TERMS STARTING WITH
Japanese Colonial Period 1910-1945
Japanese cosmogony says that “out of the chaotic mass, an egg-like nucleus appears, having within itself the germ and potency of all the universal as well as of all terrestrial life” (SD 1:216).
Japanese Cross-References
Japanese Historical Periods
japanese ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Japan, or its inhabitants. ::: n. sing. & pl. --> A native or inhabitant of Japan; collectively, the people of Japan.
The language of the people of Japan.
TERMS ANYWHERE
25. Japanese Buddhist writings (vols. 56-84)
abhidharma. (P. abhidhamma; T. chos mngon pa; C. apidamo/duifa; J. abidatsuma/taiho; K. abidalma/taebop 阿毘達磨/對法). In Sanskrit, abhidharma is a prepositional compound composed of abhi- + dharma. The compound is typically glossed with abhi being interpreted as equivalent to uttama and meaning "highest" or "advanced" DHARMA (viz., doctrines or teachings), or abhi meaning "pertaining to" the dharma. The SARVASTIVADA Sanskrit tradition typically follows the latter etymology, while the THERAVADA PAli tradition prefers the former, as in BUDDHAGHOSA's gloss of the term meaning either "special dharma" or "supplementary dharma." These definitions suggest that abhidharma was conceived as a precise (P. nippariyAya), definitive (PARAMARTHA) assessment of the dharma that was presented in its discursive (P. sappariyAya), conventional (SAMVṚTI) form in the SuTRAS. Where the sutras offered more subjective presentations of the dharma, drawing on worldly parlance, simile, metaphor, and personal anecdote in order to appeal to their specific audiences, the abhidharma provided an objective, impersonal, and highly technical description of the specific characteristics of reality and the causal processes governing production and cessation. There are two divergent theories for the emergence of the abhidharma as a separate genre of Buddhist literature. In one theory, accepted by most Western scholars, the abhidharma is thought to have evolved out of the "matrices" (S. MATṚKA; P. mAtikA), or numerical lists of dharmas, that were used as mnemonic devices for organizing the teachings of the Buddha systematically. Such treatments of dharma are found even in the sutra literature and are probably an inevitable by-product of the oral quality of early Buddhist textual transmission. A second theory, favored by Japanese scholars, is that abhidharma evolved from catechistic discussions (abhidharmakathA) in which a dialogic format was used to clarify problematic issues in doctrine. The dialogic style also appears prominently in the sutras where, for example, the Buddha might give a brief statement of doctrine (uddesa; P. uddesa) whose meaning had to be drawn out through exegesis (NIRDEsA; P. niddesa); indeed, MAHAKATYAYANA, one of the ten major disciples of the Buddha, was noted for his skill in such explications. This same style was prominent enough in the sutras even to be listed as one of the nine or twelve genres of Buddhist literature (specifically, VYAKARAnA; P. veyyAkarana). According to tradition, the Buddha first taught the abhidharma to his mother MAHAMAYA, who had died shortly after his birth and been reborn as a god in TUsITA heaven. He met her in the heaven of the thirty-three (TRAYASTRIMsA), where he expounded the abhidharma to her and the other divinities there, repeating those teachings to sARIPUTRA when he descended each day to go on his alms-round. sAriputra was renowned as a master of the abhidharma. Abhidharma primarily sets forth the training in higher wisdom (ADHIPRAJNAsIKsA) and involves both analytical and synthetic modes of doctrinal exegesis. The body of scholastic literature that developed from this exegetical style was compiled into the ABHIDHARMAPItAKA, one of the three principal sections of the Buddhist canon, or TRIPItAKA, along with sutra and VINAYA, and is concerned primarily with scholastic discussions on epistemology, cosmology, psychology, KARMAN, rebirth, and the constituents of the process of enlightenment and the path (MARGA) to salvation. (In the MAHAYANA tradition, this abhidharmapitaka is sometimes redefined as a broader "treatise basket," or *sASTRAPItAKA.)
AcalanAtha-VidyArAja. (T. Mi g.yo mgon po rig pa'i rgyal po; C. Budong mingwang; J. Fudo myoo; K. Pudong myongwang 不動明王). In Sanskrit, a wrathful DHARMAPALA of the VAJRAYANA pantheon and the chief of the eight VIDYARAJA. As described in the MAHAVAIROCANABHISAMBODHISuTRA, he is the NIRMAnAKAYA of VAIROCANA, a protector of boundaries and vanquisher of obstacles. A late Indian deity, AcalanAtha-VidyArAja possibly originated from the YAKsA form of VAJRAPAnI, with whom he is associated in his form of AcalavajrapAni. Indian forms of the god from the eleventh century show him kneeling on his left leg, holding a sword (khadga). VajrayAna images show him standing with one or three faces and varied numbers of pairs of hands, identified by his raised sword, snare, and ACALASANA. The cult of AcalanAtha-VidyArAja entered China during the first millennium CE, and was brought to Japan by KuKAI in the ninth century, where the wrathful deity (known in Japanese as Fudo myoo) became important for the Shingon school (SHINGONSHu), even being listed by it as one of the thirteen buddhas. In East Asian iconography, AcalanAtha-VidyArAja holds the sword and a snare or lasso (pAsa), with which he binds evil spirits.
AcArya. (P. Acariya; Thai AchAn; T. slob dpon; C. asheli; J. ajari; K. asari 阿闍梨). In Sanskrit, "teacher" or "master"; the term literally means "one who teaches the AcAra (proper conduct)," but it has come into general use as a title for religious teachers. In early Buddhism, it refers specifically to someone who teaches the supra dharma and is used in contrast to the UPADHYAYA (P. upajjhAya) or "preceptor." (See ACARIYA entry supra.) The title AcArya becomes particularly important in VAJRAYANA Buddhism, where the officiant of a tantric ritual is often viewed as the vajra master (VAJRACARYA). The term has recently been adopted by Tibetan monastic universities in India as a degree (similar to a Master of Arts) conferred upon graduation. In Japan, the term refers to a wise teacher, saint, holy person, or a wonder-worker who is most often a Buddhist monk. The term is used by many Japanese Buddhist traditions, including ZEN, TENDAI, and SHINGON. Within the Japanese Zen context, an ajari is a formal title given to those who have been training for five years or more.
AdhyardhasatikAprajNApAramitAsutra/PrajNApAramitAnayasatapaNcasatikA. (T. Shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa'i tshul brgya lnga bcu pa; C. Shixiang bore boluomi jing/Bore liqu fen; J. Jisso hannya haramitsukyo/Hannya rishubun; K. Silsang panya paramil kyong/Panya ich'wi pun 實相般若波羅蜜經/般若理趣分). In Sanskrit, "Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred and Fifty Lines." The basic verses (in Sanskrit) and a commentary describing the ritual accompanying its recitation (originally in Khotanese), are found together as two YOGA class tantras, the srīparmAdhya (T. Dpal mchog dang po) and srīvajramandalAlaMkAra (T. Dpal rdo rje snying po rgyan). In Japan, AMOGHAVAJRA's version of the text (called the Rishukyo) came to form an integral part of the philosophy and practice of the Japanese Shingon sect (SHINGONSHu).
Agonshu. (阿含宗). In Japanese, "AGAMA School"; a Japanese "new religion" structured from elements drawn from esoteric Buddhism (MIKKYo) and indigenous Japanese religions; founded in 1970 by Kiriyama Seiyu (born Tsutsumi Masao in 1921). Kiriyama's teachings are presented first in his Henshin no genri ("Principles of Transformation"; 1975). Kiriyama believed he had been saved by the compassion of Kannon (AVALOKITEsVARA) and was told by that BODHISATTVA to teach others using the HOMA (J. goma) fire rituals drawn from Buddhist esoteric (MIKKYo) traditions. Later, while Kiriyama was reading the Agama (J. agon) scriptures, he realized that Buddhism as it was currently constituted in Japan did not correspond to the original teachings of the Buddha. In 1978, Kiriyama changed the name of his religious movement to Agon, the Japanese pronunciation of the transcription of Agama, positing that his teachings derived from the earliest scriptures of Buddhism and thus legitimizing them. His practices are fundamentally concerned with removing practitioners' karmic hindrances (KARMAVARAnA). Since many of these hindrances, he claims, are the result of neglecting one's ancestors or are inherited from them, much attention is also paid in the school to transforming the spirits of the dead into buddhas themselves, which in turn will also free the current generation from their karmic obstructions. Spiritual power in the school derives from the shinsei busshari (true sARĪRA [relics] of the Buddha), a sacred reliquary holding a bone fragment of the Buddha himself, given to Kiriyama in 1986 by the president of Sri Lanka. Individual adherents keep a miniature replica of the sarīra in their own homes, and the relic is said to have the transformational power to turn ancestors into buddhas. A "Star Festival" (Hoshi Matsuri) is held in Kyoto on each National Foundation Day (February 11), at which time two massive homa fires are lit, one liberating the spirits of the ancestors (and thus freeing the current generation from inherited karmic obstructions), the other helping to make the deepest wishes of its adherents come true. Adherents write millions of prayers on wooden sticks, which are cast into the two fires.
agyo. (C. xiayu; K. hao 下語). In Japanese, "appended words" or "granted words." Although the term is now used generally to refer to the instructions of a ZEN master, agyo can also more specifically refer to a set number of stereotyped sayings, often a verse or phrase, that were used in KoAN (C. GONG'AN) training. Unlike the literate monks of the medieval GOZAN monasteries, monks of the RINKA, or forest, monasteries were usually unable to compose their own Chinese verses to express the insight that they had gained while struggling with a koan. The rinka monks therefore began to study the "appended words" or "capping phrases" (JAKUGO) of a koan text such as the BIYAN LU, which summarized or explained each segment of the text. The agyo are found in koan manuals known as MONSAN, or Zen phrase manuals, such as the ZENRIN KUSHu, where they are used to explicate a koan.
aino ::: n. --> One of a peculiar race inhabiting Yesso, the Kooril Islands etc., in the northern part of the empire of Japan, by some supposed to have been the progenitors of the Japanese. The Ainos are stout and short, with hairy bodies.
Aizen Myoo. (愛染明王) (S. RAgavidyArAja). In Japanese, lit. "Bright King of the Taint of Lust"; an esoteric deity considered to be the destroyer of vulgar passions. In stark contrast to the traditional Buddhist approach of suppressing the passions through various antidotes or counteractive techniques (PRATIPAKsA), this VIDYARAJA is believed to be able to transform attachment, desire, craving, and defilement directly into pure BODHICITTA. This deity became a principal deity of the heretical Tachikawa branch (TACHIKAWARYu) of the SHINGONSHu and was considered the deity of conception. As an emanation of the buddha MAHAVAIROCANA or the bodhisattva VAJRASATTVA, Aizen Myoo was favored by many followers of Shingon Buddhism in Japan and by various esoteric branches of the TENDAISHu. Aizen Myoo was also sometimes held to be a secret buddha (HIBUTSU) by these traditions. The NICHIRENSHu was the last to adopt him as an important deity, but he played an important role in the dissemination of its cult. Aizen Myoo is well known for his fierce appearance, which belies the love and affection he is presumed to convey. Aizen Myoo usually has three eyes (to see the three realms of existence) and holds a lotus in his hand, which is symbolic of the calming of the senses, among other things. Other attributes of this deity are the bow and arrows, VAJRAs, and weapons that he holds in his hands.
AjAtasatru. (P. AjAtasattu; T. Ma skyes dgra; C. Asheshi wang; J. Ajase o; K. Asase wang 阿闍世王). In Sanskrit, "Enemy While Still Unborn," the son of King BIMBISARA of Magadha and his successor as king. According to the PAli account, when BimbisAra's queen VAIDEHĪ (P. Videhī) was pregnant, she developed an overwhelming urge to drink blood from the king's right knee, a craving that the king's astrologers interpreted to mean that the son would eventually commit patricide and seize the throne. Despite several attempts to abort the fetus, the child was born and was given the name AjAtasatru. While a prince, AjAtasatru became devoted to the monk DEVADATTA, the Buddha's cousin and rival, because of Devadatta's mastery of yogic powers (ṚDDHI). Devadatta plotted to take revenge on the Buddha through manipulating AjAtasatru, whom he convinced to murder his father BimbisAra, a close lay disciple and patron of the Buddha, and seize the throne. AjAtasatru subsequently assisted Devadatta in several attempts on the Buddha's life. AjAtasatru is said to have later grown remorseful over his evil deeds and, on the advice of the physician JĪVAKA, sought the Buddha's forgiveness. The Buddha preached to him on the benefits of renunciation from the SAMANNAPHALASUTTA, and AjAtasatru became a lay disciple. Because he had committed patricide, one of the five most heinous of evil deeds that are said to bring immediate retribution (ANANTARYAKARMAN), AjAtasatru was precluded from attaining any degree of enlightenment during this lifetime and was destined for rebirth in the lohakumbhiya hell. Nevertheless, Sakka (S. sAKRA), the king of the gods, described AjAtasatru as the chief in piety among the Buddha's unenlightened disciples. When the Buddha passed away, AjAtasatru was overcome with grief and, along with other kings, was given a portion of the Buddha's relics (sARĪRA) for veneration. According to the PAli commentaries, AjAtasatru provided the material support for convening the first Buddhist council (see COUNCIL, FIRST) following the Buddha's death. The same sources state that, despite his piety, he will remain in hell for sixty thousand years but later will attain liberation as a solitary buddha (P. paccekabuddha; S. PRATYEKABUDDHA) named Viditavisesa. ¶ MahAyAna scriptures, such as the MAHAPARINIRVAnASuTRA and the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING ("Contemplation Sutra on the Buddha of Infinite Life"), give a slightly different account of AjAtasatru's story. BimbisAra was concerned that his queen, Vaidehī, had yet to bear him an heir. He consulted a soothsayer, who told him that an aging forest ascetic would eventually be reborn as BimbisAra's son. The king then decided to speed the process along and had the ascetic killed so he would take rebirth in Vaidehī's womb. After the queen had already conceived, however, the soothsayer prophesized that the child she would bear would become the king's enemy. After his birth, the king dropped him from a tall tower, but the child survived the fall, suffering only a broken finger. (In other versions of the story, Vaidehī is so mortified to learn that her unborn son will murder her husband the king that she tried to abort the fetus, but to no avail.) Devadatta later told AjAtasatru the story of his conception and the son then imprisoned his father, intending to starve him to death. But Vaidehī kept the king alive by smuggling food to him, smearing her body with flour-paste and hiding grape juice inside her jewelry. When AjAtasatru learned of her treachery, he drew his sword to murder her, but his vassals dissuaded him. The prince's subsequent guilt about his intended matricide caused his skin break out in oozing abscesses that emitted such a foul odor that no one except his mother was able to approach him and care for him. Despite her loving care, AjAtasatru did not improve and Vaidehī sought the Buddha's counsel. The Buddha was able to cure the prince by teaching him the "NirvAna Sutra," and the prince ultimately became one of the preeminent Buddhist monarchs of India. This version of the story of AjAtasatru was used by Kosawa Heisaku (1897-1968), one of the founding figures of Japanese psychoanalysis, and his successors to posit an "Ajase (AjAtasatru) Complex" that distinguished Eastern cultures from the "Oedipal Complex" described by Sigmund Freud in Western psychoanalysis. As Kosawa interpreted this story, Vaidehī's ambivalence or active antagonism toward her son and AjAtasatru's rancor toward his mother were examples of the pathological relationship that pertains between mother and son in Eastern cultures, in distinction to the competition between father and son that Freud posited in his Oedipal Complex. This pathological relationship can be healed only through the mother's love and forgiveness, which redeem the child and thus reunite them.
aji gatsurinkan. (阿字月輪觀). In Japanese, "contemplation of the letter 'A' in the moon-wheel." See AJIKAN.
aji honpusho. (阿字本不生). In Japanese, "the letter 'A' that is originally uncreated." See AJIKAN.
ajikan. (阿字観). In Japanese, "contemplation of the letter ‛A'"; a meditative exercise employed primarily within the the Japanese SHINGON school of esoteric Buddhism. The ajikan practice is also known as the "contemplation of the letter 'A' in the moon-wheel" (AJI GATSURINKAN). The letter "A" is the first letter in the Sanskrit SIDDHAM alphabet and is considered to be the "seed" (BĪJA) of MAHAVAIROCANA, the central divinity of the esoteric traditions. The letter "A" is also understood to be the "unborn" buddha-nature (FOXING) of the practitioner; hence, the identification of oneself with this letter serves as a catalyst to enlightenment. In ajikan meditation, the adept draws a picture of the full moon with an eight-petaled lotus flower at its center. The Siddham letter "A" is then superimposed over the lotus flower as a focus of visualization. As the visualization continues, the moon increases in size until it becomes coextensive with the universe itself. Through this visualization, the adept realizes the letter "A" that is originally uncreated (AJI HONPUSHo), which is the essence of all phenomena in the universe and the DHARMAKAYA of MAHAVAIROCANA Buddha.
akunin shoki. (惡人正機). In Japanese, lit. "evil people have the right capacity"; the emblematic teaching of the JoDO SHINSHu teacher SHINRAN (1173-1263), which suggests that AMITABHA's compassion is directed primarily to evildoers. When AmitAbha was still the monk named DHARMAKARA, he made a series of forty-eight vows (PRAnIDHANA) that he promised to fulfill before he became a buddha. The most important of these vows to much of the PURE LAND tradition is the eighteenth, in which he vows that all beings who call his name will be reborn in his pure land of SUKHAVATĪ. This prospect of salvation has nothing to do with whether one is a monk or layperson, man or woman, saint or sinner, learned or ignorant. In this doctrine, Shinran goes so far as to claim that if a good man can be reborn in the pure land, so much more so can an evil man. This is because the good man remains attached to the delusion that his virtuous deeds will somehow bring about his salvation, while the evil man has abandoned this conceit and accepts that only through AmitAbha's grace will rebirth in the pure land be won.
Ame No Mi Naka Nushi No Kami (Japanese) Divine monarch of the central heaven; the first of three arupa (formless) spiritual beings to appear from kon-ton (chaos) in Japanese cosmogony (SD 1:214).
Amida. Japanese pronunciation of the Sinographic transcripton of the name AMITABHA, the buddha who is the primary focus of worship in the PURE LAND traditions of Japan. See JoDOSHu; JoDO SHINSHu.
AmitAyus. (T. Tshe dpag med; C. Wuliangshou fo; J. Muryoju butsu; K. Muryangsu pul 無量壽佛). In Sanskrit, the buddha or bodhisattva of "Limitless Life" or "Infinite Lifespan." Although the name originally was synonymous with AMITABHA, in the tantric traditions, AmitAyus has developed distinguishing characteristics and is now sometimes considered to be an independent form of AmitAbha. The Japanese SHINGON school, for example, uses Muryoju in representations of the TAIZoKAI (garbhadhAtumandala) and Amida (AmitAbha) in the KONGoKAI (vajradhAtumandala). AmitAyus is often central in tantric ceremonies for prolonging life and so has numerous forms and appellations in various groupings, such as one of six and one of nine. He is shown in bodhisattva guise, with crown and jewels, sitting in DHYANASANA with both hands in DHYANAMUDRA and holding a water pot (kalasa) full of AMṚTA (here the nectar of long life); like AmitAbha, he is usually red.
anchin kokkaho. (安鎭國家法). In Japanese, the "technique for pacifying the state." Japanese TENDAI priests often performed this ritual in the palace at the request of the emperor. Offerings were made to the deity fudo myoo (S. ACALANATHA-VIDYARAJA), who in return would quell the demons who were disturbing the peace of the state. A simplified version of this ritual known as kachin or chintaku is now commonly performed for laity at their homes.
ango. (S. vArsika; P. vassa; C. anju; K. an'go 安居). In Japanese, "peaceful dwelling"; also known as gegyo ("summer dwelling"), zage ("sitting in the summer"), zaro ("sitting age"), etc. The term is used in ZEN monasteries to refer either to the summer rainy season retreat, which usually lasts for three months, or to an intensive period of meditative training during the summer rain's retreat. The beginning of this period is known as kessei (C. JIEZHI), but this term is also occasionally used in place of ango to refer to the meditation retreat. In the Soto Zen tradition (SoToSHu), ango is often used as a means of measuring the dharma age, or horo (C. FALA), of a monk. A monk who completes his first summer retreat is known as "one who has entered the community," five retreats or more a "saint," and ten retreats or more a "master." See also VARsA.
anjitsu. (C. anshi; K. amsil 庵室). In Japanese "hut" or "hermitage"; the term is used for a small residence often used by monks to further their training away from the company of others. According to various sources, such as the SHASEKISHu, an anshitsu was preferably built deep in the mountains, far away from the hustle and bustle of cities and towns, which might distract monks from their practice. See also AN.
ankokuji. (安國寺). In Japanese, "temples for the pacification of the country." After the Ashikaga shogunate took over control of the capital of Kyoto from the rapidly declining forces of Emperor Godaigo (1288-1339) between the years 1336 and 1337, they sought to heal the scars of civil war by following the suggestions of the ZEN master MUSo SOSEKI and building pagodas and temples in every province of Japan. By constructing these temples, the shogunate also sought to subsume local military centers under the control of the centralized government, just as the monarch Shomu (r. 724-749) had once done with the KOKUBUNJI system. These pagodas were later called rishoto, and the temples were given the name ankokuji in 1344. Many of these temples belonged to the lineages of the GOZAN system, especially that of Muso and ENNI BEN'EN.
Annen. (安然) (841-889?). Japanese TENDAI (C. TIANTAI) monk considered to be the founder of Japanese Tendai esoterism and thus also known as Himitsu daishi. Annen studied under ENNIN and initiated a reform of the Japanese Tendai tradition by incorporating new teachings from China called MIKKYo, or esoteric Buddhism. He received the bodhisattva precepts at ENRYAKUJI on Mt. Hiei (HIEIZAN) in 859 and by 884 had become the main dharma lecturer at Gangyoji. He subsequently was the founder of a monastery called Godaiin and is therefore often known to the tradition as "master Godaiin" (Godaiin daitoku or Godaiin ajari). Over one hundred works are attributed to Annen on both the exoteric and esoteric teachings of Tendai as well as on Sanskrit SIDDHAM orthography; dozens are extant, including texts that are considered primary textbooks of the Japanese Tendai tradition, such as his Hakke hiroku, Kyojijo, and Shittanzo. Annen is especially important for having examined comprehensively the relationship between precepts associated with the esoteric tradition and the Buddhist monastic precepts, including the bodhisattva precepts (BODHISATTVAsĪLA); his ultimate conclusion is that all precepts ultimately derive from specific sets of esoteric precepts.
Apart from the remarkable learning that these earlier works display, two things are noteworthy about them. The first is that they are principally based on a single source language or Buddhist tradition. The second is that they are all at least a half-century old. Many things have changed in the field of Buddhist Studies over the past fifty years, some for the worse, some very much for the better. One looks back in awe at figures like Louis de la Vallée Poussin and his student Msgr. Étienne Lamotte, who were able to use sources in Sanskrit, PAli, Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan with a high level of skill. Today, few scholars have the luxury of time to develop such expertise. Yet this change is not necessarily a sign of the decline of the dharma predicted by the Buddha; from several perspectives, we are now in the golden age of Buddhist Studies. A century ago, scholarship on Buddhism focused on the classical texts of India and, to a much lesser extent, China. Tibetan and Chinese sources were valued largely for the access they provided to Indian texts lost in the original Sanskrit. The Buddhism of Korea was seen as an appendage to the Buddhism of China or as a largely unacknowledged source of the Buddhism of Japan. Beyond the works of "the PAli canon," relatively little was known of the practice of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. All of this has changed for the better over the past half century. There are now many more scholars of Buddhism, there is a much higher level of specialization, and there is a larger body of important scholarship on each of the many Buddhist cultures of Asia. In addition, the number of adherents of Buddhism in the West has grown significantly, with many developing an extensive knowledge of a particular Buddhist tradition, whether or not they hold the academic credentials of a professional Buddhologist. It has been our good fortune to be able to draw upon this expanding body of scholarship in preparing The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism.
ardhaparyanka. (T. skyil krung phyed pa; C. ban jiafuzuo; J. hankafuza; K. pan kabujwa 半跏趺坐). In Sanskrit, the "half cross-legged" posture (ASANA). This particular posture may be formed in a number of ways. As a seated pose, either foot rests on the opposite thigh with the remaining leg bent forward. Alternatively, both shins may be loosely crossed at the ankles while resting or crouching on the seat. As a standing pose, it may form a dancing posture sometimes described as NṚTYASANA. Some standing Japanese images described as being in ardhaparyanka may show a raised foot lifted straight up off the ground, as if about to stomp down. See also VAJRAPARYAnKA; ARDHAPADMASANA.
Arya. (P. ariya; T. 'phags pa; C. sheng; J. sho; K. song 聖). In Sanskrit, "noble" or "superior." A term appropriated by the Buddhists from earlier Indian culture to refer to its saints and used technically to denote a person who has directly perceived reality and has become a "noble one." In the fourfold path structure of the mainstream schools, an Arya is a person who has achieved at least the first level of sanctity, that of stream-enterer (SROTAAPANNA), or above. In the fivefold path system, an Arya is one who has achieved at least the path of vision (DARsANAMARGA), or above. The SARVASTIVADA (e.g., ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA) and THERAVADA (e.g., VISUDDHIMAGGA) schools of mainstream Buddhism both recognize seven types of noble ones (Arya, P. ariya). In e.g., the VISUDDHIMAGGA, these are listed in order of their intellectual superiority as (1) follower of faith (P. saddhAnusAri; S. sRADDHANUSARIN); (2) follower of the dharma (P. dhammAnusAri; S. DHARMANUSARIN); (3) one who is freed by faith (P. saddhAvimutta; S. sRADDHAVIMUKTA); (4) one who has formed right view (P. ditthippatta; S. DṚstIPRAPTA), by developing both faith and knowledge; (5) one who has bodily testimony (P. kAyasakkhi; S. KAYASAKsIN), viz., through the temporary suspension of mentality in the equipoise of cessation (NIRODHASAMAPATTI); (6) one who is freed by wisdom (P. paNNAvimutta; S. PRAJNAVIMUKTA), by freeing oneself through analysis; and (7) one who is freed both ways (P. ubhatobhAgavimutta; S. UBHAYATOBHAGAVIMUKTA), by freeing oneself through both meditative absorption (P. jhAna; S. DHYANA) and wisdom (P. paNNA; S. PRAJNA). In the AbhidharmakosabhAsya, the seven types of Arya beings are presented in a slightly different manner, together with the list of eight noble persons (ARYAPUDGALA) based on candidates for (pratipannika) and those who have reached the result of (phalastha) stream-enterer (srotaApanna), once-returner (SAKṚDAGAMIN), nonreturner (ANAGAMIN), and ARHAT; these are again further expanded into a list of twenty members of the Arya VIMsATIPRABHEDASAMGHA and in MahAyAna explanations into forty-eight or more ARYABODHISATTVAs. The Chinese character sheng, used to render this term in East Asia, has a long indigenous history and several local meanings; see, for example, the Japanese vernacular equivalent HIJIRI. It is also the name of one of two Indian esoteric GUHYASAMAJATANTRA traditions, receiving its name from Arya NAgArjuna, the author of the PANCAKRAMA.
As a general rule, we provide multiple language equivalencies only for terms that were traditionally known in the other languages. For this reason, many late tantric terms known only in India and Tibet will not have East Asian equivalents (even though equivalents were in some cases created in the twentieth century); Chinese texts not translated into Tibetan will give only Japanese and Korean equivalencies; Japanese and Korean figures and texts not generally known in China will have only Japanese and Korean transcriptions, and so forth.
"As for the spectator and the coils of the dragon, it is the Chino-Japanese image for the world-force extending itself in the course of the universe and this expresses the attitude of the witness seeing it all and observing in its unfolding the unrolling of the play of the Divine Lila.” Letters on Yoga
“As for the spectator and the coils of the dragon, it is the Chino-Japanese image for the world-force extending itself in the course of the universe and this expresses the attitude of the witness seeing it all and observing in its unfolding the unrolling of the play of the Divine Lila.” Letters on Yoga
A striking similarity is present in the mythology of the Algonquin Indians of North America; their chief deity was a mighty hare known as Menabosho or Michabo, to whom they went at death. One account places him in the east, another in the west. The ancient Germanic and Scandinavian peoples used the hare as a symbol, being sacred to the nature goddess Freyja; likewise to the Anglo-Saxon Ostara, goddess of springtime. This is believed to be the basis for the present-day association of the rabbit or hare with Easter. The anthropomorphic idea is found also among other races, very frequently among the Mongolians, Chinese, Japanese, and other Far Eastern peoples. It was considered to be androgynous, thus typifying an attribute of the creative Logos.
Asukadera. (飛鳥寺) In Japanese, "Asuka Temple"; also known as Hokoji ("Monastery of the Flourishing Dharma"), the Asukadera was built during the ASUKA period on a site known as the Amakashi no Oka by the Asuka River near Nara, Japan. Shortly after the death of Emperor Yomei in 587, the powerful vassals Mononobe no Moriya (d. 587), who represented the indigenous ritual specialists, and Soga no Umako (551?-626), a supporter of Buddhism who came from the Korean peninsula, found themselves caught in battle over imperial succession. In celebration of the Soga clan's victory over the Mononobe and the death of Moriya, the Soga commenced the construction of the first complete monastic compound in Japan, which they named Hokoji in 588. Hokoji was completed nine years later in 596 and for more than a century served as the central monastic complex of the Yamato court. The large monastic compound contained a central hall or KONDo and a central pagoda flanked by two other halls. A large lecture hall flanked by a belfry and SuTRA repository was located behind the main monastic complex. According to the NIHON SHOKI ("Historical Records of Japan"), Empress Suiko commissioned two sixteen-feet gilt-bronze icons of the Buddha to be made by Tori Busshi for installment in Hokoji. When the capital was moved from Fujiwarakyo to Heijokyo (modern-day Nara) in 710, the major monasteries including Hokoji were moved as well. Hokoji, otherwise known as Asukadera, was subsequently renamed Gangoji.
Asuka. (飛鳥). Japan's first historical epoch, named after a region in the plains south of modern NARA. Until the eighth century (710) when the capital was moved to Nara, a new palace, and virtually a new capital, was built every time a new ruler succeeded to the throne. One of the earliest capitals was located in the region of Asuka. The Asuka period is characterized by the rise of powerful aristocratic clans such as the Soga and Mononobe and attempts such as the Taika reform (646) to counteract the rise of these clans and to strengthen the authority of the emperor. According to the NIHON SHOKI ("Historical Records of Japan"), the inception of Buddhism occurred in the Japanese isles during this period, when Emperor Kimmei (r. 532-571) received an image of the Buddha from the King Songmyong of the Korean kingdom of Paekche in 552 (var. 538). Buddhism became the central religion of the Asuka court with the support of such famous figures as Prince SHoTOKU, Empress Suiko (r. 593-628), and Empress Jito (r. 686-697). After the establishment of the grand monastery ASUKADERA by the descendants of a Korean clan, other temples modeled after early Chinese monastery campuses, such as HoRYuJI, were also constructed during this period. These temples enshrined the magnificent sculptures executed by Tori Busshi.
At more than one million words, this is the largest dictionary of Buddhism ever produced in the English language. Yet even at this length, it only begins to represent the full breadth and depth of the Buddhist tradition. Many great dictionaries and glossaries have been produced in Asia over the long history of Buddhism and Buddhist Studies. One thinks immediately of works like the MahAvyutpatti, the ninth-century Tibetan-Sanskrit lexicon said to have been commissioned by the king of Tibet to serve as a guide for translators of the dharma. It contains 9,565 entries in 283 categories. One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Buddhology was the Bukkyo Daijiten ("Encyclopedia of Buddhism"), published in ten massive volumes between 1932 and 1964 by the distinguished Japanese scholar Mochizuki Shinko. Among English-language works, there is William Soothill and Lewis Hodous's A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, published in 1937, and, from the same year, G. P. Malalasekera's invaluable Dictionary of PAli Proper Names. In preparing the present dictionary, we have sought to build upon these classic works in substantial ways.
Bankei Yotaku. (盤珪永琢) (1622-1693). Japanese ZEN master of the Tokugawa period; also known as Eitaku. Bankei was born in the district of Hamada in present-day Hyogo prefecture. According to his sermons, Bankei was dissatisfied with the standard explanations of the concept of "bright virtue" (mingde) found in the CONFUCIAN classic Daxue ("Great Learning"), and sought explanations elsewhere. His search eventually brought him to the temple of Zuioji, the residence of Zen master Unpo Zensho (1568-1653). After he received ordination and the dharma name Yotaku from Unpo, Bankei left his teacher to perform a long pilgrimage (angya) to various temples and hermitages. After what he describes in sermons as an awakening at the age of twenty-six, Bankei continued his post-awakening training under Unpo's senior disciple, Bokuo Sogyu (d. 1694), and perfected the teaching of FUSHo ZEN ("unborn Zen"). Upon hearing of the arrival of the Chinese monk DAOZHE CHAOYUAN in Nagasaki (1651), Bankei traveled to Sofukuji where Daozhe was residing and furthered his studies under the Chinese master. Bankei spent the rest of his life teaching his "unborn Zen" to both lay and clergy in various locations. He also built and restored a great number of temples and hermitages, such as Ryumonji in his native Hamada. In 1672 he was appointed the abbot of the RINZAI monastery of MYoSHINJI in Kyoto.
Baojing sanmei. (J. Hokyo sanmai/zanmai; K. Pogyong sammae 寶鏡三昧). In Chinese, "Jeweled-Mirror SAMADHI"; a definitive poem on enlightenment and practice from the standpoint of the Chinese CAODONG ZONG; otherwise known as the Baojing sanmei ge, or "GATHA of the Jeweled-Mirror SamAdhi." This lengthy Chinese song is attributed to the Chan master DONGSHAN LIANGJIE and, along with the CANTONG QI, is revered in the Chinese Caodong and Japanese SoTo schools of CHAN and ZEN as the foundational scripture of their tradition. Although the song is traditionally attributed to Dongshan, a number of sources note that Dongshan secretly received this song from his teacher Yunyan Tansheng (780-841), and Dongshan in turn transmitted it to his head disciple CAOSHAN BENJI. The earliest version of this song appears in the entry on Caoshan in the CHANLIN SENGBAO ZHUAN, written in 1123. The Baojing sanmei emphasizes the "inherent enlightenment" (BENJUE; cf. HONGAKU) of sentient beings and the futility of seeking that enlightenment through conscious reflection. Instead, the song urges its audience to allow one's inherently pure enlightened nature to "silently illuminate" itself through meditation (MOZHAO CHAN), as the Buddha did under the BODHI TREE. Numerous commentaries on this song are extant.
Bassui Tokusho. (拔隊得勝) (1327-1387). Japanese monk of the Hotto branch of the RINZAISHu of ZEN; also known as Bassui Zenji. Ordained at the age of twenty-nine, Bassui subsequently began a pilgrimage around the Kanto area of Japan in search of enlightened teachers. He eventually met Koho Kakumyo (1271-1361) of Unjuji in Izumo, and received from him the name Bassui, which means "well above average," lit., "to rise above the rank-and-file." Their relationship, however, remains unclear. After taking leave from Koho, Bassui continued traveling on pilgrimage until he settled down in Kai, where his local patrons established for him the monastery of Kogakuji ("Facing Lofty Peaks Monastery"). Bassui's teachings stress the importance of KoAN (C. GONG'AN) training and especially the notion of doubt (see YIJING; YITUAN). Bassui was also extremely critical of SoTo teachers of his day, despite the fact that his own teacher Koho was once a Soto monk, and he was strongly critical of their use of koan manuals called MONSAN in their training. Although his teacher Koho employed Soto-style "lineage charts" (see KECHIMYAKU SoJo) as a means of attracting lay support, Bassui rejected their use and instead stressed the importance of practice.
