Encyclopedia of Buddhism

and may have fathered a daughter with her. At eighty,
he was appointed abbot of the great Zen monastery
Daitokuji, which had been mostly destroyed in the
O
nin war (1467); Ikkyu
completely rebuilt it in the last
years of his life.

Ikkyu
is a Zen master beloved as much for his out-
landish jokes and erotic affairs as for his ascetic med-
itation practice. One New Year’s Day he appeared in
the streets of Kyoto brandishing a human skull on a
pole, claiming that this reminder of death should not
dampen the day’s spirit of celebration. Ikkyu
refused
to receive or grant official dharma transmission, com-
pared the Zen of his day to a wooden sword—all show
and no substance—and flouted convention by fre-
quenting bars and brothels. He is well known for his
literary works, including Skeletons(Gaikotsu), Crazy
Cloud Collection(Kyo
unshu
), and many other poems
and prose works, as well as calligraphy and paintings.

See also:Chan Art; Chan School; Japanese, Buddhist
Influences on Vernacular Literature in

Bibliography

Arntzen, Sonya. Ikkyu
and the Crazy Cloud Anthology: A Zen
Poet of Medieval Japan.Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press,
1987.

Berg, Stephen, trans. Crow with No Mouth: Ikkyu
, Fifteenth Cen-
tury Zen Master.Reprint. Port Towsend, WA: Copper
Canyon Press, 2000.

Sanford, James. Zen-Man Ikkyu
.Chico, CA: Scholar’s Press,
1981.

SARAHFREMERMAN

IMPERMANENCE. SeeAnitya (Impermanence)

INDIA

For Buddhists, India is a land of many buddhas. From
time immemorial, bodhisattvas have been born within
India’s borders, have awakened there, and have at-
tained final NIRVA
NA. As the buddha of our present
era, S ́a
kyamuni is crucial but not unique: The dharma
he taught has been found and lost countless times over
the ages. This myth of buddhahood has profoundly
affected traditional biographies of S ́a
kyamuni, a fact
that limits their utility as evidence for “what really
happened.”

Historians accept that S ́a
kyamuni lived, taught, and

founded a monastic order. But they cannot easily ac-

cept most details included in his biographies. Available

sources are twofold—textual and archaeological—and

neither is satisfactory. Textual sources cannot be fully

trusted, since even the earliest extant texts date to five

centuries after S ́a
kyamuni’s death; archaeological

sources are older, but sparser in their details. For this

reason, scholars cannot agree upon the century in

which S ́a
kyamuni lived. One chronology places his life

circa 566 to 486 B.C.E.; a second, circa 488 to 368 B.C.E.,

and other dates are proposed as well. Scholars do not

know all the doctrines S ́a
kyamuni taught, nor how

people regarded him in his own day. Lacking even such

basic knowledge, one can consider the social milieu of

Buddhism’s origins in only the most general terms.

The social milieu of early Buddhism (fifth or

fourth century B.C.E)

To understand the rise of Buddhism, one must look to

a world in transition. Approximately one millennium

before Siddha
rtha Gautama—the man who was to be-

come the Buddha S ́a
kyamuni—was born, waves of no-

mads, the Indo-A
ryans, crossed the mountain passes

of Afghanistan in approach to South Asia. Little is

known about these people. What is known comes from

their sacred Vedas, collections of hymns and lore to be

used in the performance of ritual. These texts repre-

sent the Indo-A
ryans as proud warriors, noble masters

of the world who by 1000 B.C.E. began replacing their

caravans with agrarian settlements. As agricultural

production increased, villages developed into towns,

and towns into cities.

As the Indo-A
ryans settled, Vedic lore increasingly

became the dominant ideology of the Gangetic plain in

North India. Vedic Brahmin priests performed rituals,

told stories of the gods, and explained the working of

the universe; they even guaranteed supporters a favor-

able place in the afterlife. But the Vedas had been com-

posed when the Indo-A
ryans were nomad-warriors.

Although the Brahmins held that their sacred knowl-

edge was valid in this new urban context, some found

that a hollow claim. Men like Siddha
rtha Gautama were

not satisfied by the ordinary patterns of daily life, or the

Vedic legitimations thereof. Such men left their fami-

lies and wandered out of the cities to become s ́ramanas

(seekers). Siddha
rtha was to become the most success-

ful critic of the Vedic Brahmins, and the most famous

representative of India’s seeker movement.

The problem, as Siddha
rtha saw it, was that the

Vedic priests of his day did not merit their high social

IMPERMANENCE