Zen Buddhism 8

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For Masao Abe & My Dear Friend Jeff

Hearing a crow with no mouth Cry in the deep

Darkness of the night, I feel a longing for

My father before he was born.

from A Zen Harvest, translated by Sōiku Shigematsu

Contents

Title Page Note to Reader Preface Foreword

1. Crow with No Mouth

About the Translator Books by Stephen Berg Copyright Special Thanks

Preface

When Ninagawa-Shinzaemon, linked verse poet and Zen devotee, heard that Ikkyū, abbot of the famous Daitokuji in Murasakino (violet field) of Kyoto, was a remarkable master, he desired to become his disciple. He called on Ikkyū, and the following dialogue took place at the temple entrance:

Ikkyū: Who are you? Ninagawa: A devotee of Buddhism. Ikkyū: You are from? Ninagawa: Your region. Ikkyū: Ah. And what’s happening there these days? Ninagawa: The crows caw, the sparrows twitter. Ikkyū: And where do you think you are now? Ninagawa: In a field dyed violet. Ikkyū: Why? Ninagawa: Miscanthus, morning glories, safflowers, chrysanthemums, asters. Ikkyū: And after they’re gone? Ninagawa: It’s Miyagino (field known for its autumn flowering). Ikkyū: What happens in the field? Ninagawa: The stream flows through, the wind sweeps over.

Amazed at Ninagawa’s Zen-like speech, Ikkyū led him to his room and served him tea. Then he spoke the following impromptu verse:

I want to serve You delicacies. Alas! the Zen sect Can offer nothing.

At which the visitor replied:

The mind which treats me To nothing is the original void—

A delicacy of delicacies.

Deeply moved, the master said, “My son, you have learned much.”

Speaking those words, perhaps Ikkyū recalled harsh treatment he received from his second master, Kasō Sōdon, in the very same circumstances. Kasō had ignored him completely while he waited five days outside his temple gate, then had disciples pour water over his head. It would have taken much more to discourage this would-be disciple. Finally Kasō agreed to take him on. It could not have been his kindly disposition that encouraged Ninagawa to approach Ikkyū, whose reputation was fierce. Rather all he heard of the great master, famed painter and poet, suggested such an approach might please Ikkyū, which proved to be the case for the fortunate Ninagawa.

Ikkyū Sōjun, according to traditional sources, was born in 1394, the natural child of the Emperor Go Komatsu and a favorite lady in waiting, of the Fujiwara clan, at the Kyoto court. The Empress, seething, it’s told, had her banished to a low section of the city, where Ikkyū was born. At six the boy was sent for training to Kyoto’s Ankokuji Temple. Precocious, by thirteen he was composing poems in Chinese, a poem, no less, daily. At fifteen he wrote lines that were recited everywhere. He was already extremely independent, something of a gadfly. There was much that bothered him about temple life, its pious snobbery over family connections, and he nettled fellow monks with his sharp comments.

By seventeen Ikkyū had a Zen master, Ken’ō, with whom he lived for four years, until Ken’ō’s death. Ken’ō was known for modesty and compassionate concern for the welfare of his disciples, and his loss affected Ikkyū profoundly. In comparison with Ken’ō, other Zen masters seemed ridiculously ostentations and, in matters of temple ritual, nitpicking. Seeking another master, Ikkyū chose a severe disciplinarian of the Rinzai sect named Kasō Sōdon. He was of the Daitokuji Temple line, whose distinguished lineage led to Hakuin (1686–1769), among its greatest heirs. While Kasō was aware of the importance of such

lineage, and performed his abbot’s duties faithfully, he preferred living in a small temple in Kataka, a short distance from Kyoto on the shore of Lake Biwa.

When twenty-five, Ikkyū, hearing a song from the Heike Monogatari, suddenly penetrated a koan (Zen problem for meditation) given him by Kasō, and he always was to speak of the moment as his first kenshō (awakening). But a more profound experience came two years later. While meditating in a boat on Lake Biwa, hearing a crow call, he was immediately, fully enlightened.

He hurried to Kasō for approval of his satori, but the master said, “This is the enlightenment of a mere arhat, you’re no master yet.” Ikkyū replied, “Then I’m happy to be an arhat, I detest masters.” At which Kasō declared, “Ha, now you really are a master.”