Because this second Koryo canon was renowned throughout East Asia for its scholarly accuracy, it was used as the basis of the modern Japanese TAISHo SHINSHu DAIZoKYo ("New Edition of the Buddhist Canon Compiled during the Taisho Reign Era"), edited by TAKAKUSU JUNJIRo and Watanabe Kaikyoku, published using movable-type printing between 1924 and 1935, which has become the standard reference source for East Asian Buddhist materials. See also DAZANGJING.
beidou qixing. (J. hokuto shichisho; K. puktu ch'ilsong 北斗七星). In Chinese, "seven stars of the Northern Dipper" (viz., the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major); Daoist divinities that are also prominent in Korean Buddhism, where they are typically known as the ch'ilsong. The cult of the seven stars of the Big Dipper developed within Chinese Buddhist circles through influence from indigenous Daoist schools, who worshipped these seven deities to guard against plague and other misfortunes. The apocryphal Beidou qixing yanming jing ("Book of the Prolongation of Life through Worshipping the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper"), suggests a correlation between the healing buddha BHAIsAJYAGURU and the Big Dipper cult by addressing the seven-star TATHAGATAs (qixing rulai) with names that are very similar to Bhaisajyaguru's seven emanations. This indigenous Chinese scripture (see APOCRYPHA), which derives from an early Daoist text on Big Dipper worship, is certainly dated no later than the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries but may have been composed as early as the middle of the eighth century; it later was translated into Uighur, Mongolian, and Tibetan, as part of the Mongol Yuan dynasty's extension of power throughout the Central Asian region. Thanks to this scripture, the seven-star cult became associated in Buddhism with the prolongation of life. We know that seven-star worship had already been introduced into esoteric Buddhist ritual by at least the eighth century because of two contemporary manuals that discuss HOMA fire offerings to the seven stars: VAJRABODHI's (671-741) Beidou qixing niansong yigui ("Ritual Procedures for Invoking the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper") and his disciple AMOGHAVAJRA's (705-774) Beidou qixing humo miyao yigui ("Esoteric Ritual Procedure for the Homa Offering to the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper"). Renderings of DHARAnĪ sutras dedicated to the tathAgata TEJAPRABHA (Qixingguang Rulai), who is said to be master of the planets and the twenty-eight asterisms, are also attributed to Amoghavajra's translation bureau. Worship of the seven stars within esoteric Buddhist circles was therefore certainly well established in China by the eighth century during the Tang dynasty and probably soon afterward in Korean Buddhism. ¶ The worship of the Big Dipper in Korea may date as far back as the Megalithic period, as evidenced by the engraving of the Big Dipper and other asterisms on dolmens or menhirs. In the fourth-century Ji'an tombs of the Koguryo kingdom (37 BCE-668 CE), one of the traditional Three Kingdoms of early Korea, a mural of the Big Dipper is found on the north wall of tomb no. 1, along with an accompanying asterism of the six stars of Sagittarius (sometimes called the Southern Dipper) on the south wall; this juxtaposition is presumed to reflect the influence of the Shangqing school of contemporary Chinese Daoism. Court rituals to the seven stars and the tathAgata Tejaprabha date from the twelfth century during the Koryo dynasty. By at least the thirteen century, the full range of texts and ritual practices associated with the seven-star deities were circulating in Korea. At the popular level in Korea, the divinities of the Big Dipper were thought to control longevity, especially for children, and the ch'ilsong cult gained widespread popularity during the Choson dynasty (1392-1910). This popularization is in turn reflected in the ubiquity in Korean monasteries of "seven-stars shrines" (ch'ilsonggak), which were typically located in less-conspicuous locations along the outer perimeter of the monasteries and were worshipped primarily by the nonelite. Inside these shrines were hung seven-star paintings (T'AENGHWA), which typically depict the tathAgatas of the seven stars, with the tathAgata Tejaprabha presiding at the center. There are also several comprehensive ritual and liturgical manuals compiled during the Choson dynasty and Japanese colonial period in Korea that include rituals and invocations to the seven stars and Tejaprabha, most dedicated to the prolongation of life. Along with the mountain god (sansin), who also often has his own shrine in the monasteries of Korea, the role of the ch'ilsong in Korean Buddhism is often raised in the scholarship as an example of Buddhism's penchant to adapt beliefs and practices from rival religions. Although ch'ilsong worship has declined markedly in contemporary Korea, the ch'ilsokche, a worship ceremony dedicated to the tathAgata Tejaprabha, is occasionally held at some Buddhist monasteries on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, with lay believers praying for good fortune and the prevention of calamity.
Bendoho. (辨道法). In Japanese, "Techniques for Pursuing the Way"; a work devoted to the rules of the SAMGHA hall (see C. SENGTANG), written by DoGEN KIGEN. Primarily during his stays at the monasteries Daibutsuji and EIHEIJI, Dogen wrote a number of related manuals on monastic rules (C. QINGGUI), of which the Bendoho is perhaps most important. These manuals, including the Bendoho, were later collected and published together as a single text known as the EIHEI SHINGI. Dogen modeled his regulations after those found in an earlier code of monastic rules produced in China, the CHANYUAN QINGGUI. The Bendoho was therefore heavily influenced by the Chinese Chan master CHANGLU ZONGZE's manual of meditation, ZUOCHAN YI, which was embedded in the Chanyuan qinggui. The text includes guidelines for all of the activities of the saMgha hall, from sitting, walking, sleeping, and cleaning to the practice of seated meditation (J. zazen; C. ZUOCHAN). The Bendoho also contains a version of Dogen's FUKAN ZAZENGI.
Bendowa. (辨道話). In Japanese, "A Talk on Pursuing the Way"; a short essay written in vernacular Japanese by the SoTo ZEN monk DoGEN KIGEN in 1231. Dogen's earliest extant work, the Bendowa contains a brief description of the orthodox transmission to the East of the "true dharma" (shobo; S. SADDHARMA) of the Buddha and also a succinct explanation of Zen in a series of eighteen questions and answers. The Bendowa was later incorporated into Dogen's magnum opus, the SHoBoGENZo. The teachings on Zen meditation found in the Bendowa are similar to those of Dogen's FUKAN ZAZENGI.
Benkenmitsu nikyoron. (辯顯密二教論). In Japanese, literally "Distinguishing the Two Teachings of the Exoteric and Esoteric"; a relatively short treatise composed by the Japanese SHINGON monk KuKAI in the early ninth century. The text is commonly known more simply as the Nikyoron. As the title suggests, the central theme of the Benkenmitsu nikyoron is the elaboration of the difference between the exoteric and esoteric teachings of Buddhism and the demonstration of the latter's superiority. The text begins with a brief introduction, followed by a series of questions and answers, and a short conclusion. The Benkenmitsu nikyoron describes the relation between the exoteric teachings preached by the NIRMAnAKAYA of the Buddha and the esoteric teachings preached by his DHARMAKAYA as that between provisional words spoken according to the different capacities of sentient beings and ultimate truth. By meticulously citing scriptural references, such as the LAnKAVATARASuTRA, the Benkenmitsu nikyoron shows that the dharmakAya, like the nirmAnakAya and SAMBHOGAKAYA, can indeed preach and that it does so in a special language best articulated in such esoteric scriptures as the MAHAVAIROCANABHISAMBODHISuTRA. Whereas the nirmAnakAya speaks the DHARMA with reference to the six perfections (PARAMITA), the dharmakAya employs the language of the three mysteries: the body, speech, and mind of MAHAVAIROCANA expressed in MUDRA, MANTRA, and MAndALA. Like many of kukai's other writings, the arguments presented in his Benkenmitsu nikyoron helped him legitimize the introduction and installment of the new teachings, now known as MIKKYo or esoteric Buddhism, which he had brought back from China. There are several commentaries on the text, including those composed by Seisen (1025-1115), Raiyu (1226-1304), Yukai (1345-1416), and Kaijo (1750-1805).
betsuji nenbutsu. (別時念佛). In Japanese, lit. "special-time recitation of the Buddha's name," also known as nyoho nenbutsu; a term for an intensive nenbutsu (C. NIANFO) practice, usually the chanting of the name of the buddha AMITABHA, as mentioned in the oJo YoSHu and SHASEKISHu. This type of recitation is mainly practiced among the followers of the JoDOSHu for a special period of one, seven, ten, or ninety days as a means of overcoming torpor and sluggishness.
BhadrapAla. (T. Bzang skyong; C. Xianhu/Batuoboluo; J. Kengo/Batsudahara; K. Hyonho/Palt'abara 賢護/跋陀波羅) In Sanskrit, "Auspicious Protector"; a lay (GṚHAPATI) BODHISATTVA who is listed as one of the eight great bodhisattvas (S. AstAMAHOPAPUTRA), who have vowed to protect and propagate the true dharma (S. SADDHARMA) in the age of decline (S. SADDHARMAVIPRALOPA; C. MOFA) after sAKYAMUNI Buddha's death and to guard sentient beings. He is also listed in the DAZHIDU LUN (*MahAprajNApAramitAsAstra) as one of the sixteen great bodhisattvas who have remained a householder. In the RATNAKutASuTRA, BhadrapAla is described as the son of a wealthy merchant (gṛhapati) whose enjoyments surpassed even those of INDRA, the king of the gods, himself. In the Banzhou sanmei jing (PRATYUTPANNABUDDHASAMMUKHAVASTHITASAMADHISuTRA), BhadrapAla appears together with his five hundred attendant bodhisattvas to ask the Buddha how bodhisattvas can obtain wisdom that is as deep and broad as the ocean. In the twentieth chapter of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), BhadrapAla is identified as someone who slighted the Buddha in a previous lifetime and as a result fell into AVĪCI hell. After suffering there for a thousand eons (KALPA) and requiting his offenses, BhadrapAla was again able to encounter the Buddha and finally accept his teaching. He is also mentioned as one of the eighty thousand bodhisattvas who attended the assembly on Vulture Peak (GṚDHRAKutAPARVATA) where sAkyamuni preached in the opening chapter of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra. BhadrapAla eventually became a buddha who attained enlightenment through the contemplation of water. Drawing on this experience, the Chinese apocryphal *suRAMGAMASuTRA (Shoulengyan jing) says that BhadrapAla became enlightened as he entered the bathhouse; hence, the Chinese CHAN tradition enshrined an image of BhadrapAla in the monastic bathhouse and some Japanese Buddhist schools similarly considered him to be the patron of the temple bathhouse.
Biyan lu. (J. Hekiganroku; K. Pyogam nok 碧巖録). In Chinese, "Emerald Grotto Record" or, as it is popularly known in the West, the "Blue Cliff Record"; compiled by CHAN master YUANWU KEQIN; also known by its full title of Foguo Yuanwu chanshi biyan lu ("Emerald Grotto Record of Chan Master Foguo Yuanwu"). The Biyan lu is one of the two most famous and widely used collection of Chan cases (GONG'AN), along with the WUMEN GUAN ("The Gateless Checkpoint"). The anthology is built around XUEDOU CHONGXIAN's Xuedou heshang baice songgu, an earlier independent collection of one hundred old Chan cases (GUCE) with verse commentary; Xuedou's text is embedded within the Biyan lu and Yuanwu's comments are interspersed throughout. Each of the one hundred cases, with a few exceptions, is introduced by a pointer (CHUISHI), a short introductory paragraph composed by Yuanwu. Following the pointer, the term "raised" (ju) is used to formally mark the actual case. Each case is followed by interlinear notes known as annotations or capping phrases (ZHUOYU; J. JAKUGO) and prose commentary (PINGCHANG), both composed by Yuanwu. The phrase "the verse says" (song yue) subsequently introduces Xuedou's verse, which is also accompanied by its own capping phrases and prose commentary, both added by Yuanwu. The cases, comments, and capping phrases found in the Biyan lu were widely used and read among both the clergy and laity in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam as an contemplative tool in Chan meditation practice and, in some contexts, as a token of social or institutional status. A famous (or perhaps infamous) story tells of the Chan master DAHUI ZONGGAO, the major disciple of Yuanwu, burning his teacher's Biyan lu for fear that his students would become attached to the words of Xuedou and Yuanwu. The Biyan lu shares many cases with the Wumen guan, and the two texts continue to function as the foundation of training in the Japanese RINZAI Zen school.
Japanese Colonial Period 1910-1945
Japanese cosmogony says that “out of the chaotic mass, an egg-like nucleus appears, having within itself the germ and potency of all the universal as well as of all terrestrial life” (SD 1:216).
Japanese Cross-References
Japanese Historical Periods
Blyth, Reginald H. (1898-1964). An early English translator of Japanese poetry, with a particular interest in ZEN Buddhism. Blyth was born in Essex; his father was railway clerk. He was imprisoned for three years during the First World War as a conscientious objector. In 1925, he traveled to Korea, then a Japanese colony, where he taught English at Keijo University in Seoul. It was there that he developed his first interest in Zen through the priest Hanayama Taigi. After a brief trip to England, he returned to Seoul and then went to Japan, where he taught English in Kanazawa. With the outbreak of the Pacific War, Blyth was interned as an enemy alien, despite having expressed sympathy for the Japanese cause. Although he remained interned throughout the war, he was allowed to continue his studies, and in 1942 published his most famous work, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, which sought to identify Zen elements in a wide range of literature. After the war, Blyth served as a liaison between the Japanese imperial household and the Allies, later becoming a professor of English at Gakushuin University, where one of his students was the future emperor Akihito (b. 1933). After the war, he published a four-volume collection of his translations of Japanese haiku poetry, which was largely responsible for European and American interest in haiku during the 1950s, among the Beat Poets and others, and the writing of haiku in languages other than Japanese. Subsequent scholarship has questioned the strong connection that Blyth saw between Zen and haiku. Blyth died in Japan and is buried in Kamakura next to his friend D. T. SUZUKI.
bodaiji. (菩提寺). In Japanese, literally "BODHI temple"; also known as bodaiin, bodaisho, or DANNADERA. Bodaiji are temples that flourished mainly during the Edo period under the parish system (DANKA SEIDO) established by the Tokugawa shogunate. Parishioners, known as danka or DAN'OTSU, were required to register at these local temples. By establishing the danka and terauke ("temple support") system, the early Tokugawa shogunate hoped to eradicate the threat of Christianity as they had witnessed it in the Christian-led Shimabara Uprising of 1637. During the Edo period, the bodaiji primarily offered funerary and memorial services for the ancestors of its parishioners and in many cases came to function as cemeteries. Festivals for the dead such as bon (see YULANBEN) and higan were also held annually at these temples. Although the danka system was abolished during the Meiji period, the bodaiji continue to function as memorial temples in modern Japan.
Bodhisena. (C. Putixianna; J. Bodaisenna; K. Porisonna 菩提僊那) (704-760). Indian monk who traveled first to Southeast Asia and China starting in 723 and subsequently continued on to Japan in 736 at the invitation of the Japanese emperor Shomu (r. 724-749), where he resided at DAIANJI in Nara. Bodhisena was instrumental in helping to introduce the teachings of the HUAYAN (Kegon) school of Buddhism to Japan. Shomu also asked Bodhisena to perform the "opening the eyes" (KAIYAN; NETRAPRATIstHAPANA) ceremony for the 752 dedication of the great buddha image of VAIROCANA (see NARA DAIBUTSU; Birushana Nyorai) at ToDAIJI. At forty-eight feet high, this image remains the largest extant gilt-bronze image in the world and the Daibutsuden (Great Buddha Hall) where the image is enshrined is the world's largest surviving wooden building.
bokuseki. (墨蹟). In Japanese, "ink traces"; generally referring to any sort of calligraphy executed by an ink brush on paper or silk. The Japanese monk Murata Juko (1422-1502) is said to have hung in his tea room the calligraphy of the Song-dynasty CHAN master YUANWU KEQIN, which he had received from his teacher IKKYu SoJUN, a practice that seems to have had no precedent in Japan. Following his lead, monks largely from the GOZAN lineage began to collect the calligraphy of eminent Song-dynasty Chan masters such as DAHUI ZONGGAO and XUTANG ZHIYU to display in their private quarters and tea rooms. From the time of the Zen and tea master Sen no Rikyu (Soeki Rikyu; 1521-1591), the calligraphy of Japanese Zen monks such as MYoAN EISAI, DoGEN KIGEN, and MUSo SoSEKI began to be seen as valuable commodities. The calligraphy of Zen masters belonging to the DAITOKUJI lineage such as SoHo MYoCHo, Ikkyu Sojun, and TAKUAN SoHo also came to be highly prized. Beginning with Sen no Rikyu, the practice of collecting relatively simple calligraphy, comprised largely of a single, horizontally executed line, came to be favored over those containing longer poems or sermons written in vertical lines.
bonze. (J. bonso/bosso 凡僧). An early English term for a Buddhist monk, especially in East Asia, deriving from the Portuguese pronunciation of the Japanese bonso ("ordinary cleric"). Although occasionally still used in reference to Japanese Buddhist priests, this sixteenth-century term is long outmoded and should be discarded.
Book titles are generally given in the language of original provenance, e.g., Saddharmapundarīkasutra, in Sanskrit, with cross-references to Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean; Dasheng qixin lun, in Chinese, with cross-references to a putative Sanskrit reconstruction of the title, and Japanese and Korean. We also include some main entries to indigenous terms, book titles, personal names, or place names in other Asian languages, e.g.: Burmese, Thai, Lao, Nepalese, Sinhalese, Mongolian, and Vietnamese.
Bosatsu: In Japanese Buddhist terminology, the equivalent of Bodhisattva (q.v.).
buddhAnusmṛti. (P. buddhAnussati; T. sangs rgyas rjes su dran pa; C. nianfo; J. nenbutsu; K. yombul 念佛). In Sanskrit, "recollection of the Buddha"; one of the common practices designed to develop concentration, in which the meditator reflects on the meritorious qualities of the Buddha, often through contemplating a series of his epithets. The oldest list of epithets of the Buddha used in such recollection, which is found across all traditions, is worthy one (ARHAT), fully enlightened (SAMYAKSAMBUDDHA), perfect in both knowledge and conduct (vidyAcaranasampanna), well gone (SUGATA), knower of all worlds (lokavid), teacher of divinities (or kings) and human beings (sAstṛ devamanusyAnaM), buddha, and BHAGAVAT. BuddhAnusmṛti is listed among the forty meditative exercises (KAMMAttHANA) discussed in the VISUDDHIMAGGA and is said to be conducive to gaining access concentration (UPACARASAMADHI). In East Asia, this recollection practice evolved into the recitation of the name of the buddha AMITABHA (see NIANFO) in the form of the phrase namo Amituo fo ("homage to AmitAbha Buddha"; J. NAMU AMIDABUTSU). This recitation was often performed in a ritual setting accompanied by the performance of prostrations, the burning of incense, and the recitation of scriptures, all directed toward gaining a vision of AmitAbha's PURE LAND (SUKHAVATĪ), which was considered proof that one would be reborn there. Nianfo practice was widely practiced across schools and social strata in China. In Japan, repetition of the phrase in its Japanese pronunciation of namu Amidabutsu (homage to AmitAbha Buddha) became a central practice of the Japanese Pure Land schools of Buddhism (see JoDOSHu, JoDO SHINSHu).
buddhapAtramudrA. (T. sangs rgyas kyi lhung bzed phyag rgya; C. foboyin; J. buppatsuin; K. pulbarin 佛鉢印). In Sanskrit, "the gesture of the Buddha's begging bowl." In this symbolic posture or gesture (MUDRA), the Buddha holds a begging bowl (PATRA) that sits in his lap. In some variations, the hands hold a jewel, or ornate treasure box, instead. In esoteric rituals, variations of this mudrA may be used for a number of different outcomes. For example, one Chinese indigenous SuTRA (see APOCRYPHA) suggests that forming and holding this gesture will cure stomach ailments. In another Japanese ritual, this mudrA is used to invite autochthonous deities to join the audience in attendance. The buddhapAtramudrA is typically associated with images of the Buddha AMITABHA, whose begging bowl is filled with the nectar of immortality (AMṚTA).
Bunkyo hifuron. (文鏡秘府論). In Japanese, "A Mirror on Literature and a Treasury of Marvels Treatise"; a work on classical Chinese poetics and prosody, composed by the Japanese SHINGONSHu monk KuKAI, probably in the early ninth century. The work was intended to serve as a vade mecum on classical Chinese writing style and literary allusions for Japanese ranging from novice monks who needed to know how to parse Buddhist MANTRAs and DHARAnĪs to diplomats or scribes who had to compose elegant Chinese prose and verse. The treatise is titled a "mirror on literature" because it describes correct Chinese style and a "treasury of marvels" because it serves as a literary compendium and thesaurus. The text is significant not only because of its impact on the development of Japanese classical-Chinese writing, but also because its extensive extracts of original Chinese sources (most now lost) stand as a valuable resource for the study of Tang literature.
butsudan. (佛壇). In Japanese, literally "buddha platform"; a platform on which an image of a buddha and/or BODHISATTVA is placed and worshipped; also known as SHuMIDAN ("SUMERU platform"). A butsudan can be made of stone, clay, or wood and can take the shape of a lotus platform, niche, or portable shrine. According to the BAIZHANG QINGGUI, a butsudan houses the image of the SAMBHOGAKAYA of the Buddha. The Nihon shoki also notes that the practice of making butsudan had spread widely among Japanese commoners as early as the Nara and Heian periods. Nowadays, butsudan are owned by most households and take the form of a portable shrine that houses icons, sacred objects of a particular school or sect, and mortuary tablets, known as ihai, for deceased family members. They are thus used primarily for private worship and mortuary practice.
Byodoin. (平等院). A famous Japanese temple located in Uji, south of Kyoto, now associated with the TENDAISHu and JoDOSHu sects. Byodoin is especially famous for its Phoenix Hall (Hoodo), which houses a magnificent image of AMITABHA made by the artist Jocho (d. 1057). The hall, the statue, and fifty-two other small sculptures of BODHISATTVAs making offerings of music to the central AmitAbha statue have been designated as national treasures. The Byodoin AmitAbha image is highly regarded as a representative piece of the refined art of the Fujiwara period (894-1185). Byodoin was originally a villa that belonged to the powerful regent Fujiwara no Michinaga (966-1027). The private villa was later transformed by Michinaga's son Yorimichi (992-1074) into a temple in 1052, and the Phoenix Hall was constructed the following year. Many halls dedicated to the buddha AmitAbha were built in this period by powerful aristocrats who were influenced by the growing belief in the notion of mappo (see MOFA), or "the demise of the dharma," wherein the only means of salvation was the practice of nenbutsu, the recitation of AmitAbha's name (see also NIANFO; BUDDHANUSMṚTI). The monk Myoson (d. 1063), originally the abbot of another temple called ONJoJI, was installed as the first abbot of Byodoin.
cankrama. (P. cankama; T. 'chag pa; C. jingxing; J. kyogyo/kinhin; K. kyonghaeng 經行). In Sanskrit, lit. "walking"; referring to both the physical act of walking itself and, by extension, composed, meditative walking, as well as the mendicant life of wandering as a vocation. Cankrama is the most active of the four postures (ĪRYAPATHA), and is one of the specific objects of mindfulness of the body (see SMṚTYUPASTHANA). Cankrama also refers to walking in a calm, collected manner, while maintaining one's object of meditation. Finally, cankrama refers to the wandering, "homeless" life (see PRAVRAJITA) of the Indian recluse, which was the model for the Buddhist SAMGHA. In East Asia, in addition to walking meditation per se, the term is also used to describe short periods of walking that break up extended periods of seated meditation (ZUOCHAN). In Korean meditation halls, for example, a three-hour block of meditation practice will be divided into three fifty-minute blocks of seated meditation, punctuated by ten-minutes of walking meditation. The Japanese ZEN tradition reads these Sinographs as kinhin.
Cantong qi. (J. Sandokai; K. Ch'amdong kye 参同契). A famous verse attributed to the Chinese CHAN master SHITOU XIQIAN. Along with the BAOJING SANMEI, the Cantong qi is revered in the Chinese CAODONG ZONG and Japanese SoToSHu traditions as the foundational scripture of the tradition. The Cantong qi is relatively short (forty-four five-character stanzas, for a total of 220 Sinographs), but Shitou's verse is praised for its succinct and unequivocal expression of the teaching of nonduality. The Sinograph "can" in the title means to "consider," "compare," or "differentiate"; it thus carries the connotation of "difference" and is said to refer to the myriad phenomena. The Sinograph "tong" means "sameness" and is said to refer to the oneness of all phenomena. The Sinograph "qi" means "tally" and is said to refer to the tallying of oneself and all phenomena. The title might be alluding to an earlier verse bearing the same title, which is attributed to the renowned Daoist master Wei Boyang. The Cantong qi also seems to be the root source from which were derived core concepts in the "five ranks" (WUWEI) doctrine, an emblematic teaching of the mature Caodong school.
Caodong zong. (J. Sotoshu; K. Chodong chong 曹洞宗). One of the so-called "five houses and seven schools" (WU JIA QI ZONG) of the mature Chinese CHAN tradition. The school traces its own pedigree back to the sixth patriarch (LIUZU) HUINENG via a lineage that derives from QINGYUAN XINGSI and SHITOU XIQIAN, but its history begins with the two Tang-dynasty Chan masters who lend their names to the school: DONGSHAN LIANGJIE and his disciple CAOSHAN BENJI. The name of this tradition, Caodong, is derived from the first characters of the two patriarchs' names, viz., Caoshan's "Cao" and Dongshan's "Dong." (The disciple's name is said to appear first in the school's name purely for euphonic reasons.) One of the emblematic teachings of the Caodong tradition is that of the "five ranks" (WUWEI), taught by Dongshan and further developed by Caoshan, which was a form of dialectical analysis that sought to present the full panoply of MAHAYANA Buddhist insights in a compressed rubric. During the Song dynasty, the Caodong school also came to be associated with the contemplative practice of "silent illumination" (MOZHAO CHAN), a form of meditation that built upon the normative East Asian notion of the inherency of buddhahood (see TATHAGATAGARBHA) to suggest that, since enlightenment was the mind's natural state, nothing needed to be done in order to attain enlightenment other than letting go of all striving for that state. Authentic Chan practice therefore entailed only maintaining this original purity of the mind by simply sitting silently in meditation. The practice of silent illumination is traditionally attributed to HONGZHI ZHENGJUE (see MOZHAO MING) and ZHENGXIE QINGLIAO, who helped revive the moribund Caodong lineage during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and turned it into one of the two major forces in mature Song-dynasty Chan. The silent-illumination technique that they championed was harshly criticized by teachers in the rival LINJI ZONG, most notably Hongzhi's contemporary DAHUI ZONGGAO. In Japan, the ZEN master DoGEN KIGEN is credited with transmitting the Caodong lineage to the Japanese isles in the thirteenth century, where it is known as the SoToSHu (the Japanese pronunciation of Caodong zong); it became one of the three major branches of the Japanese Zen school, along with RINZAISHu and oBAKUSHu. In Korea, just one of the early Nine Mountains schools of SoN (see KUSAN SoNMUN), the Sumisan school, is presumed to trace back to a teacher, Yunju Daoying (d. 902), who was also a disciple of Dongshan Liangjie; the Caodong school had no impact in the subsequent development of Korean Son, where Imje (C. Linji zong) lineages and practices dominated from the thirteenth century onwards.
Chan. (J. Zen; K. Son; V. Thièn 禪). In Chinese, the "Meditation," or Chan school (CHAN ZONG); one of the major indigenous schools of East Asian Buddhism. The Sinograph "chan" is the first syllable in the transcription channa, the Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit term DHYANA (P. JHANA); thus chan, like the cognate term chanding (chan is a transcription and ding a translation, of dhyAna), is often translated in English simply as "meditation." For centuries, the title CHANSHI (meditation master) was used in such sources as the "Biography of Eminent Monks" (GAOSENG ZHUAN) to refer to a small group of elite monks who specialized in the art of meditation. Some of these specialists adopted the term chan as the formal name of their community (Chan zong), perhaps sometime during the sixth or seventh centuries. These early "Chan" communities gathered around a number of charismatic teachers who were later considered to be "patriarchs" (ZUSHI) of their tradition. The legendary Indian monk BODHIDHARMA was honored as the first patriarch; it was retrospectively claimed that he first brought the Chan teachings to China. Later Chan lineage histories (see CHUANDENG LU) reconstructed elaborate genealogies of such patriarchs that extended back to MAHAKAsYAPA, the first Indian patriarch, and ultimately to the Buddha himself; often, these genealogies would even go back to all of the seven buddhas of antiquity (SAPTABUDDHA). Six indigenous patriarchs (Bodhidharma, HUIKE, SENGCAN, DAOXIN, HONGREN, and HUINENG) are credited by the established tradition with the development and growth of Chan in China, but early records of the Chan school, such as the LENGQIE SHIZI JI and LIDAI FABAO JI, reveal the polemical battles fought between the disparate communities to establish their own teachers as the orthodox patriarchs of the tradition. A particularly controversial dispute over the sixth patriarchy broke out between the Chan master SHENXIU, the leading disciple of the fifth patriarch Hongren, and HEZE SHENHUI, the purported disciple of the legendary Chinese monk Huineng. This dispute is often referred to as the "sudden and gradual debate," and the differing factions came to be retrospectively designated as the gradualist Northern school (BEI ZONG; the followers of Shenxiu) and the subitist Southern school (NAN ZONG; the followers of Huineng). The famous LIUZU TANJING ("Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch"), composed by the followers of this putative Southern school, is an important source for the history of this debate. Following the sixth patriarch, the Chan lineage split into a number of collateral lines, which eventually evolved into the so-called "five houses and seven schools" (WU JIA QI ZONG) of the mature Chan tradition: the five "houses" of GUIYANG (alt. Weiyang), LINJI, CAODONG, YUNMEN, and FAYAN, and the subsequent bifurcation of Linji into the two lineages of HUANGLONG and YANGQI, giving a total of seven schools. ¶ The teachings of the Chan school were introduced to Korea perhaps as early as the end of the seventh century CE and the tradition, there known as SoN, flourished with the rise of the Nine Mountains school of Son (KUSAN SoNMUN) in the ninth century. By the twelfth century, the teachings and practices of Korean Buddhism were dominated by Son; and today, the largest Buddhist denomination in Korea, the CHOGYE CHONG, remains firmly rooted in the Son tradition. The Chan teachings were introduced to Japan in the late twelfth century by MYoAN EISAI (1141-1215); the Japanese tradition, known as ZEN, eventually developed three major sects, RINZAISHu, SoToSHu, and oBAKUSHu. The Chan teachings are traditionally assumed to have been transmitted to Vietnam by VINĪTARUCI (d. 594), a South Indian brAhmana who is claimed (rather dubiously) to have studied in China with the third Chan patriarch SENGCAN before heading south to Guangzhou and Vietnam. In 580, he is said to have arrived in Vietnam and settled at Pháp Van monastery, where he subsequently transmitted his teachings to Pháp Hièn (d. 626), who carried on the Chan tradition, which in Vietnamese is known as THIỀN. In addition to the Vinītaruci lineage, there are two other putative lineages of Vietnamese Thièn, both named after their supposed founders: VÔ NGÔN THÔNG (reputedly a student of BAIZHANG HUAIHAI), and THẢO ĐƯỜNG (reputedly connected to the YUNMEN ZONG lineage in China). Chan had a presence in Tibet during the early dissemination (SNGA DAR) of Buddhism, and the Chan monk MOHEYAN was an influential figure at the Tibetan court in the late eighth century, leading to the famous BSAM YAS DEBATE.
Ch’an school of Buddhism: The Chinese equivalent of the Japanese Zen Buddhism (q.v.).
Chanyuan qinggui. (J. Zen'on shingi; K. Sonwon ch'onggyu 禪苑清規). In Chinese, "Pure Rules of the Chan Garden"; compiled by the CHAN master CHANGLU ZONGZE, in ten rolls. According to its preface, which is dated 1103, the Chanyuan qinggui was modeled on BAIZHANG HUAIHAI's legendary "rules of purity" (QINGGUI) and sought to provide a standardized set of monastic rules and an outline of institutional administration that could be used across all Chan monasteries. As the oldest extant example of the qinggui genre, the Chanyuan qinggui is an invaluable source for the study of early Chan monasticism. It was the first truly Chinese set of monastic regulations that came to rival in importance and influence the imported VINAYA materials of Indian Buddhism and it eventually came to be used not only in Chan monasteries but also in "public monasteries" (SHIFANG CHA) across the Chinese mainland. The Chanyuan qinggui provides meticulous descriptions of monastic precepts, life in the SAMGHA hall (SENGTANG), rites and rituals, manners of giving and receiving instruction, and the various institutional offices at a Chan monastery. A great deal of information is also provided on the abbot and his duties, such as the tea ceremony. Semi-independent texts such the ZUOCHAN YI, a primer of meditation, the Guijing wen, a summary of the duties of the monastic elite, and the Baizhang guisheng song, Zongze's commentary on Baizhang's purported monastic code, are also appended at the end of the Chanyuan qinggui. The Japanese pilgrims MYoAN EISAI, DoGEN KIGEN, and ENNI BEN'EN came across the Chanyuan qinggui during their visits to various monastic centers in China and, upon their return to Japan, they used the text as the basis for the establishment of the Zen monastic institution. Copies of a Chinese edition by a certain Yu Xiang, dated 1202, are now housed at the Toyo and Kanazawa Bunko libraries. The Chanyuan qinggui was also imported into Korea, which printed its own edition of the text in 1254; the text was used to reorganize Korean monastic institutions as well.
Chengshi lun. (S. *Tattvasiddhi; J. Jojitsuron; K. Songsil non 成實論). In Chinese, "Treatise on Establishing Reality"; a summary written c. 253 CE by the third century CE author HARIVARMAN of the lost ABHIDHARMA of the BAHUsRUTĪYA school, a branch of the MAHASAMGHIKA. (The Sanskrit reconstruction *Tattvasiddhi is now generally preferred over the outmoded *SatyasiddhisAstra). The Tattvasiddhi is extant only in KUMARAJĪVA's Chinese translation, made in 411-412, in sixteen rolls (juan) and 202 chapters (pin). The treatise is especially valuable for its detailed refutations of the positions held by other early MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS; the introduction, for example, surveys ten different grounds of controversy separating the different early schools. The treatise is structured in the form of an exposition of the traditional theory of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS, but does not include listings for different factors (DHARMA) that typify many works in the abhidharma genre. The positions advocated in the text are closest to those of the STHAVIRANIKAYA and SAUTRANTIKA schools, although, unlike the SthaviranikAya, the treatise accepts the reality of "unmanifest materiality" (AVIJNAPTIRuPA) and, unlike SautrAntika, rejects the notion of an "intermediate state" (ANTARABHAVA) between existences. Harivarman opposes the SARVASTIVADA position that dharmas exist in past, present, and future, the MahAsAMghika view that thought is inherently pure, and the VATSĪPUTRĪYA premise that the "person" (PUDGALA) exists. The Chengshi lun thus hones to a "middle way" between the extremes of "everything exists" and "everything does not exist," both of which it views as expediencies that do not represent ultimate reality. The text advocates, instead, the "voidness of everything" (sarvasunya) and is therefore sometimes viewed within the East Asian traditions as representing a transitional stage between the mainstream Buddhist schools and MahAyAna philosophical doctrine. The text was so widely studied in East Asia, especially during the fifth and sixth centuries, that reference is made to a *Tattvasiddhi school of exegesis (C. Chengshi zong; J. Jojitsushu; K. Songsilchong); indeed, the Jojitsu school is considered one of the six major schools of Japanese Buddhist scholasticism during the Nara period.
Cheng weishi lun shu ji. (J. Joyuishikiron jukki; K. Song yusik non sulgi 成唯識論述). In Chinese, "Explanatory Notes on the CHENG WEISHI LUN" (*VijNaptimAtratAsiddhi); by the Chinese YOGACARA monk KUIJI and probably compiled sometime between 659 and 682. In his preface, Kuiji praises VASUBANDHU and his TRIMsIKA, DHARMAPALA's *VijNaptimAtratAsiddhi (C. Cheng weishi lun) and XUANZANG for translating DHARMAPALA's text. Then, as do most commentaries of that period, Kuiji expounds upon the title of DharmapAla's text. In his subsequent introduction, Kuiji largely divides his commentary into five sections. In the first section, he ascertains the period in the Buddha's life to which the teachings belong (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI; PANJIAO) and discusses its audience, the BODHISATTVAs. In the second section, Kuiji discusses the tenets of the Cheng weishi lun, which he subsumes under the notion of "mind-only" (CITTAMATRA). In third section, Kuiji demonstrates that the Cheng weishi lun belongs to the "one vehicle" (EKAYANA) and the BODHISATTVAPItAKA. In the fourth section, short biographies and dates of the ten masters of the YOGACARA are provided. Kuiji then provides a detailed analysis of the Cheng weishi lun itself in the last section. Several commentaries on Kuiji's text have been written throughout the ages in East Asia. The Cheng weishi lun shu ji also exerted a considerable amount of influence on Silla-period Korean Buddhism and among the Nara schools of early Japanese Buddhism (see NARA BUDDHISM, SIX SCHOOLS OF).
