Create Your Own Religion by Daniele Bolelli

Author:Daniele Bolelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609258665
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
Published: 2017-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Sex, Sake, and Zen: The Philosophy of Ikkyū Sojun

Since our little journey through the sexual morals of world religions may have bummed you out by now, I'm here to come to the rescue and offer you some water in the midst of the desert. Just when you start thinking that all religions have been shaped by sexophobic freaks, I'll give you three examples to show you otherwise. The one and only Tom Robbins introduced me to the first.

The hero of our story is a Japanese monk from the fifteenth century—hardly a promising start if you're looking for sexual redemption, but don't despair. Appearances in this case are very deceiving. The life of Ikkyū Sojun was wild from the beginning. Born in 1394 as the illegitimate son of the Emperor of Japan and a lady of the court, Ikkyū barely survived a political conspiracy aimed at wiping out possible heirs to the throne. After being banished from the court, his mother placed him in the care of a Zen temple when he was only five years old—a desperate move made in an effort to save his life. Despite being considered a genius by his peers, Ikkyū seriously flirted with suicide on a couple of occasions. But in a way his early existential troubles made him much stronger, since he would eventually become renowned for his ability to find joy in the midst of the most desperate circumstances.163

Ikkyū's sharp intellect and intuitive grasp of Buddhism made him a likely candidate to climb the religious hierarchy within Zen temples, but Ikkyū instead chose to raise his middle finger toward the religious establishment of the day and create his own path. In an act of rare defiance, he burned the certificate of enlightenment (think of it as the Buddhist equivalent of a spiritual PhD) given to him by his teacher—a daring gesture since the certificate was a requirement for the higher offices in temples. Certificate of enlightenment? Has spirituality turned into some bureaucratic perversion? Screw this, I don't want any part of it, thought Ikkyū.

Then Ikkyū found yet another way to burn his bridges with the religious orthodoxy. Despite his earlier iconoclastic behavior, he was named abbot of a temple. He disappeared a little over a week later. When the other monks went looking for him, they only found a poem he left behind which said if anyone wanted to see him, they could find him at the sake shops or the local brothels!

It wasn't that Ikkyū was giving up on Zen in favor of a life of drunken parties and hookers (though sex and sake-drinking were among his favorite activities). Rather, choosing the life of a vagabond teacher wandering the countryside was for him an extension of his Zen insight. It's precisely because he loved what Zen could be that he couldn't settle for what Zen in the temples had become. Given a choice between the power politics, corruption, hypocrisy, and blind devotion to empty formalisms that characterized many Zen communities and the

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