Hayashi: Ponder the sound of one man slurping
The ticket machine at the door to Hayashi looks more like a Zen riddle than a method of ordering noodles. The columns and rows of buttons stand empty and blank, mocking all illusion of choice: egg or no egg; standard or extra grilled pork (options ...
'Crooked Cucumber': The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki
Shunryu Suzuki, author of the influential "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," is credited with introducing Zen to the West and founding California's first Zen Buddhist monastery. Crooked Cucumber, by David Chadwick.468 pagesHarmony, Nonfiction. In David Chadwick's biography of Suzuki, "Crooked Cucumber," he mentions an incident that deftly ...
The usefulness of Zen in management culture
Zen should be an integral part of educational curricula and an inspiring driver of business practices.
The powerful ambiguities of dry landscape arrangements, the inevitable questions they raise in relation to what constitutes a garden, the profundity of concepts and principals, many of them deriving from Taoism and Zen, never fail to baffle the uninitiated. Francoise Berthier, a professor of ...
'Zen's sudden awakening to the truth beyond reason, beyond language'
Rabbi Zusia tramped through his native Poland — this admittedly is an odd way of introducing a story about Zen — collecting money to ransom Jews unjustly imprisoned, victims of the rampant anti-Semitism then prevailing. At a wayside inn he saw birds in a ...
Black Illumination: Zen and the poetry of death
On a winter morning in 1360, Zen master Kozan Ichikyo gathered together his pupils. Kozan, 77, told them that, upon his death, they should bury his body, perform no ceremony and hold no services in his memory. Sitting in the traditional Zen posture, he ...
In space-tight Japan, how to live like a minimalist
Fumio Sasaki's one-room Tokyo apartment is so stark friends liken it to an interrogation room. He owns three shirts, four pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks and a meager scattering of various other items. Money isn't the issue. The 36-year-old editor has made a ...
'The Book of Tea' is a transcendent view of life, art and Japan
To those unfamiliar with his name, Okakura Kakuzo was a pivotal figure in trying to make sense out of the clash between Western innovation in Japan and Oriental tradition. Self-exiled from the emerging modernism of the Meiji Era (1868-1912), Okakura traveled to India, China, ...
'Mystical Realist' Eihei Dogen's 13th-century writings
Eihei Dogen (1200-53), founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, is a key figure in the intellectual history of Japan, but for many centuries his work was not widely read. This changed in 1926, when the publication of Watsuji Tetsuro's "Shamon Dogen" ("The ...
Monk uses experience with acting to spread Zen teachings in Berlin
A 34-year-old Japanese Buddhist monk and actor who is living in Berlin is trying to teach his students there "how to apply Zen wisdom to modern life." Seigaku, who was born Seitaro Higuchi in Yonago, Tottori Prefecture, in January 1981, became an actor when he ...
Priestly pair set out to boost 'Buddhism 3.0' across Japan
A pair of Zen priests have been causing a stir with their campaign to spread a new interpretation of Buddhism in Japan that combines practices from separate branches of the ancient religion. Issho Fujita and Ryodo Yamashita have been running workshops around the country based ...
Only in Japan could a sword be 'life-giving'
Few countries have broken with their past as sharply as Japan did. That was the price it paid for modernity. Japan in the mid-19th century had a beautiful, deep, highly refined culture that reached far down the social scale — but it was an ancient ...