Chikchisa. (直指寺). In Korean, "Direct Pointing Monastery"; the eighth district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism, located on Mount Hwangak in North Kyongsang province. The monastery purports to have been founded in 418 CE by the Koguryo monk Ado (fl. c. 418). There are three different stories about how the monastery got its name. The first version states that the name originated when Ado pointed directly at Mount Hwangak and said, "At that place, a large monastery will be established." The second story says that a monk called Nŭngyo (fl. c. 936) laid out the monastery campus using only his hands and without using any other measuring devices; hence, the monastery was given the name "Direct Measuring" (chikchi). A third story connects the name to the famous line concerning the soteriological approach of the SoN or CHAN school: "direct pointing to the human mind" (K. chikchi insim; C. ZHIZHI RENXIN). With the support of the Koryo king Taejo (r. 918-943), Nŭngyo restored the monastery in 936; major renovations followed in the tenth century and again during the Choson dynasty. In 1595, during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions, all its buildings except the Ch'onbul Chon (Thousand Buddhas Hall), Ch'onwang Mun (Heavenly Kings Gate), and Chaha Mun (Purple-Glow Gate) were burned to the ground. The monastery was rebuilt in a massive construction project that began in 1602 and lasted for seventy years. The monastery enshrines many treasures, including a seated figure of the healing buddha BHAIsAJYAGURU and a hanging picture of a Buddha triad (Samjonbul T'AENGHWA). Two three-story stone pagodas are located in front of the main shrine hall (TAEUNG CHoN) and other three-story pagodas are located in front of the Piro chon (VAIROCANA Hall).
chinyong. (C. zhenying; J. shin'ei 眞影). In Korean, lit. "true image"; viz., a "monk's portrait." Although the term is known throughout the East Asian Buddhist traditions, it is especially associated with Korea; the related term DINGXIANG (J. chinzo, lit. "head's appearance") is more typically used within the Chinese and Japanese traditions. The employment of the term chinyong in Korea is a late Choson dynasty development; different terms were used in Korea before that era to refer to monk's portraits, including chinhyong ("true form"), sinyong ("divine image"), chinyong ("true appearance") and yongja ("small portrait image"). "Chin" ("true") in the compound refers to the inherent qualities of the subject, while "yong" ("image") alludes to his physical appearance; thus, a chinyong is a portrait that seeks to convey the true inner spirituality of the subject. Images of eminent masters who had been renowned patriarchs of schools, courageous monk soldiers, or successful fund-raisers were enshrined in a monastery's portrait hall. These portraits were painted posthumously-and, unlike Chinese dingxiang portraits, typically without the consent of the subjects-as one means of legitimizing the dharma-transmission lineage of their religious descendants; this usage of portraits is seen in both meditation (SoN) and doctrinal (KYO) monasteries. Korean monk portraits were not given out to individual disciples or lay adherents, as occurred in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, where dozens and even hundreds of portraits were produced by and for a variety of persons. In the context of the Korean Son school, the pictures additionally enhanced the Son Buddhist emphasis on the direct spiritual transmission (see YINKE) between master and disciple. The development of monk portraiture was closely tied to annual commemorative practices in Buddhist monasteries, which sought to maintain the religious bonds between the dharma ancestors and their descendants.
Chion'in. (知恩院). In Japanese, "Knowing Beneficence Cloister"; the headquarters of the JoDOSHu, or PURE LAND school of Japanese Buddhism, which was founded by HoNENs (1133-1212); located in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto. Chion'in was the site where Honen taught and where he died after a long period of fasting. His disciple Genchi (1183-1238) built the complex in his honor in 1234 and, still today, a statue of Honen is enshrined in the founder's hall. Most of the monastery was destroyed by fire in 1633, but the third Tokugawa shogun rebuilt the monastery in the middle of the seventeenth century with the structures present today. These include the main gate, or sanmon, built in 1619 and the largest gate of this type in Japan at seventy-nine feet tall. The oldest building on the monastery campus is the hondo, or main Buddha hall, built in 1633, which can hold three thousand people. Guesthouses from 1641 are roofed in the Irimoya style, and the roof beams on many of the buildings are capped with the Tokugawa three-hollyhock leaf crest. Various hallways in the monastery have also been built with "nightingale floors" (J. uguisubari)-floorboards with metal ends that rub on metal joints when someone walks across them, making them extremely squeaky. This flooring was specifically designed to sound an alarm in case any assassin might try to sneak into the sleeping quarters when the Tokugawa family stayed over at the monastery. The monastery's bell was cast in 1633 and weighs seventy-four tons; it is so massive that it takes seventeen monks to ring it when it is rung annually on New Year's Day.
Chodang chip. (C. Zutang ji; J. Sodoshu 祖堂集). In Korean, "Patriarchs' Hall Collection"; one of the earliest "lamplight histories" (CHUANDENG LU), viz., lineage records, of the CHAN tradition, compiled in 952 by the monks Jing (K. Chong) (d.u.) and Yun/Jun (K. Un/Kyun) (d.u.) of the monastery of Chaojingsi in Quanzhou (in present-day Fujian provine). The Chodang chip builds on an earlier Chan history, the BAOLIN ZHUAN, on which it seems largely to have been based. According to one current theory, the original text by Jing and Yun was a short work in a single roll, which was expanded into ten rolls early in the Song dynasty and subsequently reissued in twenty rolls in the definitive 1245 Korean edition. The anthology includes a preface by the compilers' teacher and collaborator Zhaoqing Shendeng/Wendeng (884-972), also known as the Chan master Jingxiu, who also appends verse panegyrics after several of the biographies in the collection. The Chodang chip provides biographies of 253 figures, including the seven buddhas of the past (SAPTATATHAGATA), the first Indian patriarch (ZUSHI) MAHAKAsYAPA up to and including the sixth patriarch (LIUZU) of Chan in China, HUINENG, and monks belonging to the lineages of Huineng's putative disciples QINGYUAN XINGSI and NANYUE HUAIRANG. In contrast to the later JINGDE CHUANDENG LU, the Chodang chip mentions the lineage of Qingyuan before that of Nanyue. In addition to the biographical narrative, the entries also include short excerpts from the celebrated sayings and dialogues of the persons it covers. These are notable for including many features that derive from the local vernacular (what has sometimes been labeled "Medieval Vernacular Sinitic"); for this reason, the text has been the frequent object of study by Chinese historical linguists. The Chodang chip is also significant for containing the biographies of several Silla-dynasty monks who were founders of, or associated with, the Korean "Nine Mountains School of Son" (KUSAN SoNMUN), eight of whom had lineage ties to the Chinese HONGZHOU ZONG of Chan that derived from MAZU DAOYI; the anthology in fact offers the most extensive body of early material on the developing Korean Son tradition. This emphasis suggests that the two compilers may themselves have been expatriate Koreans training in China and/or that the extant anthology was substantially reedited in Korea. The Chodang chip was lost in China after the Northern Song dynasty and remained completely unknown subsequently to the Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen traditions. However, the 1245 Korean edition was included as a supplement to the Koryo Buddhist canon (KORYo TAEJANGGYoNG), which was completed in 1251 during the reign of the Koryo king Kojong (r. 1214-1259), and fortunately survived; this is the edition that was rediscovered in the 1930s at the Korean monastery of HAEINSA. Because the collection is extant only in a Koryo edition and because of the many Korean monks included in the collection, the Chodang chip is often cited in the scholarly literature by its Korean pronunciation.
Chogye chong. (曹溪宗). In Korean, the "Chogye order"; short for Taehan Pulgyo Chogye chong (Chogye Order of Korean Buddhism); the largest Buddhist order in Korea, with and some fifteen thousand monks and nuns and over two thousand monasteries and temples organized around twenty-five district monasteries (PONSA). "Chogye" is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese Caoxi, the name of the mountain (CAOXISHAN) where the sixth patriarch (LIUZU) of CHAN, HUINENG, resided; the name is therefore meant to evoke the order's pedigree as a predominantly Chan (K. SoN) tradition, though it seeks also to incorporate all other major strands of Korean Buddhist thought and practice. The term Chogye chong was first used by the Koryo monk ŬICHoN to refer to the "Nine Mountains school of Son" (KUSAN SoNMUN), and the name was used at various points during the Koryo and Choson dynasties to designate the indigenous Korean Son tradition. The Chogye order as it is known today is, however, a modern institution. It was formed in 1938 during the Japanese colonial administration of Korea, a year after the monastery of T'aegosa was established in central Seoul and made the new headquarters of Choson Buddhism (Choson Pulgyo ch'ongbonsan). This monastery, later renamed CHOGYESA, still serves today as the headquarters of the order. The constitution of the order traces its origins to Toŭi (d. 825), founder of the Kajisan school in the Nine Mountains school of Son; this tradition is said to have been revived during the Koryo dynasty by POJO CHINUL, who provided its soteriological grounding; finally, the order's lineage derives from T'AEGO POU, who returned to Korea at the very end of the Koryo dynasty with dharma transmission in the contemporary Chinese LINJI ZONG. In 1955, following the end of the Korean War, Korean Buddhism entered into a decade-long "purification movement" (chonghwa undong), through which the celibate monks (pigu sŭng) sought to remove all vestiges of Japanese influence in Korean Buddhism, and especially the institution of married monks (taech'o sŭng). This confrontation ultimately led to the creation of two separate orders: the Chogye chong of the celibate monks, officially reconstituted in 1962, and the much smaller T'AEGO CHONG of married monks.
Chogyesa. (曹溪寺). In Korean, "Chogye Monastery"; the administrative headquarters of the CHOGYE CHONG, the largest Buddhist order in contemporary Korea, and its first district monastery (PONSA). In an attempt to unify Korean Buddhist institutions during the Japanese colonial period, Korean Buddhist leaders prepared a joint constitution of the SoN and KYO orders and established the Central Bureau of Religious Affairs (Chungang Kyomuwon) in 1929. Eight years later, in 1937, the Japanese government-general decided to help bring the Buddhist tradition under centralized control by establishing a new headquarters for Choson Buddhism (Choson Pulgyo Ch'ongbonsan) in the capital of Seoul. With financial and logistical assistance from the Japanese colonial administration, the former headquarters building of a proscribed Korean new religion, the Poch'on'gyo, was purchased, disassembled, and relocated from the southwest of Korea to the site of Kakhwangsa in the Chongno district of central Seoul. That new monastery was given the name T'aegosa, after its namesake T'AEGO POU, the late-Koryo Son teacher who received dharma transmission in the Chinese LINJI ZONG. After the split in 1962 between the celibate monks of the Chogye chong and the married monks (taech'o sŭng), who organized themselves into the T'AEGO CHONG, T'aegosa was renamed Chogyesa, from the name of the mountain where the sixth patriarch (LIUZU) of Chan, HUINENG, resided (see CAOXISHAN). This monastery continues to serve today as the headquarters of the Chogye chong. In addition to the role it plays as the largest traditional monastery in the city center of Seoul, Chogyesa also houses all of the administrative offices of the order.
Ch'ongho Hyujong. (清虚休静) (1520-1604). Korean SoN master of the Choson dynasty; best known to Koreans by his sobriquet Sosan taesa (lit. the Great Master "West Mountain," referring to Mt. Myohyang near present-day P'yongyang in North Korea). Hyujong was a native of Anju in present-day South P'yongan province. After losing his parents at an early age, Hyujong was adopted by the local magistrate of Anju, Yi Sajŭng (d.u.), and educated at the Songgyun'gwan Confucian academy. In 1534, Hyujong failed to attain the chinsa degree and decided instead to become a monk. He was ordained by a certain Sungin (d.u.) on CHIRISAN in 1540, and he later received the full monastic precepts from Hyuong Ilson (1488-1568). Hyujong later became the disciple of the Son master Puyong Yonggwan (1485-1571). In 1552, Hyujong passed the clerical exams (SŬNGKWA) revived by HoŮNG POU, who later appointed Hyujong the prelate (p'ansa) of both the SoN and KYO traditions. Hyujong also succeeded Pou as the abbot of the monastery Pongŭnsa in the capital, but he left his post as prelate and spent the next few years teaching and traveling throughout the country. When the Japanese troops of Hideyoshi Toyotomi (1536/7-1598) invaded Korea in 1592, Hyujong's disciple Kiho Yonggyu (d. 1592) succeeded in retaking the city of Ch'ongju, but died shortly afterward in battle. Hyujong himself was then asked by King Sonjo (r. 1567-1608) to lead an army against the invading forces. His monk militias (ŭisŭnggun) eventually played an important role in fending off the Japanese troops. When the king subsequently gave Hyujong permission to retire, the master left his command in the hands of his disciple SAMYoNG YUJoNG; he died shortly thereafter. Hyujong is said to have had more than one thousand students, among whom Yujong, P'yonyang Ŭn'gi (1581-1644), Soyo T'aenŭng (1562-1649), and Chonggwan Ilson (1533-1608) are best known. Hyujong left a number of writings, including the SoN'GA KWIGAM, which is one of the most widely read works of the Korean Buddhist tradition. Other important works include the Samga kwigam, Son'gyo sok, Son'gyo kyol, and Solson ŭi. In these works, Hyujong attempted to reconcile the teachings of the Son and Kyo traditions of Buddhism, as well as the doctrines of Buddhism and Confucianism.
chongjong. (宗正). In Korean, "supreme patriarch" (lit. "primate of the order"); the spiritual head of the CHOGYE CHONG (Chogye order) of Korean Buddhism. The term chongjong first began to be used in Korean Buddhism during Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) and has continued to be employed since 1954 when the celibate monks (pigu sŭng) established an independent Chogye order, which eventually excluded the married monks (taech'o sŭng) who had dominated monastic positions during the colonial period. A Korean Supreme Court ruling in 1962 ultimately gave the celibate monks title to virtually all the major monasteries across the nation and led to the Chogye order's official re-establishment as the principal ecclesiastical institution of Korean Buddhism, with the chongjong serving as its primate. The married monks subsequently split off from the Chogye order to form the independent T'AEGO CHONG. ¶ To be selected as chongjong, a candidate must be a minimum of sixty-five years of age and have been a monk for at least forty-five years; his rank in the Chogye order must be that of Taejongsa (great master of the order), the highest of the Chogye order's six ecclesiastical ranks. To select the chongjong, a committee of seventeen to twenty-five monks is appointed, which includes the Chogye order's top executive (ch'ongmuwonjang), council representative (chonghoe ŭijang), and head vinaya master (hogye wiwonjang); the selection is finalized through a majority vote of the committee members. The chongjong is initially appointed for a five-year term and is eligible for reappointment for one additional term. The contemporary Chogye order counts Wonmyong Hyobong (1888-1966), appointed in 1962, as its first chongjong.
Chonŭnsa. (泉隱寺). In Korean, "Monastery of the Hidden Fount"; one of the three major monasteries located on the Buddhist sacred mountain of CHIRISAN. The monastery is said to have been founded in 828 by an Indian monk named Togun (d.u.) and was originally named Kamnosa (either "Sweet Dew Monastery" or "Responsive Dew Monastery"), after a spring there that would clear the minds of people who drank its ambrosial waters. During the Koryo dynasty, Chonŭnsa was elevated to the status of first Son monastery of the South, during the rule of Ch'ŭngnyol wang (r. 1275-1308). Most of the monastery was destroyed during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasion (1592-1598). In 1679, a Son monk named Tanyu (d.u.) rebuilt the monastery, but changed the name to Chonŭn (Hidden Fount), because the spring had disappeared after a monk killed a snake that kept showing up around it. Subsequently, fires of unknown origin repeatedly occurred in the monastery, which stopped only after hanging up a board with the name of the monastery written in the "water" calligraphic style by Won'gyo Yi Kwangsa (1705-1777), one of the four preeminent calligraphers of the Choson dynasty.
chopstick ::: n. --> One of two small sticks of wood, ivory, etc., used by the Chinese and Japanese to convey food to the mouth.
chosan. (朝参). In Japanese, lit. "morning meditation"; the morning-period ZAZEN that begins the day at a Japanese ZEN monastery.
Choson Pulgyo t'ongsa. (朝鮮佛教通史). In Korean, "A Comprehensive History of Choson Buddhism"; compiled by the Buddhist historian Yi Nŭnghwa (1868-1943). Yi's Choson Pulgyo t'ongsa is the first modern attempt to write a comprehensive history of Korean (or Choson as it was then known) Buddhism. The text was first published by Sinmun'gwan in 1918. The first volume narrates the history of Korean Buddhism from its inception during the Three Kingdoms period up until the time of the Japanese occupation. Information on the temples and monasteries established by Koreans and a report on the current number of monks and nuns are also appended to end of this volume. The second volume narrates the history of Buddhism in India after the Buddha's death. The compilation of the canon (TRIPItAKA; DAZANGJING) and the formation of the various schools and traditions are provided in this volume. The third and final volume provides a commentary on some of the more important events described in volume one. Yi relied heavily on biographies of eminent monks and stele inscriptions. Yi's text is still considered an important source for studying the history of Korean Buddhism.
Choson Pulgyo yusin non. (朝鮮佛教唯新論). In Korean, "Treatise on the Reformation of Korean Buddhism"; composed by the Korean monk-reformer HAN YONGUN in 1910. While sojourning in Japan, Han personally witnessed what to him seemed quite innovative ways in which Japanese Buddhists were seeking to adapt their religious practices to modern society and hoped to implement similar ideas in Korea. This clarion call for Buddhist reform was one of the first attempts by a Korean author to apply Western liberalism in the context of Korean society. Han attributed many of the contemporary problems Korean Buddhism was facing to its isolation from society at large, a result of the centuries-long persecution Buddhism had suffered in Korea at the hands of Confucian ideologues during the previous Choson dynasty (1392-1910). To help restore Buddhism to a central place in Korean society and culture, Han called for what were at the time quite radical reforms, including social and national egalitarianism, the secularization of the SAMGHA, a married clergy, expanded educational opportunities for monks, the transfer of monasteries from the mountains to the cities, and economic self-reliance within the monastic community. Both the Japanese government-general and the leaders of the Korean Buddhist community rebuffed most of Han's proposals (although several of his suggestions, including a married clergy, were subsequently co-opted by the Japanese colonial administration), but the issues that he raised about how to make Buddhism relevant in an increasingly secularized and capitalist society remain pertinent even to this day.
chukai. (抽解). In Japanese, "to take off"; referring to the rest period between meditation periods for monks practicing in the sodo, or SAMGHA hall. In between meditation sessions, monks are allowed to leave the SAMGHA hall and take off their robes to lie down and rest.
CJK ::: (character) In internationalisation, a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.The characters of these languages are all partly based on Han characters (i.e., hanzi or kanji), which require 16-bit character encodings. CJK character encodings should consist minimally of Han characters plus language-specific phonetic scripts such as pinyin, bopomofo, hiragana, hangul, etc.CJKV is CJK plus Vietnamese. .(2001-01-01)
CJK "character" In {internationalisation}, a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The characters of these languages are all partly based on {Han characters} (i.e., "hanzi" or "{kanji}"), which require 16-bit {character encodings}. CJK character encodings should consist minimally of {Han characters} plus language-specific phonetic scripts such as pinyin, bopomofo, hiragana, hangul, etc. {CJKV} is CJK plus {Vietnamese}. {(ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/nutshell/ujip/doc/cjk.inf)}. (2001-01-01)
CJKV ::: (character) CJK plus Vietnamese. Vietnamese, like the other three CJK languages, requires 16-bit character encodings but it does not use Han characters.[CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing, Ken Lunde, pub. O'Reilly 1998, ].(2001-03-18)
CJKV "character" {CJK} plus {Vietnamese}. Vietnamese, like the other three CJK languages, requires 16-bit {character encodings} but it does not use {Han characters}. ["CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing", Ken Lunde, pub. O'Reilly 1998, {(http://oreilly.com/catalog/cjkvinfo/)}]. (2001-03-18)
Clipper ::: 1. (hardware, cryptography) An integrated circuit which implements the SkipJack algorithm. The Clipper is manufactured by the US government to encrypt Phil Zimmerman (inventor of PGP) remarked, This doesn't even pass the sniff test (i.e. it stinks). .alt.privacy.clipper2. A compiled dBASE dialect from Nantucket Corp, LA. Versions: Winter 85, Spring 86, Autumn 86, Summer 87, 4.5 (Japanese Kanji), 5.0. It uses the Xbase programming language.(2004-09-01)
Clipper 1. "hardware, cryptography" An {integrated circuit} which implements the {SkipJack} {algorithm}. The Clipper is manufactured by the US government to encrypt telephone data. It has the added feature that it can be decrypted by the US government, which has tried to make the chip compulsory in the United States. Phil Zimmerman (inventor of {PGP}) remarked, "This doesn't even pass the sniff test" (i.e. it stinks). {(http://wired.com/clipper/)}. {news:alt.privacy.clipper} 2. A compiled {dBASE} dialect from Nantucket Corp, LA. Versions: Winter 85, Spring 86, Autumn 86, Summer 87, 4.5 (Japanese Kanji), 5.0. It uses the {Xbase} programming language. (2004-09-01)
CompuServe Information Service "company" (CIS, CompuServe Interactive Services). An ISP and on-line service {portal} based in Columbus, Ohio, USA; part of {AOL} since February 1998. CIS was founded in 1969 as a computer {time-sharing service}. Along with {AOL} and {Prodigy}, CIS was one of the first pre-Internet, on-line services for consumers, providing {bulletin boards}, on-line conferencing, business news, sports and weather, financial transactions, {electronic mail}, {Usenet} news, travel and entertainment data and on-line editions of computer publications. CIS was originally run by {CompuServe Corporation}. In 1979, CompuServe was the first service to offer {electronic mail} and technical support to personal computer users. In 1980 they were the first to offer {real-time} {chat} with its CB Simulator. By 1982, the company had formed its Network Services Division to provide wide-area networking to corporate clients. Initially mostly serving the USA, in 1986 they developed a Japanese version called NIFTYSERVE. In 1989, they expanded into Europe and became a leading {Internet service provider}. In 2001 they released version 7.0 of their client program. {CompuServe home (http://compuserve.com/)}. (2009-04-02)
CSK Corporation "company" The japanese company that owns {CSK Software} and {Sega}. CSK Corp. is the largest independent japanese software company. (2003-05-13)
CSK Corporation ::: (company) The japanese company that owns CSK Software and Sega. CSK Corp. is the largest independent japanese software company.(2003-05-13)
Cundī. (T. Skul byed ma; C. Zhunti; J. Juntei; K. Chunje 准提). In Sanskrit, the name Cundī (with many orthographic variations) probably connotes a prostitute or other woman of low caste but specifically denotes a prominent local ogress (YAKsInĪ), whose divinized form becomes the subject of an important Buddhist cult starting in the eighth century. Her worship began in the Bengal and Orissa regions of the Indian subcontinent, where she became the patron goddess of the PAla dynasty, and soon spread throughout India, and into Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and Tibet, eventually making its way to East Asia. Cundī was originally an independent focus of cultic worship, who only later (as in the Japanese SHINGONSHu) was incorporated into such broader cultic practices as those focused on the "womb MAndALA" (see TAIZoKAI). Several scriptures related to her cult were translated into Chinese starting in the early eighth century, and she lends her name to both a MUDRA as well as an influential DHARAnĪ: namaḥ saptAnAM samyaksaMbuddhakotīnAM tadyathA: oM cale cule cunde svAhA. The dhAranī attributed to Cundī is said to convey infinite power because it is in continuous recitation by myriads of buddhas; hence, an adept who participates in this ongoing recitation will accrue manifold benefits and purify himself from unwholesome actions. The efficacy of the dhAranī is said to be particularly pronounced when it is recited before an image of Cundī while the accompanying Cundī mudrA is also being performed. This dhAranī also gives Cundī her common epithet of "Goddess of the Seventy Million [Buddhas]," which is sometimes mistakenly interpreted (based on a misreading of the Chinese) as the "Mother of the Seventy Million Buddhas." The texts also provide elaborate directions on how to portray her and paint her image. In Cundī's most common depiction, she has eighteen arms (each holding specific implements) and is sitting atop a lotus flower (PADMA) while being worshipped by two ophidian deities.
Dahui Pujue chanshi shu. (J. Daie Fukaku zenji sho; K. Taehye Pogak sonsa so 大慧普覺禪師書). In Chinese, "CHAN Master Dahui Pujue's Letters"; also known as the Dahui shumen, DAHUI SHUZHUANG, SHUZHUANG, and Dahui shu. Its colophon is dated to 1166. In reply to the letters he received from his many students, both ordained and lay, the Chan master DAHUI ZONGGAO wrote back with detailed instructions on meditation practice, especially his signature training in "observing the meditative topic," or more freely "questioning meditation" (KANHUA CHAN); after his death, his letters were compiled and edited in two rolls by his disciples Huiran and Huang Wenchang. Numerous editions of this collection were subsequently printed in China, Korea, and Japan. Many practitioners of Chan, SoN, and ZEN favored the Dahui Pujue chanshi shu for its clarity, intelligibility, and uniquely personal tone. The text was especially influential in the writings of the Korean Son master POJO CHINUL (1158-1210), who first learned about the Chan meditative technique of kanhua Chan from its pages and who attributed one of his three awakenings to his readings of Dahui. Dahui's letters were formally incorporated into the Korean Son monastic curriculum by at least the seventeenth century, as one of books in the "Fourfold Collection" (SAJIP), where it is typically known by its abbreviated title of "Dahui's Letters" (K. TAEHYE SoJANG) or just "Letters" (K. SoJANG; C. Shuzhuang). The Japanese monk and historian MUJAKU DoCHu (1653-1744) also wrote an important commentary to the text, known as the Daiesho koroju.
Daianji. (大安寺). In Japanese, "Great Peace Monastery"; one of the seven great monasteries of the ancient Japanese capital of Nara (NANTO SHICHIDAIJI). Daianji was founded in the Asuka area and, according to internal monastery records, was originally the Kudara no odera (Great Paekche Monastery) that was founded by Emperor Jomei in 639. When this monastery burned down in 642, Empress Kogyoku had it rebuilt and renamed it Daianji. If this identification with Kudara no odera is correct, Daianji has the distinction of being the first monastery in Japan founded by the court. The monastery moved to Nara in 716, following the relocation of the capital there in 710. The Koguryo monk Tohyon (J. Togen, fl. c. seventh century) lived at Daianji during the seventh century, where he wrote the Nihon segi, an early historical chronicle, which is no longer extant. Daianji was also the residence of the Indian monk BODHISENA (704-760), who lived and taught there until the end of his life. Bodhisena performed the "opening the eyes" (C. KAIYAN; J. KAIGEN; NETRAPRATIstHAPANA) ceremony for the 752 dedication of the great buddha image of Vairocana (NARA DAIBUTSU; Birushana Nyorai) at ToDAIJI, another of the great Nara monasteries. Daianji was also home to the Korean monk SIMSANG (J. Shinjo, d. 742) from the Silla kingdom, who was instrumental in introducing the teachings of the Kegon (C. HUAYAN; K. Hwaom) school of Buddhism to Japan. Since the time of another famous resident, KuKAI (774-835), Daianji has been associated with the SHINGONSHu of Japanese Buddhism. Daianji was at times quite grand, with two seven-story pagodas and many other buildings on its campus. After a fire destroyed much of the monastery in the 1200s, rebuilding was slow and the renovated structures were damaged once again by an earthquake in 1449. Daianji's fireproof treasury holds nine wooden images from the eighth century, including three different representations of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA, including both his representations as AMOGHAPAsA (J. Fuku Kenjaku) and his thousand-armed manifestation (SAHASRABHUJASAHASRANETRAVALOKITEsVARA), as well as two of the four heavenly kings (S. CATURMAHARAJAKAYIKA; J. shitenno). The monastery also retains two famous images that are brought out for display for one month each year: in March, HAYAGRĪVA, and in October, the eleven-headed Avalokitesvara (Juichimen Kannon).
daibutsu. (大佛). In Japanese, "great buddha"; referring to colossal wooden or cast-bronze buddha images, such as the forty-eight-foot-high image of VAIROCANA enshrined at ToDAIJI and the image of AMITABHA in KAmakura. As a specific example, see NARA DAIBUTSU.
dai-gohonzon. (大御本尊). In Japanese, lit. "great object of devotion"; the most important object of worship in the NICHIREN SHoSHu school of Japanese Buddhism. The dai-gohonzon is a plank of camphor wood that has at its center an inscription of homage to the title of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra")-NAMU MYoHo RENGEKYo, as well as the name of NICHIREN (1222-1282), surrounded by a cosmological chart (MAndALA) of the Buddhist universe, written in Nichiren's own hand in 1279. By placing namu Myohorengekyo and his name on the same line, the school understands that Nichiren meant that the teachings of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra and the person who proclaimed those teachings (Nichiren) are one and the same (ninpo ikka). The dai-gohonzon has been enshrined at TAISEKIJI, the administrative head temple of Nichiren Shoshu, since the temple's foundation in 1290; for this reason, the temple remains the major pilgrimage center for the school's adherents. The dai-gohonzon itself, the sanctuary (kaidan) where it is enshrined at Kaisekiji, and the teaching of namu Myohorengekyo, are together called the "three great esoteric laws" (SANDAI HIHo), because they were hidden between the lines of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra until Nichiren discovered them and revealed them to the world. Transcriptions of the mandala, called simply GOHONZON, are inscribed on wooden tablets in temples or on paper scrolls when they are enshrined in home altars. See also DAIMOKU.
Daigu Sochiku. (大愚宗築) (1584-1669). Japanese ZEN master of the RINZAISHu lineage. Daigu was born in Mino, present-day Gifu prefecture. In his twenties, Daigu went on a pilgrimage around the country with several other young monks, including GUDo ToSHOKU and Ungo Kiyo (1582-1659), in search of a teacher. In his thirties, Daigu built the monastery of Nansenji in the capital Edo, which he named after his home temple in Mino. He also founded the monasteries of Enkyoji in Kinko (present-day Shiga prefecture) and Enichiji in Tanba (present-day Hyogo prefecture). Daigu was active in restoring dilapidated temples. In 1656, he was invited as the founding abbot of the temple Daianji in Echizen (present-day Fukui prefecture). During the Tokugawa period, temples were mandated by the bakufu to affiliate themselves with a main monastery (honzan), thus becoming a branch temple (matsuji). The temples that Daigu built or restored became branch temples of MYoSHINJI. Daigu's efforts thus allowed the influence of Myoshinji, where he once served as abbot, to grow. Along with Gudo, Daigu also led a faction within Myoshinji that rejected the invitation of the Chinese Chan master YINYUAN LONGQI to serve as abbot of the main temple.
daimoku. (題目). In Japanese, lit. "title" of a scripture; the term comes to be used most commonly in the NICHIRENSHu and associated schools of Japanese Buddhism to refer specifically to the title of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"). The title is presumed to summarize the gist of the entire scripture, and the recitation of its title in its Japanese pronunciation (see NAMU MYoHoRENGEKYo) is a principal religious practice of the Nichiren and SoKKA GAKKAI schools. Recitation of the title of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra is called specifically the "diamoku of the essential teaching" (honmon no daimoku) in the Nichiren school. The Japanese reformer NICHIREN (1222-1282) advocated recitation of this daimoku as one of the "three great esoteric laws" (SANDAI HIHo), and he claimed it exemplified mastery of wisdom (PRAJNA) in the three trainings (TRIsIKsA).
Dainichi(bo) Nonin. (大日[房]能忍) (d.u.). Japanese monk of the late Heian and early Kamakura eras; his surname was Taira. Nonin is the reputed founder of the short-lived ZEN sect known as the DARUMASHu, one of the earliest Zen traditions to develop in Japan. Nonin was something of an autodidact and is thought to have achieved awakening through his own study of scriptures and commentaries, rather than through any training with an established teacher. He taught at the temple of Sanboji in Suita (present-day osaka prefecture) and established himself as a Zen master. Well aware that he did not have formal authorization (YINKE) from a Chan master in a recognized lineage, Nonin sent two of his disciples to China in 1189. They returned with a portrait of BODHIDHARMA inscribed by the Chan master FOZHAO DEGUANG (1121-1203) and the robe of Fozhao's influential teacher DAHUI ZONGGAO. Fozhao also presented Nonin with a portrait of himself (see DINGXIANG), on which he wrote a verse at the request of Nonin's two disciples. Such bestowals suggested that Nonin was a recognized successor in the LINJI lineage. In 1194, the monks of HIEIZAN, threatened by Nonin's burgeoning popularity, urged the court to suppress Nonin and his teachings as an antinomian heresy. His school did not survive his death, and many of his leading disciples subsequently became students of other prominent teachers, such as DoGEN KIGEN; this influx of Nonin's adherents introduced a significant Darumashu component into the early SoToSHu tradition. Nonin was later given the posthumous title Zen Master Shinpo [alt. Jinho] (Profound Dharma).
Daitokuji. (大德寺). A famous Japanese ZEN monastery in Kyoto; also known as Murasakino Daitokuji. After his secluded training at the hermitage of Ungoan in eastern Kyoto in 1319, the Japanese RINZAI Zen master SoHo MYoCHo, or Daito Kokushi, was invited by his uncle Akamatsu Norimura to Murasakino located in the northeastern part of Kyoto. There a dharma hall was built and inaugurated by Daito in 1326. Daito was formally honored as the founding abbot (kaizan; C. KAISHAN) and he continued to serve as abbot of Daitokuji until his death in 1337. In an attempt to control the influential monasteries in Kyoto, Emperor Godaigo (1288-1339), who was a powerful patron of Daito and Daitokuji, decreed in 1313 that only those belonging to Daito's lineage could become abbot of Daitokuji and added Daitokuji to the official GOZAN system. Two years later, Daitokuji was raised to top rank of the gozan system, which it shared with the monastery NANZENJI. These policies were later supported by retired Emperor Hanazono (1297-1348), another powerful patron of Daito and his monastery. Daitokuji was devastated by a great fire in 1453 and suffered further destruction during the onin War (1467-1477). The monastery was restored to its former glory in 1474, largely through the efforts of its prominent abbot IKKYu SoJUN. A famous sanmon gate was built by the influential tea master Sen no Rikyu. During its heyday, Daitokuji had some twenty-four inner cloisters (tatchu), such as Ikkyu's Shinjuan and Rikyu's Jukoin and over 173 subtemples (matsuji).
dAkinī. (T. mkha' 'gro ma; C. tuzhini; J. dakini; K. tojini 荼枳尼). In Sanskrit, a cannibalistic female demon, a witch; in sANTIDEVA's BODHICARYAVATARA, a female hell guardian (narakapAlA); in tantric Buddhism, dAkinīs, particularly the vajradAkinī, are guardians from whom tAntrikas obtain secret doctrines. For example, the VAJRABHAIRAVA adept LAlitavajra is said to have received the YAMANTAKA tantras from vajradAkinīs, who allowed him to bring back to the human world only as many of the texts as he could memorize in one night. The dAkinī first appears in Indian sources during the fourth century CE, and it has been suggested that they evolved from local female shamans. The term is of uncertain derivation, perhaps having something to do with "drumming" (a common feature of shamanic ritual). The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean give simply a phonetic transcription of the Sanskrit. In Tibetan, dAkinī is translated as "sky goer" (mkha' 'gro ma), probably related to the Sanskrit khecara, a term associated with the CAKRASAMVARATANTRA. Here, the dAkinī is a goddess, often depicted naked, in semi-wrathful pose (see VAJRAYOGINĪ); they retain their fearsome element but are synonymous with the highest female beauty and attractiveness and are enlightened beings. They form the third of what are known as the "inner" three jewels (RATNATRAYA): the guru, the YI DAM, and the dAkinīs and protectors (DHARMAPALA; T. chos skyong). The archetypical Tibetan wisdom or knowledge dAkinī (ye shes mkha' 'gro) is YE SHES MTSHO RGYAL, the consort of PADMASAMBHAVA. dAkinīs are classified in a variety of ways, the most common being mkha' 'gro sde lnga, the female buddhas equivalent to the PANCATATHAGATA or five buddha families (PANCAKULA): BuddhadAkinī [alt. AkAsadhAtvīsvarī; SparsavajrA] in the center of the mandala, with LocanA, MAmakī, PAndaravAsinī, and TARA in the cardinal directions. Another division is into three: outer, inner, and secret dAkinīs. The first is a YOGINĪ or a YOGIN's wife or a regional goddess, the second is a female buddha that practitioners visualize themselves to be in the course of tantric meditation, and the last is nondual wisdom (ADVAYAJNANA). This division is also connected with the three bodies (TRIKAYA) of MahAyAna Buddhism: the NIRMAnAKAYA (here referring to the outer dAkinīs), SAMBHOGAKAYA (meditative deity), and the DHARMAKAYA (the knowledge dAkinī). The word dAkinī is found in the title of the explanation (vAkhyA) tantras of the yoginī class or mother tantras included in the CakrasaMvaratantra group.
danka seido. (檀家制度). In Japanese, "parish-household system"; danka (parish household) is synonymous with DANNA, and the more common form after the mid-Tokugawa period. See DANNA.
dannadera. (J) (檀那寺). In Japanese, "parish temple"; a Japanese Buddhist institutional system that reached its apex in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See DANNA.
danna. (檀那). This Japanese term is originally a transcription of the Sanskrit term DANA, or "giving." When referring to a patron of a monk, nun, or monastery, the term danna is used with reference to a "donor" (J. dan'otsu, dan'ochi, dannotsu; S. DANAPATI) or "parish temple" (DANKA). During the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), the Japanese shogunate required every family to register at and support a local temple, called the DANNADERA, which in turned entitled that family to receive funerary services from the local priest. The dannadera, also called the BODAIJI and dankadera, thus served as a means of monitoring the populace and preventing the spread in Japan of subversive religions, such as Christianity and the banned Nichiren-Fuju-Fuse sect of the NICHIREN school. By requiring each Japanese family to be registered at a specific local temple and obligating them to provide for that temple's economic support and to participate in its religious rituals, all Japanese thus became Buddhist in affiliation for the first time in Japanese history.