After his awakening Ikkyū stayed with the master, taking care of him in growing illness, a paralysis of the lower limbs that necessitated his being carried everywhere. Ikkyū’s unflagging loyalty impressed all, became legendary:

my dying teacher could not wipe himself unlike you disciples

who use bamboo I cleaned his lovely ass with my bare hands

Kasō died when Ikkyū was thirty-five, and the bereaved monk, who at the darkest moment of mourning had been close to suicide, began an endless round of travel, lasting the remainder of his life. He could not settle anywhere, and his behavior, even in those bawdy times, was thought scandalous. He never pretended to be saintly, took his passions as a natural part of life, frankly loved sake and women. After a disappointing day he would rush from the temple to a bar, wind up at a brothel. After which there was often a crisis of self-doubt, if not guilt. At such moments he went to his hermitage in the mountains at Joo:

ten years of whorehouse joy I’m alone now in the mountains

the pines are like a jail the wind scratches my skin

Ikkyū also had a hermitage in Kyoto which he called Katsuroan (Blind Donkey Hermitage), and often stayed at Daitokuji. But increasingly, to the point of anguish, he became disgusted with worldly carryings on at the main temple, shuddered at the business side of its affairs, and felt intense enmity toward Kasō’s successor, Yōsō. Twenty years his senior, Yōsō represented all Ikkyū despised in Rinzai practices of the day, among them frantic hustling for donations:

Yōsō hangs up ladles baskets useless donations in the temple

my style’s a straw raincoat strolls by rivers and lakes ...................................................... ten fussy days running this temple all red tape look me up if you want to in the bar whorehouse fish

market

In 1471, when seventy-seven, Ikkyū revealed his passion for a blind girl, an attendant at the Shūon’an Temple at Takigi. He wrote poems about their affair, some farcical, some very moving. He was self-conscious at the oddness of an old Zen monk falling for a young woman, but they spent years together, Ikkyū’s feeling for her growing in intensity:

I love taking my new girl blind Mori on a spring picnic I love seeing her exquisite free face its moist sexual heat

shine ............................................................... your name Mori means forest like the infinite fresh green distances of your blindness

When Ikkyū reached the age of eighty-two, far steadier, much becalmed, he was made abbot of Daitokuji, and often expressed childlike wonderment at his elevation, given his

unorthodox behavior throughout his long life, to a position so lofty. Though he appeared to revel in his unexpected role, he was often away from Daitokuji, mostly at his beloved Shūon’an Temple where he died in 1482, at eighty-eight.

While it may be that Ikkyū is best known in the Zen world as a sort of rake, always spitting in the face of orthodoxy, madly carrying on as freest of the free, most of his poems are concerned with Zen, revered to this day by Zennists. Among the best-known of such poems are two based on the concepts “Void in Form” and “Form in Void” as given in the Hridaya (Heart Sutra), one of the major sutras of Buddhism and of great importance to the Zen sect:

VOID IN FORM When, just as they are, White dewdrops gather On scarlet maple leaves, Regard the scarlet beads! .......................... FORM IN VOID The tree is stripped, All color, fragrance gone, Yet already on the bough, Uncaring spring!

As indication of the importance to the Zen community of such pieces, I was constantly reminded by my collaborator the late Takashi Ikemoto, while translating these two poems, of their spiritual and metaphysical significance. They were to be just so, and we turned the phrasing over and over. We were fully conscious of the range of Ikkyū’s life and art, making no excuses for his unconventional behavior but insisting on approaching him as illustrious master, one whose insight guided so many disciples.

Among those who came to him for guidance was Murata Shukō, the most eminent tea ceremony master of the day. Visiting Ikkyū, he was asked what he thought of Master Joshu’s well- known reference to tea drinking (in spite of their different responses, Joshu invariably said to three monks training under

him, “Have a cup of tea”). Shukō remained silent, and at last Ikkyū served him a cup of tea.

As Shukō lifted the cup to his lips, Ikkyū let out with a Zen shout and smashed the cup with his iron nyoi (Buddhist implement).

