Japanese Zen Research Articles

Essential Chan Buddhism: The Character and Spirit of Chinese Zen

This book embraces the essence of talks Guo Jun gave at a fourteen-day retreat at Chan Forest in the hills of Jakarta in 2010 as well as subsequent conversations the editor and his wife had with him. It is highly readable and accessible to the reader. It has poetic, spontaneous and witty qualities, providing deep insight into Chan (also spelled Cha’n) Buddhism. Chan is the Chinese form of Zen and is not well-known in the West as Zen is, but it derives from the traditions of India. It has flourished and continued to develop through many masters and its teachings have parallels to Korean Son, Vietnamese Thien, and Japanese Zen. But it has its own flavor in how it presents wisdom to admirers and practitioners. Chan is not the only Buddhist tradition connected to China.¹

Narratives of Detachment: Meister Eckhart and Buddhaghosa on Personal Transformation

Meister Eckhart has many Buddhist admirers, not least the Japanese Zen teacher, Daisetz Suzuki, and one of his most celebrated translators, Maurice Walshe. As an exercise in what has come to be called Comparative Theology, this paper brings Eckhart into dialogue with the fifth century Theravadin commentator, Buddhaghosa. The main teachings of Buddhaghosa’s celebrated Visuddhimagga, the ‘Path of Purification’, focus on the dual practice of ethics and concentration, building stages of meditative consciousness, most notably upekkha, often translated as ‘equanimity’ or ‘detachment’, that lead to Nirvana. It is this last quality, the state of calm and open mindfulness, that most suggests a correlation with Eckhart and what he speaks of as Abgescheidenheit. Despite the many differences between their cultural backgrounds and metaphysical presuppositions, certain resonances between Eckhart and Buddhaghosa, particularly with regard to the virtues that underpin the religious life, open up a dialectical path between the already and the not-yet, transcendence and immanence, sameness and otherness.

A Buddhist God?

A Buddhist God?

A Critique and Discussion of the View That Shi Miyuan Proposed the Five-Mountain, Ten-Monastery System

Abstract When Japan, during the Kamakura (1180-1333) and Muromachi (1336-1573) periods, imported Zen 禪 Buddhism from Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1279- 1368) China, it not only continually dispatched Zen monks on pilgrimages to China to seek materials for transmitting sectarian doctrine, but also introduced Zen temple architecture and monastic discipline to Japan, established the Five Mountain, Ten Monastery 五山十剎 system of government temples, and developed Five Mountain 五山 literature. This system of government temples is believed to have imitated the Song system of government temples of the same name. Moreover, it is the best example of Sino-Japanese cultural interaction in the field of Buddhism. In contrast with the ample materials we have on the operation of the Japanese system of the Five Mountain, Ten Monastery government temples, we lack sufficient materials to determine the time and impetus of the Song system of Five Mountain, Ten Monastery government temples and are at a loss to give a detailed accurate account of the Song system. Among the many views in circulation, the view most accepted by modern scholars is that Shi Miyuan 史彌遠 proposed to the court to establish this system of government temples during the reign of Emperor Ningzong (r. 1194-1224) of the Southern Song dynasty. But this theory comes down to us from Song Lian 宋濂 (1310-1381) of the early Ming dynasty, and no Song or Yuan sources mention this matter. Moreover, no Japanese Five Mountain Zen monks touch on this matter in any of their writings. Hence, whether Shi Miyuan actually proposed this system of government temples is a topic worth revisiting. This paper discusses whether Shi Miyuan proposed the Five Mountain, Ten Monastery system from the vantage point of materials related to Shi Miyuan and observations of Japanese Zen monks, and it reaches the conclusion that it is not credible that Shi Miyuan proposed the system to the court.

A study on "poem - report - poems" on Su - Shi's poems by Japanese Wu-Shan zen monks

A study on "poem - report - poems" on Su - Shi's poems by Japanese Wu-Shan zen monks

Aesthetics and Environmental Enclosure in Japanese Zen Gardens: Report on the Participation in the 17th International Conference on Perception and Action

Aesthetics and Environmental Enclosure in Japanese Zen Gardens: Report on the Participation in the 17th International Conference on Perception and Action

