by Sarah Messer
The flower gives way beneath the branch of the plum tree.
Rising on the waves, the nymph wraps around my hips.
The kōan of a poisonous snake in the deep southern mountains: “Take a good look at it,” says the master, “all of you.” And the commentator adds: “Its poisonous spirit wounds people.”
At the same time as this kōan, two Tang monks in love went on a pilgrimage. They met a pregnant woman. One said in distress, “I made a vow to be born as her child. Now I must leave you to fulfill that obligation. But twelve years from now, meet me in a grove outside the India Temple.”
Twelve years later, his companion heard a young cowherd singing in the moonlight:
I’m ashamed my lover had to come so far to meet me.
Though this body is different, my nature continually exists.
In late fall, Ikkyū heard Mori singing at the Yakushidō temple in the Sumiyoshi district of Sakai. Yakushidō, “Temple of the Medicine Buddha,” the Buddha who heals all illness.
A Tang poet wrote:
The river wind penetrates the dawn, unable to sleep.
With the sound of all twenty-five zither strings, autumn complains of its lengthening nights.
poem #541
Talking Together at the Sumiyoshi Yakushidō
On the 25th of November 1470 I traveled to the Yakushidō and heard the blind woman’s love ballads. So I made this gatha to record it.
With great ease and joy I traveled to the Yakushidō,
My belly full of poison spirit.
I’m ashamed that I don’t notice my snow-frost topknot.
She chants till nothing’s left, sharp cold complaint of lengthening nights.
Ikkyū had been alone in Takigi, south of the capital, open fields and bamboo forest.
His ancient vow of solitude. Then, avoiding war, he moved to Sumiyoshi.
Li Bo, exuberant poet of Tang China, master of fūryū, was always longing for something, fame, favor, wine, his home, the moon. Sometimes he takes on the voice of a court lady waiting for love:
White dew emerging on the jade steps.
Night lengthens, creeps into my stockings.
I withdraw, lowering the water-crystal curtains.
In the sound of their chiming, I look toward the autumn moon.
poem #542
I remember when I lived in the Takigi countryside.
As soon as we heard each other’s name, we imagined each other.
Now that the vow of many years is forgotten,
I love the new moon’s shape on jade steps even more.
Regarding the above, I dwelt for some years in a small cottage in Takigi. The attendant Mori had heard of my manner and was intent on her love for me. I also knew of this but hesitated until now. In the spring of 1471, we met by chance in Sumiyoshi. I asked about her intent, and she responded favorably. So I made this small poem to tell of it.
Zen Master Huanglong, “The Yellow Dragon,” would stop students at his Three Barriers—three questions that halt conceptual mind. The commentator observes: “If you don’t pass through the patriarch’s barrier, if you don’t cut off your mind-stream, you are not even a free-agent ghost, you’re still caught haunting grasses and trees.”
The Second Barrier asks: “How does my hand resemble the Buddha’s hand?” One hand grabs another and everybody feels it, one ailment and everyone is ill. Yet before everything there is Mori, master of the secret assembly that is Ikkyū’s own body.
poem #536
Calling My Hand Mori’s Hand
How does my hand resemble Mori’s hand?
I believe the lady is a fūryū master.
When I’m sick, she makes my jade stalk sprout,
Delighting all in my assembly.
Yang Guifei, consort of the Tang Emperor, was one of the Four Beauties of ancient China. The Emperor compared her to crab-apple flowers, haitang, “the ocean cherry-apple.” He loved her especially when she was slightly drunk, singing, swaying, and he’d feed her sweets, placing them into her mouth.
They met when the Emperor was in his fifties, she not yet twenty. He named the last fourteen years of his reign Tianbao, “Heaven’s Treasure,” perhaps for her. Years of spring love-making, and then disaster.
The name Mori means “forest,” a pictogram of three trees
poem #540
Watching the Beauty Mori Nap at Noon
A beauty who is the fūryū of the age.
Luxurious love ballads, pure feasts, exquisitely new songs.
I chant a new poem to her heart-breaking flower-face dimples.
Mori, you’re a heaven-treasure, ocean-apple, you’re a whole forest of blooming trees.
Regarding a Painting of Ikkyū and Mori Together in a Single Scroll, Dated Winter 1471
Fifth year of the Ōnin War. Daitoku-ji, all northern Kyōtō, just rubble and ash. Monks dispersed, pavilions and brothels empty, shops closed, plague in the streets. And in the west, impoverished peasants tumbling into revolt. Always on the move—starvation, skeletons walking everywhere.
The Pavilion Monk Ikkyū looks like Xutang, the great Chinese antecedent of Daitoku-ji. His mind fully occupies the Great Circle that is all the heavens.
On this portrait, Ikkyū’s poem and Mori’s poem written in Ikkyū’s own hand.
Within the face of the great circle, the whole body manifests—
The painting shows the truth of Xutang’s face and eyes.
The blind woman’s love ballads mock the Pavilion Monk.