Shukō made a deep bow. “What are you like,” Ikkyū said, “when you’ve no

intention of taking tea?” Without answering, Shukō got up and moved toward the

door. “Stop,” Ikkyū called. “What are you like when you’ve

taken tea?” “The willow is green,” Shukō said, “the rose is red.” Ikkyū, approving Shukō’s grasp of Zen, smiled broadly. Through his life Ikkyū took his Zen responsibilities, the

temple rituals and later, disciples, conscientiously, in spite of his marked independence, but he would suddenly get fed up with routine, heading for the hills:

when I was 47 everyone came to see me so I walked out forever

Once, in utter disgust with the Zen community’s catering to the privileged, its blindness to raw truth, he destroyed his inka, his master’s formal written testimony to his enlightenment, his major qualification to serve as master:

one of you saved my satori paper I know it piece by piece you

pasted it back together now watch me burn it once and for all

With that by now typical gesture, I imagine, Ikkyū probably rushed from the temple to the nearest bar, followed by a night in the brothel.

What are we, centuries, worlds away from Ikkyū, to make of his extraordinary life? The Japanese, with few exceptions, have been equally puzzled. He has perhaps as many apologists as

followers—it would be wrong to imagine that they are more forgiving than we of eccentricity and “turpitude.” And though they have made allowances for Zen behavior, just as the Chinese in the T’ang Dynasty did for Taoist ways, there are clear limits to their tolerance, as much today as in the past. Yet it is his total freedom that makes him such an appealing figure. What is wrong about delighting in the body, its natural needs, on what authority is sex condemnable? If one avoids giving pain, if one abides by what is virtually Buddhism’s golden rule, to live inoffensively, why not live passionately?

There is a touching side to Crazy Cloud, as he was known and often referred to himself. It has to do with what is known in modern clinical parlance as “erotic renewal,” and it was something he was not only aware of but most grateful for:

I was like an old leafless tree until we met green buds burst and blossom

now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you .................................................... white-haired priest in his eighties Ikkyū still sings aloud each night to himself to the sky to

the clouds because she gave herself freely her hands her mouth her breasts her long moist thighs

Not only Ikkyū, in fulfillment, had much to thank his young blind lover for, but Zennists everywhere owe her a debt, for in the fullest sense she perked up his life, inspired his days, keeping ever clear his Zen mind. A mind so sharp that even at the very end, when as all masters of his day he brushed his death poem, he couldn’t resist just one more barb:

South of Mount Sumeru Who understands my Zen? Call Master Kido over— He’s not worth a cent.

Crow with No Mouth: Ikkyū is a most welcome collection of many of Ikkyū’s strongest and most revealing poems, rendered in very free and highly spirited versions by Stephen Berg, Ikkyū’s fellow poet. It is a collection to rejoice over and, I feel confident, would have mightily pleased Crazy Cloud himself.

—Lucien Stryk

Foreword

Harsh, delicate, brilliant, reckless, precise, intimate, ignorant, arrogant, aloof—Ikkyū comes across as a man of simultaneously miserable self-doubt and infinite self-confidence. He is always bent on crushing any ideal of self or conduct, any theory or belief. His core, his “real self” as it has been called, the “true man of no rank” is an anonymous force whose successive conditions are the same moment-by-moment states of fluid nameless identity we can sense in ourselves. Or say that Ikkyū’s nature and Nature are synonymous. Listening to fishermen, playing with a lover, expounding a fleeting splinter of thought, the man is all there. He is never a “half-filled mask,” Rilke’s term for us when we evade ourselves as we are. Jung’s “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely” is enacted by Ikkyū in the poems that track his life and the life of his mind. Kawabata calls him “the most severe and profound” teacher, perhaps because he leaves no part of himself unrevealed; because of his attempt at moral, spiritual, and personal inclusiveness. Wherever he is, whoever he is, he is relentlessly frank, naked, sincere, skilled in the uses of suffering. The long explosion of his character continues with equal intensity to the end of his life. Strangers at first, possibly we discovered a lost acquaintance—it happened in a flash, couplet after couplet. They say everyone meets himself in Ikkyū, immediately, in his deep fund of passion.

