258 CHAPTER TENthe newly enfranchised, who adopted a self-consciously rustic version of the
Zen style as a badge of their newfound status and cultural sophistication. It
:vas thus that Zen began to percolate throughout Japanese culture, less as a
philosophy or path of practice than as an attitude: the belief that anything, if
done in the proper style with the proper frame of mind, could count as Zen.
This style was best expressed in the no drama, particularly in the plays of
Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443), which developed at this time. The structure
of no drama in general is based on a generic Mahayana teaching that claims
that beings suffer if they view saf!1sara as separate from nirval).a, but can gain
tranquility if they can break through dualities to realize the nirval).a in Saf!lsara
here and now. Zeami's plays drew on incidents that conveyed Buddhist themes,
including the teachings of Tendai, Shingon, and Pure Land, while the aristo-
cratic Zen style provided the stark stage settings and the overriding aesthetic.
In his theoretical writings on no, Zeami maintained that the training of the
no actor was analogous to that of a Zen monk. Each performance of a play
was part of the ongoing training, in which the actor, while acting, was to at-
tain a particular state of mind as a result of the performance. In Zearni's phrase,
the performance is the seed, and the mind is the flower. Thus the actor was to
direct his efforts at his own state of mind, rather than at pleasing the audience.
If the audience was sufficiently sensitive, of course, it would be able to intuit
the actor's success at internal transformation, but even if it couldn't, the true
measure of the actor's performance would be something that he could gauge
from within. Later writers, such as Komparu Zenchiku (1405-68), made the
Zen-no connection even more obvious as they fashioned their dramas around
explicit Zen themes.
As had happened in the Nara and Heian periods, the close relationship be-
tween monasreries and the ruling elite led to the corruption of the monks.
This is attested to in the life and writings of the Rinzai monk Ikkyu Sojun
(1394-1481). The illegitimate son of an emperor, Ikkyu was forced into a
Rinzai monastery at the age of five to escape the political intrigues of the
court, only to encounter the political and sexual intrigues of monks close to
the court and the shogunate. Trained in a Kyoto temple to be an accomplished
poet, he eventually left the capital to undergo spartan koan training in a
provincial center, where he claimed to have gained Awakening. His uncom-
promising temperament, though, led him to rebel against the hypocrisy he
saw around him, both in the capital and in the provinces. He began using his
poetic skills to mount scathing attacks on the "leprous and perverted" Zen es-
tablishment. He also flagrantly broke monastic rules as a form of protest, eat-
ing meat, drinking alcohol, and even fathering a child.
Styling himself a "crazy cloud," Ikkyu frequented the company of honestly
dishonest commoners and was not averse to taking ruffians and streetwalkers
as disciples. Nevertheless, he insisted on rigorous standards of meditation prac-
tice. His distinctive contribution to Zen thought was his doctrine of "the red
thread of passion," in which lust became the testing ground for the doctrine
of the nonduality of the realm of Awakening and the realm of desire. In his