Dari jing yishi. (J. Dainichikyo gishaku; K. Taeil kyong ŭisok 大日經義釋). In Chinese, "Interpretation of the Meaning of the MAHAVAIROCANABHISAMBODHISuTRA." The monks Zhiyan (d.u.) and Wengu (d.u.) further edited and expanded upon the famous commentary on the MahAvairocanAbhisaMbodhisutra, the DARI JING SHU. The Dari jing shu was dictated by sUBHAKARASIMHA and written down by his disciple YIXING, with further notes. Both texts were transmitted to Japan (the Dari jing shu by KuKAI and Dari jing yishi by ENNIN); monks connected with the Taimitsu strand of the TENDAI tradition exclusively relied on the Dari jing yishi that Ennin had brought back from China. The eminent Japanese monk ENCHIN paid much attention to the Dari jing yishi and composed a catalogue for the text known as Dainichigyo gishaku mokuroku, wherein he details the provenance of the text and the circumstances of its arrival in Japan. Enchin also discusses three different points on which the Dari jing yishi was superior to the Dari jing shu. These points were further elaborated in his other commentaries on the Dari jing yishi. Few others besides Enchin have written commentaries on this text. In China, the Liao dynasty monk Jueyuan (d.u.) composed a commentary entitled the Dari jing yishi yanmi chao.
Darumashu. (達摩宗). In Japanese, the "BODHIDHARMA sect"; one of the earliest Japanese Buddhist ZEN sects, established in the tenth century by DAINICHI NoNIN; the sect takes its name from the putative founder of the CHAN tradition, Bodhidharma. Little was known about the teachings of the Darumashu until the late-twentieth century apart from criticisms found in the writings of its contemporary rivals, who considered the school to be heretical. Criticisms focused on issues of the authenticity of Nonin's lineage and antinomian tendencies in Nonin's teachings. A recently discovered Darumashu treatise, the Joto shogakuron ("Treatise on the Attainment of Complete, Perfect Enlightenment"), discusses the prototypical Chan statement "mind is the buddha," demonstrating that a whole range of benefits, both worldly and religious, would accrue to an adept who simply awakens to that truth. As a critique of the Darumashu by Nonin's rival MYoAN EISAI states, however, since the school posits that the mind is already enlightened and the afflictions (KLEsA) do not exist in reality, its adherents claimed that there were therefore no precepts that had to be kept or practices to be followed, for religious cultivation would only serve to hinder the experience of awakening. The Darumashu also emphasized the importance of the transmission of the patriarchs' relics (J. shari; S. sARĪRA) as a mark of legitimacy. Although the Darumashu was influential enough while Nonin was alive to prompt other sects to call for its suppression, it did not survive its founder's death, and most of Nonin's leading disciples affiliated themselves with other prominent teachers, such as DoGEN KIGEN. These Darumashu adherents had a significant influence on early SoToSHu doctrine and self-identity and seem to have constituted the majority of the Sotoshu tradition into its third generation of successors. ¶ Darumashu, as the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese term Damo zong (Bodhidharma lineage), can also refer more generally to the CHAN/SoN/ZEN school, which traces its heritage back to the founder and first Chinese patriarch, Bodhidharma.
date ::: (convention, data) A string unique to a time duration of 24 hours between 2 successive midnights defined by the local time zone. The specific e.g., Gregorian, Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew etc. as well as local ordering conventions such as UK: day/month/year, US: month/day/year.Inputting and outputting dates on computers is greatly complicated by these localisation issues which is why they tend to operate on dates internally in some unified form such as seconds past midnight at the start of the first of January 1970.Many software and hardware representations of dates allow only two digits for the year, leading to the year 2000 problem.Unix manual page: date(1), ctime(3). (1997-07-11)
date "convention, data" A string unique to a time duration of 24 hours between 2 successive midnights defined by the local time zone. The specific representation of a date will depend on which calendar convention is in force; e.g., Gregorian, Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew etc. as well as local ordering conventions such as UK: day/month/year, US: month/day/year. Inputting and outputting dates on computers is greatly complicated by these {localisation} issues which is why they tend to operate on dates internally in some unified form such as seconds past midnight at the start of the first of January 1970. Many software and hardware representations of dates allow only two digits for the year, leading to the {year 2000} problem. {Unix manual page}: date(1), ctime(3). (1997-07-11)
Denkoroku. (傳光録). In Japanese, "Record of the Transmission of the Light"; a text also known by its full title, Keizan osho denkoroku ("A Record of the Transmission of the Light by Master Keizan"). The anthology is attributed by Soto tradition to KEIZAN JoKIN, but was most probably composed posthumously by his disciples. The Denkoroku is a collection of pithy stories and anecdotes concerning fifty-two teachers recognized by the Japanese SoToSHu as the patriarchs of the school, accompanied by the author's own explanatory commentaries and concluding verses. Each chapter includes a short opening case (honsoku), which describes the enlightenment experience of the teacher; a longer section (called a kien) offering a short biography and history of the teacher, including some of his representative teachings and exchanges with students and other teachers; a prose commentary (teisho; C. TICHANG) by the author; and a concluding appreciatory verse (juko). The teachers discussed in the text include twenty-seven Indian patriarchs from MAHĀKĀsYAPA to PrajNātāra; six Chinese patriarchs from BODHIDHARMA through HUINENG; seventeen Chinese successors of Huineng in the CAODONG ZONG, from QINGYUAN XINGSI to TIANTONG RUJING; and finally the two Japanese patriarchs DoGEN KIGEN and Koun Ejo (1198-1280). The Denkoroku belongs to a larger genre of texts known as the CHUANDENG LU ("transmission of the lamplight records"), although it is a rigidly sectarian lineage history, discussing only the single successor to each patriarch with no treatment of any collateral lines.
Devadatta. (T. Lhas sbyin; C. Tipodaduo; J. Daibadatta; K. Chebadalta 提婆達多). Sanskrit and Pāli proper name for a cousin and rival of the Buddha; he comes to be viewed within the tradition as the embodiment of evil for trying to kill the Buddha and split the SAMGHA (SAMGHABHEDA). Devadatta is said to have been the brother of ĀNANDA, who would later become the Buddha's attendant. According to Pāli sources, when Gotama (GAUTAMA) Buddha returned to Kapalivatthu (KAPILAVASTU) after his enlightenment to preach to his native clan, the Sākiyans (sĀKYA), Devadatta along with ĀNANDA, Bhagu, Kimbila, BHADDIYA-KĀlIGODHĀPUTTA, Anuruddha (ANIRUDDHA), and UPĀLI were converted and took ordination as monks. Devadatta quickly attained mundane supranormal powers (iddhi; S. ṚDDHI) through his practice of meditation, although he never attained any degree of enlightenment. For a period of time, Devadatta was revered in the order. Sāriputta (sĀRIPUTRA) is depicted as praising him, and the Buddha lists him among eleven chief elders. Devadatta, however, always seems to have been of evil disposition and jealous of Gotama; in the final years of the Buddha's ministry, he sought to increase his influence and even usurp leadership of the saMgha. He used his supranormal powers to win over the patronage of Prince Ajātasattu (AJĀTAsATRU), who built for him a monastery at Gayāsīsa (Gayāsīrsa). Emboldened by this success, he approached the Buddha with the suggestion that the Buddha retire and pass the leadership of the saMgha to him, whereupon the Buddha severely rebuked him. It was then that Devadatta conceived a plan to kill the Buddha even while he incited Ajātasattu to murder his father BIMBISĀRA, king of MAGADHA, who was the Buddha's chief patron. At Devadatta's behest, Ajātasattu dispatched sixteen archers to shoot the Buddha along a road, but the Buddha, using his supranormal powers, instead converted the archers. Later, Devadatta hurled a boulder down the slope of Mt. Gijjhakuta (GṚDHRAKutAPARVATA) at the Buddha, which grazed his toe and caused it to bleed. Finally, Devadatta caused the bull elephant NĀLĀGIRI, crazed with toddy, to charge at the Buddha, but the Buddha tamed the elephant with the power of his loving-kindness (P. mettā; S. MAITRĪ). Unsuccessful in his attempts to kill the Buddha, Devadatta then decided to establish a separate order. He approached the Buddha and recommended that five austere practices (DHUTAnGA) be made mandatory for all members of the saMgha: forest dwelling, subsistence only on alms food collected by begging, use of rag robes only, dwelling at the foot of a tree, and vegetarianism. When the Buddha rejected his recommendation, Devadatta gathered around him five hundred newly ordained monks from Vesāli (VAIsĀLĪ) and, performing the fortnightly uposatha (UPOsADHA) ceremony separately at Gayāsīsa, formally seceded from the Buddha's saMgha. When the five hundred Vesāli monks were won back to the fold by Sāriputta (sĀRIPUTRA) and Moggallāna (MAHĀMAUDGALYĀYANA), Devadatta grew sick with rage, coughing up blood, and never recovered. It is said that toward the end of his life, Devadatta felt remorse and decided to journey to see the Buddha to ask him for his forgiveness. However, spilling the blood of a Buddha and causing schism in the saMgha are two of the five "acts that brings immediate retribution" (P. ānantariyakamma; S. ĀNANTARYAKARMAN), viz., rebirth in hell. In addition, Devadatta is said to have beaten to death the nun UTPALAVARnĀ when she rebuked him for attempting to assassinate the Buddha. She was an arhat, and killing an arhat is another of the "acts that bring immediate retribution." When Devadatta was on his way to visit the Buddha (according to some accounts, to repent; according to other accounts, to attempt to kill him one last time by scratching him with poisoned fingernails), the earth opened up and Devadatta fell into AVĪCI hell, where he will remain for one hundred thousand eons. His last utterance was that he had no other refuge than the Buddha, an act that, at the end of his torment in hell, will cause him to be reborn as the paccekabuddha (PRATYEKABUDDHA) Atthissara. In many JĀTAKA stories, the villain or chief antagonist of the BODHISATTVA is often identified as a previous rebirth of Devadatta. In the "Devadatta Chapter" of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), the Buddha remarks that in a previous life, he had studied with the sage Asita, who was in fact Devadatta, and that Devadatta would eventually become a buddha himself. This statement was used in the Japanese NICHIREN school as proof that even the most evil of persons (see ICCHANTIKA; SAMUCCHINAKUsALAMuLA) still have the capacity to achieve enlightenment. In their accounts of India, both FAXIAN and XUANZANG note the presence of followers of Devadatta who adhered to the austere practices he had recommended to the Buddha.
Dewa sanzan. (出羽三山). In Japanese, the "three mountains of Dewa"; referring to Mount Haguro, Mount Gassan, and Mount Yudono in what was once known as Dewa province (in modern-day Yamagata prefecture). The region is particularly important in SHUGENDo and has long been a place of pilgrimage; it was visited by BASHo.
Dharmodgata. (T. Chos 'phags; C. Faqi pusa; J. Hoki bosatsu; K. Popki posal 法起菩薩). In Sanskrit, "Elevated Dharma," or "Dharma Arising," the name of a BODHISATTVA whom the AVATAMSAKASuTRA describes as residing in the Diamond (S. VAJRA) Mountains. According to the Chinese translations of the AvataMsakasutra, Dharmodgata lives in the middle of the sea in the Diamond Mountains (C. Jingangshan; J. KONGoSAN; K. KŬMGANGSAN), where he preaches the dharma to his large congregation of fellow bodhisattvas. The AstASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ also says that Dharmodgata (his name there is transcribed as C. Tanwujian, J. Donmukatsu, and K. Tammugal) preaches the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ three times daily at the City of Fragrances (S. Gandhavatī; C. Zhongxiangcheng; J. Shukojo; K. Chunghyangsong), now used as the name of one of the individual peaks at the Korean KŬMGANGSAN. Since the Chinese Tang dynasty and the Korean Silla dynasty, East Asian Buddhists have presumed that Dharmodgata resided at the Diamond Mountains, just as the bodhisattva MANJUsRĪ lived at WUTAISHAN. In his HUAYAN JING SHU, CHENGGUAN's massive commentary to the AvataMsakasutra, Chengguan explicitly connects the sutra's mention of the Diamond Mountains to the Kŭmgangsan of Korea. At Kŭmgangsan, there are many place names associated with Dharmodgata and several legends and stories concerning him have been transmitted. Records explain that P'YOHUNSA, an important monastery at Kŭmgangsan, at one time had an image of Dharmodgata enshrined in its main basilica (although the image is now lost). According to the Japanese ascetic tradition of SHUGENDo, the semilegendary founder of the school, EN NO OZUNU (b. 634), is considered to be a manifestation of Dharmodgata, and his principal residence, Katsuragi Mountain in Nara prefecture, is therefore also sometimes known as the Diamond Mountains (KONGoSAN).
dianzuo. (J. tenzo; K. chonjwa 典座). In Chinese, lit. "in charge of seating"; the term that comes to be used for a cook at a Buddhist monastery, who supervises the preparation and distribution of meals. In Indian VINAYA texts, the term was used to designate a "manager," the service monk (S. VAIYĀPṚTYA[KARA]; P. veyyāvaccakara) who assigned seating at assemblies and ceremonies and arranged for the distribution of material objects or donations in addition to food. In the pilgrimage records of YIJING in India and ENNIN in China, the term always referred to a "manager," not someone who worked in the monastic kitchen. But sometime after the tenth century, during the Northern Song dynasty, the term came to be used in Chinese monasteries to refer to the cook. In East Asian CHAN monasteries, the cook and five other officers, collectively known as the ZHISHI (J. chiji), oversaw the administration of the monastic community. Typically, the dianzuo position was considered a prestigious position and offered only to monks of senior rank. The Japanese Zen monk DoGEN KIGEN wrote a famous essay on the responsibilities of the cook entitled Tenzo kyokun ("Instructions to the Cook"). Cf. DRAVYA MALLAPUTRA.
dingxiang. (J. chinzo; K. chongsang 頂相). In Chinese, lit. "mark on the forehead" or "head's appearance." The term dingxiang was originally coined as the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit term UsnĪsA, but the term also came to be used to refer to a portrait or image of a monk or nun. Written sources from as early as the sixth century, such as the GAOSENG ZHUAN ("Biographies of Eminent Monks"), recount the natural mummification of eminent Buddhist monks, and subsequently, the making of lifelike sculptures of monks made from ashes (often from cremation) mixed with clay. The earliest extant monk portraits date from the ninth century and depict the five patriarchs of the esoteric school (C. Zhenyan; J. SHINGONSHu); these portraits are now enshrined in the collection of ToJI in Kyoto, Japan. Another early example is the sculpture of the abbot Hongbian in cave 17 at DUNHUANG. Dingxiang portraits were largely, but not exclusively, used within the CHAN, SoN, and ZEN traditions, to be installed in special halls prepared for memorial and mortuary worship. After the rise of the SHIFANGCHA (monasteries of the ten directions) system in the Song dynasty, which guaranteed the abbacy to monks belonging to a Chan lineage, portraits of abbots were hung in these image halls to establish their presence in a shared spiritual genealogy. The portraits of the legendary Indian monk BODHIDHARMA and the Chan master BAIZHANG HUAIHAI were often placed at the center of these arrangements, symbolizing the spiritual and institutional foundations of Chan. The practice of inscribing one's own dingxiang portrait before death also flourished in China; inscribed portraits were presented to disciples and wealthy supporters as gifts and these portraits thus functioned as highly valued commodities within the Buddhist religious community. The practice of preparing dingxiang portraits was transmitted to Japan. Specifically noteworthy are the Japanese monk portrait sculptures dating from the Kamakura period, known for their lifelike appearance. The making of dingxiang portraits continues to flourish even to this day. In Korea, the related term CHINYoNG ("true image") is more commonly used to refer to monks' portraits.
Dogen Kigen. (道元希玄) (1200-1253). Japanese ZEN monk who is regarded as the founder of the SoToSHu. After losing both his parents at an early age, Dogen became the student of a relative, the monk Ryokan (d.u.), who lived at the base of HIEIZAN, the headquarters of the TENDAI school (C. TIANTAI) in 1212; Ryokan subsequently recommended that Dogen study at the famed training center of Senkobo. The next year, Dogen was ordained by Koen (d.u.), the abbot of the powerful Tendai monastery of ENRYAKUJI. Dogen was later visited by the monk Koin (1145-1216) of Onjoji, who suggested the eminent Japanese monk MYoAN EISAI as a more suitable teacher. Dogen visited Eisai at his monastery of KENNINJI and became a student of Eisai's disciple Myozen (1184-1225). In 1223, Dogen accompanied Myozen to China as his attendant and made a pilgrimage to various important monastic centers on Mts. Tiantong, Jing, and Yuwang. Before returning to Japan in 1227, Dogen made another trip in 1225 to Mt. Tiantong to study with the CAODONG ZONG Chan master TIANTONG RUJING (1162-1227), from whom he is said to have received dharma transmission. During his time there, Dogen overheard Rujing scolding a monk who was sleeping, saying, "The practice of zazen (C. ZUOCHAN) is the sloughing off of body and mind. What does sleeping accomplish?" Dogen reports that he experienced awakening upon hearing Rujing's words "sloughing off body and mind" (SHINJIN DATSURAKU), a phrase that would figure prominently in his later writings. The phrase, however, is not common in the Chan tradition, and scholars have questioned whether Dogen's spoken Chinese was up to the task of understanding Rujing's oral instructions. Dogen also attributes to Rujing's influence the practice of SHIKAN TAZA, or "just sitting," and the notion of the identity of practice and attainment: that to sit correctly in meditative posture is to enact one's own buddhahood. After Rujing's death, Dogen returned to Japan, famously reporting that he had learned only that noses are vertical and eyes are horizontal. He returned to Kenninji, but relocated two years later in 1229 to the monastery of Anyoin in Fukakusa. In 1233, Dogen moved to Koshoji, on the outskirts of Kyoto, where he established one of the first monasteries in Japan modeled on Song-dynasty Chan monastic practice. Dogen resided there for the next ten years and attracted a large following, including several adherents of the DARUMASHu, who became influential in his burgeoning community. When the powerful monastery of Tofukuji was established by his RINZAISHu rival ENNI BEN'EN, Dogen moved again to remote area of Echizen (present-day Fukui prefecture), where he was invited to reside at the newly established monastery of Daibutsuji; Dogen renamed the monastery EIHEIJI in 1246. There, he composed several chapters of his magnum opus, SHoBoGENZo ("Treasury of the True Dharma Eye"). In 1253, as his health declined, Dogen entrusted Eiheiji to his successor Koun Ejo (1198-1280), a former disciple of the Darumashu founder DAINICHIBo NoNIN, and left for Kyoto to seek medical treatment. He died that same year. Dogen was a prolific writer whose work includes the FUKAN ZAZENGI, EIHEI SHINGI, Eihei koroku, BENDoWA, HoKYoKI, GAKUDo YoJINSHU, Tenzo kyokun, and others. Dogen's voluminous oeuvre has been extremely influential in the modern construction of the Japanese Zen tradition and its portrayal in Western literature. See also GENJo KoAN; SHIKAN TAZA.
Dokuan Genko. (独庵玄光) (1630-1698). Japanese ZEN monk in the SoToSHu. Dokuan was ordained by the monk Tenkoku (d.u.) at the temple of Kodenji in his hometown of Saga. After traveling around the country on pilgrimage, Dokuan visited the émigré Chinese CHAN monk DAOZHE CHAOYUAN in Nagasaki and studied under him for eight years. When Daozhe returned to China in 1658, Dokuan continued his training under the Zen master Gesshu Sorin (1614-1687) at Kotaiji in Nagasaki and remained at Kotaiji after Gesshu's death. Dokuan was a prolific writer whose work includes the Gohoshu, Shui sanbo kanno den, and the Zenaku genken hoo hen.
dokusan. (C. ducan; K. tokch'am 獨參). In Japanese, lit. a "private consultation" between a ZEN student and master, which is conducted in the privacy of the master's room. This consultation is an important element of training in the Japanese RINZAISHu, and allows the master to check the progress of the student in his meditation, and the student to ask questions regarding his practice. Dokusan is also the formal occasion where the student is expected to express his understanding of a specific Zen koan (GONG'AN) so that the master can gauge his development (see J. JAKUGO; C. ZHUOYU).
Dosho. (道昭) (629-700). Japanese monk and reputed founder of the Japanese Hosso (YOGĀCĀRA) school in the seventh century. A native of Kawachi province, Dosho became renowned for his strict adherence to the precepts while he was residing at the monastery of Gangoji. In 653, Dosho made a pilgrimage to China, where he studied under the Chinese monk-translator and Yogācāra scholar XUANZANG. In 660, Dosho returned to Gangoji and devoted the rest of his life to the dissemination of the Yogācāra teachings that he had brought back with him from China.
DS level ::: (communications) (Digital Signal or Data Service level) Originally an AT&T classification of transmitting one or more voice conversations in one digital data stream. The best known DS levels are DS0 (a single conversation), DS1 (24 conversations multiplexed), DS1C, DS2, and DS3.By extension, the DS level can refer to the raw data rate necessary for transmission: DS0 64 Kb/sDS1 1.544 Mb/s technologies or standards (e.g. X.25, SMDS, ISDN, ATM, PDH).Japan uses the US standards for DS0 through DS2 but Japanese DS5 has roughly the circuit capacity of US DS4, while the European standards are rather different bits per second but rates above DS1 are not necessarily integral multiples of 1,544 kb/s. (1998-05-18)
DS level "communications" (Digital Signal or Data Service level) Originally an {AT&T} classification of transmitting one or more voice conversations in one digital data stream. The best known DS levels are {DS0} (a single conversation), {DS1} (24 conversations multiplexed), {DS1C}, {DS2}, and {DS3}. By extension, the DS level can refer to the raw data rate necessary for transmission: DS0 64 Kb/s DS1 1.544 Mb/s DS1C 3.15 Mb/s DS2 6.31 Mb/s DS3 44.736 Mb/s DS4 274.1 Mb/s (where K and M signify multiplication by 1000 and 1000000, rather than powers of two). In this sense it can be used to measure of data service rates classifying the user access rates for various point-to-point {WAN} technologies or standards (e.g. {X.25}, {SMDS}, {ISDN}, {ATM}, {PDH}). Japan uses the US standards for DS0 through DS2 but Japanese DS5 has roughly the circuit capacity of US DS4, while the European standards are rather different (see {E1}). In the US all of the transmission rates are integral multiples of 8000 bits per second but rates above DS1 are not necessarily integral multiples of 1,544 kb/s. (1998-05-18)
Dunhuang. (J. Tonko; K. Tonhwang 敦煌). A northwest Chinese garrison town on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in Central Asia, first established in the Han dynasty and an important stop along the ancient SILK ROAD; still seen written also as Tun-huang, followed the older Wade-Giles transcription. Today an oasis town in China's Gansu province, Dunhuang is often used to refer to the nearby complex of approximately five hunded Buddhist caves, including the MOGAO KU (Peerless Caves) to the southeast of town and the QIANFO DONG (Caves of the Thousand Buddhas) about twenty miles to the west. Excavations to build the caves at the Mogao site began in the late-fourth century CE and continued into the mid-fourteenth century CE. Of the more than one thousand caves that were hewn from the cliff face, roughly half were decorated. Along with the cave sites of LONGMEN and YUNGANG further east and BEZEKLIK and KIZIL to the west, the Mogao grottoes contain some of the most spectacular examples of ancient Buddhist sculpture and wall painting to be found anywhere in the world. Legend has it that in 366 CE a wandering monk named Yuezun had a vision of a thousand golden buddhas at a site along some cliffs bordering a creek and excavated the first cave in the cliffs for his meditation practice. Soon afterward, additional caves were excavated and the first monasteries established to serve the needs of the monks and merchants traveling to and from China along the Silk Road. The caves were largely abandoned in the fourteenth century. In the early twentieth century, Wang Yuanlu (1849-1931), self-appointed guardian of the Dunhuang caves, discovered a large cache of ancient manuscripts and paintings in Cave 17, a side chamber of the larger Cave 16. As rumors of these manuscripts reached Europe, explorer-scholars such as SIR MARC AUREL STEIN and PAUL PELLIOT set out across Central Asia to obtain samples of ancient texts and artwork buried in the ruins of the Taklamakan desert. Inside were hundreds of paintings on silk and tens of thousands of manuscripts dating from the fifth to roughly the eleventh centuries CE, forming what has been described as the world's earliest and largest paper archive. The texts were written in more than a dozen languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Uighur, Khotanese, Tangut, and TOCHARIAN and consisted of paper scrolls, wooden tablets, and one of the world's earliest printed books (868 CE), a copy of the VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA ("Diamond Sutra"). In the seventh-century, a Tibetan garrison was based at Dunhuang, and materials discovered in the library cave also include some of the earliest documents in the Tibetan language. This hidden library cave was apparently sealed in the eleventh century. As a result of the competition between European, American, and Japanese institutions to acquire documents from Dunhuang, the material was dispersed among collections world-wide, making access to all the manuscripts difficult. Many items have still not been properly catalogued or conserved and there are scholarly disputes over what quantity of the materials are modern forgeries. In 1944 the Dunhuang Academy was established to document and study the site and in 1980 the site was opened to the public. In 1987 the Dunhuang caves were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and today are being preserved through the efforts of both Chinese and international groups.
Dz'yan and Zen are the Chinese, Senzar and Japanese forms of this word.
Edward Yourdon "person" A {software engineering} consultant, widely known as the developer of the "{Yourdon method}" of structured systems analysis and design, as well as the co-developer of the Coad/Yourdon method of {object-oriented analysis} and design. He is also the editor of three software journals - American Programmer, Guerrilla Programmer, and Application Development Strategies - that analyse software technology trends and products in the United States and several other countries around the world. Ed Yourdon received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from {MIT}, and has done graduate work at MIT and at the Polytechnic Institute of New York. He has been appointed an Honorary Professor of {Information Technology} at Universidad CAECE in Buenos Aires, Argentina and has received numerous honors and awards from other universities and professional societies around the world. He has worked in the computer industry for 30 years, including positions with {DEC} and {General Electric}. Earlier in his career, he worked on over 25 different {mainframe} computers, and was involved in a number of pioneering computer projects involving {time-sharing} and {virtual memory}. In 1974, he founded the consulting firm, {Yourdon, Inc.}. He is currently immersed in research in new developments in software engineering, such as object-oriented software development and {system dynamics} modelling. Ed Yourdon is the author of over 200 technical articles; he has also written 19 computer books, including a novel on {computer crime} and a book for the general public entitled Nations At Risk. His most recent books are Object-Oriented Systems Development (1994), Decline and Fall of the American Programmer (1992), Object-Oriented Design (1991), and Object-Oriented Analysis (1990). Several of his books have been translated into Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Portugese, Dutch, French, German, and other languages, and his articles have appeared in virtually all of the major computer journals. He is a regular keynote speaker at major computer conferences around the world, and serves as the conference Chairman for Digital Consulting's SOFTWARE WORLD conference. He was an advisor to Technology Transfer's research project on software industry opportunities in the former Soviet Union, and a member of the expert advisory panel on CASE acquisition for the U.S. Department of Defense. Mr. Yourdon was born on a small planet at the edge of one of the distant red-shifted galaxies. He now lives in the Center of the Universe (New York City) with his wife, three children, and nine Macintosh computers, all of which are linked together through an Appletalk network. (1995-04-16)
Eiheiji. (永平寺). In Japanese, "Eternal Peace Monastery." Eiheiji is currently the headquarters (honzan) of the SoToSHu. Eiheiji was founded by the Zen master DoGEN KIGEN. A lay follower named Hatano Yoshishige offered his property in Echizen as a site for the new monastery and invited Dogen to lead the community. In 1243, Dogen moved to Echizen and resided in a dilapidated temple named Kippoji. In the meantime, Hatano and others began constructing a new DHARMA hall and SAMGHA hall (see C. SENGTANG), which they quickly finished by 1244. The new monastery was named Daibutsuji and renamed Eiheiji by Dogen in 1246. The name Eihei is said to derive from the Han-dynasty reign period, Yongping (58-75 CE; J. Eihei), when Buddhism first arrived in China. In 1248, the mountain on which Eiheiji is located was renamed Mt. Kichijo. In 1372, Eiheiji was declared a shusse dojo, an official monastery whose abbot is appointed by the state. In 1473, Eiheiji was devastated by war and fire, and reconstruction efforts began in 1487. Since its foundation, Eiheiji has continued to serve as one of the most important Zen institutions in Japan.
Eihei shingi. (永平清規). In Japanese, "Pure Rules for EIHEI(JI)"; a collection of essays on the ZEN monastic codes or "pure rules" (QINGGUI), composed by DoGEN KIGEN. The work is composed in two rolls, in six major sections. The Tenzo Kyokun section, composed while Dogen was still residing at Koshoji in 1237, discusses the duties of the cook. The BENDoHo details the daily duties at the monastery of Daibutsuji and the practices, such as meditation, carried out in the SAMGHA hall (see C. SENGTANG). The Fu shukuhanpo explains the proper method of preparing and consuming rice gruel. The Shuryo shingi of 1249 describes the proper deportment of monks in training at Eiheiji's shuryo. The Tai taiko goge jariho, composed in 1244, deals with the proper ritual decorum or means of respecting a master (ĀCĀRYA). The final section, the Chiji shingi, from 1246, details the duties of the officers of the monastery. In 1667, these essays were edited together and published by Kosho Chido (d. 1670), the thirtieth abbot of Eiheiji. The fiftieth abbot, Gento Sokuchu (1729-1807), republished Kosho's edited volume with minor corrections in 1794.
Eison. [alt. Eizon] (叡尊) (1201-1290). In Japanese, "Lord of Sagacity"; founder of Shingon Risshu, a Kamakura-period school that combined the esoteric teachings of the SHINGONSHu with VINAYA disciplinary observance. After beginning his career as a monk at the age of eleven, he initially studied Shingon teachings at DAIGOJI in Kyoto and in 1224 moved to KoYASAN, the mountain center of esoteric teachings and practices. In 1235, while studying vinaya at SAIDAIJI, Eison came to realize the centrality of the PRĀTIMOKsA precepts to a monastic vocation; however, since the custom of full monastic ordination (J. gusokukai) had died out in Japan long before, he was unable to be properly ordained. Eison decided that his only recourse was to take the precepts in a self-administrated ceremony (J. jisei jukai) before an image of the Buddha. Eison and three other monks conducted such a self-ordination at ToDAIJI in 1236, after which he traveled around the country, ordaining monks and lecturing on the Buddhist precepts, before eventually returning to Saidaiji to stay. That monastery is now regarded as the center of the Shingon Risshu school. Eison is also known for his extensive charitable activities and his attempts to disseminate the recitation of the MANTRA of light (J. komyo shingon) among the laity. When the Mongols invaded Japan in 1274 and 1281, Eison performed esoteric rituals on behalf of the court to ward off the invasions. Among Eison's works are the Bonmokyo koshakuki bugyo monju, a sub-commentary to the Pommanggyong kojokki, the Korean YOGĀCĀRA monk T'AEHYoN's (d.u.) commentary on the FANWANG JING; and the Kanjingaku shoki, his autobiography, compiled at the age of eighty-six. Eison was given the posthumous name Kosho Bosatsu (Promoting Orthodoxy BODHISATTVA).
Emma-O: In Japanese Buddhism, the god who is the ruler of the underworld and judges the dead.
Enchin. (圓珍) (814-891). Japanese monk affiliated with the TENDAISHu (C. TIANTAI ZONG) and reputed founder of the Jimon branch of the school. Enchin was a native of Sanuki in present-day Kagawa and a cousin of the SHINGON master KuKAI. At age fourteen, Enchin became the student of GISHIN, the abbot of ENRYAKUJI, and four years later received the full monastic precepts from him. For the next twelve years, Enchin remained in retreat on HIEIZAN. In 853, Enchin traveled to Fuzhou, China, and stayed at the nearby monastery of Kaiyuansi. There he studied the Sanskrit SIDDHAM script under the Indian TREPItAKA Boredaluo (PrajNātāra?). Enchin later visited Yuezhou and Taizhou (present-day Zhejiang province), where he studied Tiantai doctrine and practice. In 855, Enchin entered the Chinese capital of Chang'an with his fellow Japanese monk Ensai (d. 877), where they are believed to have received the "dharma-transmission ABHIsEKA" (denbo kanjo) from Faquan (d.u.) at the monastery of Qinglongsi, as well as the secret of teachings of the "two realms" (RYoBU) from PrajNācakra (d.u.). Enchin then returned to Mt. Tiantai in Taizhou with the new translations of esoteric scriptures that he acquired in Chang'an. Enchin returned to Japan in 858 and resided at the monastery of Onjoji (see MIIDERA). In 866, Enchin became the fifth head (zasu) of Enryakuji and was given imperial permission to transform Onjoji into the official grounds of "dharma-transmission abhiseka." A schism between the lineages of Enchin and ENNIN over the issue of succession in 993 led to the split between Ennin's Sanmon branch of Hieizan and Enchin's Jimon branch of Onjoji. Enchin was later given the posthumous title Great Master Chisho (Realization of Wisdom).
Enni Ben'en. (C. Yuan'er Bianyuan 圓爾辨圓) (1202-1280). Japanese ZEN master in the Chinese LINJI ZONG and Japanese RINZAISHu. Enni was tonsured at the TENDAI monastery of Onjoji (see MIIDERA) at the age of seventeen, and received the full monastic precepts at the precepts platform (kaidan) in the monastery of ToDAIJI. In 1235, Enni left for China and visited the CHAN masters Chijue Daochong (1169-1250), Xiaoweng Miaokan (1177-1248), and Shitian Faxun (1171-1245). Enni eventually visited the Chan master WUZHUN SHIFAN at the monastery of WANSHOUSI on Mt. Jing and inherited his Linji lineage. In 1241, Enni returned to Japan and began to teach at the capital Kyoto at the invitation of the powerful Fujiwara minister Kujo Michiie (1191-1252). In 1243, Enni was given the title Shoichi (Sacred Unity). Enni also won the support of the powerful regent Hojo Tokiyori (1227-1263). Michiie later installed Enni as the founding abbot (J. kaisan; C. KAISHAN) of his powerful monastery of Tofukuji. Enni also served as abbot of the Zen monastery of KENNINJI in Kyoto. In 1311, Enni was named State Preceptor Shoichi. His teachings are recorded in the Shoichi Kokushi goroku and Shoichi kokushi kana hogo.
Ennin. (C. Yuanren 圓仁) (794-864). Japanese monk of the TENDAISHu (C. TIANTAI ZONG), who wrote a classic account of his ninth-century pilgrimage to China. A native of Tochigi prefecture, Ennin lost his father when young, and became a student of the eminent Japanese monk SAICHo at the monastery of ENRYAKUJI on HIEIZAN. Ennin was ordained on Mt. Hiei in 814 and received the full monastic precepts three years later at the precepts platform (kaidan) on the grounds of the monastery of ToDAIJI. In 838, Ennin traveled to China with his companions Engyo (799-852) and Jokyo (d. 866), arriving in Yangzhou (present-day Jiangsu province) at the mouth of the Yangzi River. The next year, he visited the monastery of Kaiyuansi, where he received the teachings and rituals of the various KONGoKAI (vajradhātu) deities from the monk Quanya (d.u.). Ennin also studied the Sanskrit SIDDHAM script while in China. When adverse winds kept him from returning to Japan, he remained behind at the monastery of Fahuayuan on Mt. Chi in Dengzhou (present-day Shandong province). From there, Ennin made a pilgrimage to WUTAISHAN and studied Tiantai doctrine and practice. In 840, Ennin arrived in the capital of Chang'an, where he studied the kongokai MAndALA under Yuanzheng (d.u.) of the monastery of Daxingshansi. The next year, Ennin also studied the teachings of the TAIZoKAI (garbhadhātu) and *SUSIDDHIKARASuTRA under Yizhen (d.u.) of the monastery of Qinglongsi. In 842, Ennin furthered his studies of the taizokai under Faquan (d.u.) at the monastery of Xuanfasi, siddham under Yuanjian (d.u.) of Da'anguosi, and siddham pronunciation under the Indian ĀCĀRYA Baoyue (d.u.). In 845, Ennin fled from the Huichang persecution of Buddhism (see HUICHANG FANAN) that then raged in Chang'an, and arrived back in Japan in 847. Ennin kept a detailed record of his sojourn in China in his famed diary, the NITTo GUHo JUNREI GYoKI (translated into English as A Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law). In 854, Ennin was appointed the head (zasu) of Enryakuji and three years later was allowed to perform the RYoBU ABHIsEKA for Emperor Buntoku (r. 850-858) in the palace. Ennin promoted the Tendai/Tiantai teachings of the four kinds of SAMĀDHI (sizhong sanmei), which he had brought back to Japan from China. He also made an effort to continue his teacher Saicho's attempt to implement the use of the bodhisattva precepts (see FANWANG JING) in Japan.