中世禅宗の土地伽藍神について

中世禅宗の土地伽藍神について

Holding the lotus to the rock: Creating dance community in Red-State America

In describing the dedication necessary to transplant Buddhism to North America, the Japanese Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki (1882–1945) famously said ‘it will be like holding a lotus to a rock, expecting it to take root’. Since 2001, the Texas Tech University Vernacular Music Center (VMC) (whose mission statement includes ‘teaching, research, and advocacy in the world’s vernacular traditions’) has grown a community of collegiate dancers and musicians in the American Southwest, one that cuts across boundaries of class, age and ethnicity. Paradoxically, in this socially and culturally conservative part of the world, while receptivity to music and dance is very high – Texas is the only state in the Union that still maintains required music and art in the public schools – awareness of the art forms’ available stylistic and cultural diversity is very low. Here, vernacular music communities are separated, insulated and cut-off from one another: alienated both geographically, stylistically and sociologically. At the same time, university music programmes, while recognizing the benefits to all of inclusive and diverse excellence, struggle to actualize this recognition: lacking resources, personnel, materials and/or community engagement. Drawing on musicology, ethnography, arts advocacy and mass communications theory, this article investigates the history, goals, means and methods by which the VMC has developed a series of student-centered, boundary-crossing participatory arts communities in the American Southwest, and provides both a practical toolbox, a political vocabulary and a philosophical framework for building like bridges elsewhere

Don’t Let Borders Limit Your Perspective

Don’t Let Borders Limit Your Perspective

To the Margins. On the Spatiality of Klee’s Art

Abstract With reference mainly to Paul Klee’s Ad marginem from 1930 (reworked 1935/36), this article focuses on space—namely, on the question of how space can be made visible as such. Having figures, lines, and the background establishing an intense interplay of transparency, Klee’s work refrains from displaying the mere spatiality of objects. It is this interplay of transparent figures entangled with their background that are withdrawing but not disappearing that creates an empty space that is as such limited and unoccupied. Compared to a (Japanese Zen-) garden, the idea of limiting and simultaneously making visible an eminent openness is stressed. Referring, furthermore, to observations like Rilke’s poem Shawl or to Toyo Ito’s comments on Klee’s work, this article aims to display the eminent space character becoming visible in the painter’s œuvre.

Zen and the Art of Self-Negation in Samuel Beckett's Not I

and the brain ... raving away on its own ... trying to make sense of it ... or make it stop ... or in the past ... dragging up the past ... flashes from all over ... --Samuel Beckett, Not I Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest ... Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire. --Eihei Dogen Samuel Beckett's late plays stage minimal images of body and mind: a woman sits in an autonomously-moving rocking chair listening to her recorded voice (Rockaby); a disembodied head breathes audibly while three recordings of his voice play (That Time); a mouth suspended in the dark speaks a rapid outpouring of disjointed phrases (Not I). As the actor Donald Davis put it, Not I's visual and aural minimalism (like many of Beckett's plays from the 1970s and 80s) makes Waiting for Godot look an MGM musical. (1) Devoid of whole characters and dynamic action, these brief pieces stage streams of thought and physically restrained human figures surrounded by dark voids. Critics have framed these pieces' baffling simplicity and suffering within European literary and philosophical paradigms ranging from the psychographic landscapes of Dante Alighieri's Inferno and Purgatorio, to the psychoanalytic thinking of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan, to Gilles Deleuze's notions of the exhausted in language and image. (2) Some of these paradigms touch on the ways Beckett pushes to the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought itself, but they tend to do so from within conceptual and metaphysical frameworks. As an alternative lens through which to read these late plays, Japanese Zen Buddhism also suggests the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought but offers a far more concrete paradigm for contextualizing these plays within a tradition of mental and physical practice. (3) Several scholars have noted deep affinities between Beckett's writing and Zen philosophy, from Buddhism's influence on Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism influenced Beckett, to the formal similarities between Beckett's theater and Japanese Noh plays. (4) Paul Foster's Beckett and Zen suggests that Beckett's novels distill the dilemma of existence that Buddhism recognizes as a fundamental human condition but that Beckett fails to find a way out. (5) Combining the enigmatic illogic of Zen with chaos theory, John Kundert-Gibbs's No-Thing is Left to Tell reads Beckett's plays as visual and conceptual riddles that, like koans, baffle the dualistic mind, defeating discursive thought from within. (6) Extending this work beyond Zen ideas to Zen practice, the enigmatic figures who sparsely populate Beckett's late stages appear not as symbolic tropes in the representational and metaphysical traditions of European art, but instead look like ritual enactments of the mind's basic nature. Instead of Dante's damned half-buried in ice, the immobilized figures of That Time and Rockaby begin to look like the meditator in zazen (seated meditation), observing thoughts and perceptions arise in the present moment through restrained bodies. Instead of a spirit condemned forever to pace her own level of Hell, or Jung's example of a woman with the feeling of never having been born, May's prescribed and tightly choreographed pacing in Footfalls begins to resemble a monk in kinhin (walking meditation), repeating slow steps around a cyclical path as deliberate practice. Mouth's refusal to articulate a first-person subject position in Not I, as I will posit here, may even suggest a liberating rather than pathological negation of self. Beneath these surface affinities lies a deeper connection between Beckett's gestures of self-negation and their embodied thought. Beckett's 1973 play Not I in particular, this essay suggests, fleshes out the mental suffering that Buddhism cites as being caused by grasping thoughts or sensations and clinging to the delusion of a persistent self. …