Her one song before flowers, ten-thousand years of spring.
Song of the Exalted Lady Mori
Heavy, thought-filled sleep
on a bed of sleep, floating,
floating and sinking.
Waves of tears: except for these
I have no joy or pleasures.
The red-plumed phoenix is often joined in union with her mate.
A phoenix carriage, the royal conveyance, bears the Emperor through land and sky. “It must be made with reverence,” writes the ancient scholar Dongzhong Shu. “It is modeled on the ordering of Heaven, it is drawn by a team of four phoenixes.”
Zhuangzi wandered, floating through spring.
poem #533
Lady Mori Rides by Carriage
In spring, the blind woman often wanders in her phoenix carriage.
It pleases her to soothe my autumn gloom.
Despite the mocking of all beings,
I love to look at Mori, her lovely fūryū.
Guishan’s Admonitions from late Tang still shapes the rules of all earnest practice. He’d say, “You old monks, if you’re not attentive, a hundred years from now I’ll be reborn as a water-buffalo down the mountain.” His monks’ fear of rebirth as a stupid animal, with no chance of enlightenment. Their striving for incarnation as a human being, again and again.
Yet the human body is also something for monks to fear. Once a Chinese goddess took rocks to buttress heaven against yin, “a surfeit of water.” Often the flooding of the north China plain sweeps all barriers to sea. And always, like its cognate yin, “the lewdness of humans,” the flood of desire rises to engulf the body.
Guishan’s contemporary Yantou relates the story of two monks. At the start of the summer training session, their master had only said to them, “What’s this?” and then walked away.
Yantou said, “Ah, how I regret now that in that moment I didn’t give the ‘final words’ that would have completed things.”
Three months later the monks told Yantou that they hadn’t understood his comment.
“Why didn’t you ask me earlier?” demanded Yantou.
“We didn’t dare to,” they said.
A commentator remarks: “If you monks aren’t willing to dare to, how can I secretly report these words to you?” “Secret report”: a privileged communication to the Emperor. If you monks aren’t willing to dare to, how will you ever hear the secret report of your liberation?
The “private words at mi
dnight” that the Tang Emperor exchanged with Yang Guifei, vowing to be reborn together as two wings of a single bird, vowing to be reborn together in all three lives of past, present, and future.
poem #529
Drinking the Waters of a Beauty’s Wet Sex
Secret report: I’m ashamed of our league of private words.
As our fūryū singing ends, we take the three-lives vow.
Our flesh-bodies will fall into the animal realm.
How marvelous, this feeling of Guishan wearing horns!
During the Ōnin War, Yamana Sōzen, the Red-Faced Monk, cut off all deliveries of rice to Kyōtō. The Emperor could not prevent it. This starvation spread into the surrounding countryside.
Fifteen hundred years earlier, in China, briefly a truce with the western nomads. The Chinese Emperor sent Su Wu out as ambassador. Yet abruptly conditions changed. The nomads imprisoned Su Wu and demanded he switch sides. But he would not betray his Emperor. They stuck him in an underground cell with no food or water, but he ate the fur off his robes and drank snow that melted down the walls. He was exiled to steppe-land a thousand miles west and, when food was gone, ate wild grasses and rodents. Still, he would not submit. Nineteen years later he was rescued and returned to China.
Zen Master Baizhang would rarely offer the expected formal discourse or public ceremony, saying, “Oh tomorrow, oh tomorrow.” Instead he sent his monks to farm, telling them “A day not working is a day not eating.” Patrons drifted off, nothing there for them. And still his Zen students kept on tilling their fields and feeding their monasteries.
The Indians call the Lord of Death “Yama,” the judge with a red face. The kōan says,
When old Yama asks, “Do you want any rice money?” you should know how many straw sandals he’s tromped around in.
Yama has been around longer than anyone; he’s worn out more pairs of straw sandals than Su Wu ate blades of grass.
Su Wu, loyal to the end, vomited blood when his Emperor died and was buried outside the capital at Maoling. A Tang poet wrote:
Who will provision Su Wu on the final return to his country?
Maoling pine and cedar, rain sound plok-plok.
During the famine, Mori gave her food to Ikkyū, the Pavilion Monk, insisting that he eat instead of her. The King of Chu was fed by his consort in a dream.
poem #531
The blind woman, Mori, my attendant, has generous feelings of love. She is going to starve herself to death. Overcome with grief, I made this gatha to speak of it.
Baizhang’s hoe made patrons’ gifts melt away.
Yama hasn’t been generous with the rice money.
The blind woman’s love ballads mock the Pavilion Monk.
Chu terrace, evening rain dripping plok-plok.
The Buddha was considered complete and perfect, the only refuge, until the Third Zen Patriarch Sengcan wrote the “Inscription on Confidence in Mind,” overthrowing the dependency on Buddha. Don’t rely on Buddha, Buddha is only mind, one’s own mind, there is nothing external to achieve. His inscription begins:
The very dao is without difficulties,
Only it rejects choosing.
