The Crow called, “Ikkyū, Ikkyū, Ikkyū”
Leland Shields, January 11, 2026
Ten dumb years I wanted things to be different furious proud I still feel it
One summer midnight on my little boat on Lake Biwa Caaaawwwweee
Father when I was a boy you left us now I forgive youIkkyū, translation by Stephen Berg Crow With No Mouth, (p. 26)
This is one of several poems identified as the one Ikkyū wrote after his enlightenment when he was twenty-six years old, in 1420 Japan. From accounts of his life – or I could say the accounts of his “antics”– he was passionate, irreverent, unpretentious, impatient with pretention, arrogant, and clear-eyed.
In biographical accounts, Ikkyū’s father was rumored to be Chinese emperor Gokomatsu, and his mother was a member of a prominent family and an attendant at court. His mother was slandered by the empress and expelled from the palace. In her subsequent poverty she gave Ikkyū up to a Zen temple when he was five years old. Allusions to his mother and father arise in his poems.
Ikkyū wrote mostly in a four-line format. The version I just read was from Stephen Berg’s book, Crow with No Mouth in which Berg freely adapted his translations to bring out the voice he heard in the poems, without a constraint about the number of lines. I wasn’t able to find another translation to see what other freedoms Berg took, so I’ll take it as it is.
I’ve talked about this poem previously, and apparently, I can’t get enough of it. It contains the whole of Zen in these few lines. I hate to break it down, so instead, I’ll just read the poem again. As translated it has three lines and no punctuation. One annotation – other poems by Ikkyū’ make clear that the call of a crow sounded on this night.
Ten dumb years I wanted things to be different furious proud I still feel it
One summer midnight on my little boat on Lake Biwa Caaaawwwweee
Father when I was a boy you left us now I forgive you(Ibid)
In these sparse words, Ikkyū richly calls us to our true home, as it is, as we are, as you are, whether or not it is as we would dream it could or should be. Take the first line:
Ten dumb years I wanted things to be different furious proud I still feel it
Ikkyū practiced diligently, with angst, doubt, and drive to find something more, something better. He practiced to be better. I don’t take his starting words of “ten dumb years” to be self-critical, but his and the translator’s way of saying that as hard as he worked, his efforts were misdirected. In a passage from “Verse of the Faith Mind” in our sutra book, Chien-Chih Seng-ts’an wrote:
…Using the mind to seek the mind —
isn’t that a great mistake?
Rest and unrest arise in delusion,
enlightenment knows neither like nor dislike.
All dualistic views come
from your own mistaken deductions…“Verse of the Faith-Mind” Jianzhi Sengcan [Chien-Chih Seng-ts’an] d. 606.
Using the mind to seek the mind may be a mistake in the spirit of falling down nine times and getting up ten. There is nothing wrong with misdirected zazen; there is no zazen without misdirected zazen. Sometimes we have to try north, south, east, and west, up, and down, before recognizing that groping in each of the six directions takes us away from home, take us away from what we seek. Seeking at all takes us away from what we seek.
Jazz saxophonist and apparent Zen master Charlie Parker said “Hear with your eyes and see with your ears.” The discriminating mind is not able to follow that advice.
When I was growing up, my father’s day job was engineering, and he had a side gig fixing TV’s for people. He would test the vacuum tubes, replace one, and give the person an invoice. My father adapted an old joke saying that if people complained about the $100 bill, he’d rewrite it to say, that’s $5 for the tube and $95 to know which tube to replace.
Thinking about this talk, I realized that joke did not tell the story of what I watched my father do when fixing things. When our washing machine broke, my father knew nothing about the machine as he brought his tools to it. He took off the back panel and began by looking, my face next to his as he shined a flashlight on the components. He started by not knowing. I see the water supply hoses comes in here and pipes take it to this…must be a valve. These pipes go to the drain pipe on the back panel again, so that device there must be a drain pump…the machine isn’t draining, so let’s look at what could be wrong – is power getting to the pump? – I watched as he moved on, with full engagement.
The key wasn’t what my father knew; it was his engagement with not knowing that revealed the life of the washing machine. For Ikkyū one night the Cawww of the crow shattered discriminating mind. What did he realize?
Coming back to the end of the poem’s first line, Ikkyū said, “furious proud and I still feel it.” There would be no poem unless something shifted, but he tells us up front that he still wants things to be different, or is still furious proud, or both. We know from his biography that the angst expressed is not trivial; after the death of two of his teachers, Ken’o and Kasō he was deeply depressed and thought of suicide.
The second line comes before any chance to wonder about the first line:
One summer midnight on my little boat on Lake Biwa Caaaawwwweee
Ikkyū, translation by Stephen Berg Crow With No Mouth, (p. 26)
Here, we are in a little boat on Lake Biwa. Caawwww…. Caaaawww! Pierced through by the raucous sound, sight, touch, and thought today in zenkai, still wanting things to be different. Before the sound, there was dark of night, boat, and gentle rocking on the water. After the sound was dark of night, boat, and gentle rocking on the water. Something is different and nothing has changed. Hearing the crow didn’t make Ikkyū better, it just introduced him to Ikkyū.
The Caawww of the Crow didn’t just pierce Ikkyū. It rang through the wind, the drop of rain hanging at the bottom of the railing, and Mount Rainier. “Pierce” might not be the most descriptive word; The Caaawww resonated with every molecule in Ikkyū’s body, and every drop of rain, and every stone of Mount Rainier. The Caaww resonates still in the blood, coursing through your veins, though the crow might sound like the fan of the heating system, and may look like the faucet perched on the far edge of the sink, looking down at the dishes below.
