Having Once Paused Poems of Zen Master Ikkyū ( 1394 – 1481 ) Translated by

The influence of Zen Master Ikky? (1394u1481) permeates the full field of medieval Japanese aesthetics. Though best known as a poet, Ikky? was central to the shaping and reshaping of practices in calligraphy, Noh theater, tea ceremony, and rock gardening, all of which now define JapanAEs sense of its cultural tradition. A lifelong outsider to religious establishments, Ikky? nonetheless accepted an imperial command to rebuild his home temple, Daitoku-ji, destroyed in the civil wars. He died before that project was complete. Ikky?AEs work is allusion rich, and, as is common to his Tang poetic models, Ikky?AEs verse makes frequent allusion to elements from the full range of ChinaAEs cultural history and literature. He draws as well from a variety of Buddhist texts in Chinese, including its koans. Two Chinese wordsuothe dropping of raino or othe King of Chuoumay be suffi cient to conjure a full account of drama, romance, enlightenment, or degradation. Ikky? simply assumes a readership as well educated as he. Faced with this richness, translators have generally chosen one of two solutions. Some have expanded Ikky?AEs line to include as much information as possible. Others have added extensive annotations. By contrast, Messer and Smith, who represent an exciting combination of contemporary poetic and scholarly expertise, have retold those stories in a brief introduction to each poem, as Ikky? himself might have heard them. Thus the poem emerges as a response to those circumstances.

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 twosyllable 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 twenty-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-firstcentury 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 allow 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.
Lineage face-to-face with a portrait of Linji Between black sky and black earth, inside the summer wind, a crow. "If you pass through this gate," says a sutra, "you're an arhat emerging from the dust," a monk whose small enlightenment has forsaken the Three Poisons of lust, anger, and indifference.
The indifferent crow lifts its body in air and glides like a concubine's dropped fan. Fifteen hundred years ago in China, two sisters stole the Emperor's heart with their cold, crow-black hair, and Lady Ban became a palace serving maid, a white silk fan abandoned on a shelf. Five hundred years later a poet remembered it: She holds the broom respectfully as the golden halls open at first light. Taking the rounded palace fan, she paces here and there with folded hands. Her white jade face cannot match the sensual colors of cold crow, And still she tends the Zhaoyang Palace in the play of spotted sunlight.
The palace of rejected concubines. Like Ikkyū's mother, removed to Long Gate Palace when politics changed. The Chronology of the Monk Ikkyū of the Eastern Sea gives this account: Ikkyū was twenty six. One summer night he heard a crow and had understanding. He immediately brought his insight to Kasō, who said, "That is the realm of an arhat, not a master." Ikkyū said, "I only like arhats. I detest masters." So Kasō said, "You are a true master." It was the night of the 30th of June 1420. Kasō wanted a gatha to record it, so Ikkyū wrote: In his youth, Linji lived as such a pure monk, in complete accordance with the Vinaya, Buddha's monastic rule, that only Huangbo's stick could smack him loose.
Two hundred fifty years later in Linji's lineage arose the great monk Yuanwu, so assiduous in his practice that he was called Diligence. His story goes like this: Diligence's teacher addressed a lay visitor, saying "When you were young, perhaps you read the love poem by Emperor Wu? The last two lines are very close to the meaning of why Bodhidharma came from the west. They read, Oh, oh, these small bits of jade mean nothing. I only want to hear the sounds of my lover." Just then Diligence came in, heard this, and making a doubtful face, asked, "Has he mastered it?" The teacher replied, "He has only attained the sound." "Since he knows the sound, then why can't he see the dao?" His teacher yelled an old kōan question-and-response, "What is the meaning of why Bodhidharma came from the west? The cypress tree in front of the garden!" Diligence was instantly enlightened. Bounding out of the room, he saw a cock fly to the top of the railing, beat its wings and crow loudly. He laughed and said, "Isn't this the sound of 'I only want to hear the sounds of my lover'?" Then he wrote a gatha expressing his enlightenment and presented it to his teacher. It said, The fūryū affair of her youth Can only be known by the beauty herself.
His teacher said to him, "Today your sounds are joined with those of all the Buddhas."
Where do Linji's heart teachings lie? Is it in the Three Mysteries and Three Essentials that everyone called his true dharma eye? But he never explained what those were.
As Linji was dying, he gathered monks in the assembly hall, saying, "After I am extinguished, don't extinguish my true dharma eye." Sansheng burst out, "How would I dare extinguish your true dharma eye?" Linji said, "Afterwards, if people ask you, what will you say?" Sansheng just shouted. Linji said, "Who'd have known that my true dharma eye would come to extinction right here in front of this blind donkey." He finished speaking. Then, sitting upright, he died.
And a master adds, "The Blind Donkey Sansheng is a true son of Linji." Once Ikkyū lived in a shack he called "Hut of the Blind Donkey." Later he named himself "Dream Boudoir," saying: If you are thirsty in the dream, you dream of water. If you are cold in it, you dream of a fur coat. To dream of the boudoirthat's my nature. I've lately taken the name "Dream Boudoir" and set it on a plaque above my studio. I'm just a crazy old scoundrel, advertising what I like.

