so many words about it
the only language is you don’t open your lips
— Ikkyu
When I was a Zen monastic acolyte I used to indulge the habit of dharma talk. Not so much out of arrogance, but more because I actually thought the word — the idea in my own too fluent mind — was equal to the thing. I had convinced myself that I, at least, knew what I was talking about when I opened my mouth and made pious sounds come out.
When I incanted such words as “radical” and “consciousness” and “dharma” and “right,” I was like a man in the grip of febrile hallucinations, believing these high-sounding words of mine referred to real things I knew about. And I juggled my fancy words around making sense of reality — not only to myself — but to others too. In ashrams, this is how we stay certain we're in control of our faculties.
One of my favorite Zen masters in early days was a man named Ikkyu. I think it’s fair to say that, were he my own master while alive, I would have been one of those hyper, well-meaning types — newly bald and enterprising — who he would have dragged off to a Kyoto brothel in the evenings, there to drink and consort, but truly, and mostly, to laugh. Likely until his ribs ached at the sight of this baffled, yet hopeful novice, who knew not what to do in such a deftly invented scene. “Is this a test? And how to pass it! Oh, Lord Buddha!” (And, of course, the women…)
When I hear community members in our various colonies branding themselves or others renunciates, I'm often reminded of Ikkyu. I like to entertain, in my own mind, such renunciates robed in their traditional black and brown cloths, sitting cross-legged at a low lacquer table piled high with empty porcelain sake bottles in a 14th century Kyoto brothel, arms enclasped tight with a half-in-the-bag and cackling Ikkyu. Part of the reason Ikkyu took his monks to brothels was to hammer the iron of their practice and test its strength. The high-spoken words (“radical,” “consciousness,” “dharma,” “right”) of false renunciates may be best tested against Reality in the hands of an erotic smith. For almost nothing unveils the true body of an aspiring priest than a witnessed grappling with sexual desire and all the intricacies of love.
I encountered this terrible fact myself — something like a bucket of ice water thrown in my face — when I first came into the company of my Guru, fresh from Korean temple encampments. That bucket of ice water left me with an unflagging skepticism about religious big talk to this day. I’ve found big talk, in my own case, to be mostly a way of navigating my own worldly purposes, in the way a neon jungle frog will balloon his vocal sack to avoid sex, to get sex, to evade unwanted attention, or to appear too big to eat.
It is well known that Ikkyu was a mostly noiseless man. He hummed most of his sounds into rice-paper poems that now mock his long lost body, having stood the test of time. I wonder sometimes if Ikkyu fell into his deeper silence as a demonstration against the clamor of the Daitoku-ji monastery itself. Those novice bodies. Those silver-tongued wits. Those words.
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flowers are silent silence is silent the mind
is a silent flower the silent flower of the world opens
— Ikkyu