Having Once Paused, Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (1394-1481) Read online

  Having Once Paused

  Poems of Zen Master Ikkyū (1394–1481)

  Translated by Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith

  UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

  Ann Arbor

  Copyright © by Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith 2015

  All rights reserved

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

  Published in the United States of America by

  the University of Michigan Press

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  2018 2017 2016 2015 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0-472–07256–9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978–0-472–05256–1 (paper)

  ISBN 978–0-472–12095–6 (e-book)

  for t.k. and s.t.

  only because of,

  impossible without

  Contents

  Translators’ Introduction

  A Note on the Word Fūryū, Translation, and the Art of Magic, by Traktung Yeshe Dorje

  The poems:

  I. Lineage

  II. Fūryū

  III. Hunger

  IV. Mori

  Notes and References

  Further Reading

  Authors

  Translators’ Introduction

  Ikkyū is unique in Zen for letting his love of all appearance occupy him until it destroys any possibility for safety or seclusion. In his poetry, he turns the eye of enlightenment to all phenomena: politics, pine trees, hard meditation practice, sex, wine. The poems express the unborn bliss of his realization and equally his devastation at the horrors of this world. From this union of bliss and heartbreak he rails without hatred against hypocrisy, corruption, and bad religion, he consorts free of lust with prostitutes and musicians. His awakening outshines the small idols of reason, emotion, self, desire, doctrine, even of Buddhism itself.

  We translate Ikkyū because we love that shine, which is his mind. It is unbound, uncorrupt, effulgent, playful, and recondite. We hope to transmit something of its quality to an English-reading audience.

  We don’t know much about the human being we call Ikkyū. The Chronology of the Monk Ikkyū of the Eastern Sea, written by a disciple, gives only a year-by-year outline of Ikkyū’s public life. It tells us that he was the son of a seventeen-year-old Emperor by a palace concubine, born auspiciously on New Year’s Day 1394—the first of February by the Gregorian calendar. If this is so, then the story is at once political: one hundred years previous, an Emperor had rebelled against his generals, establishing an exile Southern Court in opposition to their Northern Court in Kyōtō. The split was only repaired a century after Ikkyū’s death by the reunification of Japan under the Tokugawa. Ikkyū lived through recurrent civil wars: periodic vast starvation, the burning of Kyōtō, and fragile armistices when both sides reached exhaustion. Ikkyū’s mother is said to have been a Southern aristocrat, a peace offering; Northern jealousies saw a knife up both her sleeves. She and Ikkyū were thus soon banished to the Long Gate Palace, seat of disfavored concubines, and his imperial patrimony concealed.

  At age five, Ikkyū went alone into a minor Kyōtō monastery, where he received a good education—that is, he was trained in Buddhist doctrine and the high cultures of China. In particular, he learned to compose classical poetry in that language. (The poems we translate here are all of that genre.) Zen monasteries of the period functioned in ways reminiscent of the medieval European church. They were lavishly patronized, rich in land and peasant farmers, traders in luxury goods, repositories of culture and its accoutrements, and perfectly interpenetrated by the concerns of their political lords. These make a poor home for serious Zen practice, and Ikkyū’s home temple Daitoku-ji was no exception. At sixteen years old, he quit in disgust and for the next fifteen years trained in poverty under the two most exacting Zen masters he could find. In the end both masters were dead, and he had attained his first enlightenments and the name Ikkyū , meaning “Having Once Paused.”

  For the next fifty years he lived in and around Kyōtō and Sakai, a suburb of modern Ōsaka whose merchant and artistic cultures parallel Renaissance Venice. He remained an outsider to established religion, ever disgusted by its cant and compromise. “I’m just as likely to be found in a brothel as a temple,” he wrote. Though we know him best through his poetry, he also collaborated intensively with artists who were reworking the whole of the medieval aesthetic. His influence shaped their calligraphy, Noh theater, linked verse, tea ceremony, and rock gardening, all of which now define Japan’s sense of its cultural tradition.