poem #495
Face-to-face with a Portrait of Linji Who in Linji's lineage dwells as true transmission? Three mysteries, three essentials, a blind donkey. This old monk Dream Boudoir, a moon inside the boudoir. Night after night, fūryū, right here in front of this sodden drunk.
"Pine window, the moon reflects my idleness," writes a Tang poet. And another adds: In the evening I sit beneath the old green pine. At night I sleep inside the bamboo pavilion.
A thousand years before, the King of Chu climbed Cloud Dream terrace, where he met the goddess of Shaman Mountain. She said to him, "I wish to serve at your pillow and sleeping mat." The next morning she became the mist of the high peaks and disappeared. Since then, their night together has been called "cloud dreams and idle feelings." One day while Linji was planting pines, Huangbo asked him, "What are you doing, planting all these trees deep in the mountains?" Linji said, "For one, this offering will improve the environment around our monastery's Mountain Gate. For another, this offering will persist and impress future generations." Having spoken, he took his mattock and hit the ground three times.
Huangbo said, "Even so, I've already beaten you some thirty times." Linji again took his mattock and hit the ground three times, making a "shu shu" sound. Huangbo said, "Now that my lineage has reached you, it will flourish greatly in the world."

poem #151
Pine Window a name for my studio Buddha enumerated five heinous crimes: to kill mother, father, a monastic, to shed a Buddha's blood, to split the community. Anyone committing such crimes creates the karma to be born in the Avici hell, the eighth of the eight hot hells, called in Chinese "no-space hell." Linji said: Mind is born, and every sort of dharma is born. Mind is extinguished, and every sort of dharma is extinguished. When one mind is unborn, ten-thousand dharmas are without fault. In this world and beyond this world, there is no buddha, no dharma, nor is anything present, nor was anything lost. Names and phrases are not of themselves names and phrases. It's only you in the present, radiant and bright, perceiving, understanding, and illuminating, who attach all names and phrases. Great virtuous ones, it is just by creating the five no-space karmas that you attain emancipation.
How are these five crimes liberation? A student asked Master Wuzu, "How are things in the lineage after Linji?" and he replied "Five crimes and hearing thunder." People took this to mean that if you commit one of the five crimes, you'll hear thunder, because lighting's about to strike your head. But by "five crimes" Wuzu meant the shouts and beatings, the overturning of monks, appropriate and inappropriate, Linji's wild acts of liberation.
The Vimalakirti Sutra says, "When the bodhisattva practices the five no-space crimes without lust or hatred, he enters the various hells without the filth of sin." To kill, to destroy without lust or hatred, to love beings with perfect kindness, beyond crimes and beyond nocrimes, this is liberation.

