This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ikkyu Sojun took up with Mori, a blind itinerant singer, in his old age, reportedly around 1471 when he was in his late seventies, a documented late-life companionship distinct from the institutional rebuilding of Daitokuji his first article covers from the same decade. Their relationship became a recurring subject of his own poetry, verse frank about desire and the body in exactly the register his first article describes him using against a clergy he considered polished and hollow, now turned toward an unashamed old-age romance rather than institutional critique.
Ikkyu treated that romance as continuous with his teaching rather than as a lapse from it, presenting embodied passion as itself compatible with, and even expressive of, Zen awakening, a documented stance distinct from an abbot who separated his private life from the temple he was simultaneously rebuilding on Sakai merchant money. His poems to and about Mori are counted among his best known verses, read today as part of the same body of work that made him Zen's most public internal critic in his middle years.
That the same monk who spent his final years as Daitokuji's abbot, restoring an institution his younger self had needled for its comfortable respectability, also spent those same years in an openly celebrated relationship with a blind singer that his own poetry refused to treat as separate from his practice, marks Ikkyu's companionship with Mori as a documented case where his old age held together, rather than resolved, the same tension between critique and institution his first article already traces.