The Eastern Continental Divide runs through Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, with rain falling on the east of the Divide finding its way to the Atlantic Ocean, and rain falling west of the divide running to the Gulf of Mexico. No engineer designed the Divide. Each drop of rain falls without need of discriminating mind; some drops fall and flow west, and neighboring drops fall and flow east. There is no purpose for the rain going west or east; each drop cannot help but to respond in accord, inextricably enmeshed in the Tao. You and I can’t help it either, though we can respond begrudgingly, and we can respond with grace.
Expressed as in the timeframe while still in the boat, the third line of the poem opens wider still:
Father when I was a boy you left us now I forgive you
(Ibid, p. 26)
There was father before the Caaww, and father after the Caaww. With the phrase, “…now I forgive you…” in some manner, the wanting things to be different has fallen away. With forgiveness of his father comes embrace, nothing left out. Parsing, measuring mind is not active in the moment. Father of the past is left in the past. Grief of it is not far gone. Forgiveness – just now – without parsing.
When Ikkyū presented his enlightenment poem to Master Kasō, Kasō said,
“This is the enlightenment of a mere Arhat, you’re no master yet” [an arhat is an adept in Theravadan Buddhism, implying “small vehicle”]. Ikkyū replied, “Then I’m happy to be an Arhat, I detest masters.” At which time Kasō declared, “Ha, now you really are a master.”
(Ibid, p. 8)
In our tradition there are many koans that remind us not to get stuck in any state of mind, not mine, not that of crows over Lake Biwa, and not yesterday’s. I find some of Ikkyū’s poetry refreshing in his expression of the vitality of his state of mind, like in this one in which he refuses to be pinned down by his own words and past experiences:
nobody understands my not no Zen Zen
not even that crow’s shattering bleak scream got it(Ibid, p. 36)
And again, in this one that demystifies the core symbols of Buddhism:
that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets
I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind(Ibid, p. 20)
Do you want to be a Buddha? If that’s a hair different from this right here, then there may already be birds casually perching on your stone shoulders and head.
Ikkyū went on to wander Japan as a vagrant monk, enjoying the company of all kinds of folks from what we would consider the highest and lowest members of society. He defended the poor, and occasionally used money intended for a rich person’s funeral to help the homeless. There was one story of his begging at the door of a wealthy home while wearing shabby robes and being shunted to the back door to receive scraps. He returned in his brocade robes when the family hosted a feast; when his hosts offered him a generous plate of food, he took off his robes, placed them before the plate, and as he left said the food was for his robes, not for him.
Lest we idealize Ikkyū, he also is recorded as publicly demeaning the dharma brother who took over the teaching and administration of the monastery left by their teacher. Ikkyū spent late nights noisily drinking with men to the disgust of their wives, and one can easily imagine other inconsiderate behaviors.
Periodically, Ikkyū was summoned to serve as chief priest of a temple, only to quickly grow disgusted with what he saw as the hypocrisy of “fame-and-fortune Zen,” and the monks practicing there. His criticisms can’t help but reveal his own flawed humanity as well, such as in this passage.
Upon Becoming Abbot of Daitoku-ji
Daitö’s descendants have nearly extinguished his light;
After such a long, cold night, the chill will be hard to thaw even with my love songs.
For fifty years, a vagabond in a straw raincoat and hat —
Now I’m mortified as a purple-robed abbot.(Ikkyū, trans. John Stevens, Wild Ways)
At the same time, the fullness of Ikkyū’s unfiltered embrace of all shows through in these couple of poems:
I try to be a good man but all that comes
of trying is I feel more guiltyIkkyū, translation by Stephen Berg Crow With No Mouth, (p. 22)
Bliss and sorrow, love and hate, light and shadow, hot and cold, joy and anger, self and other.
The enjoyment of poetic beauty may well lead to hell.
But look what we find strewn all along our Path: Plum blossoms and peach flowers!(Ikkyū, trans. John Stevens, Wild Ways)
Other concise poems speak directly and clearly, like this one:
where you are whatever you do
hearing a stalk struck remember bamboo remembers nothing(Ikkyū, trans. John Stevens, Wild Ways, p. 29)
The life, stories, and poems Ikkyū left behind touch me deeply. I know I’ve offered a lot of words, with maybe less of my own commentary; this is one of the cases where it seemed the words of an ancestor stood well on their own. So much so that I wanted you to have them to savor for yourselves.
All that I’ve included from Ikkyū today shares one critical thread. In his expressive poem of enlightenment he included his pride; when he alluded to an old koan story, like the sound of stone on a bamboo stalk, he reminded us to stay in present tense; he wrote arrogantly and derisively about his fellow monks and teachers; he wrote of his own guilt when falling short, trying to be a better person. In each of these and all others he pounded the ground right here in Seattle, and in your room, shouting, Here! Here! Here! Nothing left out!
I’ll end with the instructions Ikkyū’s offered to his disciples shortly before he died:
After I’m gone, some of you will seclude yourselves in the forests and mountains to meditate, while others may drink rice wine and enjoy the company of women. Both kinds of Zen are fine, but if some become professional clerics, babbling about “Zen as the Way,” they are my enemies.
(Ikkyū, trans. John Stevens, Wild Ways)