  In this book we translate some fifty poems, divided into four slightly overlapping sections. The first consists of poems dedicated to Zen masters of China and Japan, lineage founders who preceded Ikkyū and whose tradition lives in him. The great Linji, whom Japanese call Rinzai, is prominent among them, but a dozen more sublime masters also appear.

  Second is a set of poems containing the term fūryū . It’s a two-syllable word: “fū” is pronounced “foo,” and “ryū” is pronounced like the English word “cue,” but with an r in the place of the c. Its literal meaning is “the flow of wind,” but it holds within itself a grand expanse of human exploration. In a China some thousand years before Ikkyū, it was a style of elegant sensuality. Soon, though, its elegance emerged as the refinements of eremitic joy and simple beauty. Japan played out both its gaudiness and restraint. Ikkyū upholds all these usages and then subsumes them under a higher one: fūryū is his heart-broken appreciation for the play of appearance, for mystery. It’s the center of his aesthetic, and he shows it differently in each poem. We have therefore left it untranslated. The subsequent essay, by Traktung Yeshe Dorje, expands on the term.

  Third is a set of nine poems that Ikkyū wrote on the night of 18 October 1447. They are among his few writings we can date with certainty. Daitoku-ji had been nearly alone among Buddhist establishments in retaining the right to appoint its abbot from within, thus controlling the intrusion of political powers. When this privilege was rescinded on a technicality, the monks rioted. Ikkyū, in turn, walked out of Kyōtō and began a hunger strike, recorded in this poem cycle.

  Finally there are a dozen poems to his lover Mori. They met when he was in his seventies, she a blind musician in her thirties or forties. They lived together until Ikkyū’s death eleven years later. We know her almost exclusively through his poetry. She appears there only as “Mori,” which is her surname, or as “the attendant Mori,” or simply as “the blind woman.”

  A thousand of Ikkyū’s poems are gathered in the Crazy Cloud Collection and its addenda. It’s not unusual that he wrote in classical Chinese—it was the language in which Buddhism had come to Japan, and many important texts, religious or otherwise, continued to be written in it. His chief model was the four-line Regulated Verse of Tang China, a poem-form with five or seven words per line. Rhyme, rhythm, tonal pattern, and parallelism are all prescribed; diction and subject-matter are also controlled. All well-educated people wrote such poetry, with results varying from the inspired to the very ordinary. Another model for Ikkyū was the Sanskrit-derived gatha, short poems attesting to one’s awakening. The first poem we translate in this book is the gatha Ikkyū wrote for his teacher Kasō, when he was enlightened at age twent
y-six.

  The Buddhist practitioner has been called a lotus, growing pure and fragrant from the muck of a swamp. But in these poems Ikkyū is swamp and lotus both: he cannot be sullied by circumstance, by birth and death, by identity, by either impurity or purity. His ongoing moment of enlightenment changes how this world appears. If we are deluded, we see mostly its degrading forces. But in unborn wisdom mind, “the great one-thousand worlds manifest from primordial purity,” writes Ikkyū. Thus, “When I enter a brothel, I display this same great wisdom.”

  It’s easy to get the wrong idea about Ikkyū’s rage against corruption and his love of women. He may look Bohemian, yet there’s no trace in him of self-indulgence. He seems rebellious, but his refusals are so profound that they sweep away even the category “rebel.” He might be called antinomian save for an utter fidelity to the deep conventions of his practice lineage. He’s been compared to the eccentric monk-poets Nankō Sōgan and Banri Shūkyū, his near contemporaries, but Ikkyū’s supposed eccentricity is only the surface of a deeper mystery. It may also be shocking to know that at age eighty he became abbot of Daitoku-ji, his erstwhile home temple and brunt of his most vitriolic attacks. Its rebuilding from the ruination of civil war was launched under his tutelage.

