Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka)

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

Shigematsu, Soiku
Aitken, Robert
Shigematsu, Soiku

Paperback

Poetry AnthologiesGeneral Poetry

Publisher Price: $19.00

ISBN10: 0865473285
ISBN13: 9780865473287
Publisher: North Point Press
Published: Aug 1 1988
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.03 Depth: 8.97
Language: English

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.

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