Sublime

Note: According to the biography of the ninth-century poet-recluse Lu Kuei-meng , as recorded in the Hsintangshu (New History of the T’ang Dynasty),

Teishin,

“Dao reminds me of my father.” It wasn’t just that he was the same age as our fathers. It was also his trim and discreet appearance that made him familiar. His nondescript appearance was as much for camouflage as it was for comfort, cultivated to project a benign and anonymous professionalism. His appearance said: I am not one to take up space nor

Haiku and waka poems convey perhaps more easily than painting the subtle differences between the four moods of sabi, wabi, aware, and yugen.

Rinzai Roku (a celebrated Zen text of the T’ang dynasty) and the teachings of Bankei, the seventeenth-century Japanese master who, for me, represents Zen at its best.

Hung-jan was apparently the first of the Patriarchs to have any large following, for it is said that he presided over a group of some five hundred monks in a monastery on the Yellow Plum Mountain (Wang-mei Shan) at the eastern end of modern Hupeh, He is, however, much overshadowed by his immediate successor, Hui-neng (637–713), whose life and teach

sick on my journey ,

my dreams go wandering

on this withered field

Matsuo Basho, Death Haiku, 1694

respected Tanchiu Koji Terayama, director of Hitsu Zendo. The English translation of his book’s title is Zen and the Art of Calligraphy (transl. by John Stevens; Penguin Group, 1983).