Enpo dentoroku. (延寶傳燈). In Japanese, "The Enpo Reign-Era Transmission of the Lamplight Record"; a late Japanese genealogical history of the ZEN school, written by the RINZAISHu monk Mangen Shiban (1626-1710) and completed in 1678 and published in 1706, in a total of 41 rolls. Like the earlier Chinese lamplight record JINGDE CHUANDENG LU, which was named after the Chinese reign-era during which the text was compiled, Mangen used the Japanese reign-era Enpo to designate his collection. The text includes the biographies of over one thousand Zen clerics and lay practitioners in the major Zen lineages of the Japanese Rinzaishu and SoToSHu, with excerpts from their sermons and verses. Because of its vast scope, the collection offers a comprehensive overview of the history of the Japanese Zen tradition up to Mangen's time. In his preface, Shiban states that his source materials were these masters' discourse records (J. goroku; C. YULU), biographies, and stele and pagoda inscriptions, which he had collected for over thirty years since his youth. Mangen subsequently collected the biographies of 1,662 Buddhist monks from a range of Japanese sects and compiled them into the HONCHo KoSoDEN, completed in 1702 in a total of 75 rolls.
Enryakuji. (延暦寺). An important monastery located on HIEIZAN (Mt. Hiei), near Kyoto, Japan, which has served as the headquarters (honzan) of the TENDAISHu (C. TIANTAI ZONG) since its foundation. Enryakuji, or Hieizanji, started from humble beginnings in 785, when the Japanese monk SAICHo built a straw hut on Mt. Hiei. Three years later he built Ichijo shikan'in, the famous main hall that later was named Konpon chudo and is currently designated a national treasure (kokuho). In 806, with Emperor Kanmu's (r. 781-806) support, Saicho's residence was firmly established as a powerful monastery, whose function was to protect the new capital Heijokyo (present-day Kyoto) from the demons that threatened the capital from the northeast. In 822, the year of Saicho's death, the emperor granted permission to construct a MAHĀYĀNA precepts platform (daijo kaidan) at the site, and a year later the monastery was renamed Enryakuji. In 824, the monk GISHIN was appointed the first head (zasu) of Enryakuji and the Tendai school. In 828, the Mahāyāna precepts platform was constructed on Mt. Hiei, which gave the Tendai monks freedom from the monopoly over ordination that the powerful monasteries in Nara had wielded up to that time. In 834, the Shakado was constructed in the Saito (West Hall) subcomplex. In 848, ENNIN established the Shuryogon'in complex at YOKAWA and in 858 the monk ENCHIN established the subtemple Onjoji (see MIIDERA) as his separate residence. A schism between the lineages of Enchin and Ennin over the issue of succession in 993 led to the split between Ennin's Sanmon branch of Mt. Hiei and Enchin's Jimon branch of Onjoji. This schism grew into a violent battle that involved the recruiting of so-called warrior monks (SoHEI). In 1571, Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) burned a large number of monasteries on Mt. Hiei to the ground, including Enryakuji. Enryakuji now largely consists of three independent subcomplexes known as the Todo (East Pagoda), Saito (West Pagoda), and Yokawa.
er mi. (J. nimitsu; K. i mil 二密). In Chinese, "two aspects of esoteric Buddhism." "Esoteric as to principle" (li mi) refers to the doctrines and conceptual understanding of esoteric Buddhism. "Esoteric as to practices" (shi mi) refers to the physical enactment of the "esoteric principle," either in tantric rituals and practices or in the Buddha's unfathomable activities. The Japanese TAIMITSU sect of esoteric Buddhism (as advocated by Japanese TENDAISHu) regards the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA and MAHĀPARINIRVĀnASuTRA as representative of esoteric as to principle, whereas the sutras promoted by SHINGONSHu are esoteric with regard to both principle and practices.
Even though the Taisho is often considered to be the definitive East Asian canon, it does not offer truly critical editions of its texts. The second Koryo canon's reputation for accuracy was so strong that the Japanese editors adopted it wholesale as the textus receptus for the modern Taisho edition of the canon, i.e., where there was a Koryo edition available for a text, the Taisho editors simply copied it verbatim, listing in footnotes alternate readings found in other canons, but not attempting to evaluate the accuracy of those readings or to establish a critical edition. Hence, to a large extent, the Taisho edition of the dazangjing is a modern typeset edition of the xylographical Koryo canon, with an updated arrangement of its contents based on modern historiographical criteria.
Fafang. (法舫) (1904-1951). In Chinese, "Skiff of Dharma"; distinguished Chinese Buddhist scholar and activist who initiated some of the earliest ecumenical dialogues between Chinese MAHĀYĀNA and Sri Lankan THERAVĀDA Buddhists. Ordained at the age of eighteen, Fafang was one of the first students to study in the Chinese Buddhist Academy that TAIXU founded in Wuchang (Wuchang Foxue Yuan). He eventually taught at the academy, as well as at other leading Chinese Buddhist institutions of his time, contributing significantly to Taixu's attempts to found international Buddhist research centers and libraries. He also was longtime chief editor of the influential and long-running Buddhist periodical Haichao yin ("Sound of the Tide"). In 1946, Fafang traveled to Sri Lanka after becoming proficient in Sanskrit, Pāli, Japanese, and English and studied Theravāda Buddhism with Kirwatatuduwe Prasekene. Among his later accomplishments, Fafang taught at the University of Sri Lanka, served as one of the chief editors for the compilation of Taixu's collected works, founded one of the first Pāli learning centers in China, and created a student exchange program for Chinese and Sri Lankan monks.
fanbai. (J. bonbai; K. pomp'ae 梵唄). In Chinese, lit., "the speech of BRAHMĀ," Buddhist ritual chanting performed in a distinctively clear, melodious, and resonate voice; "fan," lit. Brahmā, is generically used in China to refer to all things Indian, and "bai" is a transcription of the Sanskrit word bhāsā, or "speech," so fanbai means something like "Indian-style chanting." Although the historical origins of fanbai are uncertain, according to legend, it derives from the singing of the heavenly musicians (GANDHARVA) or from the chants of Gadgadasvara (Miaoyin), a bodhisattva appearing in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA who eulogized the virtues of sĀKYAMUNI Buddha. An account in the NANHAI JIGUI NEIFA CHUAN, a pilgrimage record written by the Chinese monk YIJING (635-713), who sojourned in India for twenty-five years, confirms that fanbai chanting was still popular on the Indian subcontinent during the seventh century. Fanbai was transmitted to China almost simultaneously with the introduction of Buddhism. The Chinese developed their own style of fanbai by at least the third century CE: Cao Zhi (192-232) of the Wei dynasty is said to have created it inspired by a fish's movement, leading to the use of the term yushan (lit. "fish mountain") as an alternate name for fanbai. According to the Korean SAMGUK YUSA, the transmission of fanbai (K. pomp'ae) from China to Korea occurred perhaps as early as the first half of the seventh century; subsequently, the monk CHIN'GAM HYESO (774-850) is said to have introduced the Tang-Chinese style of fanbai to the Silla kingdom around 830. The NITTo KYuHo JUNREIGYoKI by ENNIN (794-864), a Japanese pilgrim monk who visited both Silla Korea and Tang China, reports that both Silla and Tang styles of pomp'ae were used in Korean Buddhist ceremonies. The Choson monk Taehwi (fl. c. 1748), in his Pomŭmjong po ("The Lineage of the Brahmā's Voice School"), traces his Korean lineage of pomp'ae monks back to the person of Chin'gam Hyeso. Fanbai was preserved orally in China and Korea, but was recorded in Japan using the Hakase neume style of notation. The fanbai chanting style involves special vocalization techniques with complex ornamentation that are thought to have been introduced from India, but uses lyrics that derive from Chinese verse; these lyrics are usually in non-rhyming patterns of five- or seven-character lines, making up four-line verses that praise the virtues of the Buddha. Vocables are sometimes employed in fanbai, unlike in sutra chanting. The different fanbai chants are traditionally performed solo or by a chorus, often in a call and response format. Only in Korea has fanbai branched into two distinct types: hossori pomp'ae and chissori pomp'ae. Some pomp'ae texts can be performed only in one style, but others, such as porye and toryanggye, leave the choice to the performer. Hossori pomp'ae is performed in a melismatic style that is elegantly simple, in a vocal style somewhat similar to Western music. By contrast, chissori pomp'ae is solemn, highly sophisticated, and utilizes a tensed throat and falsetto for high notes. Although chissori pomp'ae is considered to be a more important vocal musical form, there are only twelve extant compositions in this style. Owing to how texts and melodic phrases are organized, even though it uses a shorter text, chissori pomp'ae takes two or three times longer to complete than hossori. Of the two, only hossori can be accompanied by musicians or sung to accompany dance. Korean pomp'ae is also performed during Buddhist ceremonies such as YoNGSANJAE.
Faxiang zong. (J. Hossoshu; K. Popsang chong 法相宗). In Chinese, "Dharma Characteristics School," the third and most important of three strands of YOGĀCĀRA-oriented MAHĀYĀNA Buddhism to emerge in China, along with the DI LUN ZONG and SHE LUN ZONG. The name Faxiang (originally coined by its opponents and having pejorative connotations) comes from its detailed analysis of factors (DHARMA) on the basis of the Yogācāra doctrine that all phenomena are transformations of consciousness, or "mere-representation" (VIJNAPTIMĀTRATĀ). The school's own preferred name for itself was the WEISHI ZONG (Consciousness/Representation-Only School). Interest in the theories of the SHIDIJING LUN (viz., Di lun) and the MAHĀLĀNASAMGRAHA (viz., She lun) largely waned as new YOGĀLĀRA texts from India were introduced to China by the pilgrim and translator XUANZANG (600/602-664) and the work of HUAYAN scholars such as FAZANG (643-712) on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA (within which the Dasabhumikasutra is incorporated) began to gain prominence. One of the reasons motivating Xuanzang's pilgrimage to India, in fact, was to procure definitive Indian materials that would help to resolve the discrepancies in interpretation of Yogācāra found in these different traditions. Because of the imperial patronage he received upon his return, Xuanzang became one of the most prominent monks in Chinese Buddhist history and attracted students from all over East Asia. The Faxiang school was established mainly on the basis of the CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimātratāsiddhi; "The Treatise on the Establishment of Consciousness-Only"), a text edited and translated into Chinese by Xuanzang, based on material that he brought back with him from India. Xuanzang studied under sĪLABHADRA (529-645), a principal disciple of DHARMAPĀLA (530-561), during his stay in India, and brought Dharmapāla's scholastic lineage back with him to China. Xuanzang translated portions of Dharmapāla's *VijNaptimātratāsiddhi, an extended commentary on VASUBANDHU's TRIMsILĀ ("Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only"). Dharmapāla's original exegesis cited the different interpretations of Vasubandhu's treatise offered by himself and nine other major scholiasts within the Yogācāra tradition; Xuanzang, however, created a précis of the text and translated only the "orthodox" interpretation of Dharmapāla. Xuanzang's disciple KUIJI (632-682) further systematized Xuanzang's materials by compiling the CHENG WEISHI LUN SHUJI ("Commentarial Notes on the *VijNaptimātratāsiddhi") and the Cheng weishi lun shuyao ("Essentials of the *VijNaptimātratāsiddhi"); for his efforts to build the school, Kuiji is traditionally regarded as the first Faxiang patriarch. The Faxiang school further developed under Huizhao (650-714), its second patriarch, and Zhizhou (668-723), its third patriarch, but thereafter declined in China. ¶ The teachings of the Faxiang school were transmitted to Korea (where it is called the Popsang chong) and were classified as one of the five major doctrinal traditions (see KYO) of the Unified Silla (668-935) and Koryo (935-1392) dynasties. The Korean expatriate monk WoNCH'ŬK (613-696) was one of the two major disciples of Xuanzang, along with Kuiji, and there are reports of intense controversies between Kuiji's Ci'en scholastic line (CI'EN XUEPAI) and Wonch'uk's Ximing scholastic line (XIMING XUEPAI) due to their differing interpretations of Yogācāra doctrine. Wonch'ŭk's commentary to the SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA, the Jieshenmi jing shu (K. Haesimmil kyong so), was transmitted to the DUNHUANG region and translated into Tibetan by CHOS GRUB (C. Facheng, c. 755-849) at the behest of the Tibetan king RAL PA CAN (806-838), probably sometime between 815 and 824. Wonch'ŭk's exegesis of the scripture proved to be extremely influential in the writings of TSONG KHA PA (1357-1419), and especially on his LEGS BSHAD SNYING PO, where Wonch'ŭk's work is called the "Great Chinese Commentary." ¶ The Japanese Hossoshu developed during the Nara period (710-784) after being transmitted from China and Korea, but declined during the Heian (794-1185) due to persistent attacks from the larger TENDAI (C. TIANTAI) and SHINGON (C. Zhenyan) schools. Although the Hossoshu survived, it did not have the wide influence over the Japanese tradition as did its major rivals. ¶ Faxiang is known for its comprehensive list of one hundred DHARMAs, or "factors" (BAIFA), in which all dharmas-whether "compounded" or "uncompounded," mundane or supramundane-are subsumed; this list accounts in large measure for its designation as the "dharma characteristics" school. These factors are classified into five major categories:
Fazang. (J. Hozo; K. Popchang 法藏) (643-712). Tang-dynasty Chinese monk and putative third patriarch of the HUAYAN ZONG, also known as Xianshou, Dharma Master Guoyi (Nation's Best), Great Master Xiangxiang (Fragrant Elephant), and state preceptor (GUOSHI) Kang Zang. Fazang was the third-generation descendent of immigrants to China from the kingdom of SOGDIANA in Central Asia (the Greek Transoxiana) and thus used as his secular surname the ethnicon KANG. At a young age, Fazang became a student of the Chinese monk ZHIYAN, and studied the AVATAMSAKASuTRA. Fazang was also fluent in several Central Asian languages, and assisted the monks sIKsĀNANDA and YIJING in translating new recensions of the AvataMsakasutra (699) and the LAnKĀVATĀRASuTRA (704). Empress WU ZETIAN often requested Fazang to lecture on the AvataMsakasutra and its teachings on PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA. Fazang devoted the rest of his career to the study of the AvataMsakasutra and composing commentaries on the Lankāvatārasutra, FANWANG JING, DASHENG QIXIN LUN, and other texts. Many of Fazang's compositions sought to systematize his teacher Zhiyan's vision of the AvataMsakasutra in terms drawn from indigenous Chinese Buddhist materials, such as the Dasheng qixin lun. In so doing, Fazang developed much of the specific doctrinal terminology and worldview that comes to be emblematic of the Huayan zong, making him the de facto founder of this indigenous school of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. Among Fazang's many works, his HUAYAN JING TANXUAN JI, HUAYAN WUJIAO ZHANG, and his commentary to the Dasheng qixin lun shu ("Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna") are most famous. Fazang passed away while residing at the monastery of Da Qianfusi. Fazang remained close throughout his life to his Korean colleague ŬISANG, the founder of the Korean Hwaom school, with whom he studied together under Zhiyan, and some of his correspondence with Ŭisang survives. SIMSANG (J. Shinjo) (d. c. 744), another Korean who is claimed to have been a direct disciple of Fazang, was the first transmitter of the Huayan teachings in Japan, and Simsang's own disciple RYoBEN [alt. Roben] (689-773) is considered the founder of the Japanese Kegon school. For discussion of Fazang's philosophical views, see also HUAYAN ZONG; INDRA'S NET; SI FAJIE.
Fazhao. (J. Hosho; K. Popcho 法照) (d.u.). Tang-dynasty Chinese monk, now revered by followers of the Japanese JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu as the fifth patriarch of the PURE LAND (JINGTU ZONG) tradition in China. Fazhao resided at LUSHAN early in his career, where he devoted himself to recitation of the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA (see NIANFO); there, Fazhao had a vision of AMITĀBHA, who personally taught him about the pure land. Fazhao subsequently traveled to the Chinese capital of Chang'an, where he developed the method of WUHUI NIANFO, or "five-tempo intonation of [the name of] the Buddha." When he demonstrated this practice in 767 at the monastery of Yunfengsi, the practice is said to have resulted in a series of miracles, such as the appearance of Amitābha amid the clouds, which in turn purportedly led Emperor Daizong (762-779) to invite Fazhao to the imperial palace. In addition to demonstrating the value of buddha-recitation practice, Fazhao also sought to explain pure land teachings in terms drawn from TIANTAI doctrine, bringing pure land beliefs into the mainstream of contemporary Buddhist intellectual discourse. Because of his success in propagating pure land teachings, his peers called Fazhao the "latter-day SHANDAO." Fazhao later moved to the monastery of Zhulinsi on WUTAISHAN and acquired the cognomen Wuhui fashi (Dharma Master Five-Tempo).
Fazun. (法尊) (T. Blo bzang chos 'phags) (1902-1980). Twentieth-century Chinese translator of Buddhist scriptures and scholar of Tibetan religious and political history. In 1920, Fazun was ordained as a novice on WUTAISHAN. He became acquainted with Dayong (1893-1929), a student of TAIXU's who introduced him to the techniques of Buddhist TANTRA, at the time a popular strand of Buddhism in China in its Japanese (MIKKYo) and Tibetan forms. Fully ordained in Beijing in 1922, Fazun trained under Taixu's patronage in the tenets of the PURE LAND and TIANTAI schools at the Wuchang Institute for Buddhist Studies. During the same years, Taixu urged Dayong to train in Japanese mikkyo on KoYASAN. Taixu's aim was to verify and rectify the opinions about Buddhist tantra that circulated in China, where this form of Indian Buddhism had flourished at the Tang court. Upon his return, Dayong conferred on Fazun several ABHIsEKAs of the lower tantric cycles that he had brought from Japan. He also instructed Fazun in the Mizong gangyao ("Essentials of Tantra"), a primer for students of Buddhist tantra by the Japanese SHINGONSHu scholar Gonda Raifu (1846-1934) that Wang Hongyuan (1876-1937), a Chinese student of Gonda's, had translated in 1918. After an introduction to the Tibetan tantric traditions by Bai Puren (1870-1927), a Mongolian lama stationed at Beijing's Yonghe Gong, Dayong became gradually dissatisfied with Japanese mikkyo. With Taixu's endorsement, he resolved to study Buddhist tantra in its Tibetan form. In 1924, Fazun joined Dayong's Group for Learning the Dharma in Tibet (Liu Zang Xuefa Tuan), a team of some thirty Chinese monks who were studying the basics of the Tibetan language in Beijing. From 1925 to 1929, Fazun carried on his language learning in eastern Tibet and began his training in the classics of the DGE LUGS monastic curriculum, which in the ensuing years would become his main focus of translation. After Dayong's passing in 1929, Fazun followed his Tibetan teacher, DGE BSHES A mdo, to central Tibet. He stayed at 'BRAS SPUNGS monastery from 1930 to 1933. In 1934, Taixu asked Fazun to take on the position of director at the newly established Sino-Tibetan Institute (Hanzang Jiaoli Yuan) near Chongqing. The thirteenth DALAI LAMA also encouraged Fazun to spread TSONG KHA PA's synthesis of the Buddhist teachings in China. Hence from 1935, under the Japanese occupation and during the Chinese civil war, Fazun served as an educator of young monks in Tibetan Buddhism and as a translator of Tibetan scriptures at the Sino-Tibetan Institute. These years of prolific translation work established Fazun as the foremost translator of Buddhism from Tibetan sources in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Among his translations are Tsong kha pa's LAM RIM CHEN MO (Putidao cidi guanglun), LEGS BSHAD SNYING PO (Bian liaoyi buliaoyi lun), SNGAGS RIM CHEN MO (Mizong daocidi lun); MAITREYA's ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA (Xianguan zhuangyan lun); CANDRAKĪRTI's MADHYAMAKĀVATĀRA (Ru zhonglun); and ĀRYADEVA's CATUḤsATAKA (Sibailun song). Fazun also translated into Tibetan the ABHIDHARMAMAHĀVIBLĀsA, extant in the two hundred rolls of XUANZANG's Chinese rendering (Da piposha lun), by the title Bye brag bshad mdzod chen mo. In 1950, after the Communist authorities discontinued the activities of the Institute, Fazun moved to Beijing. The Committee for Minority Affairs appointed him as a translator of communist propaganda materials, including Chairman Mao's Xin minzhu zhuyi("New Democracy") and Lun renmin minzhu zhuanzheng ("On the People's Democratic Dictatorship"), for the education of the new generation of cadres in occupied Tibet. In 1966, as the Cultural Revolution set in, he was charged with expressing anti-Communist sentiments during the 1930s. He was confined in a labor camp until his release in 1972. During the 1970s Fazun resumed his translation activity from Tibetan with DHARMAKĪRTI's PRALĀnAVĀRTTIKA (Shiliang lun), DIGNĀGA's PRALĀnASAMUCCAYA (Jiliang lun), and ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNĀNA's BODHIPATHAPRADĪPA (Putidao deng lun). Fazun suffered a fatal heart attack in 1980. Because of his unsurpassed knowledge of Tibetan language, religion, and history, and his writing style inspired by KUMĀRAJĪVA's and Xuanzang's Buddhist Chinese, Fazun is often referred to as "the Xuanzang of modern times."
Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco (Kano Yeitan). (1853-1908). An American proponent of Japanese Buddhism and Japanese art. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, to a mother from Salem and a Spanish father, he was part of Boston's East Asian renaissance during the 1890s and one of the first students of the incipient discipline of art history. He studied philosophy at Harvard and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At the age of twenty-five, Fenollosa went to teach at the Imperial University in Japan, where his students introduced him to Buddhism. His interest in the religion grew through his visits to temples near Nara and Kyoto. Fenollosa also became interested in traditional Japanese art and met the aristocratic families who had been court painters during the Tokugawa shogunate. By 1882, Fenollosa was considered enough of an expert to lecture at the Ryuchikai Club and, in 1884, he was named an imperial commissioner of fine arts. Sakurai Keitaku Ajari, the head of the Hoyugin Temple at MIIDERA, became Fenollosa's teacher of Buddhism. Fenollosa received the precepts of TENDAI Buddhism in 1885, making him one of the first Americans to practice MAHĀLĀNA Buddhism. During his time in Japan, he was adopted into the Kano family and received the name Kano Yeitan. He was also presented with the "Order of the Sacred Mirror" by the Meiji emperor. After returning to the United States in 1890, Fenollosa lectured and wrote about Buddhism, became the curator of Far Eastern Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and in 1893 published a poem called East and West. In 1895, he married his second wife, Mary McNeil Scott, and they returned together to Japan, where Fenollosa taught English at Tokyo Higher Normal School. He and Mary remained in Japan until 1900. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, his magnum opus, was published posthumously, with help from Ezra Pound.
fifth generation language ::: (language, artificial intelligence) A myth the Japanese spent a lot of money on. In about 1982, MITI decided it would spend ten years and a lot of crisis. The project spent its money and its ten years and in 1992 closed down with a wimper. (1996-11-06)
fifth generation language "language, artificial intelligence" A myth the Japanese spent a lot of money on. In about 1982, {MITI} decided it would spend ten years and a lot of money applying {artificial intelligence} to programming, thus solving the {software crisis}. The project spent its money and its ten years and in 1992 closed down with a wimper. (1996-11-06)
Fourteen A septenate in which each member is dual. In the Hindu Laws of Manu, fourteen manus are enumerated; and in theosophy a root-manu and a seed-manu are given for each round. In a Hindu allegory, there arise from the churning of the ocean fourteen “precious things,” which in a corresponding Japanese system are enumerated as seven. See also KURMA-AVATARA
Fudochi shinmyoroku. (不動智神妙録). In Japanese, "Record of the Mental Sublimity of Immovable Wisdom," a treatise on ZEN and sword fighting composed by the Japanese RINZAISHu monk TAKUAN SoHo (1573-1645). In the first half of the seventeenth century, Takuan found himself in the middle of a political battle known as the "purple robe incident" (shi'e jiken), which, in 1629, ultimately led to his exile to Kaminoyama in Uzen (present-day Yamagata Prefecture). There, he composed this treatise on the proper use of the mind in Zen and sword fighting for the samurai sword master Yagyu Muneori (1571-1646), the personal instructor to the shogun. Takuan first describes the afflictions that rise from ignorance (AVIDLĀ) as hindrances to proper sword fighting. Then he explains the "immovable wisdom" as the unclinging, unstopping mind. Takuan likens this unmoving state to the concept of "no-mind" (J. mushin; C. WUXIN) in the "Platform Sutra" (LIUZU TANJING), wherein one's movements are not calculated, but instinctual; thus, there should be no gap between mind and sword. The rest of the treatise expounds upon the proper means of attaining this state of no-mind.
Fujitsu ::: (company) A Japanese elecronics corporation. Fujitsu owns ICL, Amdahl Corporation, and DMR.Home .(2000-04-03)
Fujitsu "company" A Japanese elecronics corporation. Fujitsu owns {ICL}, {Amdahl Corporation}, and {DMR}. Home {USA (http://fujitsu.com/)}, {Japan (http://fujitsu.co.jp/index-e.html)}. (2000-04-03)
Fukan zazengi. (普勸坐禪儀). In Japanese, "General Advice on the Principles of Seated Meditation," an important meditation manual composed by the eminent Japanese ZEN master DoGEN KIGEN. Although this treatise is traditionally dated to 1227, recent discoveries of a hitherto unknown copy of the Fukan zazengi suggest the date of 1233. The Fukan zazengi is a relatively short treatise on seated meditation (ZAZEN), which is also embedded in Dogen's magnum opus, the SHoBoGENZo. The treatise underscores the need to practice seated meditation as a corrective against excessive indulgence in "words and letters," viz., scholastic interpretations of Buddhist doctrine (cf. BULI WENZI). The explanation of how to perform seated meditation starts with preparing a quiet spot for practice and following a proper diet. The correct posture for meditation is then described. The actual practice of seated meditation begins with the regulation of breathing, which is followed by an injunction to stay aware of all thoughts that arise in the mind. The treatise then briefly explains the psychosomatic effects of meditation and the proper way to rise from seated meditation. The importance of seated meditation is reiterated at the end. Dogen's manual is in large part a revision of the Chinese Chan master CHANGLU ZONGZE's influential primer of meditation, the ZUOCHAN YI.
Fukeshu. (普化宗). In Japanese, "Puhua Sect"; a secondary sect of the Japanese ZEN school, founded by SHINCHI KAKUSHIN (1207-1298). While Kakushin was in China studying under WUMEN HUIKAI (1183-1260), he is said to have met a layman, the otherwise-unknown Zhang Can (J. Cho San; d.u.), who claimed to be a sixteenth-generation successor of the little-known Tang-dynasty monk Puhua (J. Fuke; d.u.), supposedly an eccentric friend of LINJI YIXUAN and a successor of MAZU DAOYI. Four lay disciples of Zhang's accompanied Kakushin when he returned to Japan, helping Kakushin to establish the sect. There is no evidence of the existence of a Puhua school in China apart from Kakushin's account, however, and the school seems to be a purely Japanese creation. During the Tokugawa era (1603-1867), in particular, the school attracted itinerant lay Zen practitioners, known as "clerics of emptiness" (kamuso), who played the bamboo flute (shakuhachi) as a form of meditation and wore a distinctive bamboo hat that covered their entire face as they traveled on pilgrimage around the country. Because masterless samurai (ronin) and bandits began adopting Fuke garb as a convenient disguise during the commission of their crimes, the Meiji government proscribed the school in 1871 and it vanished from the scene.
furigana "human language, Japanese" (Or "rubi") Small {hiragana}, written above {kanji} (and these days sometimes above Latin characters) as a phonetic comment and reading aid. The singular and plural are both "furigana". (2000-12-30)
furigana ::: (human language, Japanese) (Or rubi) Small hiragana, written above kanji (and these days sometimes above Latin characters) as a phonetic comment and reading aid. The singular and plural are both furigana.(2000-12-30)
fusho Zen. (不生禪). In Japanese, "unborn Zen"; a form of ZEN meditation popularized by the RINZAISHu master BANKEI YoTAKU. The teaching of the "unborn" (fusho) functioned as the central theme of Bankei's vernacular sermons (kana hogo). According to Bankei, the unborn is none other than buddha-nature (FOXING), or buddha mind, itself. As such, he emphatically notes that there is little need actually to seek buddhahood, since everyone is already born with the innate, unborn buddha mind. Bankei's teaching of unborn Zen was harshly criticized by the fellow Rinzai Zen master HAKUIN EKAKU.
garanbo. (伽藍法). In Japanese, lit. "temple dharma," viz., "temple lineage." Garanbo refers to the practice of inheriting the lineage of a temple (i.e., the lineage of the temple's founder) regardless of the monastic lineage one might have inherited earlier from one's teacher. By the Edo period, most temples and monasteries belonging to the ZENSHu in Japan required monks to follow the garanbo system. Through the garanbo system, monasteries built by the founder of a lineage were able to secure financial and spiritual support from a network of temples belonging to that lineage.
GCOS "operating system" /jee'kohs/ An {operating system} developed by {General Electric} from 1962; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System). The GECOS-II operating system was developed by {General Electric} for the 36-bit {GE-635} in 1962-1964. Contrary to rumour, GECOS was not cloned from {System/360} [{DOS/360}?] - the GE-635 architecture was very different from the {IBM 360} and GECOS was more ambitious than DOS/360. GE Information Service Divsion developed a large special multi-computer system that was not publicised because they did not wish {time sharing} customers to challenge their bills. Although GE ISD was marketing {DTSS} - the first commercial time sharing system - GE Computer Division had no license from Dartmouth and GE-ISD to market it to external customers, so they designed a time-sharing system to sell as a standard part of GECOS-III, which replaced GECOS-II in 1967. GECOS TSS was more general purpose than DTSS, it was more a programmer's tool (program editing, e-mail on a single system) than a BASIC TSS. The {GE-645}, a modified 635 built by the same people, was selected by {MIT} and {Bell} for the {Multics} project. Multics' infancy was as painful as any infancy. Bell pulled out in 1969 and later produced {Unix}. After the buy-out of GE's computer division by {Honeywell}, GECOS-III was renamed GCOS-3 (General Comprehensive Operating System). Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as "God's Chosen Operating System", allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their product. [Can anyone confirm this?] GCOS won and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell {Multics}. Honeywell also decided to launch a new product line called Level64, and later DPS-7. It was decided to mainatin, at least temporarily, the 36-bit machine as top of the line, because GCOS-3 was so successfull in the 1970s. The plan in 1972-1973 was that GCOS-3 and Multics should converge. This plan was killed by Honeywell management in 1973 for lack of resources and the inability of Multics, lacking {databases} and {transaction processing}, to act as a business operating system without a substantial reinvestment. The name "GCOS" was extended to all Honeywell-marketed product lines and GCOS-64, a completely different 32-bit operating system, significanctly inspired by Multics, was designed in France and Boston. GCOS-62, another different 32-bit low-end DOS level was designed in Italy. GCOS-61 represented a new version of a small system made in France and the new {DPS-6} 16-bit {minicomputer} line got GCOS-6. When the intended merge between GCOS-3 and Multics failed, the Phoenix designers had in mind a big upgrade of the architecture to introduce {segmentation} and {capabilities}. GCOS-3 was renamed GCOS-8, well before it started to use the new features which were introduced in next generation hardware. The GCOS licenses were sold to the Japanese companies {NEC} and {Toshiba} who developed the Honeywell products, including GCOS, much further, surpassing the {IBM 3090} and {IBM 390}. When Honeywell decided in 1984 to get its top of the range machines from NEC, they considered running Multics on them but the Multics market was considered too small. Due to the difficulty of porting the ancient Multics code they considered modifying the NEC hardware to support the Multics compilers. GCOS3 featured a good {Codasyl} {database} called IDS (Integrated Data Store) that was the model for the more successful {IDMS}. Several versions of transaction processing were designed for GCOS-3 and GCOS-8. An early attempt at TP for GCOS-3, not taken up in Europe, assumed that, as in {Unix}, a new process should be started to handle each transaction. IBM customers required a more efficient model where multiplexed {threads} wait for messages and can share resources. Those features were implemented as subsystems. GCOS-3 soon acquired a proper {TP monitor} called Transaction Driven System (TDS). TDS was essentially a Honeywell development. It later evolved into TP8 on GCOS-8. TDS and its developments were commercially successful and predated IBM {CICS}, which had a very similar architecture. GCOS-6 and GCOS-4 (ex-GCOS-62) were superseded by {Motorola 68000}-based {minicomputers} running {Unix} and the product lines were discontinued. In the late 1980s Bull took over Honeywell and Bull's management chose Unix, probably with the intent to move out of hardware into {middleware}. Bull killed the Boston proposal to port Multics to a platform derived from DPS-6. Very few customers rushed to convert from GCOS to Unix and new machines (of CMOS technology) were still to be introduced in 1997 with GCOS-8. GCOS played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the {mainframe} market. Some early Unix systems at {Bell Labs} used GCOS machines for print spooling and various other services. The field added to "/etc/passwd" to carry GCOS ID information was called the "{GECOS field}" and survives today as the "pw_gecos" member used for the user's full name and other human-ID information. [{Jargon File}] (1998-04-23)
GCOS ::: (operating system) /jee'kohs/ An operating system developed by General Electric from 1962; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System).The GECOS-II operating system was developed by General Electric for the 36-bit GE-635 in 1962-1964. Contrary to rumour, GECOS was not cloned from System/360 [DOS/360?] - the GE-635 architecture was very different from the IBM 360 and GECOS was more ambitious than DOS/360.GE Information Service Divsion developed a large special multi-computer system that was not publicised because they did not wish time sharing customers to GECOS TSS was more general purpose than DTSS, it was more a programmer's tool (program editing, e-mail on a single system) than a BASIC TSS.The GE-645, a modified 635 built by the same people, was selected by MIT and Bell for the Multics project. Multics' infancy was as painful as any infancy. Bell pulled out in 1969 and later produced Unix.After the buy-out of GE's computer division by Honeywell, GECOS-III was renamed GCOS-3 (General Comprehensive Operating System). Other OS groups at Honeywell their product. [Can anyone confirm this?] GCOS won and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell Multics.Honeywell also decided to launch a new product line called Level64, and later DPS-7. It was decided to mainatin, at least temporarily, the 36-bit machine as lacking databases and transaction processing, to act as a business operating system without a substantial reinvestment.The name GCOS was extended to all Honeywell-marketed product lines and GCOS-64, a completely different 32-bit operating system, significanctly inspired small system made in France and the new DPS-6 16-bit minicomputer line got GCOS-6.When the intended merge between GCOS-3 and Multics failed, the Phoenix designers had in mind a big upgrade of the architecture to introduce segmentation and capabilities. GCOS-3 was renamed GCOS-8, well before it started to use the new features which were introduced in next generation hardware.The GCOS licenses were sold to the Japanese companies NEC and Toshiba who developed the Honeywell products, including GCOS, much further, surpassing the IBM 3090 and IBM 390.When Honeywell decided in 1984 to get its top of the range machines from NEC, they considered running Multics on them but the Multics market was considered too small. Due to the difficulty of porting the ancient Multics code they considered modifying the NEC hardware to support the Multics compilers.GCOS3 featured a good Codasyl database called IDS (Integrated Data Store) that was the model for the more successful IDMS.Several versions of transaction processing were designed for GCOS-3 and GCOS-8. An early attempt at TP for GCOS-3, not taken up in Europe, assumed that, as in required a more efficient model where multiplexed threads wait for messages and can share resources. Those features were implemented as subsystems.GCOS-3 soon acquired a proper TP monitor called Transaction Driven System (TDS). TDS was essentially a Honeywell development. It later evolved into TP8 on GCOS-8. TDS and its developments were commercially successful and predated IBM CICS, which had a very similar architecture.GCOS-6 and GCOS-4 (ex-GCOS-62) were superseded by Motorola 68000-based minicomputers running Unix and the product lines were discontinued.In the late 1980s Bull took over Honeywell and Bull's management choose Unix, probably with the intent to move out of hardware into middleware. Bull killed technology) are still to be introduced in 1997 with GCOS-8. GCOS played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe market.Some early Unix systems at Bell Labs used GCOS machines for print spooling and various other services. The field added to /etc/passwd to carry GCOS ID information was called the GECOS field and survives today as the pw_gecos member used for the user's full name and other human-ID information.[Jargon File] (1998-04-23)
genjo koan. (C. xiancheng gong'an; K. hyonsong kongan 現[見]成公案). In Japanese, lit. "presently manifest case," or "actualized case," deriving from a term in Chinese law for an "open and shut case," or someone "caught dead to rights." The term is sometimes used in the CHAN school to refer to the universality of buddhahood in all aspects of the mundane world and, for this reason, is occasionally interpreted (rather too freely) as the "koan of everyday life." Genjo koan is one of the seminal terms in the writings of DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253), the putative founder of the SoToSHu of Japanese ZEN, and is the title of a treatise written in 1233 that was later anthologized as the first roll of the sixty- and the seventy-five-roll recensions of his magnum opus, the SHoBoGENZo ("Treasury of the True Dharma Eye"). The term seems to have first been used by the Tang Chan master Muzhou Daoming (780-877), and more often later by such Song Chan masters as HONGZHI ZHENGJUE (1091-1157) and YUANWU KEQIN (1063-1135). Dogen deploys the term to criticize the RINZAI (LINJI) usage of koan (C. GONG'AN) as a means of catalyzing a breakthrough into awakening, thus making genjo koan a polemical device for distinguishing his presentation of Zen thought and practice from rival schools. Although Dogen never directly defines it, in his usage, genjo koan indicates the way in which all things are constantly manifesting their inherent buddhahood in the here and now; thus, Buddhist cultivation entails simply performing a single practice, such as seated meditation (J. ZAZEN), so completely that the enlightenment inherent in that practice becomes "an open and shut case."
