A free spirit, the Zen monk Ikkyū (1394–1481) writes rebelliously of institutional Buddhism – “that stone Buddha deserves all the bird shit it gets / I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind” – which perhaps freed him to make insights beyond his professed order. Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987), a rebel also, was educated with easy access to western thought, writing in one poem, “A quail has seized God by the neck // With its black bill, because there is no / God greater than a quail. / (Peter, Christ, Judas: a quail.)” Takahashi sees God in all phenomena and “All the phenomena in the universe: myself.” Though freeing, such an approach can be reductive in its formulaic nature, rather than accumulative toward deeper and deeper understanding – the difference perchance between a rolling stone and the snowball effect. Zen and the western ethic have also mixed in some of our greatest American poets, namely Jim Harrison (1937-2016), a follower of Ikkyū and Takahashi
