Kozan Ikkyō

Kozan Ikkyō (Japanese: 固山一鞏, 1283 - Februari 12, 1360) was a Japanese Zen monk and poet.

Quotes

• Empty-handed I entered the world
  Barefoot I leave it.
  My coming, my going -
  Two simple happenings
  That got entangled.
  • Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6; cited in: Scoop Nisker, ‎Wes Nisker. Crazy Wisdom, 1990. p. 205.; and cited in: Frank Arjava Petter. Reiki: The Legacy of Dr. Usui. 1998. p. 72

Quotes about Kozan Ichikyo

• On a winter morning in 1360, Zen master Kozan Ichikyo (sic) gathered together his pupils. Kozan, 77, told them that, upon his death, they should bury his body, perform no ceremony and hold no services in his memory. Sitting in the traditional Zen posture, he then wrote [his dead poem]... After he finished, Kozan gently put down his brush, and then died. He was still sitting upright.

While remarkable, the story of Kozan’s death is not unusual in the Zen tradition. It is part of a larger practice of writing jisei (“death poems”), which continued for hundreds of years from as early as the seventh century by both monks and laypeople alike. Some of the earliest examples of jisei were appended to a will as a sort of farewell gesture to life. Gradually the jisei became a genre of its own, encompassing a range of poetic forms and moods. They are enigmatic, even ambivalent about death. It is because of this, perhaps, that the tradition is often overlooked.

• Eugene Thacker. "Black Illumination: Zen and the poetry of death," Special to the JAPAN TIMES, July 2, 2016. (paywall)

External links

• Yoel Hoffmann (1986) (in en). Japanese Death Poems. Rutland: Tuttle Publishing. Wikidata Q116482757. ISBN 0-8048-1505-4. OCLC 1335736500.