ikkyu refused the inka

in a Rinzai monastery in fifteenth-century Japan, a monk named Ikkyu Sojun was offered the certificate that says you are done. it’s called the inka shōmei. it’s the seal that his teacher, and his teacher’s teacher going back through generations, had each received in turn; the document that marks the recipient as formally enlightened, formally authorized to transmit the dharma, formally a member of the zen establishment. Ikkyu refused it. he walked out of the monastery with no credential and spent the rest of a long life teaching in the places the credentialed wouldn’t go.

this essay is about that refusal. the refusal is the whole thing.

i’m not coming to Ikkyu cold. i read Susan Murphy’s Red Thread Zen when it came out and it hit; it was saying out loud the shape of the buddhism i had already been working my way into on my own, and her reading gave me permission to keep going in that direction. so i read more Ikkyu after. he has been part of my thinking since. the work i have been doing lately, what i call the neurobuddha material, is an argument about what enlightenment traditions have always been pointing at and what happens when the institutions built around those traditions begin certifying the thing the thing was supposed to expose. Ikkyu was always going to come up. Ikkyu Sojun, 1394 to 1481, illegitimate son of the emperor Go-Komatsu, raised in a monastery his mother put him in to keep him alive, lover of the dharma and skeptic of the hierarchy, turns out to be the fifteenth-century version of a move i had so far only seen in its twenty-first-century version. same move. different millennium.

so this is the first of a short run of essays about him, about Red Thread Zen, about what it means to walk out of the building that is trying to hand you your own realization back to you in laminated form. i want to start with the inka itself, because the whole thing turns on what that document actually is.

the certificate

the inka shōmei, in the formal Rinzai usage that had stabilized by Ikkyu’s time, was the teacher’s public acknowledgment that the student had realized the buddha-dharma with sufficient depth to teach it. it was, in its own terms, a transmission; master to student, unbroken chain back to the historical Buddha. in practice, by the Ashikaga period, it had also become a bureaucratic credential. the Gozan system of state-sponsored Rinzai monasteries had embedded zen deeply into the Muromachi court; abbacies were political appointments, transmission lines were property, and the inka was among other things the paperwork that established who could sit in which chair.

this is not a modern cynical reading. Ikkyu’s own teacher, Kaso Sodon, awarded him the inka, and Ikkyu, according to the tradition preserved in the Kyoun Shu, burned or refused it. his objection is usually reported in the sources as being about the corruption of the Rinzai establishment; he watched his fellow dharma-brother Yoso Soi ascend the institutional ladder to the abbacy of Daitokuji and spent decades writing poems about him that are, to put it mildly, not polite. Ikkyu saw a zen establishment issuing seals of authentic realization to men he considered to be performing authentic realization for status. the certificate was not a fraud in the sense of being forged. it was a fraud in the sense of being real, and real was the problem.

this is the thing a reader has to sit with before the rest of the essay works. the inka was not a fake credential. it was, by the standards of the institution issuing it, a correctly awarded credential. the people receiving it had done the retreats, answered the koans, sat with the teachers. the institution was doing exactly what it had built itself to do. Ikkyu’s refusal is not the refusal of an unearned degree. it is the refusal of the institution that had become capable of issuing earned degrees for a thing that could not, structurally, be awarded.

the shape of the life

the biographical scaffold matters because it’s where the refusal gets its teeth. Ikkyu was born in 1394, almost certainly the illegitimate son of the emperor Go-Komatsu and a court woman of low rank; his mother, according to the standard accounts preserved in the Ankoku-ji records and retold in English by John Stevens and others, was expelled from the palace and, under political pressure from the shogunate or a rival court faction, placed her five-year-old son in Ankoku-ji, a Rinzai temple in Kyoto, at least in part to keep him alive. he was, from the age of five, a monk who was also a political embarrassment, a claimant whose existence the court preferred to hide inside robes.

he was, by all accounts, brilliant. he wrote classical Chinese poetry as a child. he trained under a succession of Rinzai teachers through his teenage years, left Ankoku-ji, pursued a relationship with Ken’o Soi at Saikin-ji until Ken’o’s death, and eventually found Kaso Sodon at Zenko-an, a strict teacher operating outside the Gozan establishment, in what Ikkyu would later describe as the only place he encountered zen that was not being performed for court audiences. under Kaso he went through the long koan work that ends in the recognition the inka formally marks. and it is there, in his late twenties or early thirties, that the inka arrives and he refuses it.

the refusal does not make him a hermit. this is the part that matters. he does not walk out of the institution into a cave. he walks out into Sakai, the merchant port, and into Kyoto after the Ōnin War reduced parts of the city to ash, and he lives for another fifty years; writing, drinking, bedding prostitutes, burying the dead during plague outbreaks when the credentialed monks had fled, and eventually, at the age of seventy-seven, being recalled by the emperor Go-Tsuchimikado to the abbacy of Daitokuji itself, which had burned in the war and needed rebuilding. he accepted, which i will have to come back to in another essay because it is its own problem. but the refusal of the inka in his thirties and the acceptance of an abbacy in his late seventies are not contradictions. they are the two ends of the same line.

why the seal was the tell

here is the argument i came for. a tradition that begins in an act of awakening and matures into an institution will, at some point, discover that it needs to reliably produce awakened people. the pressure to produce reliably creates the credentialing apparatus. the credentialing apparatus cannot certify the awakening itself, because the awakening is not the kind of thing a bureaucracy can verify. what the apparatus can certify is the performance of the awakening; the legible behaviors, the correct answers in the correct order, the bodily composure in the interview room. the tradition drifts, slowly and without anyone deciding it, from certifying a realization to certifying the performance of a realization. and over time, the performance becomes the thing the institution is actually transmitting, because it is the only thing the institution is actually able to transmit.

