Japan

The Zen monks used the arts as a vehicle for the serious business of communicating their understanding of life to their fellowmen, but within their work there was also humor, satire, and an exquisite sense of beauty.

Each person belongs to a separate community. And when it comes down to it, all of us belong to the community of the earth, and the community of the universe.

That’s called threefold logic, and that kind of logic could be used in designing or producing a work of art. We could describe that as the heaven, earth, and human principle used in the Japanese tradition of flower arranging, or as the three bodies of the tantric art of Tibetan vajrayana Buddhism—dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya.

it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.

more likely to diminish the experience than to enrich it. In a letter to his brothers Keats speaks of 'Negative Capability' as the capacity for ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason'. This seems exactly the response demanded by many of these gardens.