Without Ikkyū’s poetry in translations by James H. Sanford, Sonja Arntzen, and Jon Carter Covell with Sobin Yamada my versions would not have been possible. Their books explore the man’s life through firm literal English poems and commentaries that became my literary source.

Ikkyū wrote in a four-line form. My couplets (with a few exceptions) came as a necessary skeleton for the work of inspiring a voice whose first notes caught me when I read the scholars’ books. A true essay about what happened between their texts and mine would have to explain at length a process not usually associated with other such ambitious transfigurations. For

now, let me thank W.S. Merwin and Lucien Stryk for their suggestions.

—Stephen Berg

Crow with No Mouth

even before trees rocks I was nothing when I’m dead nowhere I’ll be nothing

all the bad things I do will go up in smoke and so will I

if there’s nowhere to rest at the end how can I get lost on the way?

this ink painting of wind blowing through pines who hears it?

born born everything is always born thinking about it try not to

poetry’s hellish bullshit one good way to suffer men love it men stupid as horses cows

sexual love’s attachment pain is deeper than I can know wind soothes my thoughts this lust my ceaseless koan impossibly happy

outrageous eyes ears nose in the cold one silent tinkling bell clear beautiful nudged by the wind hangs over the polished railing

sin like a madman until you can’t do anything else no room for any more

night after night after night stay up all night nothing but your own night

believe in the man facing you now just narrow your eyes feel the deep love

raining or not walk lifting your heavy wet sleeves

I can’t smell a thing can’t see their pink but they’ll find branches next spring

fuck flattery success money all I do is like back suck my thumb

so many words about it the only language is you don’t open your lips

no walls no roof no anything my house doesn’t get wet doesn’t get blown down

you can hear it when it doesn’t even move you can hear it when the wind forces itself past rocks

clouds very high look not one word helped them get up there

a well nobody dug filled with no water ripples and a shapeless weightless man drinks

this world this thing you and I call knowing those ten words these fifty-four-year-old fingers are everything

here I am simply trying to get into your head you think you were born you die what a pity

like a knifeblade the moon will be full then less than nothing but it’s dawn and the moon’s a knifeblade

oh green green willow wonderfully red flower but I know the colors are not there

one long pure beautiful road of pain and the beauty of death and no pain

you won’t even be here to read them what stupidity to put these words in your mouth

nobody told the flowers to come up nobody will ask them to leave when spring’s gone

I didn’t see one thing on my trip but I breathed and whatever I breathed was time

my gray cat jumped up just as I lifted this spoon we’re born we die

that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind

it isn’t that we’re alone or not alone whose voice do you want mine? yours?

I won’t die I won’t go away I’ll always be here no good asking me I won’t speak

you poor sad thing thinking death is real all by itself

only a kind deadly sincere man can show you the way here in the other world

I’m in it everywhere what a miracle trees lakes clouds even dust

I’d love to give you something but what would help?

melons eggplants rice rivers the sky I offer them to you on this holiday

Ikkyū this body in’t yours I say to myself wherever I am I’m there

my mind can’t answer when you call if it did I’d be stealing your life from you

oh yes things exist like the echo when you yell at the foot of a huge mountain

hear the cruel no-answer until blood drips down beat your head against the wall of it

pleasure pain are equal in a clear heart no mountain hides the moon

this boat is and is not when it sinks both disappear

I’m pure shame what I do and what I say never the same

you can’t be anyone but you therefore you are that Other one you love

no tiny wooden hut with a grass roof in the hills but this city these people where I live still are impossible

mirror facing a mirror nowhere else

on the deep green lily pad dew has no color of its own

the mind is exactly this tree that grass without thought or feeling both disappear

wife daughters friends this is for you satori is mistake after mistake

before birth after birth that’s where you are now

I try to be a good man but all that comes of trying is I feel more guilty

not two not one either and the unpainted breeze in the ink painting feels cool

I like my anger my grouchy furious love amazing how we say such nice things about the dead

this brick house I live in is really the sky and just as priceless

you me when I think really think about it are the same

go down on your silly knees pray for what? tomorrow is yesterday

don’t worry please please how many times do I have to say it there’s no way not to be who you are and where

all koans just lead you on but not the delicious pussy of the young girls I go down on

thirsty you dream of water cold you want fire not me I want the firm warm breasts and wetness of a woman