this is not unique to fifteenth-century Rinzai zen. it is what happens, structurally, to every tradition that decides it needs to scale. the brahmanical priestly economy the Buddha walked out of was doing this with the vedic rites. the Christian ecclesiastical apparatus was doing this with sacramental authority by the time of Luther. the western psychiatric credentialing apparatus is doing this right now with diagnostic categories and therapeutic modalities that can be taught in a graduate program and supervised toward competence. the form is the same. the institution develops a reliable method for producing a legible version of the thing it was founded to produce, and the legible version and the thing diverge, and eventually the legible version is what the institution is actually in the business of producing, and the thing lives outside the institution or does not live at all.

Ikkyu saw this in zen and named it with characteristic bluntness. his poem on Yoso, in Sonja Arntzen’s translation of the Kyoun Shu, describes his dharma-brother as wearing “the purple robe” while being, as a zen matter, empty of the thing the robe was meant to mark. the robe is not the problem. the robe is the institution’s honest attempt to signal the thing. the problem is that the institution became capable of issuing the robe to a body that did not contain the thing, and once that became possible it became, in Ikkyu’s read, common. by the time the robe arrived at his own shoulders he could see what it was certifying and he could not accept the signal, because the signal was no longer reliably tracking its referent.

this is what i mean when i call the neurobuddha thesis the same move. the argument i have been making, in a different vocabulary, is that contemporary mental health institutions, wellness industries, and contemplative traditions have converged on a form of pastoral certification in which the legible performance of psychological health is increasingly what the system is in the business of producing. the autistic person who learns to pass as neurotypical gets certified as high-functioning. the patient who learns the therapeutic register gets certified as making progress. the meditator who can sit still for a long retreat gets certified as advanced. the certifications are not fraudulent; the people receiving them have done the work the institutions require. but the work the institutions require and the thing the institutions were nominally founded to produce have drifted apart, and the certifications are tracking the work, not the thing.

Ikkyu’s refusal of the inka and the contemporary refusal of pastoral certification by people who have actually realized something are the same gesture, five hundred and fifty years apart. the gesture is not contempt for the institution. it is recognition that the institution’s seal has stopped reliably pointing at what it claims to point at, and accepting the seal under those conditions would be a lie one tells the institution about oneself and oneself about the institution. the refusal is not rebellion. it is accuracy.

what the refusal made possible

the cost of the refusal, for Ikkyu, was real. he spent decades marginal to his own lineage, a known teacher without an abbacy, a poet with a reputation for drinking and whoring which his contemporaries could not fully tell was a spiritual gesture or a personal failing, and which, reading him carefully, one understands to have been both at once. he writes, in one of the Skeletons passages, about walking the streets of Kyoto and seeing the robed monks perform their piety and wanting to laugh and weep at the same time. the refusal of the certificate did not leave him outside the institution peacefully. it left him in the relationship with the institution that the refusal of a seal always produces; neither inside nor outside, neither endorsed nor excommunicated, visible as a problem.

what the refusal made possible is the thing this series is ultimately about. Ikkyu, freed from the obligation to represent the institution that had offered him its seal, developed over the next fifty years a way of teaching and living and writing that the institution could not have authorized in advance, because it came from the place the institution’s seal had drifted away from. he called it, borrowing a phrase from the Song dynasty Chinese master Kido Chigu, Red Thread Zen. the red thread, in Kido’s original use, was the thread of passion that binds every person to the conditions of birth and death, and Ikkyu extended the phrase into a whole practice that refused the split between sacred and profane on which the institutional zen of his day had come to depend. Murphy’s whole book is a reading of what that practice still is, and i will be leaning on her through the rest of the series. that is the essay coming after this one. it is the necessary next move. but it is not, i want to say clearly here, a program Ikkyu designed as a reformer. it is what remained of his practice once he had refused the seal and kept walking.

this is also, i think, what the neurobuddha trail eventually arrives at. the refusal of the pastoral certificate is not a program. it does not come with a replacement credential, a new school, or a set of rules that produces a better version of the same legible performance. what it produces, if the refusing person keeps living and keeps working, is a way of being in the world that the certifying institution could not have written a criterion for, because the criterion would have been captured and re-certified on contact. it is generative the way Ikkyu is generative. not because he built a better zen. because he refused to accept a signal that had stopped tracking, and kept practicing anyway, and the practice that accumulated around the refusal turned out to be a practice the tradition he walked out of still needs and still can’t quite metabolize.

the rest of the red thread is the shape of that practice. the next essay is about the phrase itself, about Kido and Ikkyu, and about what it means to say that passion, as the moralist reader is primed to hear it, is not what the tradition has to overcome on the way to realization but what the realization is made out of. i can already hear the objection. i want to leave the objection alone for another page.

for now, the refusal. a man in a monastery, a seal in his hand, a long walk out the gate. the walk is not dramatic. it is not a scandal. it is, for him, the only honest move available. he takes it, and he is still here, five hundred years later, asking anyone with the trail to follow it to consider whether they have been offered a seal of their own, and what it is, and what it is actually tracking, and what honest reply the body knows the answer to before the mind gets a chance to dress it up.

this is part one of the red thread, a research series on Ikkyu Sojun and what his refusal still makes possible.