poem #340
The Precept Against Praising Oneself and Destroying Others "Five crimes and hearing thunder," Linji's tricks of the trade. His great love and great compassion are so very kind. The sword that gives life, the knife that kills. If you're planning to defile someone, your mouth will fill with blood.
The Record of Linji states: When Linji was first in Huangbo's assembly, his conduct was simple and pure. The head monk thus praised him, saying, "Though just a lad, he's different from the others." And then he became the great master Linji. Such masters are "a sword so long that it leans against the sky," says an ancient text, "stern and awesome, in full majesty." And it adds: "If someone rides a tiger's head, he must have a sword in his hand." The Record of Linji continues: A monk asked, "What about 'take away the environment, not take away the person'?" Linji said: The king's orders already pervade the realm. The general settles the dust beyond the borders.
Ikkyū dreamed he met a skeleton in a field. He asked himself: So what moment is not a dream? What person won't be a skeleton? We operate as skeletons wrapped in five-colored skin, so there is the sexual desire of male and female. When breath is cut off and the skin bursts open, there is no sexual desire.
An old saying: "Buddha-nature shows its magnificence, but sentient beings who dwell in appearances have difficulty seeing it."

poem # 615
Praising Myself My long sword glows as it leans against heaven, My skeleton displays its magnificence-Such singular fame this pure general. But at my core, fūryū and love of sex.
Two stories. The first is about the monk who heard a woman singing from the pavilion, and this was enough.
One day he happened to be walking through the streets, and he stopped to adjust his legging straps in front of a wine pavilion. He heard someone upstairs singing, "Since you are heartless already, I too will stop." But the Chinese word "heartless" can also be heard as "mindless," meaning Zen-emptiness. As in, since you are already mindless, I too will stop.
Suddenly he was greatly enlightened, and because of that he was called "Pavilion." The name Ikkyū also means "Once Stopped." The second story is about the Zen teacher Ciming, who was hard to find. He didn't show up for dharma talks and skipped his private audiences with the monks. One desperate student followed him as he left the monastery. Ciming was going to his lover's house-the student saw them cooking together in the kitchen, and blushed.

poem #259
Idle Meditation Defiles the Gaudy, Braggart Student The gold-robed elders' life-long desire Is to gather the assembly, practice Zen, and give lectures from the dais. What are the strategies of Pavilion Monk and Ciming? The face-paint of a lovely, fūryū beauty.
The Buddha held up a silent flower, and among the whole assembly only Kasyapa smiled. Thus he became the first patriarch of Zen. Perhaps he went next to southern China, a thousand years before Bodhidharma, settling on Chicken Foot Mountain. There he will practice meditation for millions and billions of years, until the next Buddha is born.
Yang Guifei, consort of the Tang Emperor, was one of the Four Beauties of ancient China-the Emperor loved her beyond all else, hiring seven hundred laborers to sew fabric for her gowns. Years of spring love-making, and then disaster, rebellion rending all China. His soldiers blamed it on her dalliance in politics and demanded her death. The Emperor had an impossible choice. She was strangled at Mawei Mountain. After that, they saw each other only in dreams, where they renewed their vow to be born together as husband and wife in the three lives, past, present, and future.
The ancient sage Zhuangzi knew the unturning pivot at the center of all activity. He said, "When 'this' and 'that' do not find their mate, it's called the pivot of the dao. When the pivot finally finds its central point, it can respond endlessly. Its right is a single endlessness, and its wrong is a single endlessness." The Twenty-Second Patriarch of Zen said it like this: The mind revolves, following the ten thousand realms, Its power hidden in the pivot-point. Follow the flow until you recognize its true nature. Then you are without both happiness and distress.
Yet Linji's Zen practices all happiness and all distress, together for the three lives.

poem # 260
Correct Meditation Reveals the Long-Practicing Student The power hidden in a wheel's pivot-point: Both Linji's true transmission, and schemes for fame and wealth. One pillow, spring wind, dawn at Chicken Foot Mountain. Three lives, night wine, autumn at Mawei.
From an old Chinese cautionary tale: don't straighten your hat when you're standing under a pear tree, people will think you're stealing fruit. A Song poet writes: Brothel and wineshop, the idle lay Buddhist, How could a pear tree keep him from straightening his hat?
Meanwhile, the Pavilion Monk writes of the match-maker's red thread that ties one to the beloved: Night lodging: flower city and wine pavilion. Once I'd heard the song and flute, sadness seemed left behind. A sharp knife pulls and snaps the red thread. If you're without a heart or mind, then I'll just stop.
Love's longing, the depth of passion, is held just for a moment in cloud and rain.

