This is my current favorite Ikkyu poem:

Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.

At a cash register as a teenager I picked up a copy of Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu a small, slender pocket-sized paperback translated by John Stevens, published by Shambala books (1995 - sadly no longer in print). I was probably incented to buy it because of the sex poems. There's something nicely saucy about sex poems that last five or six hundred years. Ikkyu wrote graphically, straightfowardly, about a woman's vagina as a beautiful, alluring, important place, "the birthplace of all the ten thousand buddhas" and his own penis and the joys that could be found playing in his loincloth.

A Woman's Sex:
It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

A Man's Root:
Eight inches strong, it is my favourite thing;
If I'm alone at night, I embrace it fully -
A beautiful woman hasn't touched it for ages.
Within my fundoshi there is an entire universe!

(A fundoshi is a type of loose-fitting underwear once worn by Japanese men.)

Then as I grew older I read some of the other poems included there. A monk decries incense in the temple - the trapping of spiritual searching without the hard practice. A monk celebrating all pleasures, drinking, whoring, and finding wisdom in the work of a fishmonger.

Admirably worldly and wise, humble and well-travelled. An admirable entertaining fellow this Ikkyu seemed to be.

Ikkyu is a fabled character in Japan. There are stories of him outwitting some kings and priests as a child. These tales were made into an animated TV show. So often, when I tell Japanese folks I like Ikkyu, they think I like him because of some cute cartoons. Having never seen enough of the cartoons to say for sure, I reply that instead I like his poems.

When I first arrived in Japan I went to a book store and bought a thick, expensive tome of Ikkyu's works. It turned out to be nothing but a brick yet, something so serious and dense seeming that Japanese people need a dictionary to pick through it. Ikkyu wrote in classical Chinese, and his poems are thick with references to mountains, heroes, gods, royalty, meals, implements - all the trappings of life in traditional storied China.

In April 2002 realized this entire frame of reference informed the poems I read of his after I found a marvellous book in the Foreign Correspondents' Club Library, last checked out in 1987: Ikkyuu and the Crazy Cloud Anthology: A Zen Poet of Medieval Japan Translation, Translation and Introduction by Sonja Arntzen.

I had that book with me when I visited Kyoto in June that year; I was able to visit his temple at Daitoku-ji, and see the buildings and rock garden he inhabited during his brief sojurn to the soiled city.

There's not much about Ikkyu online, a few translations, some sex poems, some fables. I bought a copy of the Sonja Arntzen book; it was quite expensive!

One zen priestess writes glowingly about him:

One of the characters I want to introduce you to is a wonderful character in the Zen tradition, called Ikkyu, who is one of my longstanding and favourite Zen masters and who appeals, I guess, to the wild woman in me. He was born in 1394 and was an illegitimate son of the emperor Go-komatsu. He was known by some as the emperor of renegades, a wild wandering monk and teacher, sometimes called Crazy Cloud. He was a lover, a poet, and he could write very tenderly about the beauty of women. He relentlessly attacked the hypocrisy of the then corrupt Zen establishment, and even had women as his students. I think he was one of the first Zen masters to have women as students; that was considered quite radical. It was in the brothels and geisha houses that he developed the Red Thread Zen, a notion he borrowed from the old Chinese master Kido and extended to deep and subtle levels of realisation.

From Red Thread Zen: The Tao of Love, Passion, and Sex by Subhana Barzaghi.

Links (June 2002)

• In 2004, I built an terribly-basic Ikkyu chat bot. It only knows a very small portion of his vocabulary!
• Ikkyu on Wikipedia
• Ikkyu's meditations on death and dying - Skeletons
• Delightful collection of Ikkyu thoughts drawn from a book entitled Crow with No Mouth
• A few of Ikkyu's greatest hits, drawn from Wild Ways.
• Page with Ikkyu images and a bibliography.