COMPOSITION TOOLS FOR CONTEMPORARY MINIMALISTIC ARCHITECTURE / KOMPOZICINĖS PRIEMONĖS ŠIUOLAIKINĖJE MINIMALISTINĖJE ARCHITEKTŪROJE

Santrauka Be formos neįmanoma jokia architektūra, o minimalizmo atveju ji yra isskirtinai specifiska, vis dėlto minimalistinės raiskos pobūdį stipriai veikia įvairios kompozicinės priemonės. Straipsnyje aptariami įvairūs, siejami su minimalistine raiska, kompozicinių priemonių panaudojimo aspektai. Analizuojant architektūrinius objektus, daug kas priklauso nuo jų spalvinio pobūdžio, sviesos, sesėlių žaismo panaudojimo, jų masto, simetriskumo ar asimetrijos, vientisumo ar daugialypiskumo, nuo to, ar turima galvoje dinamiska gyvybės forma, atvira isorinėms įtakoms, ar statiskas objektas. Visuotinai yra susiformave tam tikri minimalistinės raiskos stereotipai, pvz.: kad minimalistinei architektūrai yra būdinga balta spalva ar bent jau achromatiniai tonai (pilka, juoda), smulkumas, simetrija ir statika. Siame straipsnyje siekiama paneigti minėtus stereotipus, pateikiant spalvingojo minimalizmo, asimetrinių ir dinamiskų minimalistinių architektūros objektų pavyzdžius, be to, atskleidžiamas jų tūrių masės ir vi...

Leisure Studies, the Happiness Movement, and Japanese Zen

Leisure Studies, the Happiness Movement, and Japanese Zen

Bringing Zen home: the healing heart of Japanese women's rituals

This book maps new territory in Zen by explicating a domestic Zen filled with the ritual healing practices of contemporary Japanese female elders. It develops a 10-part theory on Japanese Zen Buddhist womens Way of Healing. It also analyzes how ritualized activities function in Soto Zen mode.

Laws That Refuse To Be Stated: The Post-Sectarian Spiritualities of Emerson, Thoreau, and D. T. Suzuki

Drawing on previously untranslated Japanese articles, this essay reveals the powerful and sustained influence New England transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau exerted on the highly renowned and yet highly unorthodox arbiter of Japanese Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki.

The Confucian Roots of zen no kenkyū: Nishida's Debt to Wang Yang-Ming in the Search for a Philosophy of Praxis

This essay takes as its focus Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and his seminal first text, An Inquiry into the Good (or in Japanese zen no kenkyū). Until now scholarship has taken for granted the predominantly Buddhist orientation of this text, centered around an analysis of the central concept of ‘pure experience’ (junsui keiken) as something Nishdia extrapolates from his early experience of Zen meditation. However, in this paper I will present an alternative and more accurate account of the origins of this important work, a text often seen as marking the beginning of Modern Japanese philosophy. I will show that while Buddhism is an important part of Nishida's early intellectual development, there is ample biographical and textual evidence to suggest that zen no kenkyū is at its core a text which attempts to solve key ethical problems via a modern interpretation of concepts drawn from the Confucian tradition. This analysis thus places the concept of ‘Conduct’ (koi), rather than ‘pure experience’, at the center of the text, suggesting that ethics, rather than metaphysics, is the core theme of the book.

Moonlight in Japanese Zen Buddhist temple gardens: an analytical simulation

Moonlight in Japanese Zen Buddhist temple gardens: an analytical simulation

How old is the Wine? Ningen Zen Ky?dan and the Formation of Lay Zen Practice in Modern Japan

This article explores the development of the contemporary model of ‘lay Zen’ that is nowadays prevalent in Japan as well as in the West. The main question that this article considers is ‘How was the Zen narrative and ideology modified to fit contemporary society?’ By following the development of Ningen Zen ky?dan, a modern Japanese Zen organization, the article will illustrate the ways in which Zen doctrines and practices were molded and reshaped to meet the rapidly changing life circumstances in modern Japanese society. This paper suggests that such notions and practices evolved as part of an attempt to modernize Buddhism, as well as a cultural and religious response of Japanese Zen to challenges posed, inter alia, by modern Western thought. Such statements raise the question – is it still ‘authentic’ Zen? Should this be considered a new phenomenon, or is it “old wine in new bottles”?