I found my sparrow Sonrin dead one morning and dug his grave as gently as I would my own daughter’s

you can’t make cherry blossoms by tearing off petals to plant only spring does that

clouds endless clouds climbing beyond ask nothing from words on a page

keep writing those deep questions sleep on when you wake even you’ll be gone

sometimes all I am is a dark emptiness I can’t hide in the sleeves of my own robes

October wind crosses the world in this field moist grass bends to itself and to the sea

I’m alive! right? don’t we say that? we don’t see the bones we walk on

gravestones melt to stumps of stone knobs use them to grind tea leaves

lone moon no clouds we stumble through the night

long life the wild pines want it too

I hate it I know it’s nothing but I suck out the world’s sweet juicy plum

why is it all so beautiful this fake dream this craziness why?

nobody before me nobody after writing it

nobody knows shit nobody lives anywhere hello dust!

so many paths go up from the foothills but one moon grazes the peak

it’s logical: if you’re not going anywhere any road is the right one

rain hail snow ice I love watching the river

pine needles inches deep hug the ground no one lives here

my friend’s funeral this morning burns inside me like my own death

and it breaks my heart how so easily smoke rises tonight like the thought of him

they could have put a small doll in the urn but it was my father’s ashes

know nothing I know nothing nobody does can you face me and know nothing know

icy window windy snow moon tangled among black flowers the mind is water wrapping itself where it is around what what what never the same

oh the evening wind hurries smoke our smoke into the sky

stare at it until your eyes drop out this desk this wall this unreal page

Yōsō hangs up ladles baskets useless donations in the temple my style’s a straw raincoat strolls by rivers and lakes

ten fussy days running this temple all red tape look me up if you want o in the bar whorehouse fish market

nature’s a killer I won’t sing to it I hold my breath and listen to the dead singing under the grass

I live in a shack on the edge of whorehouse row me autumn a single candle

one half-thawed lovesong chilly as dusk remains my life stalking hills now these shameful purple robes

talk about family laws ideals my silence drives me mad

without passion and ignorance none of it works

up all night in this fisherman’s hut drinking talking his wife hates me bangs her spoon on the kettle

chopping up herbs blood flows from my hand into the block no food my teacher mocks me with a smile

stirring cold ashes with his eyes shut tight another student weeps into the sparks

another house has its own path through the dark what about when moss grows on the heart’s road

my dying teacher could not wipe himself unlike you disciples who use bamboo I cleaned his lovely ass with my bare hands

ten dumb years I wanted things to be different furious proud I still feel it one summer midnight in my little boat on Lake Biwa caaaawwweeeee father when I was a boy you left us now I forgive you

the edges of the sword are life and death no one knows which is which

even in its scabbard my sword sees you

I don’t own a sewing needle but I keep calligraphy

in a special box given by my dying friend

in a dazzling scabbard this wooden sword which can’t kill or help you to live

suddenly nothing but grief so I put on my father’s old ripped raincoat

brown ruffle of flame rushes across my white paper diploma why tie up the donkey

when I was forty-seven everybody came to see me so I walked out forever

her mouth played with my cock the way a cloud plays with the sky

I’m up here in the hills starving myself but I’ll come down for you

one of you saved my satori paper I know it piece by piece you pasted it back together now watch me burn it once and for all

this soul torch I hold up lights the sky think of those nights freezing staring into the river

my monk friend has a weird endearing habit he weaves sandals and leaves them secretly by the roadside

look up Heaven look around you Earth red flesh white bones crushed between both the real you survives

I love bamboo how it looks and because men carve it into flutes

Ikkyū near death returns your cloak to you slash it in half it’s still yours

where you are whatever you do hearing a stalk struck remember bamboo remembers nothing

it takes horseshit to grow bamboo and it too longs forever weeps begs to the wind

night plum blossoms spreading under a branch between her thighs narcissus revolves smell it?

