https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/ikkyu-in-hell/ * Home * Essays * Collections * Explore * Shop * Support PDR * About * Blog Search Search The Public Domain Review [ ][View All Results] The Public Domain Review The Public Domain Review PDRSupport PDR * Essays * Collections * Explore * Shop * About * Blog * * * * * Collections / Images Ikkyu in Hell: Skeletons (1692) [skeleton-f] "Ikkyu is my true heir, but his ways are wild": these words, uttered by the fourteenth-century Zen master Kaso, may seem like something of an understatement to those acquainted with his chosen successor. Legends about Ikkyu abound to this day, making it difficult to separate truth from Tokugawa Period invention. The bastard son of Emperor Go-Komatsu, Ikkyu was sent to live at Ankoku-ji Temple when still a child and would soon gravitate toward the austerer strains of Buddhist thought. At twenty-one, grieving the death of his first great teacher, he paddled out to the center of Lake Biwa intending to drown himself but was stopped by the ghost of his mother. Years later, adrift in a boat on a different lake, he would hear the sound of a crow's call and achieve enlightenment. A man of iconoclastic extremes, Ikkyu adopted the pen name Mad Cloud (Kyoun), authored verses that smash scriptural references together with scatalogical content, and spurned the comforts of his home monastery's main buildings for a hut he dubbed Blind Donkey Hermitage. He is perhaps most famous, however, for his unabashed love of wine and women. In artworks, Ikkyu is often depicted flanking the Hell Courtesan, Jigoku Dayu, whose name punningly references both the highest (dayu) and lowest (jigoku) rank of Edo Period sex workers, the latter of which is also the Japanese word for the demon realm. A legend recorded in Santo Kyoden's All Records of Drunken Enlightenment of Our Country (Honcho Suibodai Zenden, 1809) relates how Jigoku Dayu began her path toward spiritual advancement after meeting Ikkyu in the brothel where she worked. Many prints of the two feature the monk with an incongruously serene smile pasted across his face as he lofts a skull above the lady's head. It is this fame for sinner-sainthood that, at least in the popular imagination, has eclipsed Ikkyu's significant achievements as an artistic jack-of-all-trades: as a shakuhachi (bamboo flute) player, as a calligrapher, as a practitioner of ink painting, and as a writer. Many of these skills are brought to bear in his book Skeletons (Gaikotsu, ca. 1457), a mixture of poetry and prose that comes down to us in printed editions supposedly replicating a manuscript, now lost, by the monk's own hand. The text describes a series of visions of animated skeletons that Ikkyu had when he visited an abandoned temple. The lively illustrations testify to their maker's sardonic sense of humor: he images skeletons dancing, drumming, drinking sake, having sex. In the verse, too, we see glimpses of the monk's trademark irreverence: If a stone Can be the memento Of the dead, Then the tombstone Would be better as a lavatory. Ikkyu lived during the Muromachi Period, when close ties between the Ashikaga Shogunate and Kyoto's temples resulted in a flush monastic class quite far from the ascetic ideal of the sangha to which Ikkyu cleaved. As many have pointed out, the monk's life also coincided with a time of virtually constant conflict -- including the devastating Onin War -- that laid Kyoto to waste amid horrific scenes of violence and upheaval. For all that Skeletons' titular apparitions frolic and cavort across the page, the dominant tone of the text is one of melancholy and somber contemplation. A number of its poems reference Mount Toribe, whose well-known cremation grounds outside the Kyoto city limits served as a memento mori for the capital's residents each time they saw its ascending column of smoke. "When the breathing stops and the skin of the body is broken there is no more form, no higher and lower", Ikkyu writes, cautioning readers about both the fleetingness of existence and the ultimately illusory nature of all things. A similar idea is expressed in certain versions of the Jigoku Dayu tale in which she witnesses Ikkyu dancing with a group of her fellow courtesans: when the group goes behind a screen, the lady is startled to see their solid bodies project ghastly skeletal shadows, as though their flesh had melted away in an instant to reveal a premonition of the death that awaits us all. As time went on, Ikkyu would become increasingly disillusioned by the corruption and worldliness of monastic authorities. In this context, his famous eccentricities begin to take on a different feeling: better to spurn the pieties professed by hypocrites than to submit to the fossilized non-thought of convention. The nickname Mad Cloud was less a sincere self-appraisal, as the Japanese literature scholar Sonja Arntzen explains, than "a way of pointing out his supramundane sanity" amid an ailing establishment increasingly removed from the values it pretended to espouse. In 1447, despairing of the intrigue and backbiting at his home monastery, Ikkyu hiked up to a remote mountain retreat with the intention of starving himself to death. He was saved this time not by his dead mother but by a living cousin, a distant half-relation who had come to occupy the imperial Chrysanthemum Throne in the meantime. Legend has it that this cousin dispatched an emissary begging Ikkyu to desist for the sake of the soul of the nation -- by which one might suppose, substituting body natural for body politic, that the emperor meant also for the sake of his own soul as well. Text by Erica X Eisen Published Oct 31, 2023 Medium * Images Theme * Death * Religion, Myth & Legend Style * Illustrations Epoch * 17th Century Tags skeletons9buddhism5prostitution4japan27 Source Source Wikimedia Commons * Wikimedia Commons logo More Wikimedia Commons content on PDR (99) Rights Underlying PD Worldwide Work Rights PD Wikimedia Digital Copy * Marked rights free on Wikimedia but not Rights officially by creator of digital copy * See their page outlining policy * We offer this info as guidance only Download Download Right click in image or see source for higher-res Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Ikkyu is greeted by a skeleton in a graveyard on the grounds of a temple. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Skeletons play musical instruments, dance, and carouse. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Skeleton couples. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. A "dead" skeleton. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Skeletons carry the body of the dead. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Skeletons walking in the hills. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. A skeleton taking the tonsure. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Skeletons in a garden. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. A skeleton procession. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Skeletons cremate the body of their companion. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Bones of a "dead" skeleton scattered in the hills. Illustration of skeletons and landscapeScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Grave of a "dead" skeleton. If You Liked This... Hand holding envelope Get Our Newsletter Our latest content, your inbox, every fortnight Privacy Policy More Info [ ][ ] HP[ ] [Subscribe] Become a Friend of the PDRPostcardsWe rely on our annual donors to keep the project alive. 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