From Critic to Abbot: Ikkyu's Two Careers

For most of his adult life Ikkyu Sojun was Zen Buddhism's most public internal critic, attacking what he saw as the Gozan establishment's comfortable accommodation with courtly and political power in poetry that was frank about wine and sensuality precisely because that frankness was itself the point being made against a clergy he considered polished, connected and hollow. It is a career that makes his final act look, on the surface, like a contradiction: appointed abbot of Daitokuji in 1474 at seventy nine years old, he spent his remaining years rebuilding the very kind of institution his younger self had spent decades needling. The Onin War had left Daitokuji in ruins, and it was Ikkyu's own long-standing ties to the merchant class of the port city Sakai, people whose money had no traditional stake in Gozan temple politics, that funded its reconstruction. Read closely the two halves of his life are less contradictory than they look: throughout, his target was never Zen institutions as such but a specific kind of institution that had let temple standing become a courtly ornament, and rebuilding Daitokuji outside that old Gozan network, on money and support drawn from outside the traditional establishment entirely, was consistent with everything the poetry had been arguing for all along.