Genshin. (源信) (942-1017). Japanese TENDAISHu monk, scholar, and artist, popularly known as ESHIN SoZU (Head Monk of Eshin) because he spent much of his life at the monastery of Eshin at YOKAWA on HIEIZAN. Genshin was born in Yamato province (present-day Nara prefecture), but after losing his father at a young age, he was put in the care of the Tendai center on Mt. Hiei. It is believed that during his teens he formally joined the institution and became a student of the Tendai reformer RYoGEN (912-985). Genshin first gained a name for himself in 974 due to his sterling performance in an important debate at Mt. Hiei. Eventually, Genshin retired to the secluded monastery of Shuryogon'in in Yokawa, where he devoted the rest of his life primarily to scholarship. Genshin wrote on a wide array of Buddhist topics related to both Tendai and PURE LAND practices and is also regarded as the founder of the Eshin school of Tendai, which espoused the notion that everyone is inherently awakened (J. HONGAKU). While it is uncertain if any of his art is extant, Genshin was both a sculptor and painter, and his paintings of the buddha Amida (S. AMITĀBHA) welcoming believers into the PURE LAND, referred to as raigozu, helped to popularize this subject in Japan. The most influential of Genshin's works was the oJo YoSHu ("Collection of Essentials on Going to Rebirth" [in the pure land]), written in 985, one of the first Japanese treatises on the practice of nenbutsu (C. NIANFO) and the soteriological goal of rebirth in the pure land, playing an important role in laying the groundwork for an independent pure land tradition in Japan a century later. The ojo yoshu offers a systematic overview of pure land thought and practice, using extensive passages culled from various scriptures and treatises, especially the writings of the Chinese pure land monks DAOCHUO and SHANDAO. Genshin contends that the practice of nenbutsu is relatively easy for everyone and is appropriate for people during the dharma-ending age (mappo; see MOFA), especially as a deathbed practice. The ojo yoshu was also one of the few texts written in Japan that made its way to China, where it influenced the development of pure land Buddhism on the mainland. Japanese Buddhists have long debated whether Genshin should be primarily viewed as affiliated with either the Tendai or pure land schools. In fact, however, this distinction was not relevant during Genshin's own lifetime, since an independent pure land tradition did not yet exist at that point. Given the Tendai notion that all beings can attain buddhahood through a variety of means, an argument he supports in his Ichijo yoketsu ("Essentials of the One Vehicle"), Genshin asserts that nenbutsu (C. nianfo) practice is the best method for reaching this goal. Pure land practice for Genshin therefore fits under the larger umbrella of Tendai thought. Nonetheless, Genshin's presentation of pure land beliefs and practice offered a foundation for the development of pure land Buddhism in Japan, notably in its influence on HoNEN (1133-1212) and SHINRAN (1173-1263); for this reason, the JoDO SHINSHu school considers Genshin to be the sixth patriarch in its lineage.
Gishin. (義眞) (781-833). Japanese monk who was the first head (zasu) of the TENDAISHu. At a young age, Gishin became the student of the Japanese monk SAICHo, who dwelled on HIEIZAN. He later went to the monastery of DAIANJI and studied the VINAYA under the Chinese vinaya master GANJIN. Gishin also studied Chinese under Jiken (d.u.) of ToDAIJI. In 804, the novice Gishin followed his teacher Saicho to China where he primarily served as an interpreter for his teacher. That same year, Saicho and Gishin arrived at the monastery of Guoqingsi on Mt. Tiantai (in present-day Zhejiang province). There, Gishin was ordained, receiving the full monastic precepts. The next year, both Saicho and Gishin received the "perfect teaching" (C. YUANJIAO) BODHISATTVA precepts (engyo bosatsukai) of the FANWANG JING from the reputed seventh patriarch of the TIANTAI tradition Daosui (d.u.) at the monastery of Longxingsi. Before their return to Japan that year, both Saicho and Gishin purportedly received initiation into the "two realms" (RYoBU) of the KONGoKAI (vajradhātu) and TAIZoKAI (garbadhātu) MAndALAs from a certain Shunxiao (d.u.) during their sojourn in Yuezhou (present-day Zhejiang province). After Saicho's death in 823, Gishin was given permission to construct a MAHĀYĀNA precepts platform (daijo kaidan) at his monastery of ENRYAKUJI. In 832, he was appointed the first head (zasu) of the Tendai school on Mt. Hiei.
Goddard, Dwight. (1861-1939). American popularizer of Buddhism and author of the widely read A Buddhist Bible. He was born in Massachusetts and educated in both theology and mechanical engineering. Following the death of his first wife, he enrolled at Hartford Theological Seminary and was ordained as a minister in the Congregational Church. He went to China as a missionary and it was there that he visited his first Buddhist monastery. After holding pastoral positions in Massachusetts and Chicago, he left the ministry to become a mechanical engineer. An invention that he sold to the government made him independently wealthy and allowed him to retire in 1913. He traveled to China several times in the 1920s, where he met a Lutheran minister who was seeking to promote understanding between Buddhists and Christians. Goddard first learned of Zen Buddhism from a Japanese friend in New York in 1928 and later traveled to Japan where he met DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI and practiced ZAZEN for eight months in Kyoto. Upon his return to America, Goddard attempted in 1934 to form an American Buddhist community, called the Followers of the Buddha. With property in Vermont and California, the organization was to include a celibate monkhood, called the Homeless Brothers, supported by lay members. Goddard also published a Buddhist magazine, Zen, A Magazine of Self-Realization, before bringing out, with his own funds, what would become his most famous work, A Buddhist Bible, in 1932. The purpose of the anthology was to "show the unreality of all conceptions of the personal ego" and inspire readers to follow the path to buddhahood. It was Goddard's conviction that Buddhism was the religion most capable of meeting the problems of European civilization. Commercially published in 1938, the contents of A Buddhist Bible were organized by the language of a text's origins and contained works that had not been translated into English before. The works came mostly from Chinese, translated by the Chinese monk Wai-tao, in collaboration with Goddard. Tibetan selections were drawn from W. Y. EVANS-WENTZ. A Buddhist Bible is not without its eccentricities. For example, Goddard rearranged the VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA ("Diamond Sutra") into a more "sensible" order, and he included in his anthology a classic of Chinese philosophy, the Daode jing (Tao te ching). Goddard also composed his own treatise to provide practical guidance in meditation, which he felt was difficult for Europeans and Americans. As one of the first anthologies of Buddhist texts widely available in the West, and especially because it was one of the few that included MAHĀYĀNA works, A Buddhist Bible remained widely read for decades after its publication.
Godensho. (御伝鈔). In Japanese, "Biographical Notes," an important early biography of SHINRAN (1163-1273), in two rolls; written in 1295 by his great-grandson KAKUNYO (1270-1351), the third abbot of HONGANJI. Godensho is the abbreviated title of this work favored in JoDO SHINSHu communities; its full title is Honganji Shonin Shinran den e ("Biography with Illustrations of the Honganji Sage Shinran"). This text is often paired with illustrations in a version that is presumed to have been composed by Kakunyo's son Zonkaku (1290-1373) and painted by Joga Hogen. As few documents survive from Shinran's time, this biography is especially important in detailing the events in Shinran's life, and all later biographies draw upon it. One of the most important features of the Godensho is its identification of Shinran as being an earthly manifestation of AMITĀBHA.
gohonzon. (御本尊). In Japanese, "object of devotion." See DAI-GOHONZON.
gong'an. (J. koan; K. kongan 公案). In Chinese, "public case," or "precedent"; better known in the West by its Japanese pronunciation koan, a word that has now entered common English parlance as "koan." Gong'an was originally a legal term, referring to the magistrate's (gong) table (an), which by metonymy comes to refer to a legal precedent or an authoritative judgment; the term also comes to mean simply a "story" (gong'an in vernacular Chinese refers to the genre of detective stories). The term is widely used in the CHAN school in a way that conveys both denotations of a legal precedent and a story. The study of gong'an seems to have had its beginnings in the practice, probably dating from the late-Tang dynasty, of commenting on the exchanges or "ancient precedents" (guce) culled from Chan genealogical histories (e.g., JINGDE CHUANDENG LU) and the recorded sayings or discourse records (YULU) of the Chan masters of the past. Commenting on old cases (niangu), often using verses (SONGGU), seems to have become a well-established practice by the early Song dynasty, as more recorded sayings began to include separate sections known as nianggu and songgu. Perhaps one of the most famous collections of verse commentaries on old cases is the Chan master XUEDOU CHONGXIAN's Xuedou heshang baice songgu, which now exists only as part of a larger influential collection of gong'ans known as the BIYAN LU. Other famous gong'an collections, such as the CONGRONG LU and WUMEN GUAN, were compiled during the Song dynasty and thereafter. These collections often shared a similar format. Each case (bence), with some exceptions, begins with a pointer (CHUISHI), a short introductory paragraph. The actual case, often a short anecdote, is interspersed with interlinear notes known as "annotations" or "capping phrases" (C. zhuoyu/zhuyu; see J. JAKUGO). After the case, a prose commentary (pingchang), verse commentary (songgu), and subcommentary on the verse commentary follow. Traditionally, 1,700 specific gong'an are said to have been in circulation in the Chan school. Although this number does have antecedents within the tradition, there are no fixed numbers of cases included in Chan gong'an anthologies; for example, a late Qing-dynasty collection, the 1712 Zongjian falin, includes 2,720 gong'an, which were claimed to be all the gong'an then in active use within the tradition. Whatever the number, there seems not to have been any kind of systematic curriculum within the Chinese Chan or Korean Son traditions using this full panoply of gong'an. The creation of a pedagogical system of training involving mastery of a series of many different koans is commonly attributed to HAKUIN EKAKU (1685-1768) in the Japanese RINZAISHu of ZEN. The widespread reference to 1,700 gong'an in Western-language materials may derive from accounts of Japanese government attempts in 1627 to routinize the Rinzai monastic curriculum, by promulgating a regulation requiring all Zen abbots to master 1,700 cases as part of their training. ¶ The literary endeavor of studying old cases also gave rise to new forms of meditation. The Chan master DAHUI ZONGGAO in the YANGQI PAI of the LINJI ZONG systematized a practice in which one focuses on what he termed the "meditative topic" (HUATOU), which in some contexts refers to the "keyword," or "critical phrase" of a gong'an story. For instance, the famous huatou "WU" (no) that Dahui used as a meditative topic was derived from a popular gong'an attributed to ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN: A student asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have buddha nature, or not?," to which Zhaozhou replied "wu" (no; lit., "it does not have it") (see WU GONG'AN; GOUZI WU FOXING). This new practice was called the "Chan of observing the meditative topic" or, more freely, "questioning meditation" (KANHUA CHAN). During the Song dynasty, students also began to seek private instruction on gong'an from Chan masters. These instructions often occurred in the abbot's quarters (FANGZHANG). ¶ The active study of gong'an in Korean SoN begins with POJO CHINUL and his disciple CHIN'GAK HYESIM, who learned of Dahui's kanhua Chan largely through the writings of their Chinese counterpart. Hyesim was also the first Korean Son monk to compile his own massive collection of cases, titled the SoNMUN YoMSONG CHIP. The use of cases was later transmitted to Japan by pilgrims and émigré monks, where koan study became emblematic of the Rinzaishu. Because rote memorization of capping phrases came to take precedence over skilled literary composition in classical Chinese, the Japanese compiled large collections of capping phrases, such as the ZENRIN KUSHu, to use in their training.
gozan. (五山). In Japanese, "five mountains"; a medieval Japanese ranking system for officially sponsored ZEN monasteries, which may derive from Chinese institutional precedents. Large and powerful public monasteries in China known as "monasteries of the ten directions" (SHIFANGCHA) came under the control of the Chinese state during the Song dynasty and were designated either as VINAYA or CHAN monasteries. Government administration of these monasteries eventually ceased, but it is widely believed that five major Chan monasteries in Zhejiang province (ranked in the order of WANSHOUSI, Lingyinsi, Jingdesi, Jingci Bao'en Guangxiaosi, and Guanglisi) were selected to be protected and governed by the state, largely through the efforts of the Chan master DAHUI ZONGGAO and his disciples. Whether this is indeed the beginning of a "five-mountain ranking system" is unclear, but by the Yuan dynasty the term was clearly in use in China. The implementation of this system in Japan began under the rule of the Kamakura shogun Hojo Sadatoki (1271-1311). Five illustrious RINZAISHu monasteries in Kamakura, including KENCHoJI and ENGAKUJI, were granted gozan status and given a specific rank. A reordering of the gozan ranks occurred when Emperor Godaigo (1288-1339) came to power in 1333. The powerful Zen monasteries in Kyoto, NANZENJI and DAITOKUJI, replaced Kenchoji and Engakuji as the top-ranking monasteries, and the monastery of ToFUKUJI was added to the gozan system. The gozan ranks were changed again several times by the Ashikaga shogunate. By the Muromachi period, some three hundred official monasteries (kanji) were ranked either gozan, jissatsu (ten temples), or shozan (many mountains). The term gozan also came to denote the prosperous lineages of MUSo SOSEKI and ENNI BEN'EN, who populated the gozan monasteries; monks in these lineages were particularly renowned for their artistic and literary talents in classical Chinese and brushstroke art. There seems also to have been a five-mountain convent system (amadera gozan or niji gozan) for Japanese nuns, which paralleled the five-mountain monastery system of the monks, but little is known about it.
Gṛdhrakutaparvata. (P. Gijjhakutapabbata; T. Bya rgod phung po'i ri; C. Lingjiushan; J. Ryojusen; K. Yongch'uksan [alt. Yongch'wisan/Yongch'usan] 靈鷲山). In Sanskrit, "Vulture Peak," one of the five hills surrounding the city of RĀJAGṚHA, a favored site of GAUTAMA Buddha and several of his most important disciples in mainstream Buddhist materials and the site where the Buddha is said to have delivered many renowned sutras in the NIKĀYAs and ĀGAMAs; in the MAHĀYĀNA, Gṛdhrakuta is also the location where sĀKYAMUNI Buddha is purported to have preached such important Mahāyāna scriptures as the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") and the perfection of wisdom sutras (PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ). The hill was so named either because it was shaped like a vulture's beak or a flock of vultures, or because vultures roosted there. In another legend, the peak is said to have received its name when, in an attempt to distract ĀNANDA from his meditation, the demon MĀRA turned himself into a frightening vulture; Ānanda, however, was unswayed by the provocation and eventually became enlightened. In one of the most famous episodes in the life of the Buddha, his evil cousin DEVADATTA, in attempting to kill the Buddha, instead wounded him when he hurled a boulder down on him from the hill, cutting his toe; for this and other "acts that bring immediate retribution" (ĀNANTARYAKARMAN), Devadatta fell into AVĪCI hell. Because many important Mahāyāna sermons are said to have been spoken on the peak, some schools-specifically the Japanese NICHIRENSHu-believe that the mountain itself is a PURE LAND. Other sources state that because of the sutras set forth there, the peak has become a STuPA, and like the Buddha's seat (VAJRĀSANA) in BODHGAYĀ, it will not be destroyed by fire at the end of the KALPA. Although beings in the intermediate state (ANTARĀBHAVA) are said to be able to pass through mountains, they are not able to pass through Vulture Peak. The first Buddhist council (see COUNCIL, FIRST), in which a group of five hundred ARHATS met to recite the Buddha's teaching after his death, is said to have been held in a cave on Vulture Peak.
Guanyin. (J. Kannon; K. Kwanŭm 觀音). In Chinese, "Perceiver of Sounds," an abbreviation of the longer name Guanshiyin (J. Kanzeon; K. Kwanseŭm; Perceiver of the World's Sounds); the most famous and influential BODHISATTVA in all of East Asia, who is commonly known in Western popular literature as "The Goddess of Mercy." Guanyin (alt. Guanshiyin) is the Chinese translation of AVALOKITEsVARA, the bodhisattva of compassion; this rendering, popularized by the renowned Kuchean translator KUMĀRAJĪVA in his 405-406 CE translation of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), derives from an earlier form of this bodhisattva's name, Avalokitasvara, which is attested in some Sanskrit manuscripts of this scripture; Kumārajīva interprets this name as "gazing" (avalokita; C. guan) on the "sounds" (svara; C. yin) [of this wailing "world" (C. shi) of suffering]. Avalokitasvara was supplanted during the seventh century CE by the standard Sanskrit form Avalokitesvara, the "gazing" (avalokita) "lord" (īsvara); this later form is followed in XUANZANG's Chinese rendering Guanzizai (J. Kanjizai; K. Kwanjajae), as found in his 649 CE translation of the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA ("Heart Sutra"). The primary textual source for Guanyin worship is the twenty-fifth chapter of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra; that chapter is devoted to the bodhisattva and circulated widely as an independent text in East Asia. The chapter guarantees that if anyone in danger calls out Guanshiyin's name with completely sincerity, the bodhisattva will "perceive the sound" of his call and rescue him from harm. Unlike in India and Tibet, Avalokitesvara took on female form in East Asia around the tenth century. In traditional China, indigenous forms of Guanyin, such as BAIYI GUANYIN (White-Robed Guanyin), Yulan Guanyin (Guanyin with Fish Basket), SHUIYUE GUANYIN (Moon in Water Guanyin), Songzi Guanyin (Child-Granting Guanyin), MALANG FU, as well as Princess MIAOSHAN, became popular subjects of worship. Guanyin was worshipped in China by both monastics and laity, but her functions differed according to her manifestation. Guanyin thus served as a protectress against personal misfortune, a symbol of Buddhist ideals and restraint, or a granter of children. Various religious groups and lay communities also took one of her various forms as their patroness, and in this role, Guanyin was seen as a symbol of personal salvation. Beginning in the tenth century, these different manifestations of Guanyin proliferated throughout China through indigenous sutras (see APOCRYPHA), secular narratives, miracle tales, monastic foundation legends, and images. In later dynasties, and up through the twentieth century, Guanyin worship inspired both male and female religious groups. For example, White Lotus groups (see BAILIAN SHE; BAILIAN JIAO) during the Song dynasty included members from both genders, who were active in erecting STuPAs and founding cloisters that promoted Guanyin worship. In the twentieth century, certain women's groups were formed that took Princess Miaoshan's refusal to marry as inspiration to reject the institution of marriage themselves and, under the auspices of a Buddhist patron, pursue other secular activities as single women. ¶ In Japan, Kannon was originally introduced during the eighth century and took on additional significance as a female deity. For example, Kannon was often invoked by both pilgrims and merchants embarking on long sea voyages or overland travel. Invoking Kannon's name was thought to protect travelers from seven different calamities, such as fire, flood, storms, demons, attackers, lust and material desires, and weapons. Moreover, Kannon worship in Japan transcended sectarian loyalties, and there were numerous miracle tales concerning Kannon that circulated throughout the Japanese isles. ¶ In Korea, Kwanŭm is by far the most popular bodhisattva and is also known there as a deity who offers succor and assistance in difficult situations. The cult of Kwanŭm flourished initially under the patronage of the aristocracy in both the Paekche and Silla kingdoms, and historical records tell of supplications made to Kwanŭm for the birth of children or to protect relatives who were prisoners of war or who had been lost at sea. Hence, while the cult of AMITĀBHA was principally focused on spiritual liberation in the next life, Kwanŭm instead was worshipped for protection in this life. Still today, Kwanŭm is an object of popular worship and a focus of ritual chanting in Korean Buddhist monasteries by both monks and, especially, laywomen (and usually chanted in the form Kwanseŭm).
Gudo Toshoku. (愚堂東寔) (1579-1661). Japanese ZEN master in the RINZAISHu. Gudo Toshoku was born in Mino, present-day Gifu prefecture. In his twenties, he went on a pilgrimage around the country with several other young monks, such as DAIGU SoCHIKU and Ungo Kiyo (1582-1659), in search of a teacher. Gudo later travelled to Shotakuin, a memorial chapel (tatchu) at the Rinzai monastery of MYoSHINJI, where he found a teacher by the name of Yozan Keiyo (1559-1626). Gudo later became Yozan's DHARMA heir (see FASI). In 1614, Gudo became the abbot of a dilapidated monastery named Zuiganji in his native Mino. He was also invited as the abbot of the nearby monastery of Shodenji. In 1621, he was once again invited to restore Daisenji, another dilapidated monastery in Mino. With the support of powerful local patrons, Gudo was able to restore all these monasteries. In 1628, he became the abbot of Myoshinji and served as abbot a total of three times. During his stay at Myoshinji, Gudo led a faction within the monastery that opposed tendering an invitation to the Chinese Chan master YINYUAN LONGQI to serve as abbot of the monastery. Yinyuan instead was invited to Uji in 1661 to establish a new monastery, MANPUKUJI, which led to the foundation of the oBAKUSHu of Japanese Zen. Gudo later returned to his efforts to restore monasteries throughout the country. During the Tokugawa period, monasteries were mandated by the military government (bakufu) to affiliate themselves with a main monastery (honzan), thus becoming branch temples (matsuji). The monasteries that Gudo restored became branch temples of Myoshinji. Through Gudo's efforts, the influence of Myoshinji thus grew extensively. The influential Zen master HAKUIN EKAKU traced his lineage back to Gudo through the latter's disciple Shido Bunan (1603-1676) and Shido's disciple Dokyo Etan (1642-1721). Gudo later received the honorary title Daien Hokan kokushi (State Preceptor Great and Perfect Jeweled Mirror). His teachings can be found in the Hokanroku.
Gyogi. (行基) (668-749). Japanese monk of the Hosso (FAXIANG ZONG) tradition; his name is sometimes also seen transcribed as Gyoki, although Gyogi is to be preferred. Gyogi was a native of otori in Izumi no kuni (present Sakai-shi, osaka prefecture). He was ordained in 682, perhaps at the monastery of YAKUSHIJI, by the eminent monk DoSHo. Almost two decades later, Gyogi is said to have taken the rather unconventional route of directly preaching to the public in the capital and the countryside. He also became famous for building monasteries, bridges, roads, and irrigation systems. As a large number of the taxable population sought ordination from Gyogi, in 717 the court issued an edict banning private ordination, leaving temple grounds, and performing rites for the sick without official sanction. The court then increased its control of the Buddhist SAMGHA by requiring government certification (kokucho) of all ordinations. The court's hostile attitude toward Gyogi later changed and in 743 he was asked to assist in the construction of the great VAIROCANA statue at ToDAIJI. Shortly thereafter, Gyogi was appointed by Emperor Shomu (r. 724-749) as the supreme priest (daisojo) of the office of priestly affairs (sogo) in 745.
Gyonen. (凝然) (1240-1321). Japanese monk associated with the Kegonshu doctrinal school (HUAYAN ZONG). Gyonen was a scion of the Fujiwara clan, one of the most influential aristocratic families in Japan, who ordained at sixteen and subsequently moved to ToDAIJI, where he eventually became abbot. At Todaiji, he lectured frequently on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, the central text of the Kegonshu, and was also invited to lecture on FAZANG's WUJIAO CHANG at the imperial court, which awarded him the honorary title of state preceptor (J. kokushi; C. GUOSHI). Gyonen wrote over 125 works, all in literary Chinese, which ran the gamut from SuTRA exegesis, to biography, to ritual music. Gyonen's interest in Buddhist doctrine was not limited to the Kegon school. His most famous work is his HASSHu KoYo ("Essentials of the Eight Traditions"), which provides a systematic overview of the history and doctrines of the eight major schools that were dominant in Japanese Buddhism during the Nara and Heian periods. Gyonen's portrayal of Japanese Buddhism as a collection of independent schools identified by discrete doctrines and independent lines of transmission had a profound impact on Japanese Buddhist studies into the modern period.
Hachiman. (八幡). In Japanese, "God of Eight Banners," a popular SHINTo deity (KAMI), who is also considered a "great BODHISATTVA"; also known as Hachiman jin. Although his origins are unclear, Hachiman can at least be traced back to his role as the tutelary deity of the Usa clan in Kyushu during the eighth century. Hachiman responded to an oracle in 749, vouchsafing the successful construction of the Great Buddha (DAIBUTSU) image at ToDAIJI and quickly rose in popularity in both Kyushu and the Nara capital. In 859, the Buddhist monk Gyokyo established the Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine near the capital of Kyoto that was dedicated to the deity. Hachiman's oracles continued to play decisive roles in Nara politics, leading to a worship cult devoted to him. The Hachiman cult expanded throughout the Heian period (794-1185), and in 809, he was designated a "great bodhisattva" (daibosatsu) by drawing on the concept of HONJI SUIJAKU (buddhas or bodhisattvas appearing in the world as gods). Hachiman also came to be considered a manifestation of the semi-legendary ancient sovereign ojin and was likewise seen as guardian of the monarch. From the eleventh century, the Minamoto warrior clan also linked itself with Hachiman. Through this patronage, Hachiman became increasingly associated with warfare. During the Meiji persecution of Buddhism in 1868, which separated the gods from the buddhas and bodhisattvas (SHINBUTSU BUNRI), Hachiman was divorced from his Buddhist identity and recast as a purely Shinto deity. Currently, there are approximately 25,000 Hachiman shrines across Japan.
haibutsu kishaku. (排佛釋). In Japanese, "abolishing Buddhism and destroying [the teachings of] sĀKYAMUNI"; a slogan coined to describe the extensive persecution of Buddhism that occurred during the Meiji period (1868-1912). The rise of Western-derived notions of nationalism, kokugaku (national learning), and SHINTo as a new national ideology raised serious questions about the role of Buddhism in modern Japan. Buddhism was characterized as a foreign influence and the institution suffered the disestablishment of thousands of temples, the desecration of its ritual objects, and the defrocking of monks and nuns. When an edict was issued separating Shinto from Buddhism in 1868 (see SHINBUTSU BUNRI), Buddhist monasteries and temples where local deities (KAMI) were worshipped as manifestations of a buddha or BODHISATTVA (see HONJI SUIJAKU) sustained the most damage. The forced separation of Shinto and Buddhism eventually led to the harsh criticism of Buddhism as a corrupt and superstitious institution. Buddhists sought to counter the effects of these attacks through a rapid transformation of the SAMGHA in order to make their religion more relevant to the needs of modern, secular society.
haiku: A Japanese poem where the form consists of a single three-line stanza of seventeen syllables. The first line contains five syllables, the second contains seven, whilst the last has, again, five syllables. The short poem encapsulates the spirit of the poet's mood. Haikus often lose their meaning in translation.
Hakuin Ekaku. (白隱慧鶴) (1685-1768). Japanese ZEN master renowned for revitalizing the RINZAISHu. Hakuin was a native of Hara in Shizuoka Prefecture. In 1699, Hakuin was ordained and received the name Ekaku (Wise Crane) from the monk Tanrei Soden (d. 1701) at the nearby temple of Shoinji. Shortly thereafter, Hakuin was sent by Tanrei to the temple of Daishoji in Numazu to serve the abbot Sokudo Fueki (d. 1712). Hakuin is then said to have lost faith in his Buddhist training and devoted much of his time instead to art. In 1704, Hakuin visited the monk Bao Sochiku (1629-1711) at the temple Zuiunji in Mino province. While studying under Bao, Hakuin is said to have read the CHANGUAN CEJIN by YUNQI ZHUHONG, which inspired him to further meditative training. In 1708, Hakuin is said to have had his first awakening experience upon hearing the ringing of a distant bell. That same year, Hakuin met Doju Sokaku (1679-1730), who urged him to visit the Zen master Dokyo Etan (1642-1721), or Shoju Ronin, at the hermitage of Shojuan in Iiyama. During one of his begging rounds, Hakuin is said to have had another important awakening after an old woman struck him with a broom. Shortly after his departure from Shojuan, Hakuin suffered from an illness, which he cured with the help of a legendary hermit named Hakuyu. Hakuin's famous story of his encounter with Hakuyu was recounted in his YASENKANNA, Orategama, and Itsumadegusa. In 1716, Hakuin returned to Shoinji and devoted much of his time to restoring the monastery, teaching students, and lecturing. Hakuin delivered famous lectures on such texts as the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA, BIYAN LU, BAOJING SANMEI, DAHUI PUJUE CHANSHI SHU, and YUANREN LUN, and the recorded sayings (YULU) of LINJI YIXUAN, WUZU FAYAN, and XUTANG ZHIYU. He also composed a number of important texts during this period, such as the Kanzan shi sendai kimon, Kaian kokugo, and SOKKoROKU KAIEN FUSETSU. Prior to his death, Hakuin established the monastery of Ryutakuji in Mishima (present-day Shizuoka prefecture). Hakuin was a strong advocate of "questioning meditation" (J. kanna Zen; C. KANHUA CHAN), which focused on the role of doubt in contemplating the koan (GONG'AN). Hakuin proposed that the sense of doubt was the catalyst for an initial SATORI (awakening; C. WU), which had then to be enhanced through further koan study in order to mature the experience. The contemporary Rinzai training system involving systematic study of many different koans is attributed to Hakuin, as is the famous koan, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" (see SEKISHU KoAN). Hakuin was a prolific writer who left many other works as well, including the Dokugo shingyo, Oniazami, Yabukoji, Hebiichigo, Keiso dokuzui, Yaemugura, and Zazen wasan. Hakuin also produced many prominent disciples, including ToREI ENJI, Suio Genro (1716-1789), and GASAN JITo. The contemporary Japanese Rinzai school of Zen traces its lineage and teachings back to Hakuin and his disciples.
Hanam Chungwon. (漢岩重遠) (1876-1951). First supreme patriarch (CHONGJoNG) of the Korean Buddhist CHOGYE CHONG (between 1941 and 1945), before the split between the Chogye order and T'AEGO CHONG; he is also known as Pang Hanam, using his secular surname. In 1899, Hanam went to the hermitage Sudoam in Ch'ongamsa to study with KYoNGHo SoNGU, the preeminent SoN master of his generation. In 1905, after three years of lecturing throughout the country, Hanam became the Son master of Naewon Meditation Center at the monastery of T'ONGDOSA. In 1926, he moved to Sangwonsa on Odae Mountain, which remained his primary residence for the rest of his life. Hanam's best-known work is the biography he wrote of his teacher Kyongho; some twenty-three correspondences between him and his teacher are also still extant. More recently, in 1995, a collection of Hanam's own dharma talks was published as the Hanam ilbal nok ("Hanam's One-Bowl Record"). Hanam's "five regulations for the SAMGHA," which he promulgated when he first arrived at Sangwonsa, outlined what he considered to be the main constituents of Korean Buddhist practice: (1) Son meditation, (2) "recollection" of the Buddha's name (K. yombul; C. NIANFO), (3) doctrinal study, (4) ritual and worship, and (5) maintaining the monastery. Hanam was a strong advocate for the revitalization of "questioning meditation" (K. kanhwa Son; C. KANHUA CHAN) in Korean Buddhism, although he was more flexible than many Korean masters-who typically used ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN's "No" (K. mu; C. wu) gong'an (see WU GONG'AN; GOUZI WU FOXING) exclusively-in recommending also a variety of other Chan cases. Hanam also led a move to reconceive "recitation of the Buddha's name," a popular practice in contemporary Korean Buddhism, as "recollection of the Buddha's name," in order better to bring out the contemplative dimensions of yombul practice and its synergies with gong'an meditation. During the four years he was supreme patriarch of the Chogye order, Hanam was especially adept at avoiding entanglement with the Japanese colonial authorities, refusing, for example, to visit the governor-general in the capital of Seoul but accepting visits from Japanese authorities who came to Sangwonsa to "pay respects" to him. Hanam's emphasis on the monastic context of Son practice was an important influence in post-liberation Korean Buddhism after the end of World War II.
Han character "character" (From the Han dynasty, 206 B.C.E to 25 C.E.) One of the set of {glyphs} common to Chinese (where they are called "hanzi"), Japanese (where they are called {kanji}), and Korean (where they are called {hanja}). Han characters are generally described as "ideographic", i.e., picture-writing; but see the reference below. Modern Korean, Chinese and Japanese {fonts} may represent a given Han character as somewhat different glyphs. However, in the formulation of {Unicode}, these differences were {folded}, in order to conserve the number of {code positions} necessary for all of {CJK}. This unification is referred to as "Han Unification", with the resulting character repertoire sometimes referred to as "Unihan". {Unihan reference at the Unicode Consortium (http://charts.unicode.org/unihan.html)}. [John DeFrancis, "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", University of Hawaii Press, 1984]. (1998-10-18)
Han character ::: (character) (From the Han dynasty, 206 B.C.E to 25 C.E.) One of the set of glyphs common to Chinese (where they are called hanzi), Japanese (where they are called kanji), and Korean (where they are called hanja).Han characters are generally described as ideographic, i.e., picture-writing; but see the reference below.Modern Korean, Chinese and Japanese fonts may represent a given Han character as somewhat different glyphs. However, in the formulation of Unicode, these necessary for all of CJK. This unification is referred to as Han Unification, with the resulting character repertoire sometimes referred to as Unihan. .[John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, University of Hawaii Press, 1984]. (1998-10-18)
Hannya shingyo hiken. (般若心經秘鍵). In Japanese, "Secret Key to the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA"; attributed to the Japanese SHINGONSHu monk KuKAI. According to its colophon, Kukai composed the Hannya shingyo hiken upon imperial request during a great epidemic in 818, but an alternative theory rejects the colophon's claim and dates the text to 834. The Hannya shingyo hiken claims that the PrajNāpāramitāhṛdaya, the famous "Heart Sutra," is actually an esoteric scripture (see TANTRA) that explicates the "great mind-MANTRA SAMĀDHI" of the BODHISATTVA PrajNā. The treatise first provides a synopsis of the scripture and an explanation of its title, followed by a detailed interpretation of its teachings, in a total of five sections (each corresponding to a certain part of the scripture). In its first section, entitled "the complete interpenetration between persons and DHARMAs," the treatise describes the practice of the bodhisattva AVALOKITEsVARA in terms of five factors (cause, practice, attainment, entrance, and time). The next section, entitled "division of the various vehicles," divides the different vehicles (YĀNA) of Buddhism into the vehicles of construction, destruction, form, two, and one, and also mentions the vehicles of SAMANTABHADRA (see HUAYAN ZONG), MANJUsRĪ (see SANLUN ZONG), MAITREYA (see YOGĀCĀRA), sRĀVAKAs, PRATYEKABUDDHAs, and Avalokitesvara (see TIANTAI ZONG). In the third section, entitled "benefits attained by the practitioner," the treatise discusses seven types of practitioners (Huayan, Sanlun, Yogācāra, srāvaka, pratyekabuddha, Tiantai, and Shingon) and four varieties of dharmas (cause, practice, attainment, and entrance). The fourth section, entitled "clarification of the DHĀRAnĪ," explains the MANTRA "GATE GATE PĀRAGATE PĀRASAMGATE BODHI SVĀHĀ" in terms of its name, essence, and function, and also divides it into four types, which are associated with the srāvaka, pratyekabuddha, MAHĀYĀNA, and esoteric (himitsu) vehicles. The fifth section, entitled "secret mantra," further divides the spell into five different types and explains the attainment of BODHI within the various vehicles. Commentaries on this treatise were written by DoHAN (1178-1252), Saisen (1025-1115), KAKUBAN (1095-1143), Innyu (1435-1519), Donjaku (1674-1742), and others.