a crazy lecher shuttling between whorehouse and bar this past master paints south north east west with his cock

they do it in the street in broad daylight like cows and horses it’s late the moon goes under west of Ch’ang-an

all the old masters want is money and fame strike like a feather but when

they screw inside the temple call in students for “mysterious satori”

only I teach like the seasons

sick Zen from the famous three you know who I mean I can change your life with a mere look

they used sticks and yells and other tricks those fakes Ikkyū reaches high low like sunlight

flowers are silent silence is silent the mind is a silent flower the silent flower of the world opens

six years of hunger sitting like a secret in darkness his bones pierced with the less-and-less the near-nothing

a flower held up twirled between human fingers a smile barely visible

frogs at the bottom of a well like you idiot thrashing in mud laughable so very very right

something in us always wants to cry out someone we love knows hears

this useless dying koan body singing its lust weeds not yet cleared everywhere

raging in the now hungry for it crows rattle the air no dust

no nothing only those wintry crows

bright black in the sun

listen whose face is it a piece of sunlit jade warbling laughing

one pause between each crow’s reckless shriek Ikkyū Ikkyū Ikkyū

rice boils in my broken-footed iron pot it’s everything but you can’t taste it

peace isn’t luck for six years stand facing a silent wall until the you of your face melts like a candle

don’t wait for the man standing in the snow to cut off his arm help him now

some monks live in caves build huts on snowy mountains right now clouds flee across the moon my heart

we’re lost born in delusions deeper than any mind if you could escape awakening you’d ripen like a pear all by itself

three-foot axe leans on the headsman’s block cuts through deep feelings April

amazingly sad how its blade mirrors the years how sadness extends far as the hills and rivers

so burning’s knowing and I’m not even drunk on three wines

plunge into the fire reality pure endless pain

one white blossom snow razor-edged mountains slice my belly

I have to admit my passion never leaves fire is the master young grasses appear each spring

don’t hesitate get laid that’s wisdom sitting around chanting what crap

we’re lost where the mind can’t find us utterly lost

Lin-chi screamed KATSU! at precisely the right time gave life death KATSU! eyes everywhere blazing blazing eyes sun moon KATSU! KATSU!

beloved Wei-shan wanted to come back as a cow grazing in a wide valley can’t you see him munching flowers idling under stars on a windy night

life’s like climbing knife-trees hills with swords sticking up day and night something stabs you

we live in a cage of light an amazing cage animals animals without end

sick all I can think of is love and fucking the love song hums in my groin listen my hair’s white wild grasses uncut on my meadow

chrysanthemums hammered out of raw iron that cloud gone now like my father

sick of it whatever it’s called sick of the names I dedicate every pore to what’s here

I’d sniff you like a dog and taste you then kiss your other mouth endlessly if I could white hair or not

Lin-chi’s followers don’t know Zen I the Blind Donkey do my tongue and gentle fingers thick hard cock one autumn night’s a thousand centuries

nobody cares about my hungers thirsts smash the plum blossom’s one night’s ice

no money in a dream plums simple and close five thousand coins in a row in a dream of power

inside the koan clear mind gashes the great darkness

in deep winter I write poems get drunk the cup’s heavier heavier moon whispering all night even at sixty I’m hard in her again and again

Ikkyū the whole day singing boozing so great so fully here he built a bridge no one uses 10,000 miles long

I went half crazy studying sitting for days now the one thing is fishermen’s songs sunset rain clouds the river night after night

ten years of whorehouse joy I’m alone now in the mountains the pines are like a jail the wind scratches my skin

I’m like wind pouring down hills into the city whatever I do is beyond whatever’s been done

the crow’s caw was ok but one night with a lovely whore opened a wisdom deeper than what the bird said

cheap tea thin gruel pale leaves as winter begins this threadbare robe feels fine in the first dawn frost

Zen’s finished stick your brain in a peach branch guzzle sake sing until you have no throat then words come by themselves

brush ink plunge forward blind man who knows each step in the dark the bristles dry dip again brush blind until you’re gone

break open the cherry tree where’s the flower? but spring

in war there’s no time to teach or learn Zen carry a strong stick bash your attackers

who brought these fish sizzling in the pan I’ll never stop thinking about women white hair lust sings through my body weeds everywhere

skinny legs wandering no friends the lamppost moves not me following my song money is power spring the cuckoo weeps blood inside me

watching my four-year-old daughter dance I can’t break free of her

it’s a hungry morning when I don’t see her more and more I love her and drink wine more

