I live in the spare, high desert of the American Southwest, a land of apparent and often illusory emptiness, a blinding bowl of light that triggers one to write with an economy of words. The eye follows winding arroyos, mouse tracks, and blowing seed. The breath gathers momentum along ridges, faults, and prehistoric waterlines. Fossils scatter at the feet, clay shards glisten after a sudden rain.
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As a Nowhere Man, Suzuki was the perfect catalyst for an emerging Western strata of neo-transcendentalists, heirs to Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, yet burdened with a psychological stigma as America gazed West across the Pacific and envisioned an Asia in ruins.
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Robert Aitken, the late Zen priest of Honolulu’s Diamond Sangha, once wrote that “Drowsy contentment may be a condition close to realization. It is a kind of emptiness, of nondifferentiation, where the ten directions melt: inside and outside become one.”
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‘I think that Dr. Suzuki is for Zen what St. Paul is for Christianity. He was “a publicist.”’
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“In Aikidō, the other guy may be big and strong, and you may be thrown down. But you have a chance to throw down the opponent, too. We had the nuclear arms race, that was probably the worst scenario of global collective suicide that we had faced as humanity, and we reversed it.”
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The author says she embarked on this year in Japan in order to undertake a spiritual practice of her own. She must occupy herself while her husband seeks Soto Zen priestly credentials by training in a nearby monastery, so she joins a pottery class as a deshi (disciple) of the elderly female teacher. But she cannot seem to make the dirt and water come together to make a smooth clay, either physically or metaphorically.
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“…understanding Zen through the intellect is a mistake. That is why in the first three years of my own training, Shibayama-roshi kept on telling me for a whole year, “Be an idiot! Be a fool!”
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“To begin with a chawan in the palm of one’s hand and end up imagining a garden, poem or painting reveals the richness inherent in Japanese culture.” — Allen S. Weiss
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Shōjin ryōri is rooted in the concept that the earth and body are inseparable. It is only through attaining a perfect symbiosis with the land that we can truly reap the benefits of the earth.
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In 1973 I went looking for a Buddha to come to my, and even maybe our, rescue. I wanted to actually meet the guy, hear his voice…Of course, I didn’t find him. I found me looking for him.
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Will this catastrophe in Japan change us and lead to a more innovative, caring and interconnected way of living? Will the outbreaks of altruism and civic enthusiasm propel us to take similar steps? Will we demand ingenious forms of accountability?
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Although human beings have interacted with nature – both cultivated and wild, for millennia, and sometimes destructively so, it was never quite like “war.” It has now become disconcertingly so…
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Taizo-in launched its groundbreaking ‘Fusuma-e Project’ in the spring of 2011. The Zen temple is commissioning a young, unknown Kyoto-based artist to compose large sumi-e ink paintings on 64 new sliding doors, or fusuma…
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TEA
BY DANIEL R. KANE
“Why do you study Tea?” The usual answers perhaps are enough: “It is an aesthetic exercise; a Zen discipline; a unique means of social interaction.” Yet, I have wondered if there might be some other attraction to Tea; something not so apparent…
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My first stay in Japan was from May of ’56 to August ’57. I left to get a change of air, to reflect on my Zen practice, and to earn some dollars.
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Japanese cultural tradition hides a vast storehouse of notions and practices that may be helpful in establishing a culturally-grounded eco-philosophy…
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Graphic artist Mayumi Oda’s cultural, spiritual, and artistic odyssey has taken her through many lives, eras, countries, and incarnations…
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Eiheiji’s reputation as the toughest Zen training center in Japan is born out in this memoir…after Nonomura passes through the Dragon Gate with seven other acolytes (three of whom will end up in the hospital within the first six months), he enters a kind of “boot-camp” hell…
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ART, MUSIC
BY PRESTON HOUSER
The player of the Japanese bamboo flute seeks to display his spirit through musicianship—even if only in a single note, a single exhalation…
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It is not a coincidence that disciples of Zen who have achieved an intuition that is spiritual and transcendental and yet strikes decisively at the very heart of the physical world, are referred to as Masters…
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