poem #144
Ode to the Brothel Beautiful woman, cloud and rain, love's deep river. Old Zen Pavilion Monk, up in the pavilion singing. I have such refined passion for hugging and kissing. My mind doesn't say: the world is a fire, give up your body.
The Chinese master Xutang, who began the lineage of Daitoku-ji, had three turning phrases meant to jolt the mind from ignorance into awakening.
As a youth, Master Dengzhou was always looking for the right phrase, but he never found it. "Speak, speak," said the head monk. Dengzhou couldn't respond. When he finally offered a few words, the monk said they were all wrong.
Dengzhou asked, "Will you please say it for me, then?" The monk replied, "What I say would be my own understanding. How would that be of benefit to you?" Dengzhou returned to the dormitory. He went through all the phrases he had collected, but there wasn't a single word with which he could reply to the monk. He sighed to himself saying, "If you paint a picture of a cake, it can't ease your hunger." So he burned all his books and said, "In this lifetime I will never realize the Buddha-dharma." Then, weeping, he bade farewell to his teacher and left.
Linji's monks were always looking for the right understanding, but they never found it. Addressing the monks, he said: If you have ceaseless thoughts, and your mind never rests, this is climbing up the tree of non-enlightenment. You'll be born in one of the six realms, with fur on your body and horns on your head.
When not a single thought is born, this is climbing up the tree of Buddha's enlightenment. Then dharma's a pleasure and Zen a delight. If you think of clothing, a thousand silk garments appear. If you think of food, you'll be sated by a feast of a hundred flavors.
Enlightenment dwells nowhere. Therefore there is no one who attains it.

poem #25
The Three Turning Phrases of the Monk Xutang (poem one) Your eyes are not yet opened, so how could you make pants for Xutang?
When you're freezing and hungry, paintings of cakes won't satisfy.
The eyes you are born with see like a blind man. At night in the cold hall: think of clothing, And a thousand silk garments will miraculously appear.
Buddha gave everyone a gift that has no value and no price. A Chinese master wrote: The spirit radiance shines of itself, Its full manifestation true and constant. It cannot be captured by words and letters. This is perfect buddhahood.
The buddha-lineage of Xutang was brought to Japan by the work of ceaseless meditation and carried onward by Daitō, founder of Daitoku-ji. In his own hand the Emperor wrote "Spirit Radiance" on Daitō's tomb.
How do we repay the Buddha's gift? A Zen patriarch replied: At the Surangama assembly, Ananda praised the Buddha, saying, "With my whole heart and mind I will revere the infinity of appearances." This is called "repaying the Buddha's blessing." In the port city of Sakai one could buy or sell temples, koāns, certificates, or sermons. And so the Chinese warning against being taken for a thief: "Don't tie your shoes in a melon patch, don't straighten your hat under a pear tree." But the purity of a true master -his interventions, manipulations, and strategies-is indifferent to gossip, is only a perfect response to the needs of beings.

poem #489
Severing Relations with the Sakai Crowd Xutang's grandchildren are addicted to wealth and in love with fame. The spirit radiance of Daitō's lineage has been completely lost. Pear hats and melon shoes-people get suspicious. But skill repays the Buddha's blessing with its perfect tricks.
The King of Chu, dreaming of his spirit consort, asks, "Who are you?" She replies, "In the morning I am the clouds, in the evening I am the rain. We will not meet again in these bodies." A thousand years later, four men and women, praising the moon and wine, write a poem, one line each. Each line must contain the word "moon" and "goblet." If they hesitate, they have to drink three cups of wine as penalty: The father says: The single-wheel bright moon shines on the golden goblet. The son: Wine fills the golden goblet, moon fills the wheel. The daughter: The bright moon hangs upside down inside the golden goblet. The son-in-law: I raise up the wine goblet and swallow down the moon.
A Zen contemporary of theirs writes: The Son of Heaven of the sacred court sits in the Bright Hall. Beings and spirits within the four seas pillow their heads in utter peace. Youthful fūryū turns the golden goblet upside down. Peach blossoms fill the courtyard like red brocade.
"Where is the mountain demon cave?" asks another Zen master. "It's that place in a large monastic gathering where the Way dwells without going or dwelling. So smash it. Chatting like this is precisely the demon cave."
What's honorable about demon caves and black mountains? I think of the past. Flute songs, evenings of cloud and rain. Youthful fūryū turns the golden goblet upside down.
Daitō's name means "Great Lamp." In 1326 he founded Daitoku-ji. In August 1453, most of it burned to the ground. Linji used to say, "Sometimes I take away both the person and the environment." And yet always the Buddha's body, the Buddha's speech, the Buddha's mind. Linji called these the Three Mysteries, naming the first "the mystery within the body." Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, said, "All of you people, your own mind is the Buddha!" Ikkyū wrote: "'Take away the person, take away the environment'-this is the mystery within the body." The Chronology of the Monk Ikkyū of the Eastern Sea tells of the Daitoku-ji fire: August. The towering heat and smoke of the conflagration. The bell and wooden fish, used to mark practice, were silent. Only the bathhouse, the veranda to the main gate, the Nyoi-an and the Daiyō-an remained. Then the monk Yōsō tore down the Daiyō-an to build the Spirit Radiance Pagoda to Daitō. Ikkyū wrote this gatha regarding the pagoda:

poem #123
Regarding the Pagoda of National Teacher Daitō, After the Daitoku-ji Fire Drafted 128 years ago, Today it looks like a dark mystery within the body. After orthodoxy and heterodoxy, environment and dharma, have been completely destroyed, There's still that Great Lamp, radiating through the great 1000 worlds.
Pious worshippers scatter powdered incense on statues of the Buddha to increase their miraculous power.
"Your childish prattle gives me a sour face," goes a poem from Southern Song.

I Hate Incense
Who can even discuss a master's methods? Speaking of Dao, talking of Zen, your tongues grow long. Old Ikkyū abhors your scrambling after marvels. I make a pinched, sour face, all this incense thrown on the Buddha.
The Blue Cliff Record sets out this kōan: One day Yanguan called to his attendant, "Bring me the rhinoceros fan." The attendant said, "The fan is broken." Yanguan said, "Since the fan is broken, then give me back the rhinoceros itself." The attendant had no reply.
That precious horn of Buddha-nature that grows on the head of every sentient being-where is it now, and how will we ever get it back? Vagrant Lu wandered into the temple of the Fifth Patriarch.
The Patriarch asked him, "Who are you and what do you want?" He said, "I'm a southerner, and I want to become a Buddha." "Southerners don't have Buddha-nature." "Men are southern and northern, but Buddha-nature has no south and north." And so Lu became a student of the Fifth Patriarch and eventually turned into Huineng, the Great Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen.

poem #208
Who is given the rhinoceros-horn fan? And what if Lord Lu wanders in the door? Constant talk of famous families in the dharma hall, As if in the office of a hundred imperial bureaucrats.
Puhua, eating raw vegetables outside the meditation hall or tipping over the dinner table-the only one who ever got the better of Linji. He'd scourge the streets, tugging and overturning everything. He'd say: When brightness comes, hitting brightness. When darkness comes, hitting darkness. When the four directions and eight sides come, a whirlwind hits. When emptiness comes, I hit like a flail.
Or the time a monk asked Zhaozhou, "What is Zhaozhou?" and he said, "East gate, west gate, south gate, north gate." In The Chronology of The Monk Ikkyū of the Eastern Sea it states: Someone asked Kasō, "After your death, to whom will your dharma be transmitted?" He replied, "Although his way is crazy, there's this pure young guy, Ikkyū."

poem #156
Praising Myself Crazy, crazy man roils up a crazy wind, Coming and going between brothels and wine shops. Is there an un-blind monk who can test my understanding? Painting south, painting north, painting west and east.

II.
Fūryū the flow of wind The monk Lingyun practiced Zen for thirty years without any understanding. By chance one day he saw a peach tree, luxuriant and in full bloom. Suddenly he was enlightened, and his joy was beyond all understanding. A poem says: At root there is no delusion or enlightenment, a jumble beyond enumeration. Lingyun alone is a true master. May I ask all honored patriarchs everywhere If they know the spot to see peach blossoms?
The Queen Mother of the West, she of Pure Jade Pond, lives in the distant Kunlun Mountains, where earth borders heaven. Golden peaches of immortality grow on her tree. At auspicious moments she has invited great emperors of China to join her and enjoy her peaches of eternal life. But none could hold his place beside her, so each remained merely human, dying in sorrow.