I’ve burnt all the holy pages I used to carry but poems flare in my heart

the wise know nothing at all well maybe one song

empty belly no wine it’s freezing melody the angel’s shining cloak stains the air

alone with the icy moon no passion these trees this mountain nothing else

nobody understands my not no Zen Zen not even that crow’s shattering bleak scream got it

break through one impasse there’s another let the sweet

lychee slip over your tongue and down

a beautiful woman’s hot vagina’s full of love I’ve given up trying to put out the fire of my body

if you don’t break rules you’re an ass not human women start us passion comes and goes until death

I love taking my new girl blind Mori on a spring picnic I love seeing her exquisite free face its moist sexual heat shine

your name Mori means forest like the infinite fresh green distances of your blindness

how is my hand like Mori’s? it’s her freedom I love when I’m sick she makes me hard fingers lips rove everywhere bring my followers joy

I’m whole as long as I hear you singing then emptiness when you stop

a woman is enlightenment when you’re with her and the red thread of both your passions flares inside you and you see

I remember one quiet afternoon she fished out my cock bent over played with it in her mouth for at least an hour

for us no difference between reading eating singing making love not one thing or the other

once while she was cooking I kneeled put my head between her warm dark legs up her skirt kissed and licked and sucked her until she came

she’d play with it almost anywhere day and night touch it with the deepest part of herself

and the nights inside you rocking smelling the odor of your thighs is everything

I think of your death think of us touching my head quiet in your lap

I was like an old leafless tree until we met green buds burst and blossom now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you

plum blossom close to the ground her dark place opens wet with the dew of her passion wet with the lust of my tongue

white-haired priest in his eighties Ikkyū still sings aloud each night to himself to the sky the clouds because she gave herself freely her hands her mouth her breasts her long moist thighs

some die meditating some on their feet but he did both not black not white that old man P’u-K’o like a distant bird barely audible

Hsu-T’ang tore off his robes like a broken sandal

Zen has no center clouds rake the moon some voice claws at my heart

this morning’s koan’s a poem tonight people flock to this mountain I live the problem ignore poor birds pleading for food

only one koan matters you

poetry’s ridiculous write it feel proud strut look in the mirror believe you know

sutras poems I stash them under my robe burn them all but not words written on my heart

flute notes bring gods demons only that music again the world’s biggest ass-man hasn’t one friend his loneliness that music

I walked through the door of death came back went back am here brisk wind warm rain dawn the bleached moon

you stand inside me naked infinite love the dawn bell rips my dreaming heart

books koans sitting miss the heart but not fishermen’s songs rain pelts the river I sing beyond all of it

who teaches truth? good/bad the wrong way

Crazy Cloud knows the taste of his own shit long love letters brief passionate poems

this hungry monk chanting by lamplight is Buddha and he still thinks of you

a butterfly hovers in front of her face how long will she sleep

one wisp rootless shifting a dot in the blue sky know it

anybody can enter Buddha’s world so few can step into the Devil’s

I ask you answer I don’t you don’t O Lord Bodidharma what’s in your unknown heart

and what is the heart pine breeze voice in a forgotten painting

this cow has come to teach you: what you do is where you are where you are is what you do: nobody knows which monk I was

no more Zen write one great line like a needle piercing a sore spot on your arm

in the freezing hall one night in a flimsy robe I hallucinated gold- threaded cloth it hung in the air uselessly

those old koans meaningless just ways of faking virtue this gorgeous young whore wears silk robes that hang open about an inch

Crazy Cloud likes his own mind its wish for flutesongs rainy nights drinking muttering beside his women

the girl listening to the poet bursting with poems thinks nothing but he thinks he wants her leaning on the gate while she just listens

I’m eighty still alive looking up every night snapping my fingers at time at the promise of love

at the bath she bathed scrubbing her face and body at the bath I splashed water on myself enjoying her body

hundreds of peaks but only one lone bell out of nowhere maple groves tipped by stars fixed above the inlet

nobody knows I’m a storm I’m dawn on the mountain twilight on the town

poems should come from bare ground night falling on night falling on a black landscape