Just don’t hate and love:
Piercingly clear!
And then that clear mind was considered complete and perfect, the only refuge, until Zhaozhou rose up:
Zhaozhou instructed the assembly, saying “‘The very dao is without difficulties, only it rejects choosing.’ Yet as soon as there is speaking, that is ‘choosing,’ that is ‘clarity.’”
There is no Buddha to be confident in, no mind to speak of, no words to speak with, and no clarity. There is nothing internal to achieve. And so the kōan commentator elaborates, “To say ‘the very dao is without difficulties’—that’s a mouthful of hard frost.”
And this silence was considered complete and perfect. Yet still, plum trees blooming in the snow.
The Song dynasty hermit Lin Bu spent twenty years in a cottage on Solitary Isle. Plum trees were his wives and concubines, the cranes his children. He wrote of them:
Spare shadows slant
the waters pure and shallow,
Dim fragrance floats
the moon at yellow dusk.
poem #534
The Waters of Her Sex
A dream deceives me: the beauty Mori in the Royal Gardens.
News of opening flowers on her pillow, plum blossoms confident in mind.
Mouth full of pure fragrance, of pure shallow water.
In yellow dusk, the moon-color of sex, how could I make a new song?
Among the Nineteen Old Poems of Han is this verse:
Floating clouds cover the white sun.
The distant traveler does not turn to look back.
In “Bequeathing a Hermitage to a Monk Friend,” the Tang poet Sikong Tu writes:
There are obstacles to returning to the ancient mountain,
But don’t delay for that.
All journeys end at Yellow Springs, the land of death. And then begin again.
poem #A79
Still in the Boudoir, My Return to the Temple Delayed
Distant traveler, Dream Boudoir, misses the time of his return—
Increasing pains, sad songs, more sickness.
This monk wandering to Yellow Springs has one regret:
That to see and meet you again should always be so delayed.
At the River Xiang, Shun’s two widows mourned themselves to death. Their tears turned to blood, their unending passion turned to unending grief, and so they became the ghosts of that river.
For one endless night the King of Chu met his shaman lover. When he looked for her the next morning, he found only mountain mist. Then for an endless eternity she was gone. He seeks her always now in the clouds and rain, their two bodies drenched in love.
poem #A80
In Celebration of the Return of Dream Boudoir and His Woman Attendant to the Temple
Three days apart feels like an eternal kalpa,
Tears and rain of the Xiang River pouring through my chest.
Outside Dream Boudoir’s curtains: the moon at the tip of a pine branch.
Mountain hut, the night is deep. You sing together with me.
The ancient kōan text:
A monk asked Yunmen, “What’s it like when the tree withers and leaves fall?”
Yunmen said, “Body completely exposed to autumn’s golden wind.”
In another kōan:
The withered tree again blooms,
Bodhidharma roams the eastern lands.
An early Tang poet wrote:
This road where we part goes on a thousand miles and more.
Your profound blessings will weigh on me a hundred years.
poem #543
Written Out of Desire to Thank Lady Mori for Her Profound Blessings
The tree withers, leaves fall. Spring returns again.
The long green stems give birth to flowers, old vows are renewed.
Ah Mori, your profound blessings. If I forget and turn away,
For a million measureless kalpas I’ll be born again and again as an animal.
The monk Huiyue preached dharma in the wilds. A tiger rested its head on his knee, making a pillow.
An imperial concubine of the Jin dynasty often dreamed she saw two dragons resting their heads on each other’s knees, as the sun and moon entered their breasts.
poem #A158
Poem on Leaving This World
For ten years beneath abundant flowers, we wove the texture of our life.
One span of fūryū, limitless feelings.
I can’t bear parting—man, woman, resting our heads on each other’s knees.
Nights deep with cloud and rain, our vow of all three lives.
The center of the world is Mt Meru. To the south is India, Buddha’s homeland and the origin of this dharma, to the east China, and across the sea from that, Japan. Seven generations ago in China, Xutang began the lineage that would found Daitoku-
ji, its temple and monastery burned to the ground in the Ōnin War.
Afterwards, the Emperor asked Ikkyū to rebuild it. He never finished. When he was sick and about to die, his disciples carried him on a palanquin to his hut in the bamboo forest, then carried him back.
South of Mt Meru,
Who can meet my Zen?
The coming of Xutang
Isn’t worth a dime.
—Pure Ikkyū of the Eastern Sea
Notes and References
These notes give quick identity to the poetry and stories mentioned in our introduction to each poem. Well-known works are usually cited in English, less common or untranslated works in Chinese. The name “Hirano” refers to his edition of Ikkyū’s poems, whose full bibliographic reference is in our Introduction. “T” indicates the Taishō Tripitika, “Z” the Zokuzōkyō. All Chinese works can be found online.
Poem #
5
Zhuangzi, ch 15
Record of Linji, “Discourses,” section 10
