Forgetting my duties I slip into freedom. Master Abbot, whose Zen is this_?21_ _ When Ikkyu was in his seventies, during the disastrous civil conflict known as the Onin war, he had a love affair with a forty-year-old temple attendant named Mori. On languid afternoons she would play the Japanese _koto _or harp and he the wistful-sounding _shakuhachi_, a long bamboo flute sometimes carried by monks as a weapon. This late- life love affair occasioned a number of erotic poems, including one that claims her restoration of his virility (called by the Chinese euphemism "jade stalk") cheered his disciples. _How is my hand like Mori's hand? Self confidence is the vassal, Freedom the master. When I am ill she cures the jade stalk And brings joy back to my followers.22 _ Ikkyu also left a number of prose fables and sermons that portray a more sober personality than does his often iconoclastic verse. One classic work, written in 1457 and called "Skeletons," has become a Zen classic. In the section given below he explores the Buddhist idea of the Void and nothingness: _Let me tell you something. Human birth is analogous to striking up a fire--the father is flint, the mother is stone and the child is the spark. Once the spark touches a lamp wick it continues to exist through the "secondary support" of the fuel until that is exhausted. Then it flickers out. The lovemaking of the parents is the equivalent of striking the spark. Since the parents too have "no beginning," in the end they, too, will flicker out. Everything grows out of empty space from which all forms derive. If one lets go the forms then he reaches what is called the "original ground." But since all sentient beings come from nothingness we can use even the term "original ground" only as a temporary tag.23 _ It seems unfortunate that Ikkyu's prose is not better known today.24 In fact the best-known accounts of Ikkyu are the apocryphal tales that attached to him during the Tokugawa era. A typical episode is the following, entitled "Ikkyu Does Magic," in which the picaresque Zen-man uses his natural resources to thwart the bluster of a haughty priest from one of the scholarly aristocratic sects--just the thing guaranteed to please the common man. Once Ikkyu was taking the Yodo no Kawase ferry on his way to Sakai. There was a _yamabushi _[mountain ascetic of Esoteric Buddhism] on board who began to question him. _"Hey, Your Reverence, what sect are you?" "I belong to the Zen sect," replied Ikkyu. "I don't suppose your sect has miracles the way our sect does?" "No, actually we have lots of miracles. But if it's miracles, why don't you show the sort of miracles that your people have?" "Well," said the _yamabushi_, "By virtue of my magic powers I can pray up Fudo [a fierce guardian deity of Buddhism] before your very eyes and make him stand right there on the prow of the boat."