IKKYU

 

 

 

Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu

translated by John Stevens

 

White Pine Press

Buffalo, NY

Paper, 152 pages, $14

ISBN 1-893996-65-4

 

and

 

After Ikkyu and Other Poems

by Jim Harrison

 

Shambhala Publications

Boston, MA

Paper, 94 pages, $10

ISBN 1-57062-218-3

 

 

 

Jim Harrison admittedly began his study of Zen in a state of rapacious and self-congratulatory spiritual greed. The antithesis of mainstream Buddhist philosophy? Maybe. But the Buddha himself left his wife and children to find enlightenment, and how does one become one with the world without striving to do so? Or as Harrison described himself: a potato that didn t know it was a potato.

If we re ignorant potatoes, Harrison s poems in After Ikkyu are short, energetic, imagistic vignettes the kind we ve come to associate with Asian poetry. But what of Ikkyu? White Pine Press answers the question in Wild Ways a hedonistic monk from 15^th century Japan, born as the sun rose on the first day of 1394.

What Harrison chases after is Ikkyu s energy and skill in gathering within himself, and using as a source of energy itself, all the sensations of life. As the (possible) illegitimate child of the emperor, Ikkyu was raised by monks from the age of five but rebelled early against organized Buddhism which appeared more intent on superficial status than spiritual matters. With an eccentric old master, he retreated to a shack in the hills, then spent much of his later life as a vagrant, calling himself crazy cloud, equally at home with the emperor as with beggars.

According to John Stevens, Ikkyu s Zen was raw, direct, and authentic, the pleasure of sex as valid an experience as deprivation and sorrow. If one is thirsty, he dreams of water; if one is cold, he will dream of a thick blanket.

Stevens translation of Ikkyu s work is unadorned. Consider Ikkyu s warning that texts may cause the loss of your original mind, while A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure. He called himself a Blind Donkey but knew Love play can make you immortal.

The autumn breeze of a single night of love is

better than a thousand years of sterile sitting meditation . . .

 

And:

The bamboo thicket has a new set of sprouts.

This old monk feels young again,

My beauty is just thirty-six.

A fresh breeze blows through the crumbling walls.

 

Poetry like this pricks our nerve-endings with each sensation, good or bad. Or as Harrison says in After Ikkyu:

Listen to the gods.

They re shouting in your ear every second.

 

Ikkyu listened. Harrison imagines him as an old man:

The monk is eighty-seven. There s no fat

left on his feet to defend against stones.

He forgot his hat, larger in recent years.

By a creek he sees a woman he saw fifty summers

before; somehow still a girl to him. Once again his hands

tremble when she gives him a cup of water.

 

Harrison takes the themes of Ikkyu and gives us poems of half-human bears dancing in hidden glades; a jaguar shot while perched on the back of a calf; the difference between here and now, now and here; birds drunk on fermented berries, and barn cats who feast on drunken birds; and a vast asteroid heading toward L.A. but unmentioned in the wordless conversation between Jesus and the Buddha. This is not a nihilistic streak so much as the sharp tick of life and death, the essence of life itself. As here:

Way up a sandy draw in the foothills

of the Whetstone Mountains I found cougar

tracks so fresh damp sand was still

trickling in from the edges. For some reason

I knelt and sniffed them, quite sure

I was being watched by a living rock

in the vast, heat-blurred landscape.

 

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