Hanyong Chongho. (漢永鼎鎬) (1870-1948). Korean monk renowned for his efforts to revitalize Buddhist education during the Japanese colonial period. Hanyong Chongho studied the Confucian classics when young and entered the SAMGHA at seventeen. He became a disciple of Soryu Ch'omyong (1858-1903), from whom he received the dharma name Hanyong. In 1909, he traveled to Seoul and helped lead the Buddhist revitalization movement, along with fellow Buddhist monks HAN YONGUN and Kŭmp'a Kyongho (1868-1915). In 1910, shortly after Japan's formal annexation of Korea, Hoegwang Sason (1862-1933) and others signed a seven-item treaty with the Japanese SoToSHu, which sought to assimilate Korean Buddhism into the Soto order. In response to this threat to Korean Buddhist autonomy, Hanyong Chongho helped Han Yongun and other Korean Buddhist leaders establish the IMJE CHONG order in Korea. In 1913, he published the journal Haedong Pulgyo ("Korean Buddhism") in order to inform the Buddhist community of the need for revitalization and self-awareness. Beginning with his teaching career at Kodŭng Pulgyo Kangsuk in 1914, he devoted himself to the cause of education and went on to teach at various other Buddhist seminaries (kangwon) throughout the country. His many writings include the Songnim sup'il ("Jottings from Stone Forest"), Chongson Ch'imunjiphwa ("Selections from Stories of Admonitions"), and Chongson Yomsong sorhwa ("Selections from the YoMSONG SoRHWA"), a digest of the most-famous Korean kongan (C. GONG'AN) collection.
Han Yongun. (韓龍雲) (1879-1944). Korean monk, poet, and writer, also known by his sobriquet Manhae or his ordination name Pongwan. In 1896, when Han was sixteen, both his parents and his brother were executed by the state for their connections to the Tonghak ("Eastern Learning") Rebellion. He subsequently joined the remaining forces of the Tonghak Rebellion and fought against the Choson-dynasty government but was forced to flee to Oseam hermitage on Mt. Sorak. He was ordained at the monastery of Paektamsa in 1905. Three years later, as one of the fifty-two monastic representatives, he participated in the establishment of the Won chong (Consummate Order) and the foundation of its headquarters at Wonhŭngsa. After returning from a sojourn in Japan, where he witnessed Japanese Buddhism's attempts to modernize in the face of the Meiji-era persecutions, Han Yongun wrote an influential tract in 1909 calling for radical changes in the Korean Buddhist tradition; this tract, entitled CHOSoN PULGYO YUSIN NON ("Treatise on the Reformation of Korean Buddhism"), set much of the agenda for Korean Buddhist modernization into the contemporary period. After Korea was formally annexed by Japan in 1910, Han devoted the rest of his life to the fight for independence. In opposition to the Korean monk Hoegwang Sason's (1862-1933) attempt to merge the Korean Won chong with the Japanese SoToSHu, Han Yongun helped to establish the IMJE CHONG (Linji order) with its headquarters at PoMoSA in Pusan. In 1919, he actively participated in the March First independence movement and signed the Korean Declaration of Independence as a representative of the Buddhist community. As a consequence, he was sentenced to three years in prison by Japanese colonial authorities. In prison, he composed the Choson Tongnip ŭi so ("Declaration of Korea's Independence"). In 1925, three years after he was released from prison, he published a book of poetry entitled Nim ŭi ch'immuk ("Silence of the Beloved"), a veiled call for the freedom of Korea (the "beloved" of the poem) and became a leader in resistance literature; this poem is widely regarded as a classic of Korean vernacular writing. In 1930, Han became publisher of the monthly journal Pulgyo ("Buddhism"), through which he attempted to popularize Buddhism and to raise the issue of Korean political sovereignty. Han Yongun continued to lobby for independence until his death in 1944 at the age of sixty-six, unable to witness the long-awaited independence of Korea that occurred a year later on August 15th, 1945, with Japan's surrender in World War II.
Hara ::: The Japanese term for the Svasthithana Chakra in the etheric anatomy. This is the seat of vitality and corresponds to the Lower Dantian in Qi Gong.
Hasshu koyo. (八宗綱要). In Japanese, "Essentials of the Eight Traditions"; an influential history of Buddhism in Japan composed by the Japanese KEGONSHu (C. HUAYAN ZONG) monk GYoNEN (1240-1321). Gyonen first divides the teachings of the Buddha into the two vehicles of MAHĀYĀNA and HĪNAYĀNA, the two paths of the sRĀVAKA and BODHISATTVA, and the three baskets (PItAKA) of SuTRA, VINAYA, and ABHIDHARMA. He then proceeds to provide a brief history of the transmission of Buddhism from India to Japan. Gyonen subsequently details the division of the Buddha's teachings into the eight different traditions that dominated Japanese Buddhism during the Nara (710-794) and Heian (794-1185) periods. This outline provides a valuable summary of the teachings of each tradition, each of their histories, and the development of their distinctive doctrines in India, China, and Japan. The first roll describes the Kusha (see ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA), Jojitsu (*Tattvasiddhi; see CHENGSHI LUN), and RITSU (see VINAYA) traditions. The second roll describes the Hosso (see FAXIANG ZONG; YOGĀCĀRA), Sanron (see SAN LUN), TENDAI (see TIANTAI), Kegon (see HUAYAN), and SHINGON traditions. Brief introductions to the ZENSHu and JoDOSHu, which were more recent additions to Japanese Buddhism, appear at the end of the text. The Hasshu koyo has been widely used in Japan since the thirteenth century as a textbook of Buddhist history and thought. Indeed, Gyonen's portrayal of Japanese Buddhism as a collection of independent schools identified by discrete doctrines and independent lineages of transmission had a profound impact on Japanese Buddhist studies into the modern period.
heshang. (J. osho; K. hwasang 和尚). In Chinese, "monk," one of the most common Chinese designations for a senior Buddhist monk. The term is actually an early Chinese transcription of the Khotanese translation of the Sanskrit UPĀDHYĀYA, meaning "preceptor." The transcription heshang originally was used in Chinese to refer specifically to the upādhyāya, the monk who administered the precepts at the ordination of either a novice (sRĀMAnERA) or fully ordained monk (BHIKsU), but over time the term entered the vernacular Chinese lexicon to refer more generically to any senior monk. The term heshang has several variant readings in Japanese, depending on the sectarian affiliation: it is read OSHo in the JoDO and ZEN schools; WAJo in the Hosso (C. FAXIANG ZONG), SHINGON, and RITSU schools; and kasho in the TENDAI school.
hibutsu. (秘仏). In Japanese, "secret buddha." A hibutsu refers to a Buddhist icon in a Japanese monastery that is more or less kept out of public view. In some cases, the hibutsu icon is periodically brought out for public showing, but even then only once in perhaps several decades. The Amida (see AMITĀBHA) triad purportedly housed at the monastery of ZENKoJI is one famous example of a hibutsu.
Hieizan. (比叡山). In Japanese "Mt. Hiei," a sacred mountain best known as the headquarters of the TENDAISHu (see TIANTAI ZONG). Mt. Hiei is located northeast of Kyoto on the border of present-day Kyoto and Shiga prefectures, and rises to 2,600 feet (848 meters). In 785, SAICHo, founder of the Tendai school, left Nara for Hieizan after receiving ordination. Dissatisfied with the Nara Buddhist schools, he resided in a hut on the mountain and gradually attracted a small group of followers. In 788, Saicho built the hall Ichijo shikan'in (later renamed Konpon chudo), which became incorporated into the larger monastery of ENRYAKUJI, headquarters for the Tendai school. As Tendai Buddhism rose to dominance in medieval Japan, Hieizan became extremely influential not only in religious matters, but also in politics, the economy, and military affairs. In addition to Enryakuji and numerous other Tendai monasteries, the mountain also housed three aristocratic temples (monzeki), which further extended its ties to the court in Kyoto. Hieizan's power was not maintained without its share of violence. Conflict erupted in the late tenth century with the nearby Tendai temple Onjoji, when succession over the position of head priest at Enryakuji broke down in armed disputes between ENNIN and ENCHIN and their respective followers and warrior monks (SoHEI). In order to wrest control of Hieizan's military and economic strength, Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) led an attack on the mountain in 1571, burning many of its monasteries to the ground. The mountain's influence was further supplanted during the Tokugawa period when Tenkai (1536?-1643), a Tendai priest and advisor to Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), presided over the construction of Kan'eiji in 1625, which the Shogunate ranked above Hieizan. Hieizan also served as home to many KAMI, notably obie and Kobie (Great and Small Hie), who developed close ties with Tendai monasteries as early as the Heian period (794-1185) through a process known as SHINBUTSU SHuGo ("unity of spirits and buddhas"). SHUGENDo practices eventually took root on Hieizan as well. The practice of "circumambulating the mountain" (KAIHoGYo), which reputedly dates back to the ninth century, consists of ascetics running a course around the mountain for as many as one thousand days.
Higashi Honganjiha. (東本願寺派). In Japanese, "Eastern Honganji sect," the second largest of the two major subsects of JoDO SHINSHu; also known as the oTANIHA. See HONGANJI; oTANIHA.
hihan Bukkyo. (C. pipan Fojiao; K. pip'an Pulgyo 批判佛教). In Japanese, "critical Buddhism." A contemporary intellectual controversy fostered largely by the Japanese Buddhist scholars and SoToSHu ZEN priests Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro and their followers. In a series of provocative essays and books, Hakamaya and Matsumoto have argued for a more engaged form of Buddhist scholarship that sought a critical pursuit of truth at the expense of the more traditional, accommodative approaches to Buddhist thought and history. "Critical" here refers to the critical analysis of Buddhist doctrines using modern historiographical and philological methodologies in order to ascertain the authentic teachings of Buddhism. "Critical" can also connote an authentic Buddhist perspective, which should be critical of intellectual misconstructions and/or societal faults. Critical Buddhists polemically dismiss many of the foundational doctrines long associated with East Asian Buddhism, and especially Japanese Zen, as corruptions of what they presume to have been the pristine, "original" teachings of the Buddha. In their interpretation, true Buddhist teachings derive from a critical perspective on the nature of reality, based on the doctrines of "dependent origination" (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA) and "nonself" (ANĀTMAN); for this reason, the style of critical philosophical analysis used in the MADHYAMAKA school represents an authentic approach to Buddhism. By contrast, more accommodative strands of Buddhism that are derived from such teachings as the "embryo of buddhahood" (TATHĀGATAGARBHA), buddha-nature (FOXING), and original enlightenment (HONGAKU) were considered heretical, because they represented the corruption of the pristine Buddhist message by Brahmanical notions of a perduring self (ĀTMAN). The Mahāyāna notion of the nonduality between such dichotomies as SAMSĀRA and NIRVĀnA, the Critical Buddhists also claim, fostered a tendency toward antinomianism or moral ambiguity that had corrupted such Buddhist schools as CHAN or Zen and encouraged those schools to accept social inequities and class-based persecution (as in Soto Zen's acquiescence to the persecution of Japanese "untouchables," or burakumin). Opponents of "Critical Buddhism" suggest that efforts to locate what is "original" in the teachings of Buddhism are inevitably doomed to failure and ignore the many local forms Buddhism has taken throughout its long history; the "Critical Buddhism" movement is therefore sometimes viewed as social criticism rather than academic scholarship.
hijiri. (聖). In Japanese, "holy man" or "saint." The term hijiri is polysemous and may refer generally to an eminent monk or more specifically to those monks who have acquired great merit through rigorous cultivation. A hijiri may also refer to an ascetic monk who rejects monastic life in favor of a more reclusive, independent lifestyle and practice. Historically, the term hijiri was also often used to refer to itinerant preachers, who converted the masses by means of healing, divination, and thaumaturgy, as well as by building basic infrastructure, such as bridges, roads, and irrigation systems. The holy men of KoYASAN, the Koya hijiri, and the saints of the JISHu tradition, the Yugyo hijiri, are best known in Japan. See also ĀRYA.
Himitsu mandara jujushinron. (秘密曼荼羅十住心論). In Japanese, "Ten Abiding States of Mind According to the Sacred MAndALA"; a treatise composed by the Japanese SHINGONSHumonk KuKAI; often referred to more briefly as the Jujushinron. In 830, Kukai submitted this treatise in reply to Emperor Junna's (r. 823-833) request to each Buddhist tradition in Japan to provide an explanation of its teachings. In his treatise, Kukai systematically classified the various Buddhist teachings (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) and placed them onto a spiritual map consisting of the ten stages of the mind (jujushin). The first and lowest stage of the mind ("the deluded, ram-like mind") is that of ignorant beings who, like animals, are driven by their uncontrolled desires for food and sex. The beings of the second stage ("the ignorant, childlike, but tempered mind") display ethical behavior consistent with the teachings of Confucius and the lay precepts of Buddhism. The third stage of mind ("the infantlike, fearless mind") is the state in which one worships the various gods and seeks rebirth in the various heavens, as would be the case in the non-Buddhist traditions of India and in Daoism. The fourth stage ("recognizing only SKANDHAs and no-self") corresponds to the sRĀVAKAYĀNA and the fifth stage ("mind free of karmic seeds") to that of the PRATYEKABUDDHAYĀNA. The sixth stage ("the mind of MAHĀYĀNA, which is concerned with others") corresponds to the YOGĀCĀRA teachings, the seventh ("mind awakened to its unborn nature") to MADHYAMAKA, the eighth ("mind of one path devoid of construction") to TIANTAI (J. TENDAI), and the ninth ("mind completely devoid of self-nature") to HUAYAN (J. Kegon). Kukai placed his own tradition of Shingon at the last and highest stage of mind ("the esoteric and adorned mind"). Kukai also likened each stage of mind to a palace and contended that these outer palaces surround an inner palace ruled by the buddha MAHĀVAIROCANA. To abide in the inner palace one must be initiated into the teachings of Shingon by receiving consecration (ABHIsEKA). Kukai thus provided a Buddhist (or Shingon) alternative to ideal rulership. To demonstrate his schema of the mind, Kukai frequently cites numerous scriptures and commentaries, which made his treatise extremely prolix; Kukai later provided an abbreviated version of his argument, without the numerous supporting references, in his HIZo HoYAKU.
hiragana "Japanese" The cursive formed Japanese {kana} syllabary. Hiragana is mostly used for grammatical particles, verb-inflection, and Japanese words which are not written in {kanji} or which are too difficult for an educated person to read or write in {kanji}. Hiragana are also used for {furigana}. (2001-03-18)
hiragana ::: (Japanese) The cursive formed Japanese kana syllabary. Hiragana is mostly used for grammatical particles, verb-inflection, and Japanese words which are not written in kanji or which are too difficult for an educated person to read or write in kanji. Hiragana are also used for furigana.(2001-03-18)
Hizo hoyaku. (秘藏寶鑰). In Japanese, "Jeweled Key to the Secret Treasury," a text composed by the Japanese SHINGONSHu monk KuKAI. The Hizo hoyaku is a summary (one-fifth the length) of Kukai's dense magnum opus HIMITSU MANDARA JuJuSHINRON. The title refers metaphorically to the "jeweled key" of the special teachings that will unlock the "secret treasury" that is the buddha-nature (C. FOXING) of all sentient beings. In contrast to the Himitsu mandara jujushinron, the Hizo hoyaku provides far fewer supporting references and introduces a fictional debate between a Confucian official and a Buddhist priest and a set of questions and answers from the Sok Mahayon non.
Hokke gisho. (法華義疏). In Japanese, "Commentary on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA," attributed to the Japanese prince SHoTOKU TAISHI (574-622). Along with his commentaries on the sRĪMĀLĀDEVĪSIMHANĀDASuTRA and VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, the Hokke gisho is known as one of the "three SuTRA commentaries" (sangyo gisho) of Shotoku Taishi. According to Shotoku Taishi's biography, the Hokke gisho was composed in 615, but the exact dates of its compilation remain uncertain. The Hokke gisho relies on the Chinese monk Fayun's (467-529) earlier commentary, the Fahua yiji, to KUMĀRAJĪVA's Chinese translation of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra. Because of its attribution to Shotoku Taishi, the Hokke gisho is considered an important source for studying the thought of this legendary figure in the evolution of Japanese Buddhism, but the extent of its influence on the early Japanese tradition remains a matter of debate.
Hokyoki. (寶慶). In Japanese, "Record from the Baoqing era," a treatise attributed to Japanese SoToSHu ZEN master DoGEN KIGEN. The Hokyoki was discovered after Dogen's death by his disciple Koun Ejo (1198-1280) and a preface was prepared in 1750. The Hokyoki is purportedly a record of Dogen's tutelage under the Chinese CAODONG ZONG master TIANTONG RUJING during his sojourn in China during the Baoqing reign era (1225-1227) of the Southern Song dynasty. The Hokyoki records specific instructions attributed to Rujing, including such topics as the "sloughing off body and mind" (J. SHINJIN DATSURAKU), seated meditation (J. zazen; C. ZUOCHAN), and his doctrinal teachings.
Honcho kosoden. (本朝高僧伝). In Japanese, "Biographies of Eminent Clerics of Japan"; a late Japanese biographic collection, written by the RINZAISHu ZEN monk Mangen Shiban (1626-1710) in 1702, in a total of seventy-five rolls. The Honcho kosoden includes the biographies of 1,662 Japanese priests affiliated with a variety of Buddhist sects (except, prominently, the JoDO SHINSHu and NICHIRENSHu) from the sixth century onward. Unlike Shiban's 1678 ENPo DENToROKU, which contains over one thousand biographies of only Zen clerics and lay practitioners, the Honcho kosoden also discusses clerics from other schools of Japanese Buddhism. The biographies are divided into ten general categories: founders, exegetes, meditators, thaumaturges, VINAYA specialists, propagators, ascetics, pilgrims, scriptural reciters, and others. As the most comprehensive and voluminous Japanese collection of biographies of eminent clerics, the text is an indispensable work for research into the lineage histories of many of the most important schools of Japanese Buddhism. In 1867, the SHINGONSHu monk Hosokawa Dokai (1816-1876) compiled a supplement to this collection, titled the Zoku Nippon kosoden ("Supplement to the Eminent Clerics of Japan"), which including biographies of over two hundred clerics of the premodern period, in a total of eleven rolls.
Honen. (法然) (1133-1212). Japanese monk regarded as the founder of the JoDOSHu, or PURE LAND school. Honen was a native of Mimasaka province. After his father's violent death, Honen was entrusted to his uncle, a monk at the nearby monastery of Bodaiji. Honen later headed for HIEIZAN in 1147 to received ordination. He began his studies under the TENDAISHu (C. TIANTAI ZONG) monks Genko (d.u.) and Koen (d. 1169), but the corruption he perceived within the Tendai community at ENRYAKUJI led Honen to seek teachings elsewhere. In 1150, he visited the master Eiku (d. 1179), a disciple of the monk RYoNIN, in Kurodani on Mt. Hiei, where he remained for the next twenty years. Under Eiku's guidance, Honen studied GENSHIN's influential treatise, the oJo YoSHu and became a specialist in the practice of nenbutsu ("recollecting the Buddha's name"; see C. NIANFO). Honen is also said to have devoted himself exclusively to the practice of invoking the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA (a type of nenbutsu) after perusing the Chinese monk SHANDAO's influential commentary on the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, the Guan Wuliangshou jing shu. In 1175, Honen left Mt. Hiei and established himself in the district of Higashiyama Yoshimizu in the capital Kyoto. His fame grew after his participation in the ohara discussion of 1186, which explored how pure land beliefs and practices could help overcome human suffering. Honen soon attracted many followers, including such prominent figures as the regent Kujo Kanezane (1149-1207). In 1198, Honen compiled his influential treatise, SENCHAKUSHu. Due perhaps to his growing influence and his purported rejection of the Tendai teachings of original enlightenment (HONGAKU), the monks of Enryakuji began attacking Honen, banning his practice of nenbutsu in 1204. The monks of the Nara monastery of KoFUKUJI also petitioned the retired emperor Gotoba (r. 1183-1198) to ban the practice in 1205. A scandal involving two of Honen's disciples led to his exile to Shikoku in 1207 and the execution of four of his disciples. He was later pardoned and returned to Kyoto in 1211. Due to illness, he died the next year in what is now known as the Seishido in the monastery of Chion'in. Honen preached that, in the current degeneration age of the dharma (J. mappo; C. MOFA), the exclusive practice of nenbutsu was the only way through which salvation could be achieved. Due in part to Honen's advocacy, nenbutsu eventually became one of the predominant practices of Japanese Buddhism. Honen's preeminent disciple was SHINRAN (1173-1262), who further radicalized pure land practice by insisting that salvation was only possible through the grace of Amitābha, rather than through continuous nenbutsu practice.
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hongaku. (本覺). In Japanese, "original enlightenment." The notion that enlightenment was a quality inherent in the minds of all sentient beings (SATTVA) initially developed in East Asia largely due to the influence of such presumptive APOCRYPHA as the DASHENG QIXIN LUN. The Dasheng qixin lun posited a distinction between the potentiality to become a buddha that was inherent in the minds of every sentient being, as expressed by the term "original enlightenment" (C. BENJUE; pronounced hongaku in Japanese); and the soteriological process through which that potential for enlightenment had to be put into practice, which it called "actualized enlightenment" (C. SHIJUE; J. shikaku). This distinction is akin to the notion that a person may in reality be enlightened (original enlightenment), but still needs to learn through a course of religious training how to act on that enlightenment (actualized enlightenment). This scheme was further developed in numerous treatises and commentaries written by Chinese exegetes in the DI LUN ZONG, HUAYAN ZONG, and TIANTAI ZONG. ¶ In medieval Japan, this imported soteriological interpretation of "original enlightenment" was reinterpreted into an ontological affirmation of things just as they are. Enlightenment was thence viewed not as a soteriological experience, but instead as something made manifest in the lived reality of everyday life. Hongaku thought also had wider cultural influences, and was used, for example, to justify conceptually incipient doctrines of the identity between the buddhas and bodhisattvas of Buddhism and the indigenous deities (KAMI) of Japan (see HONJI SUIGAKU; SHINBUTSU SHuGo). Distinctively Japanese treatments of original enlightenment thought begin in the mid-eleventh century, especially through oral transmissions (kuden) within the medieval TENDAISHu tradition. These interpretations were subsequently written down on short slips of paper (KIRIGAMI) that were gradually assembled into more extensive treatments. These interpretations ultimately came to be attributed by tradition to the great Tendai masters of old, such as SAICHo (767-822), but connections to these earlier teachers are dubious at best and the exact dates and attributions of these materials are unclear. During the late Heian and Kamakura periods, hongaku thought bifurcated into two major lineages, the Eshin and Danna (both of which subsequently divided into numerous subbranches). This bifurcation was largely a split between followers of the two major disciples of the Tendai monk RYoGEN: GENSHIN (942-1017) of Eshin'in in YOKAWA (the famous author of the oJo YoSHu); and Kakuun (953-1007) of Danna'in in the Eastern pagoda complex at ENRYAKUJI on HIEIZAN. The Tendai tradition claims that these two strands of interpretation derive from Saicho, who learned these different approaches while studying Tiantai thought in China under Daosui (J. Dosui/Dozui; d.u.) and Xingman (J. Gyoman; d.u.), and subsequently transmitted them to his successors in Japan; the distinctions between these two positions are, however, far from certain. Other indigenous Japanese schools of Buddhism that developed later during the Kamakura period, such as the JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu, seem to have harbored more of a critical attitude toward the notion of original enlightenment. One of the common charges leveled against hongaku thought was that it fostered a radical antinomianism, which denied the need for either religious practice or ethical restraint. In the contemporary period, the notion of original enlightenment has been strongly criticized by advocates of "Critical Buddhism" (HIHAN BUKKYo) as an infiltration into Buddhism of Brahmanical notions of a perduring self (ĀTMAN); in addition, by valorizing the reality of the mundane world just as it is, hongaku thought was said to be an exploitative doctrine that had been used in Japan to justify societal inequality and political despotism. For broader East Asian perspectives on "original enlightenment," see BENJUE.
Honganji. (本願寺). In Japanese, "Original Vow Monastery." Honganji is the headquarters (honzan) of the JoDO SHINSHu sect in Japan; it is located in the Shimogyo district of Kyoto. In 1277, Kakushinni (1224-1283), the daughter of the Japanese PURE LAND monk SHINRAN, designated her father's grave in the otani district near Kyoto to be the primary memorial site for his worship. The site was later transformed into a temple, where an image of the buddha AMITĀBHA was installed. After a long period of factional disputes, the various groups of Shinran's followers were reunited by the eighth head priest of Honganji, RENNYO. In 1465, warrior monks from HIEIZAN razed Honganji and turned the site into one of their own branch temples (matsuji). In 1478, having gained enough support to counter any threat from Mt. Hiei, Rennyo moved Honganji to the Yamashina area of Kyoto. The move was completed in 1483 with the completion of the Amida hall. Under Rennyo's leadership, Honganji became the central monastery of the Jodo Shinshu tradition. Rennyo built a broad network of temples that was consolidated under the sole administration of Honganji. After a brief move to osaka, Honganji was relocated to its current site in Kyoto on the order of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598). A split occurred between two factions shortly thereafter, and ever since the early seventeenth century the Nishi (West) and Higashi (East) Honganji complexes have served as the religious centers of these two major branches of Jodo Shinshu, the NISHI HONGANJIHA and the HIGASHI HONGANJIHA (also known as the oTANIHA).
honji suijaku. (本地垂迹). In Japanese, "manifestation from the original state"; an indigenous Japanese explanation of the way in which the imported religion of Buddhism interacted with local religious cults. In this interpretation, an originally Indian buddha, BODHISATTVA, or divinity (the "original ground," or "state"; J. honji) could manifest or incarnate in the form of a local Japanese deity (KAMI) or its icon, which was then designated the "trace it dropped" (J. suijaku). The notion of honji suijaku was derived from the earlier Buddhist doctrine of multiple buddha bodies (BUDDHAKĀYA), especially the so-called transformation body (NIRMĀnAKĀYA). The honji suijaku doctrine thus facilitated the systematic incorporation of local deities within Buddhism, speeding the localization of Buddhism within the religious culture of Japan. A movement forcefully to separate from Buddhism the local deities, now known collectively as SHINTo, occurred during the Meiji period (see HAIBUTSU KISHAKU). See also SHINBUTSU SHuGo.
honmon. (C. benmen; K. ponmun 本門). In Japanese, lit. "fundamental teaching" or "origin teaching"; the essential core of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), which is detailed in the latter fourteen of the scripture's twenty-four chapters; in distinction to the SHAKUMON (lit. "trace teaching"), the provisional first half of the sutra. The term is especially important in both the TIANTAI (J. TENDAI) and NICHIREN-oriented schools of East Asian Buddhism. The honmon is regarded as the teaching preached by the true Buddha, who attained buddhahood an infinite number of KALPAs ago. Traditionally, the sixteenth chapter of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra, "The Longevity of the TATHĀGATA," is believed to constitute the central chapter of the honmon. In this chapter, the Buddha reveals his true identity: he became enlightened in the remote past, yet he appears to have a limited lifespan and to pass into NIRVĀnA in order to inspire sentient beings' spiritual practice, since if they were to know about the Buddha's eternal presence, they might not exert themselves. Honmon is also called the "effect" or "fruition" section of the scripture, since it preaches the omnipresence of the Buddha, which is a consequence of the long process of training that he undertook in the course of achieving enlightenment. The Tiantai master TIANTAI ZHIYI (538-597) first applied the two terms honmon and shakumon to distinguish these two parts of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra; he compared the two teachings to the moon in the sky and its reflection on the surface of a pond, respectively. Zhiyi considered the honmon to be different from the shakumon and other scriptural teachings in that it alone revealed the fundamental enlightenment of the Buddha in the distant past. He thus argued that, even though the honmon and shakumon are inconceivably one, the timeless principle of enlightenment itself is revealed in the honmon and all other teachings are merely the "traces" of this principle. The Japanese Tendai tradition offered a slightly different understanding of honmon: despite the fact that sĀKYAMUNI Buddha attained buddhahood numerous eons ago, his manifestation in this world served as a metaphor for the enlightenment inherent in all living things. Tendai thus understood honmon to mean "original enlightenment" (HONGAKU; see also C. BENJUE) and the dynamic phase of suchness (TATHATĀ) that accorded with phenomenal conditions, while "shakumon" was the "acquired enlightenment" (see C. SHIJUE) and the immutable phase of suchness as the unchanging truth. Most crucially, the Tendai tradition emphasized the superiority of honmon over shakumon. The two terms are also important in the various Nichiren-related schools of Japanese Buddhism. NICHIREN (1222-1282) maintained that myohorengekyo, the Japanese title (DAIMOKU) of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra, was in fact the true honmon of the sutra.
honmon no daimoku. (本門の題目). In Japanese, lit. "DAIMOKU of the essential teaching"; term used specifically in the NICHIREN and associated schools of Japanese Buddhism to refer to the essential teaching epitomized in the title of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"). The title of the sutra is presumed to summarize the gist of the entire scripture and it is recited in its Japanese pronunciation (see NAM MYoHoRENGEKYo) as a principal religious practice of the Nichiren and SoKA GAKKAI schools. Recitation of the title of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra was advocated as one of the "three great esoteric laws" (SANDAIHIHo) by the Japanese reformer NICHIREN (1222-1282) and was said to exemplify mastery of wisdom (PRAJNĀ) in the three trainings (TRIsIKsĀ).
Horyuji. (法隆寺). In Japanese, "Dharma Flourishing Monastery." Horyuji is considered one of the seven great monasteries in former capital of Nara. The monastery is currently affiliated with the Shotoku tradition and serves as the headquarters (honzan) of the Hosso school (C. FAXIANG ZONG). According to extant inscriptions, Empress Suiko (r. 592-628) and SHoTOKU TAISHI (574-622) built Horyuji in 607 to honor the deathbed wishes of retired Emperor Yomei (r. 585-587). Prince Shotoku's estate in Ikaruga was chosen as the site for the construction project. A famous Shaka (sĀKYAMUNI) triad produced perhaps in the early seventh century is installed in its Golden Hall (Kondo). Horyuji is also famous for its numerous ancient icons and ritual artifacts and also for its five-story pagoda and Golden Hall, which is one of the oldest standing wooden structures in Japan. The monastery is currently divided into eastern and western cloisters.
hotoke. (佛). A vernacular Japanese term for "buddha." Colloquially, hotoke is also used to refer to a deceased person or the soul of a deceased person.
huatou. (J. wato; K. hwadu 話頭). In Chinese, "topic of inquiry"; in some contexts, "critical phrase" or "keyword." The Song-dynasty CHAN master DAHUI ZONGGAO, in the LINJI ZONG, popularized a meditative technique in which he urged his students (many of whom were educated literati) to use a Chan case (GONG'AN) as a "topic of meditative inquiry" (huatou) rather than interpret it from purely intellectual or literary perspectives. Perhaps the most famous and most widely used huatou is the topic "no" (WU) attributed to the Chan master ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN: A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have buddha-nature (FOXING), or not?," to which Zhaozhou replied "WU" ("no"; lit. "it does not have it"; see GOUZI WU FOXING; WU GONG'AN). Because of the widespread popularity of this particular one-word topic in China, Korea, and Japan, this huatou is often interpreted as a "critical phrase'" or "keyword," in which the word "wu" is presumed to be the principal topic and thus the "keyword," or "critical phrase," of the longer gong'an exchange. Because Zhaozhou's answer in this exchange goes against the grain of East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism-which presumes that all sentient beings, including dogs, are inherently enlightened-the huatou helps to foster questioning, or technically "doubt" (YIQING), the focus of a new type of Chan meditation called KANHUA CHAN, "the Chan of investigating the huatou." Huatou (which literally means "head of speech," and thus "topic") might best be taken metaphorically as the "apex of speech," or the "point at which (or beyond which) speech exhausts itself." Speech is of course initiated by thought, so "speech" in this context refers to all the discriminative tendencies of the mind, viz., conceptualization. By leading to the very limits of speech-or more accurately thought-the huatou acts as a purification device that frees the mind of its conceptualizing tendencies, leaving it clear, attentive, and calm. Even though the huatou is typically a word or phrase taken from the teachings of previous Chan masters, it is a word that is claimed to bring an end to conceptualization, leaving the mind receptive to the influence of the unconditioned. As Dahui notes, huatou produces a "cleansing knowledge and vision" (see JNĀNADARsANA) that "removes the defects of conceptual understanding so that one may find the road leading to liberation." Huatou is thus sometimes interpreted in Chinese Buddhism as a type of meditative "homeopathy," in which one uses a small dosage of the poison of concepts to cure the disease of conceptualization. Dahui's use of the huatou technique was first taught in Korea by POJO CHINUL, where it is known by its Korean pronunciation as hwadu, and popularized by Chinul's successor, CHIN'GAK HYESIM. Investigation of the hwadu remains the most widespread type of meditation taught and practiced in Korean Buddhism. In Japanese Zen, the use of the wato became widespread within the RINZAISHu, due in large part to the efforts of HAKUIN EKAKU and his disciples.
huguo Fojiao. (J. gokoku Bukkyo; K. hoguk Pulgyo 護國佛敎). In Chinese, "state-protection Buddhism," referring to the sociopolitical role Buddhism played in East Asia to protect the state against war, insurrection, and natural disasters. The doctrinal justification for such a protective role for Buddhism derives from the "Guanshiyin pusa pumen pin" ("Chapter on the Unlimited Gate of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA") and the "Tuoluoni pin" (DHĀRAnĪ chapter) of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), the "Huguo pin" ("Chapter on Protecting the State") of the RENWANG JING ("Scripture for Humane Kings"), and the "Zhenglun pin" ("Chapter on Right View") of the SUVARnAPRABHĀSOTTAMASuTRA ("Golden Light Sutra"). For example, the Suvarnaprabhāsottamasutra states that a ruler who accepts that sutra and has faith in the dharma will be protected by the four heavenly kings (CĀTURMAHĀRĀJAKĀYIKA); but if he neglects the dharma, the divinities will abandon his state and calamity will result. The "Huguo pin" of the Renwang jing notes that "when the state is thrown into chaos, facing all sorts of disasters and being destroyed by invading enemies," kings should set up in a grand hall one hundred buddha and bodhisattva images and one hundred seats, and then invite one hundred eminent monks to come there and teach the Renwang jing. This ritual, called the "Renwang Assembly of One-Hundred Seats" (C. Renwang baigaozuo hui; J. Ninno hyakukozae; K. Inwang paekkojwa hoe) would ward off any calamity facing the state and was held in China, Japan, and Korea from the late sixth century onward. In Japan, these three scriptures were used to justify the role Buddhism could play in protecting the state; and the Japanese reformist NICHIREN (1222-1282) cites the Suvarnaprabhāsottamasutra in his attempts to demonstrate that the calamities then facing Japan were a result of the divinities abandoning the state because of the government's neglect of the true teachings of Buddhism. The notion of state protection also figured in the introduction of ZEN to Japan. In 1198, the TENDAI and ZEN monk MYoAN EISAI (1141-1215) wrote his KoZEN GOKOKURON ("Treatise on the Promulgation of Zen as a Defense of the State"), which explained why the new teachings of Zen would both protect the state and allow the "perfect teachings" (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) of Tendai to flourish. ¶ "State-protection Buddhism" has also been posited as one of the defining characteristics of Korean Buddhism. There are typically four types of evidence presented in support of this view. (1) Such rituals as the Inwang paekkojwa hoe (Renwang jing recitation) were held at court at least ten times during the Silla dynasty and increased dramatically to as many as one hundred twenty times during the succeeding Koryǒ dynasty. (2) Monasteries and STuPAs were constructed for their apotropaic value in warding off calamity. During the Silla dynasty, e.g., HWANGNYONGSA and its nine-story pagoda, as well as Sach'onwangsa (Four Heavenly Kings Monastery), were constructed for the protection of the royal family and the state during the peninsular unification wars. During the succeeding Koryo dynasty, the KORYo TAEJANGGYoNG (Korean Buddhism canon) was carved (twice) in the hopes that state support for this massive project would prompt the various buddhas and divinities (DEVA) to ward off foreign invaders and bring peace to the kingdom. (3) Eminent monks served as political advisors to the king and the government. For example, Kwangjong (r. 949-975), the fourth monarch of the Koryǒ dynasty, established the positions of wangsa (royal preceptor) and kuksa (state preceptor, C. GUOSHI), and these offices continued into the early Choson dynasty. (4) Monks were sometimes at the vanguard in repelling foreign invaders, such as the Hangmagun (Defeating Māra Troops) in twelfth-century Koryo, who fought against the Jurchen, and the Choson monks CH'oNGHo HYUJoNG (1520-1604) and SAMYoNG YUJoNG (1544-1610), who raised monks' militias to fight against the Japanese during the Hideyoshi invasions of the late sixteenth century. In the late twentieth century, revisionist historians argued that the notion of "state-protection Buddhism" in Korea may reflect as much the political situation of the modern and contemporary periods as any historical reality, and may derive from the concept of "chingo kokka" (protecting the state) advocated by Japanese apologists during the Buddhist persecution of the Meiji period (1868-1912).