poem #421
Upon Seeing a Picture of Peach Blossoms Seeing the spot, fūryū enlightens the mind of dao. One branch of peach blossoms is worth a thousand ounces of gold. Queen Mother of Pure Jade Pond, face of spring wind. I bind myself to the men of sorrow, songs of cloud and rain.
Once there was a monk known only as Old Ding. He asked Linji, "What is the great meaning of Buddha's dharma?" Linji got down from his dais and slapped him. Ding just stood there, frozen. The monk sitting next to him said, "Ding, why don't you bow?" As Ding bowed, suddenly he was greatly enlightened.
Afterwards, he meets a couple of monks on the road. "Where're you coming from?" they ask. "Linji." "Give us something of him," they ask, so he tells the famous story of Linji, who said: In this lump of raw red meat is a true man without rank.
And when someone asked Linji what that is, he'd say, The true man without rank is just some dried shit-stick.
But the monks on the road with Ding can't grasp it. One's mouth falls open. The other asks, "Why don't you say 'Not a true man without rank'?" Old Ding says, "A true man without rank and not a true man without rank, how far apart are they? Quickly, quickly, speak." But he couldn't answer. So Ding says, "If you guys weren't so old, I'd beat both you bed-wetting imps to death."

poem #477
The bed-wetting imp is a man in great distress. Old Ding has the right trick, the power of his blessings is deep. Night rain. Before the lamp, confusion is already forgotten. In the fūryū tea-house, chanting ancient times.
Shaman Mountain, the dream of the King of Chu, clouds and rain. The Blue Cliff Record sets out this case: Jingqing asked a monk, "What's that sound outside?" The monk said, "The sound of rain drops." Jingqing said, "Sentient beings are all topsy-turvy. They delude themselves pursuing things outside themselves." So when Zhuangzi asks himself, "What is a gentleman of the rivers and seas?" he answers, "He moves in close to the marsh, dwells freely in bright vastness, and fishes in an idle spot, doing nothing at all." In the realm of that vast brightness, the sages of highest antiquity discerned patterns in the natural world, pattern forces they called Qian and Kun. Qian and Kun are Heaven and Earth, are the active and the receptive, male and female, the first two hexagrams of the Yijing or Book of Change.
More than two thousand years afterwards, rebellion rends China. The Tang Emperor gives up his concubine Yang Guifei to be killed and abdicates the throne to his son. A verse: The moon, sinking, sinking. . . . The fūryū Emperor does not return.
During that rebellion, Du Fu, China's greatest poet, flees the capital with his family, securing them outside a farming village at Fuzhou. Then he travels out to serve the new Emperor. On the road he's captured by rebel troops and returned to the capital. From there he writes his wife: When will we lean against the open screen, The moon shining on us both, drying the traces of tears?

poem #823
On Shaman Mountain rain drops join in a new song. Lewd fūryū, my poetry is also lewd. Rivers and seas, Qian and Kun, the tears of Du Fu. In Fuzhou, tonight the moon is sinking, sinking.
Manjushri is the bodhisattva of wisdom. But what is that wisdom? Buddha's great disciple Ananda accomplished the wisdom of an arhat, someone who has left the red dust of samsara behind, who is free of desire and hatred.
But a bodhisattva attains Manjushri's Great Wisdom and finally Buddhahood only by never abandoning the sorrows of samsara.
The Lankavatara Sutra tells this story: At that time Ananda went begging for food and, following along the streets, passed by some brothels. There he met the woman Matangi, who had great skill in sorcery and used the Kapila Brahma mantra to draw him inside. She bent forward, fondling him, and was about to destroy the essence of his vows.
The Buddha himself, dwelling in vast space, saw this delicate moment, and sent the bodhisattva Manjushri to recite a mantra that would counter her sorcery.
The evil spell was extinguished. Thereupon Ananda and Matangi were carried off to the place of the Buddha. Ananda prostrated and put the Buddha's feet on his head, weeping in compassion.