  Ikkyū’s poetry is also unpredictable. He may argue out the most delicate of doctrinal matters and then plunge us raw into grief and outrage. His intimacy, with himself and with the reader, is unprecedented. His language, often the rough colloquial of Song dynasty Zen, shows an indifference to poetic convention, though never from a lack of skill. His juxtapositions are shocking and unexplained, sometimes even puzzling to his modern Japanese editors.

  It is common in Tang-style poetry to sample previous verse or prose work. Thus two words, like “cloud-rain,” conjure up the story of the King of Chu and his shaman lover, who shared one night of passion and never met again. Ikkyū goes much further than most poets, pulling frequent allusions out of the full range of China’s cultural history and literature. He draws as well from a wide variety of Buddhist texts in Chinese, including its kōans. He never explains these allusions, simply assuming a readership as well educated as he. Translators have generally chosen one of two solutions to this richness: some have expanded Ikkyū’s line to include as much information as possible, while others have added extensive annotations.

  For this project we developed a new approach. We wondered, what would fourteenth-century readers bring with them to Ikkyū’s work? How could we reproduce that knowledge for a twenty-first-century audience? Our solution was to write a brief lyric essay to introduce each poem, identifying Ikkyū’s otherwise invisible interlocutors through a mixture of story, translation, history, and lore. These essays are more assemblages than narrative, one piece placed beside another until they create a cloud of knowledge. However, materials we have translated are always marked as such. Those who read Chinese or Japanese can find their sources in brief notes at the end of this book.

  The same ancient story may be retold in multiple ways. For example, the King of Chu and his consort wander through these poem-worlds, each version showing another face of their relationship. The two wives of Sage Emperor Shun are sometimes paragons of grief and elsewhere slaves of their sexual desire. The sinking moon may in one instance recall the poetry of a desolate frontier and in another the story of imperial demise.

  Allusion may also be understood as a mode of reincarnation. A phrase, figure, place takes new life in new surroundings. The Long Gate Palace, where Ikkyū’s mother was exiled in the first poem we translate, is the Zhaoyang Palace of Han Dynasty China, a thousand miles and years away. Its inhabitants have different names and bodies, but they tell the same story. A Tang Emperor and his fabled consort become Ikkyū and Mori, who also take the “three-lives vow” to be reborn together in past, present, and future times. Ikkyū regarded himself as the incarnation of the Chinese Master Xutang, seven generations previous, whose Japanese student brought his Rinzai lineage to fruit as Daitoku-ji. Two conjoint portraits survive with Xutang’s beard on Ikkyū’s face.

  In a broader sense, Ikkyū’s closest kin are those who devote themselves so completely to God or Love or Emptiness that all reference points become irrelevant. Daitō, the founder of Daitoku-ji, spent seven years after his enlightenment living as a beggar under Kyōtō’s Fifth Street Bridge. That tradition lives today, as in the late twentieth-century figures Jung Kwang, a Korean monk-painter who practiced “unlimited action,” and Franklin Jones (Adi Da) and Chōgyam Trungpa, masters of “crazy wisdom.” Like them, Ikkyū allowed a ceaseless compassion to burn his spirit so deeply that only an unadorned boldness remained.

  Our work has been preceded by the labors of many. Donald Keene was the first to publish Ikkyū’s poetry in English. Inspired by this, James Sanford wrote a pioneering study of his life and translation of his work. Jon Carter Covell gathered poems from Ikkyū’s temples that had not been included in the standard collections. Already Sonja Arntzen had been working on a project that culminated in her excellent book on Ikkyū and the Crazy Cloud Anthology. A more recent article by Peipei Qiu explicates the history of fūryū. Full citations are available in the notes at the end of this book.

