Instead, Ikkyū drinks more wine, whilst eating the fish meals provided, he then dances with the young woman in his attendance. Jigoku becomes more curious, then peers to have a closer look at the soiree and sees that Ikkyū is dancing with skeletons, she then quickly enters back into the room – as the dancing girl's return to their normality.
Other parts of the legend, also have Jigoku witness, in the middle of the night, Ikkyū vomit from too much wine, also bringing up the carp he had eaten. She sees then swim off into the lake below the brothel's veranda. Perturbed by these visions, in the early morning Jigoku vistits Ikkyu in his room and asks him if she was dreaming of the strange events she had witnessed, he then explains to her the Zen perspective of the body:
“When are we not in a dream? When are we not skeletons? We are all just skeletons wrapped with flesh patterned male and female. When our breath expires, our skin ruptures, our sex disappears, and superior and inferior are indistinguishable. Beneath the skin of the person we caress today, there is no more than a skeleton propping up the flesh. Think ab
out it! High and low, young and old, male and female: it is all the same. If you awaken to this one basic truth, you understand.”
A.Glass 2020
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