poem #255
An arhat emerges from dust and thus pushes Buddhahood away. When I enter a brothel, I display Great Wisdom. I laugh deeply at Manjushri reciting the Lankavatara Sutra.
He has lost the whole business of his youthful fūryū.
Thousands of years ago the Sage Emperor Shun ruled all China. Even though he was born into the poverty of a three-family village, wherever he went, he transformed society. Coming to a potterymaking village rife with quarrels, he brought such order that a year later their pots were more beautiful than ever. Coming to a fishing village rent by murderous squabbles, he brought peace. Learning of Shun's nobility, the Emperor Yao gave him his two daughters and the throne.
Because his wives had grown up spoiled by luxury, it is said that they were often filled with intemperate lust. With Shun, they learned to be humble and work the fields. Yet when he died, they forgot everything, and their unfulfilled passion drove them rushing to the spot where his body had fallen. They pleaded for his return, crying over his corpse until their tears turned to blood. The songs of their weeping might have brought down a dynasty, but Shun would not hear them.
Later, Confucius wrote: All vocal sounds arise from the human mind. The human mind responds to stimuli and moves, shaping itself in sound. Music is thus based in the human mind and its response to things. The way of sound is communicated through governance. If the five notes oppress each other, this is called "being out of tune." In that case, the state will soon come to its doom. The music in the Mulberry Grove above Pu River is the music of a doomed state.

poem #271
Pointing Out Lewd People Singing salacious songs in the Mulberry Grove above Pu River, And still my deepest reverence for youthful fūryū. A traveler through the three-family villages of the world, Shun did not recognize the songs of his two consorts.
Zhuangzi was a true gentleman of the rivers and seas. Master Yantou rowed his boat for two days across the lake, driven from his monastery in the religious persecution of late Tang.
Master Muzhou returned home to care for his mother, avoiding rebellion in the countryside. To support them both, he repaired straw sandals, using wild grape leaves he found along the road.
Linji said, "Sometimes I take away both the person and the environment." Someone asked, "What is it when you don't take it away?" He said, "The king ascends his jeweled hall, rustic elders sing their songs."

poem #5
The practice of working the oars, Yantou's boat. Muzhou weaves sandals, grape-leaf autumn. Rustic elders can't hide their praise for straw hats and raincoats. What person? The rivers and seas, a single fūryū.
Four thousand years ago Emperor Shun's wives cried tears of blood over his body. Then they threw themselves into the River Xiang and drowned.
Two thousand years later the Marquis of Biyang was such a pet to the Han Empress that she made him Prime Minister, and anyone wanting access to her was dependent on his whim.
A thousand years after that, Li Qunyu encountered Shun's two wives as spirits of the River Xiang. They told him to meet them in two years, and they would all become lovers. A friend mocked him, "I didn't know you were the Biyang Marquis to Shun's two wives!" Li Qunyu wrote: For a moment we take up the wind and moon of sex, resenting that the lake is calm. See completely how the water of the fusang tree is all dried up. "Fusang," which is what the Chinese call the nation of Japan. Li Qunyu's poem continues: The promises we made on the almond-blossom altar are gone. Inside the painted game-box, we play at backgammon, red and purple pieces.
Buddha gave laypeople five precepts. One prohibits improper sexual conduct, often interpreted as adultery, homosexuality, or masturbation. But Crazy Cloud Ikkyū writes about the sexual apparitions of suicide, politics, fantasy, and commerce.

poem #329
The Precept Against Improper Sexual Conduct The young people in the brothel are also fūryū. They kiss and hug, the crazy guest is sad. Deluded, Li Qunyu plays backgammon. The great fame of Emperor Shun and the Biyang Marquis.
Gui Shan, meaning "Gui Mountain," is the name of a place and also the name of the monk presiding there, "Guishan." One day he gathered his disciples, saying: This old monk-a hundred years from now I'll go down the mountain to a patron's house and become a water-buffalo. On my left flank will be a line of five words, "I, a Gui Shan monk." At just this moment, calling it a Gui Shan monk is the same as calling it a water-buffalo.
That water-buffalo is always plowing, being eaten and used up in the Three Family Village, a place so destitute that even Zen masters make fun of it. Guishan took the bodhisattva vow to return again and again to live in this realm of suffering.
The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment points to the perfect realization of every being. One class of its bodhisattvas is called "aware with their whole bodies," another "calm with their whole bodies."