Exotics Retrospectives Author:Lafcadio Hearn General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1898 Original Publisher: Little, Brown, and Co. Subjects: Japan History / Asia / Japan Humor / Form / Essays Literary Collections / Essays Philosophy / Eastern Religion / Buddhism / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no il... more »lustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: A Question in the Zen Texts MY friend opened a thin yellow volume of that marvellous text which proclaims at sight the patience of the Buddhist engraver. Movable Chinese types may be very useful; but the best of which they are capable is ugliness itself when compared with the beauty of the old block'-printing. " I have a queer story for you," he said. " A Japanese story ? " "No, -- Chinese." " What is the book ? " " According to Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters of the title, we call it Mu- Mon-Kwan, which means ' The Gateless Barrier." It is one of the books especially studied by the Zen sect, or sect of Dhytaa. A peculiarity of some of the DhyJna texts, -- this being a good example, -- is that they are not explanatory. They only suggest. Questions are put; but the student must think out the answers for himself. He must think them out, but not write them. You know that Dhyana represents human effort to reach, through meditation, zones of thought beyond the range of verbal expression; and any thought once narrowed into utterance loses all Dhyana quality... . Well, this story is supposed to be true; but it is used only for a Dhyana question. There are three different Chinese versions of it; and I can give you the substance of the three." Which he did as follows: -- -- The story of the girl Ts'ing, which is told in the Lui-shwo-li-hwan-ki, cited hy the Ching- tang-luh, and commented upon in the ...« less