Ikkyu Sojun 1394 – 1481

Ikkyu Sojun was a Japanese Zen master, poet, and calligrapher of the Muromachi period, abbot of the Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto, and the most idiosyncratic figure of medieval Japanese Buddhism. Reputedly an illegitimate son of the Emperor Go-Komatsu, he criticized the worldly Zen of his contemporaries with unsparing irony and sought enlightenment, by his own account, in the brothels and taverns of the capital as much as in the meditation hall. His Crazy Cloud Anthology of Chinese-style poems, his calligraphy, and the legends gathered about him have shaped Japanese Zen, tea ceremony, and literary culture down to the present.

Ikkyu Sojun was born in Kyoto in February 1394, the illegitimate son of the Emperor Go-Komatsu and a low-ranking court lady, and was sent at the age of five to the Zen monastery Ankoku-ji to be raised away from the court. He trained at Kennin-ji and other major Rinzai houses, and at twenty-two became the disciple of the austere master Kaso Sodon at Daitoku-ji's outpost at Lake Biwa, where he received his enlightenment. After Kaso's death he refused the formal seal of transmission and spent decades as a wandering and openly eccentric monk in the Kyoto-Sakai region, fiercely critical of the moral decay of the Zen monasteries; in 1474, against his preference, he was appointed by imperial command abbot of the war-ravaged Daitoku-ji and rebuilt it.

His writings include the long collection of Chinese-style poems Kyounshu (Crazy Cloud Anthology), the prose Skeletons (Gaikotsu) on impermanence, several sets of Japanese waka, the dharma talks Mizukagami and Bukkigun, and a body of calligraphy and ink painting still revered. He is famous for his openly sexual late poems addressed to the blind singer Mori, with whom he lived from his late seventies.

Ikkyu integrated Zen with the wider literary, dramatic, and visual arts of the Higashiyama era, mentored the early masters of the formal tea ceremony and the No theatre, and made the figure of the wild, sexually frank, artistically gifted Zen monk a permanent option in the Japanese imagination. He died at the Shuon-an at Takigi in November 1481.