Japanese Rinzai Zen Buddhism: Myōshinji, a Living Religion (review)

Reviewed by: Japanese Rinzai Zen Buddhism: Myōshinji, a Living Religion Stephen G. Covell (bio) Japanese Rinzai Zen Buddhism: Myōshinji, a Living Religion. By Jørn Borup. Brill, Leiden, 2008. xii, 314 pages. €119.00. Japanese Rinzai Zen Buddhism is a welcome addition to the nascent field of the study of contemporary Japanese Temple Buddhism. The book is comprehensive and presents in one volume a rich source for anyone wishing to learn about contemporary Japanese Zen. Much of the material the author presents can be applied more broadly to other denominations, making it a useful window onto modern Japanese Temple Buddhism. It is only in the last decade or so that scholars have begun to turn their attention to the [End Page 206] study of Temple Buddhism in its contemporary forms. The field of Buddhist studies instead has focused most frequently on the distant past and sacred texts, leaving the contemporary Buddhist world to anthropologists who until very recently have worked primarily on new Buddhist movements such as Sōka Gakkai and Reiyūkai. The dearth of material in this field is not limited to Western scholarship. In a recent meeting, one of Japan's top religious studies scholars reminded me that still today in Japan there is very little research being done on contemporary Temple Buddhism. Jørn Borup's detailed study of the Rinzai denomination of Buddhism gives us the opportunity to see Temple Buddhism as a multidimensional phenomenon in contemporary Japan and should be read by anyone with an interest in modern or contemporary Japanese Buddhism. In order to better understand the many dimensions of contemporary Rinzai Zen, Borup brings to bear an array of methodologies from participant-observation to historical studies to ritual studies. As such, his work reflects a new and growing trend to move beyond traditional approaches and make use of interdisciplinary methodologies. The book is divided into four chapters, but the third chapter, at over 170 pages, is a behemoth. The introduction serves to set the tone. Here Borup describes how he was nurtured in the world of idealized Zen and, like many before him who have traveled to Japan in search of that "true" Zen, he was left at a loss. He notes that having not found it at first glance, he kept pushing forward, delving deeper and deeper, "presuming gems and true treasures never reveal themselves for surface riders and doubtful agnostics" (p. 1). In the end, as this book makes clear, he found that truth takes on many forms, just as the Rinzai Zen he came to examine is made up of many, often competing or conflicting, parts. In the first chapter, Borup provides a detailed overview of Rinzai Zen institutions and structures. Here we find covered everything from legendary founders to the gozan system to postwar lay Buddhist movements. One section of particular interest is the exhaustive look at the many ways temples might be classified. This is in keeping with Borup's goal of breaking up monolithic views of Zen. He closes the chapter with a series of questions that he seeks to answer in the following chapters. "How should it continue to be a shukke [world-renouncer] religion when most of its priests are married? How can it in an increasingly individualistic modern society justify itself as a traditional religion? How should it balance between the image of being a funeral religion and a progressive organization… ?" (p. 48). These questions point to a tension in the book between the search for understanding how modern Rinzai Zen will meet key challenges to its authority or even its existence while delineating what those challenges are (something along the line of my own work on Tendai) and a clear desire on Borup's part to provide a detailed examination of ritual and ceremony (the topic of chapter 3). Borup comes back to the questions he raises here from time to time, pointing [End Page 207] out worries within Rinzai about its funeral image, about maintaining enough clergy to keep all its temples intact, and about how to promote its self-proclaimed identity as a "meditation" school. He alludes to some of the attempts at the institutional level to address...

The Buddha of the North: Swedenborg and Transpacific Zen

AbstractThe Scandinavian scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) has had a curious relationship to the history of how Western literature has responded to Buddhism. Since Honoré de Balzac’s claim in the 1830s that Swedenborg was “a Buddha of the north,” Swedenborg’s mystical teachings have been consistently aligned with Buddhism by authors on both sides of the pacific, from D. T. Suzuki to Philangi Dasa, the publisher of the first Buddhist journal in North America. This essay explores the different historical frames that allowed for this steady correlation, and argues that the rhetorical and aesthetic trope of “Swedenborg as Buddha” became a point of cultural translation, especially between Japanese Zen and twentieth-century Modernism. Swedenborg’s figuration in the earlier work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Blake, moreover, might begin to account for the peculiar ways those two Romantics have particularly affected modern Japanese literature. The transpacific flow of these ideas ultimately complicates the Orientalist critique that has read Western aesthetic contact with Buddhism as one of hegemonic misappropriation.