Rinzai did it without a care no clouds wind sky a heart that simply sings

eat the wind eat the water nobody can say how I know a man who stood twenty years on Gojo bridge

stand tiptoe on the tip of a needle like a grain of sand flashing in sunlight

my name Ikkyū’s disgusting not dust yet it should be swept away and will be

nobody understands why we do what we do this cup of sake does

age eighty weak I shit and offer it to Buddha

even if Buddha himself kneeled at my deathbed he wouldn’t be worth shit

self other right wrong wasting your life arguing you’re happy really you are happy

forget what the masters wrote truth’s a razor each instant sitting here you and I being here

no masters only you the master is you wonderful no?

men are like cows horses fuck poetry look at your hand read it

even Rinzai’s disciples don’t know so many ordinary people know but don’t know they know walking to work talking to themselves

I still worry about how I look my dry white hair oh age wanting to fuck but I’ll sing no matter how things are

rain drips from the roof lip loneliness sounds like that

passion’s red thread is infinite like the earth always under me

this donkey stumbles blind over stones into walls ditches no words for grief or joy no words for his ruined heart

cut off everything from everything stand here the soles of your feet the ground your brain in the black nothing between

I woke from a dream of death to day’s amazing death grass death rice death chairs death death asleep or awake

no words sitting alone night in my hut eyes closed hands open wisps of an unknown face

my death? who was it anyway always where he was never no not once ever seeing himself an eyeball speaks

About the Translator

Stephen Berg is the author of several volumes of poetry including The Daughters, Grief, With Akhmatova at the Black Gates, and most recently, In it, as well as versions from Nahuatl, Nothing in the Word, and versions of Eskimo songs, Sea Ice. His translations include poems of the modern Hungarian Mikos Radnoti, Clouded Sky (with Stephen Polgar and S.J. Marks) and Sophocles’s Oedipus the King (with Diskin Clay). He was the editor (with Robert Mezey) of the highly acclaimed Naked Poetry anthologies.

Berg is founder (in 1971) and co-editor of The American Poetry Review. He has been awarded the Frank O’Hara Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a National Translation Center Grant from the Ford Foundation, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and a Columbia University Translation Prize. He has taught at Princeton and Haverford, and is currently Professor of English at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Books by Stephen Berg

Cuckoo’s Blood: Versions of Zen Masters Elegy on Hats Rimbaud Versions & Inventions: Still Unilluminated Clouded Sky/Miklós Radnóti (translator, with Steven Polgar) X=: Poems Footnotes to an Unfinished Poem My Business is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery (Editor) Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review (Editor, with David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang) Halo Shaving Steel Cricket: Versions 1958–1997 Oblivion: Poems New & Selected Poems Crow with No Mouth: Ikkyū, 15th century Zen Master: Versions In It Singular Voices: American Poetry Today (Editor) In Praise of What Persists (Editor) With Akhmatova at the Back Gates: Variations Oedipus the King/Sophoclese (Translator, with Diskin Clay) Grief: Poems and Versions of Poems About Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, Poetry, and Essays (Editor, with S.J. Marks) Between People: A Reader for Open Learning (with S.J. Marks and J. Michael Pilz) Nothing in the Word: Versions of Aztec Poetry Clouded Sky (Translator, with Steven Polgar and S.J. Marks) Daughters: Poems Queen’s Triangle: A Romance Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (Editor, with Robert Mezey) Bearing Weapons: Poetry

Acknowledgments

The two anecdotes in the preface about Ninagawa and Shukō, and the two poems, “Void in Form” and “Form in Void,” translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, from Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews (2nd edition, 1981), are used with the permission of Swallow/Ohio University Press. Ikkyu’s death poem, given at the end of the Preface, from Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill (Evergreen Edition, 1987), translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, is used with permission of Grove Press.

Copyright 1989 by Stephen Berg All rights reserved

Cover art: Calligraphy by Ikkyū,: “Do no Evil.”

ISBN: 978-1-55659-152-5

eISBN: 978-1-61932-076-5

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Table of Contents Title Page Note to Reader Contents Preface Foreword Crow with No Mouth About the Translator Books by Stephen Berg Acknowledgments Copyright Special Thanks