  To accomplish our translation we have used the elegantly definitive five-volume collection of Ikkyū’s writings and calligraphy edited by Hirano Sōjō and his colleagues, Ikkyū Oshō zenshū (Tōkyō: Shunshūsha , 1997). This includes the Crazy Cloud Collection, The Chronology of the Monk Ikkyū of the Eastern Sea, “Skeletons,” and other writings. The Crazy Cloud Collection consists of 881 poems with strong attestation to Ikkyū. Our translations follow this numbering. Hirano et al. also include an appendix of 158 poems attributed to Ikkyū. The number “A122” indicates a poem from that addendum.

  All Ikkyū students are in Hirano’s debt. His unexcelled erudition has identified great numbers of Ikkyū’s references. As well, most texts of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism have now become available in searchable digital format. This has made it possible to identify further allusions and connections, even for amateurs like us.

  We use macrons in Japanese words but no diacritical marks for Sanskrit or other languages. The section “Notes and References” indicates the source for materials translated in our introduction to each poem. Rather than providing a full bibliographic reference, we’ve given sufficient information for a reader of Chinese or Japanese to identify and find the text in question.

  We would like to thank the many friends who have assisted this work, especially Douglas Penick and Suzanne Wise. Quentin Crisp of Chomu Press (London) leant us his acute ears and eyes. Two anonymous readers for the University of Michigan Press provided essential guidance for our revisions. Heartfelt thanks to Aaron McCollough of the University of Michigan Press for seeing this project as a book when we were only at the edge of the nest. We are also thankful for institutional support from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and One Pause Poetry. Our inadequacy to this task will be apparent. We ask forgiveness of the lineage.

  A Note on the Word Fūryū, Translation, and the Art of Magic

  Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

  —Anthony Burgess

  Making marks, talismans, amulets, words, paintings on the cave walls at Altamira—the mysterious magic and transformative power of communication. Languaging is the first and most primal magical act. The geographical landscape of language’s activity, and the territory of magic, are one and the same. Like a river and its banks, language is shaped by and shapes consciousness in a self-structuring autopoiesis. It is for this reason that some words simply cannot, should not, be translated. To translate them is to bring them into our world by describing a limiting circle around their magical intentionality.

  To translate Ikkyū’s use of fūryū is to translate not only the whole culture but also the territory of Ikkyū’s magical enlightened perception. Perhaps it is best to all
ow Ikkyū to translate us into his world rather than us translate his world into ours. Wind flow, impermanence, elegance, a sensual liberation theology of aesthetics, the tender heartbreak of nonjudgment, the silence and beauty of nature, a sophisticated tempest—all of these are fūryū, and more. Ikkyū says, “The guys down at the brothel, these too are fūryū.” In his time those guys were akin to Williamsburg hipsters at an oxygen bar. To see these shallow dandies with the nonjudgmental openness of great compassion is to arrive at an unexpected beauty. Ikkyū invites us into the singularity of springtime and fall in his perceptual magic.

  Fūryū, for Ikkyū, is to see the world through the eyes of unborn wisdom mind. A mind that is utterly free and yet does not have the slightest trace of withdrawal from the sense fields’ divulgence of wonderment. This meaning is not static but shifting within each context. The translators of these lovely works of magic have chosen to not translate the word fūryū. We have no equivalent. Our culture is lacking this particular magical maneuver. And our culture sorely needs to discover it. When tantric sadhanas are translated into new languages, the gnosemic power of mantras are left in the magical script of Sanskrit. Their meaning is to be found in the practice. In the same way fūryū is left in its own magical script, and the practice that finds its meaning is the alchemical act of entering into another’s world through deciphering the magical diagrams called language.

  In the western tradition a textbook of magic is called a grimoire. Ikkyū’s poems are a grimoire. The word fūryū is a magical diagram whose meaning wishes to reveal itself to you as a sentiment, a flavor of feeling, imparted through the spells, here called poems. To understand Ikkyū’s use of the magical word you will have to enter into Ikkyū’s dimension of magical realism. Lucky is the one who takes the trouble to accomplish this alchemical feat.

  —Traktung Yeshe Dorje