Of all the three great sects of Zen in Japan, the Soto school is perhaps the best-known and most inclusive, admitting to its ranks lay people and women in addition to monks. It’s one of the most widely practiced forms of Buddhism in Japan, where there are reportedly nearly fourteen thousand temples dedicated to it. Soto is also very popular in North America; in 1966 the Soto Zen Buddhist Association was founded by Japanese and American teachers, a response to a great and growing interest outside Japan in the practices of this school.
Author: John Butler
Surrealism is usually connected with the visual arts: Salvador Dali’s limp watches or René Magritte’s rainstorm of bowler-hatted businessmen. Whilst surrealist writing is perhaps not as well-known, French poet André Breton declared in his 1924 Surrealist Manifestos that in surrealism “the agonizing question of possibility does not arise,” and that “the man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.” Carl Jung once said, “it’s not the world as we know it that speaks out of [a person’s] unconscious, but the unknown world of the psyche.”
This large-format book of wonderful photographs by Jon Kolkin, an American doctor and artist who has spent many years in Asia practicing both his avocations, takes readers away from the purely visual impact of the subject matter to something beyond.
In the world of religion, it seems that one can find an abundance of crazy or eccentric people whose sayings and doings have found their way into folklore, or who are venerated by generations of people who incorporate them into their spiritual lives as if they were guides, family members or friends.
It’s a rare book which may be described unequivocally as an absolute and utter delight. This is one of them. Arup Chatterjee’s Indians in London is an erudite, well-researched and comprehensive survey of a fascinating subject—four hundred years of Indian residency in London, beginning in 1600. This was the date that the East India Company was founded, but also the year when Shakespeare’s As You Like It was entered in the Stationer’s Register.
“To this day the monument remains nearly unscathed—a meager consolation in the face of such suffering.” The monument in question is the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, erected in about 705 by the young and energetic Umayyad (the dynasty began in 661) caliph al-Walid I (705-15) on the site of a Christian church which he had ordered razed to the ground.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain, a distinguished poet herself, is also a busy and prolific translator of Chinese poetry, which is very fortunate both for the poets themselves, who get exposure to a readership outside China, and for readers, whose literary horizons are expanded thanks to her sensitive and careful work. Here are two volumes of poetry written by people whose backgrounds and experiences are completely different; Yu Xiuhua (b 1976) is a single mother with cerebral palsy, and Yin Lichuan (b 1973) a Beijing-based multi-disciplinary artist and founder-member of what Chinese critics call the Lower Body Movement of poetry, of which more later.
If you happen to have a few hours to spare and a swash to buckle, here are two rousing epic adventures from Persia and the Middle East to fill in the time. If we think of Persian epics, the two titles which probably come to mind are Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and Vis and Ramin by Fakhruddin As’ad Gurgani, both available in excellent Penguin translations by Dick Davis. There’s also Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, which is based on an episode in Ferdowsi’s poem. As for Arabic ones, the massive (and anonymous) Thousand and One Nights is the best-known.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is perhaps the most famous example of a multicultural writer in the history of British literature. His novels have been translated, serialized, made into movies, and taught at numerous schools and universities throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. His multicultural credentials are impressive: he was born Józef Teodor Nalęcz (Ian Burnet misses this one in his recent study: it was the name of the Polish noble family to which Conrad belonged) Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdychev, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire and formerly a town in the Kingdom of Poland. His father Apollo was a Polish poet, translator of Shakespeare and a dedicated Polish patriot. Conrad’s first language was Polish, of course, and he learned Latin at school, but he added German, French and finally English to the list. He also knew some Russian but avoided using it for patriotic reasons.
It’s big, it’s heavy, and it’s beautiful. Dora Ching, the Associate Director of the Tang Center for Asian Art at Princeton University, has created a book that will surely become the volume to have if you are interested in Buddhist art from China or the history of photography. This book presents the art found in the Dunhuang (Mogai) Caves (now often called the Thousand Buddha Grottoes) of western China, which boast more than 500 cave temples, every one of them decorated with sculpture, various images of the Buddha, a great number of murals and smaller-scale paintings, and some with caches of invaluable illustrated manuscripts.
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