Zen Culture

FOR AT LEAST a millennium before the coming of Zen to Japan, gardens had been constructed in China which were founded on underlying religious motives, but only with the rise of...

ASHIKAGA MONOCHROME ink painting is one of the finest moments of Japanese art. Monochrome painting, which began in China as a logical extension of brush calligraphy, came to be...

5. The best analysis to date is Eliot Deutsch, "An Invitation to Contemplation," Studies in Comparative Aesthetics, Monographs of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosoph...

_Architecturally [the Zen-inspired Silver Pavilion's] chief interest lies in the compromise which it exhibits between religious and domestic types, and a new style of living apa...

DURING THE SIXTH CENTURY B.C., in the rich and reflective civilization flourishing in what is today northeast India and Nepal, a child was born to the high-caste family of Gauta...

_ALTHOUGH JAPAN had been a nation of potters almost from prehistoric times, it was only after the rise of Zen influence and a popular interest in the tea ceremony that ceramics...

HAIKU IS REGARDED by many as the supreme achievement of Zen culture. The supposedly wordless doctrine of Zen has been accompanied throughout its history by volumes of _koan _rid...

_THERE IS A ZEN tradition that one day while the Buddha was seated at Vulture Peak he was offered a flower and requested to preach on the law. He took the flower, and holding it...

THE TEA CEREMONY combines all the faces of Zen--art, tranquility, aesthetics. It is in a sense the essence of Zen culture. Yet this Zen ritual has been explained to the West in...

_THE FLOWERING of Zen culture might be described as the Periclean age of Japan. As with fifth-century Greece, this was the era that produced Japan's finest classical art at the...

_It was a clear, moonlit night . . . Her Majesty . . . sat by the edge of the veranda while Ukon no Naishi played the flute for her. The other ladies in attendance sat together,...

THE ZEN TRADITION extends back some fifteen hundred years to a wandering Indian teacher of meditation named Bodhidharma. As Indian gurus are fond of doing, Bodhidharma left his...

The anti-scholasticism, the mental discipline--still more the strict physical discipline of the adherents of Zen, which kept their lives very close to nature--all appealed to th...

_It is not, like our theatre, a place where every fineness and subtlety must give way; where every fineness of word or of word-cadence is sacrificed to the "broad effect"; where...

IN THE CLOSING decade of the fifteenth century, the long evening parties of Zen aesthetics were over; Kyoto lay in ruins after the Onin War, and a new, sober mood gripped the la...

THE SPREAD OF ZEN culture from the mansions of the _samurai _to the houses of the bourgeoisie meant ultimately that Zen aesthetics would touch even the most routine features of...

THE ASHIKAGA was the last era in Japan entirely without knowledge of Europe. In 1542 a Portuguese trading vessel bound for Macao went aground on a small island off the coast of...

_It is not surprising if the religious need, the believing mind, and the philosophical speculations of the educated European are attracted to the symbols of the East, just as on...

1. "The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu," from Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, trans. Omori, Annie Shepley, and Kochi Doi (Tokyo, 1935; reprint ed., New York, AMS Press), p. 147.

14. Bourgeois Society and Later Zen 15. 16. The Tea Ceremony 17. 18. Zen Ceramic Art 19. 20. Zen and Haiku 21. 22. Private Zen: Flowers and Food 23. 24. The Lessons of Zen Cultu...

1. Zen Culture and the Counter Mind 2. 3. The Prelude to Zen Culture 4. 5. The Rise of Japanese Buddhism 6. 7. The Chronicles of Zen 8. 9. Zen Archery and Swordsmanship 10.

1. Sato, Shozo. The Art of Arranging Flowers. New York: Abrams, 1965. 2. 3. Quoted in Michael Cooper, ed., They Came to Japan (University of California Press, 1965), p. 194. 4.