11/21/2025
Jakush*tsu Genkō was born in 1290—seven centuries ago—into an aristocratic family in what is now Okayama Prefecture. His childhood details are sparse, as is common with medieval Zen figures, but the temple records of Eigen-ji and the Five Mountains literary tradition agree on the broad strokes: he was a bright, serious young man who turned toward Zen remarkably early. By his early teens he was already training at major temples in Kyoto, and by fifteen or sixteen he had taken vows and entered the orbit of Yakuō Tokken, a respected Rinzai master active in Kamakura and Kyoto. It was with Yakuō, according to later biographical tradition, that Jakush*tsu first tasted awakening—an intimate, private moment that would shape the rest of his life.
He belonged to the second great wave of Japanese Buddhist travelers to China, coming a full generation after Dōgen. When Dōgen sailed for Song-dynasty China, Zen had barely taken root in Japan. By the time Jakush*tsu was born, several decades later, Zen temples in Kyoto and Kamakura were flourishing, and a stream of ambitious Japanese monks was making the difficult journey across the sea to study Chan at its source. Jakush*tsu joined that stream around 1320, landing in the China of the late Yuan dynasty, when the classical Chan monasteries were still active but increasingly threatened by political upheaval.
He spent several years moving through these monasteries, studying the Linji (Rinzai) lineage and absorbing the Chinese monastic culture that was then at its height. One of the figures most strongly associated with him is the Chan master Zhongfeng Mingben—a towering late-Yuan teacher whose circle drew many Japanese disciples. Jakush*tsu’s understanding of Zen took on the texture of this environment: direct, uncompromising, rooted in meditation, and expressed as much through silence and poetry as through formal teaching.
When he returned to Japan, he did not immediately take up public teaching or accept an important post. Instead he withdrew into long periods of hermitage, living in mountain huts, wandering between temples, and practicing zazen in near solitude. This long period of withdrawal—something like a decades-long retreat—became the wellspring of his poetic voice. His poems, written in classical Chinese, belong to what later scholars called the Five Mountains literary tradition: terse, crystalline, nature-rooted, and free of ornament. The images are simple—wind, moon, rice fields, village paths—but the mind behind them is sharply distilled. Jakush*tsu wrote like someone who had pared life down to its bare essentials.
His reputation grew slowly, not through institutional advancement but through the quiet authority of his presence and verse. Eventually, around 1361, the provincial governor of Ōmi invited him to become the founding abbot of a new temple. Jakush*tsu agreed reluctantly, but the result was Eigen-ji, still one of the important Rinzai temples in Japan. The temple embodied his spirit: mountain-based, austere, stripped down to the essentials. Even as abbot, he lived simply, uninterested in status. After his death in 1367 the temple passed into village hands for a time, but it survived, and its archives became the primary home of his poems and records.
We know Jakush*tsu today not only through temple documents but through a small handful of dedicated scholars and translators who recognized the purity of his voice. Arthur Braverman’s A Quiet Room remains the only English collection devoted entirely to Jakush*tsu’s poems, offering a vivid and faithful rendition of his kanshi. Marian Ury’s translations in Poems of the Five Mountains place him among the great Zen poets of the medieval period. Other respected translators—Lucien Stryk, Takashi Ikemoto, Thomas Cleary, Yoel Hoffmann, and J. P. Seaton—have included his poems in broader Zen anthologies, ensuring that his voice continues to circulate beyond academic circles.
Although Jakush*tsu died almost thirty years before Ikkyū Sōjun was born, the kinship between them is unmistakable. Both were formed in the Ōtōkan line of Rinzai Zen. Both drew heavily on Chinese poetic tradition. Both rejected institutional comfort in favor of authenticity. Jakush*tsu is the quieter of the two, the hermit whose poems feel like mountain air. Ikkyū is the firebrand, the streetwise monk who used eroticism, humor, and transgression as teaching tools. Yet without Jakush*tsu’s example—his blend of fierce discipline, poetic refinement, and independence—the terrain Ikkyū later exploded into his own radical form would have looked different. Jakush*tsu sets the tone; Ikkyū amplifies it.
Today, some Zen communities commemorate Jakush*tsu on November 23. The date is modern rather than historically attested, but the gesture is fitting: late autumn for a master whose poems often read like the season itself—clear, spare, windswept, true. More than 700 years after his birth, Jakush*tsu Genkō remains one of the most quietly influential figures in Rinzai history: a bridge between Japan and China, between mountain solitude and temple life, and, most of all, between the wordless heart of Zen and the poems that somehow still manage to point toward it.
Looking for the Way,
I wore out sandals on many roads.
Stopping at last,
I found it everywhere.
Jakush*tsu Genko
