Sublime

Kōbō Daishi was not only the Great Teacher but also a master calligrapher.

As Zen poet Basho reminds us, The temple bell stops But the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.

Tomohiko Amada’s painting Killing Commendatore

There is a legend in which the Buddha comes upon the mind of not picking and choosing.3 On the edge of his own profound change of heart, the Buddha meditates all night under a fig tree, and an image comes to mind. He remembers that, as a child, while his father plowed a field in an annual ceremony, he was left in the shade of a rose apple tree. At

It offers an aesthetic ideal that uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent. It can be found in the arrangement of a single flower, the expression of profound emotion in three lines of poetry, or in the perception of a mountain landscape in a single rock.

Sen no Rikyu’s eye for aesthetic balance and his predilection for the simple and unadorned helped to change the focus of the tea ceremony from a display of culture and wealth to a communion of kindred spirits seeking purity and truth.

He has the finest collection of Tibetan wood-block prints in America. He has inspired generations of Stanford students