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A Path through the Woods
Georgetown Island, Maine
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Ikkyu (Japanese Zen Buddhist poet, teacher, 1400s) is credited with a popular saying, said to have been a poem he wrote:
We come into this world for three things,
to eat, to sleep, and to shit.
And then maybe some stuff in the middle.
I have not found the poem, though I was introduced to the words by a Zen Teacher - so the above format of the poem is my guess. I, however, found the following in one of my collections of Ikkyu's poetry (Stephen Berg. Ikkyu: Crow with no Mouth):
age eighty weak
I shit and offer it to Buddha
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The above sayings might sound rancid and irreverent, even blasphemous to some persons. They may be smelly, but irreverent or blasphemous is another matter. They were not given to make listeners feel comfortable. I certainly am a little uncomfortable with them, due to being brought up to see "shit" as what we called a curse word or a dirty word. Nevertheless, let us continue, regardless of how we feel right now ... How can we proceed on the Way unless someone makes us uncomfortable at least once in a while? Ikkyu, being somewhat a renegade in devotion to truth did not prioritize making his 'Zen-listeners' comfortable.
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Ikkyu is speaking reverently, trying to say the way many people see is frivolous and irreverent for being piously untrue. Ikkyus try to shock us into some common sense, turning our usual way of thinking right-side-up, for it is so often upside-down. Ikkyu's sayings are present to wake us up from the prevalent pious foolery, precisely as Jesus attempted to do in the Gospels. Ikkyu is willing to risk going too-far in what he says, or maybe he does not even entertain the thought of risk due to devotion to truth and compassion for us. Such wisdom, regardless, gives us a symbolic slap in the sleepy face.
What is Ikkyu saying? One thing is that a person of awakened heart-mind is grounded in the ordinariness of daily life. They are not chasing after fanciful flights of supernal imagination, struggling to attain some out-of-this-world salvation, or chasing after mysticism, liberation, or enlightenment. They are not taking psychedelics to have a spiritual trip. They do not want a spiritual trip of any kind. Life itself is enough for them to live with satisfaction and gratitude.
When we wake up, Ikkyu says, we wake up to eating and drinking, sleeping, and pooping what we ate and drank. We wake up to all kinds of things that have nothing to do with what many people think of as holy, sacred, or enlightened; Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi, Muslim, Jain, ... We wake up seeing that used toilet paper is as much a part of life as incense, Jesus icons, holy chants, temples, churches, or Buddhist sutras.
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When you begin to see all the shallow spiritual show, it can feel very upsetting to the ego that has pursued heaven rather than heaven on earth, nirvana bliss rather than nirvana with a headache, bills to pay, and a crying child that just dumped in their pants. Waking up is not fun! You begin to see you have been chasing ghosts, and they are not even real ghosts.
What happens when you realize you have been in a show and did not know it? You quack and walk like a duck for that is how the show was set up and taught to you, and you see you were never meant to quack and walk like a duck? Maybe you are waking up and ready to be honest about everything you took as absolutely something to be very, very serious about, defend, and maybe go to war over. You see the pretense within spirituality, religion, politics, family, country, and your own behavior and self-presentation, ...
Then, you begin to see the realness often hidden by the appearance of normality and rightness, even sacredness or holiness. You begin to see the chaff as chaff and the grain as grain. And you see that you do not need to throw the grain away and become a nihilist. You just see the fluff from the non-fluff. And this may be just the beginning.
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Now, how does this transformation of seeing occur? Good question. We must do something. We must look. Still, wherever we go looking, we will end up right where we started the looking, for how could we not? Still, we do not end up here, unless we go looking. Our search leading nowhere is important. It is a game we play, until the game ends. Then, we can stop playing. Do not be surprised if the going-looking starts up again many times, however, before we relax from the search for here.
When seeing, we may do the same things and go to the same places we did prior. Or we may not. We may make small changes or big ones. Regardless, we will realize nothing has changed, yet, somehow, nothing is the same - including us.
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(c) brian k. wilcox, 2025
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