A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka)

ISBN: 0865473285

Author: Shigematsu, Soiku

Condition: New

One of the vital aspects of traditional Rinzai Zen koan study in Japan is jakugo, or capping-phrase exercises. When Zen students have attained sufficient mastery of meditation or concentration, they are given a koan (such as the familiar What is the sound of one hand clapping?) to study. When the student provides a satisfactory response to the koan, he advances to the jakugo exercise-he must select a capping phrase, usually a passage from a poem among the thousands in a special anthology, the only book allowed in the monastery.One such anthology, written entirely in Chinese, was translated by noted Zen priest and scholar Soiku Shigematsu as A Zen Forest: Sayings of the Masters. Equally important is a Japanese collection, the Zenrin Segoshu, which Mr. Shigematsu now translates from the Japanese, including nearly eight hundred poems in sparkling English versions that retain the Zen implications of the verse.