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A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings: Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka
A Zen Harvest Japanese Folk Zen Sayings Haiku Dodoitsu and Waka Author:Soiku Shigematsu, Robert Aitken 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 of 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 satisfact... more »ory response to the koan, he advances to the jakugo exercise--he must select a "capping phrase," usually a passage from a poem among the thousand 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.
Soiku Shigematsu adds an index of first lines as well as a sensitive and helpful introduction. It begins: "To me Zen is a bit like the mikan trees that grow in our temple orchard. The mikan is a kind of mandarin orange that we harvest in late autumn, every year. I make it a rule to take Sojun, my son, out there to let him learn something of Zen from mikan-picking. At this time of the year, all the mikan branches are heavy with ripe fruit. Just looking at them makes me restless. I feel as though it were my urgent business to release each tree from its heavy burden. The drooping branch is my drooping heart. It's not good for a burdened heart to bear more than it has to. And like the bending mikan trees, the burden should not be carried indefinitely. Unload and just enjoy the freedom of it."« less