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The poetry of the Kyōunshū "Crazy cloud anthology" of Ikkyū Sōjun

University of British Columbia

The subject of this thesis is the poetry of the Kyōunshū, "Crazy Cloud Anthology", an anthology of Chinese poetry written by the Muromachi Zen monk Ikkyū Sōjun (1394-1^81). Ikkyū is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures in Japanese literature. He was both renegrade monk and venerated prelate, illuminated sage and self-proclaimed profligate. Moreover, perhaps because of these conflicting qualities, he is also one of the most human and accessible of the great Zen masters of Japan. His poems.are the medium for the expression of his dynamic personality and the vivid impression his personality makes testifies to his skill as a poet. This thesis focuses on Ikkyū's poetry itself, examining how the poetry works, how it creates a powerful reading experience. The Introduction describes a circling dialectic that plays a crucial role in Zen philosophy and also in Ikkyū's poetry. The Introduction also provides background information about the poet, his milieu and his audience. Chapter one examines some of the peculiarities of the way Ikkyū handles the elements of Chinese prosody. It will be demonstrated how Ikkyū at times broke the rules of Chinese prosody and at other times observed them in ways a native Chinese poet would not approve of. Despite his bending and breaking of the rules and, more surprisingly, because of it, his style has a fresh vigour and bold originality. Taking into consideration that he was writing for a Japanese audience, one can say he turned linguistic disadvantage to advantage, ending with a style of poetry that bewilders the critic who would try to make a dualistic judgement of "good" or "bad". The core of Chapter two is a collection of analyses that concentrate on the functioning of the technique of allusion that pervades Ikkyū's poetry. The analyses attempt to re-create the reading experience of an intended reader to clarify the specific roles allusion plays in particular poems. The more general topic of the chapter is how Ikkyū's poetry creates a dialectical reading experience, one that disturbs, unsettles and pivots the mind of the reader round to face a problem that cannot be solved by words. It is suggested that often allusion is the vehicle for bringing the opposite term of the problematic equation of non-duality into the poem, thereby turning it into a conundrum. Chapter three will pursue the dialectical theme further. It will be argued that often the juxtaposition of opposites, usually through connotation rather than by overt statement, is the dynamic technique by which Ikkyū's poems are transformed into powerful experiences. An extended analysis follows this technique in operation through a particularly strong set of poems under the joint title, "The Scriptures are Bum-wipe". The introductory section of the thesis concludes by inviting the reader to investigate Ikkyū's poems for himself. Indeed, to enable the reader to do just that, the bulk of the thesis is given over to the translations with commentaries of one hundred poems from the Crazy Cloud Anthology.

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2010-03-09

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/21718

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

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