08/12/2025
Awakening is to realize our humanness. Realization is, well, to live it fully even if untidily.
Five hundred years before modern writers began telling the truth about appetite, grief, s*x, and brokenness, Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481) was already writing it straight into Zen. A Rinzai monk, poet, wanderer, and fierce critic of spiritual performance, Ikkyū remains one of the most unsettling and necessary figures in the Zen lineage. Today marks the traditional anniversary of his passing, the day the world lost one of its most dangerous truth-tellers.
Ordained as a child and awakened early, Ikkyū’s life changed after the sudden death of his teacher. He left the monastery and wandered for decades through taverns, ruined temples, riverbanks, and the margins of society. He drank sake. He lived in poverty. He wrote poems that scalded hypocrisy and refused to separate awakening from desire, illness, loneliness, love, and death. His practice was not about transcendence. It was about radical intimacy with being human.
Late in life, in his seventies, Ikkyū fell deeply in love with a blind singer named Mori and wrote openly erotic love poems in her honor. Rather than hiding this, he made it part of his teaching: enlightenment does not cancel the heart — it reveals it. Only near the end of his life was he asked to help restore Daitoku-ji, one of Kyoto’s great Rinzai temples. Even then, he never became respectable. He kept drinking. He kept writing. He kept telling the truth.
Modern poets like Jim Harrison, and even outsiders like Bukowski, recognized in Ikkyū a rare integrity: a spiritual voice that refused to pretend the body was an obstacle to truth. But more importantly for Zen itself, Ikkyū remains a living safeguard inside the lineage. He stands as proof that awakening does not guarantee tidiness, desire is not automatically a failure, and holiness that denies the body is suspect.
Ikkyū’s great gift to Zen is this: he made it impossible for the tradition to forget the human being. He made it impossible to separate realization from appetite, grief, eros, aging, and death. He kept the Dharma dangerous, alive, and honest.
Ikkyū (translation varies):
“My brush writes the Dharma
in tears, in lust,
in the dust of broken days.”
After Ikkyū, Zen cannot become only quiet, clean, or well-behaved. It must remain real.
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