Huiguo. (J. Keika; K. Hyegwa 惠果) (746-805). Tang-dynasty Chinese monk, reputed seventh patriarch of esoteric Buddhism (J. MIKKYo), and a master especially of the KONGoKAI and TAIZoKAI transmissions. Huiguo was a native of Shaanxi province. He became a monk at an early age and went to the monastery of Qinglongsi in the Chinese capital of Chang'an, where he became a student of the master (ĀCĀRYA) AMOGHAVAJRA's disciple Tanchen (d.u.). In 765, Huiguo received the full monastic precepts, after which he is said to have received the teachings on the VAJRAsEKHARASuTRA from Amoghavajra himself. Two years later, Huiguo is also said to have received instructions on the taizokai and the SUSIDDHIKARASuTRA from the obscure Korean monk Hyonch'o (d.u.), a purported disciple of ācārya sUBHAKARASIMHA. In 789, Huiguo won the support of Emperor Dezong (r. 779-805) by successfully praying for rain. Huiguo's renown was such that he received disciples from Korea, Japan, and even Java. In 805, Huiguo purportedly gave instructions on the kongokai and taizokai to the eminent Japanese pilgrim KuKAI during the three months prior to the master's death, and eventually performed the consecration ritual (ABHIsEKA) for his student. Kukai thus claimed that Huiguo was the Chinese progenitor of the Japanese SHINGONSHu. That same year, Huiguo passed away at his residence in the Eastern Pagoda cloister at Qinglongsi.
Hwaomsa. (華嚴寺). In Korean, "Flower Garland Monastery"; the nineteenth of the major district monasteries (PONSA) in the contemporary CHOGYE order and the largest monastery on the Buddhist sacred mountain of CHIRISAN. According to the Hwaomsa monastery history, the monastery was founded in 544 by the obscure monk Yon'gi (d.u.), an Indian monk who is claimed to have been the first figure to spread the teaching of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA in Korea. (Five works related to the AvataMsakasutra and the DASHENG QIXIN LUN are attributed to Yon'gi in Buddhist catalogues, but none are extant.) In 645, during the Silla dynasty, the VINAYA master CHAJANG constructed at the monastery a three-story stone STuPA with four lions at the base, in which to preserve the relics (sARĪRA) of the Buddha. The eminent scholiast WoNHYO (617-686) is said to have taught at the monastery the "flower boys" (hwarang) group of Silla elite young men. In 677, the important vaunt courier in the Korean Hwaom school, ŬISANG (625-702), constructed a main shrine hall, the Changyukchon, where a gold buddha image six-chang (sixty feet) high was installed, and had inscribed the eighty-roll recension of the AvataMsakasutra on the four stone walls of the hall; since his time, the monastery was known as one of the centers of the Hwaom school (HUAYAN ZONG) in Korea. In 1462, during the Choson dynasty, Hwaomsa was raised to the status of a main monastery in the Son school (CHAN ZONG) of Buddhism. The monastery burned down during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasion of (1592-1598) and was rebuilt several times afterward. In 1702, the Son monk Kyeba (d.u.) built a new main shrine hall, Kakhwangjon, to replace the ruined Changyukchon, and the monastery was elevated to a main monastery of both the Son and Kyo (Doctrine) schools. The monastery is the nineteenth of the major parish monasteries (PONSA) in the contemporary CHOGYE order.
hyalonema ::: n. --> A genus of hexactinelline sponges, having a long stem composed of very long, slender, transparent, siliceous fibres twisted together like the strands of a color. The stem of the Japanese species (H. Sieboldii), called glass-rope, has long been in use as an ornament. See Glass-rope.
ichinengi. (一念義). In Japanese, "the doctrine of a single recitation," in the Japanese PURE LAND traditions, the practice of a single verbal recitation of the buddha AMITĀBHA's name (J. nenbutsu; C. NIANFO). This doctrine refers to a position held by some of HoNEN's (1133-1212) major disciples in the early JoDOSHu, especially Jokakubo Kosai (1163-1247), and to a lesser extent SHINRAN (1163-1273). After Honen passed away, a debate emerged among his followers over whether salvation in Amitābha's pure land of SUKHĀVATĪ was attained through a "single recitation" of the Buddha's name, or "multiple recitations" (see TANENGI). The single-recitation position advocates that a single moment of faith would be sufficient to ensure rebirth in that pure land, because the person would then be receptive to Amitābha's grace. Due to this near-exclusive emphasis on the role of grace in effecting salvation, some of the proponents of single-recitation practice apparently engaged in antinomian behavior, such that the doctrine of ichinengi came to be associated with subversive political activities. The degree to which this single moment of faith arises from the "self-power" (JIRIKI) of the aspirant or the "other-power" (TARIKI) of Amitābha was also debated. Although Shinran seems to have favored the single-recitation position, he also argued that neither the single- nor multiple-recitation position provided a comprehensive perspective on the prospect of salvation. (For the JISHU practice of ippen nenbutsu, the one-time invocation of the Buddha's name as if it were the time of one's death, see IPPEN.)
Ikkyu Sojun. (一休宗純) (1394-1481). Japanese ZEN master in the RINZAISHu, also known by his sobriquet Kyoun shi (Master Crazy Cloud). Materials on Ikkyu's life are an often indistinguishable mixture of history and legend. Little is known of Ikkyu's early years, but he is said to have been the illegitimate son of Emperor Gokomatsu (r. 1382-1392, 1392-1412). In 1399, Ikkyu was sent to the monastery of ANKOKUJI in Kyoto. In 1410, he left Ankokuji to study under Ken'o Soi (d. 1414), who belonged to the MYoSHINJI branch of Rinzai Zen. After Ken'o's death in 1414, Ikkyu continued his studies under the monk Kaso Sodon (1352-1428) in Katada (present-day Shiga prefecture) near Lake Biwa. Kaso gave him the name Ikkyu, which he continued to use. While studying under Kaso, Ikkyu had his first awakening experience and also acquired some notoriety for his antinomian behavior. Perhaps because of his rivalry with a fellow student named Yoso Soi (1378-1458), Ikkyu left Kaso shortly before his death and headed for the city of Sakai. During this transition period, Ikkyu is said to have briefly returned to lay life, marrying a blind singer and fathering a son. Ikkyu's life in Sakai is shrouded in legend (most of which date to the Tokugawa period). There, he is said to have led the life of a mad monk, preaching in taverns and brothels. In 1437, Ikkyu is also said to have torn up the certificate of enlightenment that his teacher Kaso had prepared for him before his death. In 1440, Ikkyu was called to serve as the abbot of the monastery of DAITOKUJI, but he resigned his post the next year. Ikkyu devoted much of his later life to his famous poetry and brushstroke art. Later, Ikkyu had a falling out with Yoso, who as abbot secured Daitokuji's prominent place in Kyoto. In 1455, Ikkyu published a collection of his poems, the Jikaishu ("Self-Admonishment Collection"), and publicly attacked Yoso. In 1456, Ikkyu restored the dilapidated temple Myoshoji in Takigi (located halfway between Sakai and Kyoto). There, he installed a portrait of the Zen master Daito (see SoHo MYoCHo). Ikkyu also began identifying himself with the Chinese Chan master XUTANG ZHIYU, the spiritual progenitor of the Daitokuji lineage(s), by transforming portraits of Xutang into those of himself. In 1474, Ikkyu was appointed abbot of Daitokuji, which had suffered from a devastating fire during the onin war, and he committed himself to its reconstruction, until his death in 1481. Among his writings, his poetry collection Kyounshu ("Crazy Cloud Anthology") is most famous. Also well known is his Gaikotsu ("Skeletons"), a work, illustrated by Ikkyu himself, about his conversations with skeletons. See also WU'AI XING.
Imje chong. (臨濟宗). The Korean pronunciation of the Chinese LINJI ZONG; the name of a short-lived school of Korean Buddhism during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). In 1910, shortly after Japan's formal annexation of Korea, Hoegwang Sason (1862-1933, a.k.a. Yi Hoegwang) and other Korean monks signed a seven-item treaty with the Japanese SoToSHu, which would have assimilated their newly formed Won chong (Consummate Order) of Korean Buddhism into the Soto order. In response to this threat to Korean Buddhist autonomy, such renowned monks as HANYoNG CHoNGHO (1870-1948), HAN YONGUN (1879-1944), and other Korean Buddhist leaders established the Imje chong, with its headquarters at the monastery of PoMoSA in Pusan. These monks adopted this name to demonstrate that they considered the practices of the Soto school to be anathema to the fundamentally Linji orientation of Korean Son practice. Both the Won chong and the Imje chong were ultimately disestablished in 1912 by the Japanese colonial administration after the promulgation of the 1911 Monastery Ordinance, in which all aspects of Korean Buddhist institutional life were brought under the administrative control of the Japanese government-general.
In (Japanese) Equivalent to the Chinese yin; in Shintoism, the feminine principle of matter or earth, impregnated by Yo (the heavens), the male ethereal principle, and then precipitated into the universe. She forms the first ethereal, sexless objective being, and with him produces the seven divine spirits who emanate the seven creations.
inc ::: n. --> A Japanese measure of length equal to about two and one twelfth yards.
in'in ekishi. (因院易師). In Japanese, "changing teachers in accordance with the temple." Since the fifteenth century, members of the SoToSHu of the ZEN tradition have participated in the practice of taking the lineage of the monastery where one was appointed abbot, even if that lineage was different from one's own. The practice of inheriting the temple's lineage was known as the "temple dharma lineage" (GARANBo), and the practice of switching lineages was called in'in ekishi. Basing his claims on the teachings found in the SHoBoGENZo, the Soto Zen master MANZAN DoHAKU attempted to reform this practice by asserting the importance of the direct, face-to-face transmission (menju shiho) from one master to his disciple (isshi insho). In 1700, he made a request to the Agency of Temples and Shrine (jisha bugyo) to intervene in the garanbo system. Despite fierce opposition from such figures as TENKEI DENSON (1646-1735), the Tokugawa government banned the practice in 1703.
inka. (印可). In Japanese, "certification." See YINKE.
internationalisation "programming" (i18n, globalisation, enabling, software enabling) The process and philosophy of making software portable to other {locales}. For successful {localisation}, products must be technically and culturally neutral. Effective internationalisation reduces the time and resources required for localisation, improving time-to-market abroad and allowing {simultaneous shipment}. In orther words, internationalisation abstracts out local details, localisation specifies those details for a particular locale. Technically this may include allowing {double-byte character sets} such as {unicode} or Japanese, local numbering, date and currency formats, and other local format conventions. It also includes the separation of {user interface} text e.g. in {dialog boxes} and {menus}. All the text used by an application may be kept in a separate file or directory, so that it can be translated all at once. User interfaces may require more screen space for text in other languages. The simplest form of internationalisation may be to make use of {operating system} calls that format time, date and currency values according to the operating system's configuration. The abbreviation i18n means "I - eighteen letters - N". (1999-06-28)
internationalisation ::: (programming) (i18n, globalisation, enabling, software enabling) The process and philosophy of making software portable to other locales.For successful localisation, products must be technically and culturally neutral. Effective internationalisation reduces the time and resources required shipment. In orther words, internationalisation abstracts out local details, localisation specifies those details for a particular locale.Technically this may include allowing double-byte character sets such as unicode or Japanese, local numbering, date and currency formats, and other local format conventions.It also includes the separation of user interface text e.g. in dialog boxes and menus. All the text used by an application may be kept in a separate file or directory, so that it can be translated all at once. User interfaces may require more screen space for text in other languages.The simplest form of internationalisation may be to make use of operating system calls that format time, date and currency values according to the operating system's configuration.The abbreviation i18n means I - eighteen letters - N. (1999-06-28)
Ippen. (一遍) (1239-1289). Japanese itinerant holy man (HIJIRI) and reputed founder of the JISHU school of the Japanese PURE LAND tradition. Due perhaps to his own antinomian proclivities, Ippen's life remains a mixture of history and legend. Ippen was a native of Iyo in Shikoku. In 1249, after his mother's death, Ippen became a monk at the urging of his father, a Buddhist monk, and was given the name Zuien. In 1251, Ippen traveled to Dazaifu in northern Kyushu, where he studied under the monk Shodatsu (d.u.). In 1263, having learned of his father's death, Ippen returned to Iyo and briefly married. In 1271, Ippen visited Shodatsu once more and made a pilgrimage to the monastery of ZENKoJI in Shinano to see its famous Amida (AMITĀBHA) triad. His visit to Zenkoji is said to have inspired Ippen to go on retreat, spending half a year in a hut that he built in his hometown of Iyo. The site of his retreat, Sugo, was widely known as a sacred place of practice for mountain ascetics (YAMABUSHI). In 1272, Ippen set out for the monastery of SHITENNoJI in osaka, where he is said to have received the ten precepts. At this time, Ippen also developed the eponymous practice known as ippen nenbutsu (one-time invocation of the name [see NIANFO] of the buddha Amitābha), which largely consists of the uttering the phrase NAMU AMIDABUTSU as if this one moment were the time of one's death. Ippen widely propagated this teaching wherever he went, and, to those who complied, he offered an amulet (fusan), which he said would assure rebirth in Amitābha's pure land. From Shitennoji, Ippen made a pilgrimage to KoYASAN and a shrine at KUMANO, where he is said to have had a revelation from a local manifestation of Amitābha. Ippen then began the life of an itinerant preacher, in the process acquiring a large following now known as the Jishu. In 1279, Ippen began performing nenbutsu while dancing with drums and bells, a practice known as odori nenbutsu and developed first by the monk KuYA. Ippen continued to wander through the country, spreading his teaching until his death. A famous set of twelve narrative hand scrolls known as the Ippen hijiri e ("The Illustrated Biography of the Holy Man Ippen") is an important source for the study of Ippen's life. Currently designated a Japanese national treasure (kokuho), the Ippen hijiri e was completed in 1299 on the tenth anniversary of Ippen's death. See also ICHINENGI.
Ishin Suden. (以心崇傳) (1569-1633). Japanese ZEN master in the RINZAISHu. Suden was born in Kii (present-day Wakayama prefecture) and, while still a youth, left home to become a monk at the Zen monastery of NANZENJI. In 1608, he was appointed the scribe of the new shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616). Suden was put in charge of foreign correspondence and was also given the important title of soroku, or registrar general of monks. As soroku, Suden established the hatto ("laws") for temples and monasteries and put them under the direct control of the bakufu government. Suden thus came to be known as the kokui no saisho, or "black-robed minister." With the assistance of the bakufu, Suden also restored Nanzenji to its former glory. Konchi'in, the name of Suden's residences at both Nanzenji and Edo, came to be synonymous with Suden and his policies. After Ieyasu's death, Suden continued to assist the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (1579-1632) in political and religious affairs. In 1626, Suden was given the honorary title Ensho Honko kokushi (State Preceptor Perfectly Illuminating, Original Radiance) from Emperor Gomizunoo (r. 1611-1629). His diary, the Honko kokushi nikki, is a valuable source for studying the sociopolitical history of the early Tokugawa bakufu. Suden also left a collection of poems known as the Kanrin gohoshu.
Izanagi and Izanami (Japanese) In Shintoism, the primordial male and female ancestors of humanity, who begot the first god of earth, Tenshoko doijin. “These ‘gods’ are simply our five races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of the ‘ancestors,’ the two preceding races which give birth to animal and to rational man” (SD 1:241). This heavenly pair was said to have created Japan from drops of brine. ( )
jakugo. (C. zhuoyu/zhuyu; K. ch'ago 著語). In Japanese, "annotation," "attached word," or "capping phrase." Such "annotations" abound in several early Chinese collections of CHAN "cases," or GONG'AN (J. koan), but they are most emblematic of the approach to koan training taught in the Japanese RINZAISHu of ZEN. The use of capping phrases in Japan is largely due to the influence of SoHo MYoCHo (1282-1337), who introduced them in his interpretations of koans. "Capping phrases" are brief phrases that are intended to offer a comment upon a specific Zen case, or koan, to express one's own enlightened understanding, or to catalyze insight in another. These phrases were originally composed in literary Chinese and are taken as often from secular Chinese literature as they are from the Zen tradition's own stories. These phrases range from as few as one word (e.g., Right!, Finished!) to parallel eight-character phrases ("But for the rule and the compass, the square and the round could not be determined,/ But for the plumb-line, the straight and the crooked could not be rectified"), but they are rarely more than twenty-five Sinographs in total. In the Japanese Rinzai system of koan meditative training, a student would demonstrate his understanding of the significance of a koan by submitting to the teacher an (or even the) appropriate jakugo, often taken from such traditional anthologies of these phrases as the seventeenth-century ZENRIN KUSHu ("An Anthology of Phrases from the Zen Grove"). Once the student's understanding of a specific koan was "passed" by the Zen master, the student would then continue on through a whole sequence of other koans, each answered in turn by another jakugo. See also KIRIKAMI.
Jakushitsu Genko. (C. Jishi Yuanguang 寂室元光) (1290-1367). Japanese ZEN monk in the RINZAISHu and founder of the Eigenji branch of the school. After entering the monastery at the age of thirteen, Jakushitsu studied under several Zen masters, including Yakuo Tokken (1244-1320) of ZENKoJI in Kamakura, who administered to him the complete monastic precepts (gusokukai) of a BHIKsU, and Yishan Yining (J. Issan Ichinei; 1247-1317) of NANZENJI in Kyoto, a Chinese LINJI ZONG monk who was active in Japan. Jakushitsu traveled to Yuan China in 1320 together with another Rinzai monk named Kao Sonen (d.1345). There, he studied with such eminent Linji Chan masters as ZHONGFENG MINGBEN (1263-1323), who gave him the cognomen Jishi (J. Jakushitsu), and Yuansou Xingduan (1255-1341). After returning to Japan in 1326, Jakushitsu spent the next twenty-five years traveling around the country as an itinerant monk, until 1362, when he assumed the abbacy of Eigenji, a monastery built for him by Sasaki Ujiyori (1326-1370) in omi no kuni (present-day Shiga prefecture). The emperor subsequently invited him to stay at Tenryuji in Kyoto and KENCHoJI in Kamakura, but he refused, choosing to remain at Eigenji for the remainder of his life. Jakushitsu is well known for his flute playing and his refined Zen poetry, which is considered some of the finest examples of the genre. He was given the posthumous title Enno Zenji (Zen Master Consummate Response).
japanese ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Japan, or its inhabitants. ::: n. sing. & pl. --> A native or inhabitant of Japan; collectively, the people of Japan.
The language of the people of Japan.
japanned ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Japan ::: a. --> Treated, or coated, with varnish in the Japanese manner.
japanner ::: n. --> One who varnishes in the manner of the Japanese, or one skilled in the art.
A bootblack.
japanning ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Japan ::: n. --> The art or act of varnishing in the Japanese manner.
japannish ::: a. --> After the manner of the Japanese; resembling japanned articles.
japan ::: n. --> Work varnished and figured in the Japanese manner; also, the varnish or lacquer used in japanning. ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Japan, or to the lacquered work of that country; as, Japan ware.
Jianzhen. (C) (鑑眞) (688-763). Chinese VINAYA master and reputed founder of the Japanese RITSU school (cf. NANSHAN LÜ ZONG) and the monastery of ToSHoDAIJI in Japan. See GANJIN.
jingtu sanbu jing. (J. jodo sanbukyo; K. chongt'o sambu kyong 淨土三部經). In Chinese, "the three scriptures on the pure land," a designation for three main sutras that focus on AMITĀBHA Buddha and his PURE LAND of SUKHĀVATĪ; these are generally considered to be the central canonical sutras of the pure land schools, and especially of the Japanese JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu. The three scriptures are (1) SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, the "[Larger] Sutra on the Buddha of Immeasurable Life" (Wuliangshou jing); (2) "Sutra on the Contemplation of the Buddha of Immeasurable Life" (GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING); and (3) AMITĀBHASuTRA, the "[Smaller] Sutra on the Buddha Amitābha" (Amituo jing). The writings of the pure land school are to a large extent commentaries on or exegeses of these three scriptures.
jingtu wuzu. (J. jodo no goso; K. chongt'o ojo 淨土五祖). In Chinese, the "five patriarchs of pure land"; according to the most common retrospective lineage, these are TANLUAN (476-?), DAOCHUO (562-645), SHANDAO (613-681), Huaigan (d.u.), and Shaokang (?-805). Of the five, Daochuo, Shandao, and Huaigan might actually have had at least a tenuous master-disciple relation, although this would not be sufficient in itself to constitute an authentic "pure land school" in China. It is among the Japanese pure land schools (e.g., JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu) that these retrospective Chinese lineages carry real authority, since they authenticate the teachings and practices associated with those Japanese traditions.
Jingying Huiyuan. (J. Joyo Eon; K. Chongyong Hyewon 浄影慧遠) (523-592). Chinese monk and putative DI LUN exegete during the Sui dynasty. Huiyuan was a native of DUNHUANG. At an early age, he entered the monastery of Guxiangusi in Zezhou (present-day Shanxi province) where he was ordained by the monk Sengsi (d.u.). Huiyuan later studied various scriptures under the VINAYA master Lizhan (d.u.) in Ye, the capital of the Eastern Wei dynasty. In his nineteenth year, Huiyuan received the full monastic precepts from Fashang (495-580), ecclesiastical head of the SAMGHA at the time, and became his disciple. Huiyuan also began his training in the DHARMAGUPTAKA "Four-Part Vinaya" (SIFEN LÜ) under the vinaya master Dayin (d.u.). After he completed his studies, Huiyuan moved back to Zezhou and began his residence at the monastery Qinghuasi. In 577, Emperor Wu (r. 560-578) of Northern Zhou began a systematic persecution of Buddhism, and in response, Huiyuan is said to have engaged the emperor in debate; a transcript of the debate, in which Huiyuan defends Buddhism against criticisms of its foreign origins and its neglect of filial piety, is still extant. As the persecution continued, Huiyuan retreated to Mt. Xi in Jijun (present-day Henan province). Shortly after the rise of the Sui dynasty, Huiyuan was summoned by Emperor Wen (r. 581-604) to serve as overseer of the saMgha (shamendu) in Luozhou (present-day Henan). He subsequently spent his time undoing the damage of the earlier persecution. Huiyuan was later asked by Emperor Wen to reside at the monastery of Daxingshansi in the capital. The emperor also built Huiyuan a new monastery named Jingyingsi, which is often used as his toponym to distinguish him from LUSHAN HUIYUAN. Jingying Huiyuan was a prolific writer who composed numerous commentaries on such texts as the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, MAHĀPARINIRVĀnASuTRA, VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, sRĪMĀLĀDEVĪSIMHANĀDASuTRA, SHIDI JING LUN (VASUBANDHU's commentary on the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA), DASHENG QIXIN LUN, and others. Among his works, the DASHENG YI ZHANG ("Compendium of the Purport of Mahāyāna"), a comprehensive encyclopedia of Mahāyāna doctrine, is perhaps the most influential and is extensively cited by traditional exegetes throughout East Asia. Jingying Huiyuan also plays a crucial role in the development of early PURE LAND doctrine in East Asia. His commentary on the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, the earliest extant treatise on this major pure land scripture, is critical in raising the profile of the Guan jing in East Asian Buddhism. His commentary to this text profoundly influenced Korean commentaries on the pure land scriptures during the Silla dynasty, which in turn were crucial in the the evolution of Japanese pure land thought during the Nara and Heian periods. Jingying Huiyuan's concept of the "dependent origination of the TATHĀGATAGARBHA" (rulaizang yuanqi)-in which tathāgatagarbha is viewed as the "essence" (TI) of both NIRVĀnA and SAMSĀRA, which are its "functioning" (YONG)-is later adapted and popularized by the third HUAYAN patriarch, FAZANG, and is an important precursor of later Huayan reconceptualizations of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA; see FAJIE YUANQI).
jiriki. (C. zili; K. charyok 自力). In Japanese, "self power." The term jiriki came to be used frequently in the pure land schools by the followers of HoNEN and SHINRAN and their JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu traditions. Jiriki, or "self power," is often contrasted with the term TARIKI, or "other power." While tariki refers to the practitioner's reliance on the power or grace of the buddha AMITĀBHA, jiriki is often used pejoratively to refer to practices requiring personal effort, such as keeping the precepts (sĪLA) and cultivating the six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ). Reliance on jiriki was often condemned as a difficult path to enlightenment, especially as compared to practices based on tariki, such as reciting Amitābha's name (J. nenbutsu; see C. NIANFO). Exegetes also attempted to underscore the futility of jiriki practices by suggesting that the world was currently in the mappo (C. MOFA), or dharma-ending age, when personal power alone was no longer sufficient to bring one to enlightenment, requiring instead the intervention of an external force. The jiriki-tariki dichotomy was often used polemically by Jodoshu and Jodo Shinshu exegetes to condemn the practices of rival Japanese traditions, such as the TENDAISHu and ZENSHu, which they claimed were ineffective in the current degenerate age of the dharma.
Jishu. [alt. Jishu] (時衆/時宗). In Japanese, "Time Assembly" or "Time school"; referring to followers of the Japanese itinerant holy man (HIJIRI) IPPEN (1239-1289). The name comes from this community's practice of rotating leadership in invoking the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA (J. nenbutsu; see NIANFO) at different time intervals. Ippen developed a practice known as ippen nenbutsu (single-time invocation of the name [see NIANFO] of the Amitābha), which largely consists of the uttering the phrase NAMU AMIDABUTSU as if that one time were the moment of one's death. Ippen widely propagated this teaching wherever he went, and to those who complied, he offered an amulet (fusan), which he claimed assured them rebirth in Amitābha's pure land of SUKHĀVATĪ. In 1279, Ippen also began performing nenbutsu while dancing with drums and bells, a practice known as odori nenbutsu (dancing recitation) and first developed by the monk KuYA. During the course of his life as an itinerant preacher, Ippen acquired a large following that eventually became known as the Jishu. The number of Jishu followers grew greatly during the Kamakura period. The Jishu community was guided by a set of eighteen vows devised by Ippen and was distinguished from monks of other traditions by their unique robes. An intense rivalry seems to have existed between the leaders of the Jishu and the JoDO SHINSHu tradition of Japanese pure land Buddhism. A large portion of the Jishu community was later absorbed into the Jodo Shinshu community, largely through the efforts of RENNYO. The current head temple of Jishu is Shojokoji in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture.
Jiun Onko. (慈雲飮光) (1718-1804). In Japanese, "Cloud of Compassion, Drinker of Light"; a monk of the Shingon Risshu school, which combined the esoteric teachings of the SHINGONSHu with disciplinary observance of the VINAYA; also known as Jiun Sonja. Up to the age of twelve, he received a traditional Confucian education, but after his father's death the following year, he was entrusted to Horakuji, a Shingon Risshu monastery in Kawachi (present-day osaka prefecture), where he studied esoteric teachings and the SIDDHAM Sanskrit syllabary. During his early studies of Buddhism, Jiun came to realize the centrality of the PRĀTIMOKsA precepts to a monastic vocation, and in 1738 decided to take the full set of monk's precepts (J. gusokukai) at the monastery of Yachuji. In the following year, Jiun was appointed abbot of his old monastery of Horakuji, but he resigned two years later to dedicate himself to ZEN practice in the SoToSHu. In his late twenties, he founded a movement called the "vinaya of the true dharma" (shoboritsu), which encouraged Buddhist clerics to commit themselves to the prātimoksa precepts, regardless of their sectarian affiliations. In 1758, Jiun wrote a massive textbook on Sanskrit, the thousand-roll Bongaku shinryo ("The Ford and Bridge to Sanskrit Studies"), the first such study aid published in Japan. In 1775, he compiled his Juzen hogo ("Dharma Discourses on the Ten Wholesome Ways of Action"), a collection of lectures on the KUsALA-KARMAPATHA that he had delivered the two previous years at Amidadera in Kyoto. Late in his life, he moved to KATSURAGISAN, where he pioneered an eclectic religious movement that came to be called Unden SHINTo ("Shinto transmitted by Jiun") or Katsuragi Shinto, which integrated Shingon, Zen, and Confucianism with Japanese indigenous religion.
Jodo Shinshu. (浄土眞宗). In Japanese, the "True Pure Land school"; referring to the followers of the Japanese PURE LAND monk SHINRAN (1173-1262) and often called simply the Shinshu ("True School"). The central scriptures of the Jodo Shinshu are the so-called three pure land SuTRAs (J. jodo sanbukyo, see JINGTU SANBUJING): the longer SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, the shorter Sukhāvatīvyuhasutra (also known as the AMITĀBHASuTRA) and the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, as well as the writings of Shinran, such as his magnum opus, KYoGYo SHINSHo. Following the example of Shinran's own vocation, the school is distinguished from the earlier JoDOSHu by its more liberal attitude toward the Buddhist VINAYA rules of conduct, permitting its clergy to marry, have families, and eat meat, and its faith-oriented approach to practice, which placed relatively less emphasis on the efficacy of nenbutsu (C. NIANFO), the invocation of the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA, and greater stress on the power and grace of Amitābha. Because Shinran believed that people in this degenerate age of the dharma (J. mappo; C. MOFA) had little hope of gaining salvation through through own power (JIRIKI), he taught instead the complete reliance on Amitābha's salvific power (TARIKI). And because there was no possibility of effecting salvation on one's own, Shinran advocated that just a single sincere recitation of his name (ICHINENGI) would be sufficient to earn Amitābha's grace, in distinction to other of Honen's successors, who advocated multiple or even continuous recitations of Amitābha's name (TANENGI). Shinran's teachings spread from the capital of Kyoto to the countryside, largely through the proselytizing efforts of his disciples. The followers of Shinran eventually formed regional centers known as dojo (cultivation sites), which later came under control of the monastery HONGANJI, thus developing a unified sectarian identity. This process largely began with the development of a memorial cult surrounding Shinran. KAKUNYO (1270-1351), Shinran's great-grandson, formalized the memorial services (hoonko) for Shinran and transformed his mausoleum in otani into a temple, which he later named Honganji. The regional centers also developed into contending factions (e.g., the Bukkoji, Senjuji, and Kinshokuji branches), but they were eventually unified under the strong leadership of RENNYO (1415-1499), the eighth abbot of Honganji. In 1465, warrior monks from HIEIZAN razed Honganji and turned the site into one of their own branch temples (matsuji). In 1478, having gained enough support to counter any threat from Mt. Hiei, Rennyo moved Honganji to the Yamashina area of Kyoto. The move was completed in 1483 with the completion of the Amida hall. Under Rennyo's leadership, Honganji became the central monastery of the Jodo Shinshu tradition. Rennyo built a broad network of temples that was consolidated under the sole administration of Honganji. After a brief move to osaka, Honganji was relocated to its current site in Kyoto on the order of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598). A split occurred between two factions shortly thereafter, and ever since the early seventeenth century the Nishi (West) and Higashi (East) Honganji complexes have served as the religious centers of these two major branches of Jodo Shinshu, the NISHI HONGANJIHA and the HIGASHI HONGANJIHA (also known as the oTANIHA). See also JoDOSHu.
Jodoshu. (浄土宗). In Japanese, the "PURE LAND school"; referring to the followers of HoNEN (1133-1212), who formed the first indigenous school of Japanese Buddhism outside the aegis of the imperial court. The central scriptures of the school are the so-called three pure land SuTRAs (jodo sanbukyo; see JINGTU SANBUJING): the longer SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, the shorter Sukhāvatīvyuhasutra (also known as the AMITĀBHASuTRA), and the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING; as well as the *Aparimitāyussutropadesa ("Exegesis of the Wuliangshou jing"), commonly known as the Jingtu lun (J. Jodoron) ("Treatise on the Pure Land") and attributed by tradition to VASUBANDHU (see WULIANGSHOU JING YOUPOTISHE YUANSHENG JI). Honen's teachings focused on the "easy path" to NIRVĀnA and the prospect of achieving enlightenment exclusively through recitation of the nenbutsu (C. NIANFO), which would lead to rebirth in the buddha AMITĀBHA's pure land. Honen's teachings quickly spread throughout Japan largely through the efforts of his disciples SHINRAN (1173-1262), Ryukan (1148-1228), Shokobo Bencho (1162-1238), Zen'ebo Shoku (1177-1247), Jokakubo Kosai (1163-1247), and Kakumyobo Chosai (1184-1366). While his disciples all agreed on the efficacy of the recitation of the nenbutsu as advocated by Honen, they developed different interpretations of this practice. These divisions eventually led to the formation of disparate factions within the school. Those who followed Bencho came to be known as the Chinzei branch; their spirit of tolerance for other practices allowed the Chinzei branch to thrive. Shoku's followers, now known as the Seizan branch, held the position that rebirth in the pure land is possible only through continuous repetition of the nenbutsu (TANENGI); indeed, Shoku himself was said to recite the nenbutsu as many as sixty thousand times a day. Kosai, and to a lesser extent Shinran, held the more radical position that a single invocation of the name of Amitābha (ICHINENGI) would suffice. In 1207, in an effort to suppress the spread of Honen's teaching of exclusive nenbutsu, Honen, Kosai, and Shinran, were exiled to different regions of the country. In 1227, the Jodo movement was further suppressed when Honen's grave was desecrated by HIEIZAN monks and Kosai was again sent into exile. In 1450, the Chinzei branch came to dominate the other branches when the Chinzei adherent Keijiku (1403-1459) assumed the position of abbot of the monastery CHION'IN (built at Honen's grave site) in Kyoto. The Chinzei branch firmly established itself as the leading branch with the support of the Tokugawa bakufu. The teachings of Bencho's disciple Ryochu (1199-1287), who advocated the active use of the nenbutsu for purifying bad KARMAN in order to attain rebirth in pure land, came to be the official position of the Chinzei branch and thus of the wider Jodoshu tradition. See also JoDO SHINSHu.
JSA ::: Japanese Standards Association.
JSA {Japanese Standards Association}
Kaian kokugo. (槐安國語). In Japanese, "Words on the Peaceful Land of the Locust-Trees," composed by the Japanese RINZAI ZEN master HAKUIN EKAKU. The peaceful land of the locust-trees (Sophora japonica) is an allusion to the tale of a retired official who dreams of a peaceful paradise, but upon waking realizes that it was nothing but a mound of ants living underneath a locust-tree in the yard. This tale is found in the Nanke taishou zhuan ("Biography of the Governor of Nanke"), written by Li Gongzuo (c. 778-848), and retold in the Nanke ji ("Record of the Southern Bough") by the Ming-dynasty playwright Tang Xianzu (1550-1617). Hakuin composed this treatise in 1749 and published it the next year in 1750. The treatise, which was written at the request of his students, consists largely of Hakuin's prose commentary and notes on the recorded sayings (YULU) of the Zen master Daito (see SoHo MYoCHo). The entire treatise was written in literary Chinese.
kaihogyo. (回峰行). In Japanese, lit. "the practice of circumambulating the mountain," a SHUGENDo-related ascetic practice of running a course around the mountain of HIEIZAN, which is undertaken by Japanese TENDAI monks and nuns within the Sanmon branch of the school. The central deity of veneration for kaihogyo is FUDo MYoo (S. ACALANĀTHA-VIDYĀRĀJA). While engaged in running the course, one chants, meditates, and stops to pray at temples, shrines, and natural elements along the route. Kaihogyo can be practiced for as little as one day or for a 100-day period as part of a monk or nun's training. Best known, however, is its 1,000-day practice (sennichi kaihogyo), which is carried out over a seven-year period. This route consists of twenty-five to fifty miles of running a day, depending on the stage of practice, which is broken up into 100-day terms. The first 700 days of practice benefits the practitioner (gyoja) himself (JIRIKI), while the last 300 days benefits others (TARIKI) and is thus known as the BODHISATTVA practice (bosatsugyo). Between these two stages, the gyoja undergoes a severe nine-day rite referred to as a doiri (lit. "entering the hall"), during which he completely forgoes food, water, rest, or sleep. One who successfully completes the 1,000-day practice receives the title Daigyoman Ajari (Ācārya whose Great Practice is Fulfilled). Kaihogyo dates back to at least the fourteenth century, and an earlier form of it may have been practiced as early as the ninth century. The origin of kaihogyo is attributed to the Tendai monk Soo (b. 831).
Kaimokusho. (開目鈔). In Japanese, "Opening the Eyes"; one of the major writings of NICHIREN. Nichiren composed this treatise in 1273 while he was living in exile in a graveyard on Sado Island. Nichiren's motivation for writing this treatise is said to have come from the doubts that he came to harbor about the efficacy of the teachings of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA due to the government's repeated persecution of him and his followers. The Kaimokusho details the reasons behind the persecutions: bad KARMAN from the past, the abandonment of the country by the gods (KAMI), life in the impure realm of SAHĀLOKA, and the trials and tribulations of the BODHISATTVA path. In the Kaimokusho, Nichiren professes to have overcome his doubts and welcomes the bodhisattva path of martyrdom. The treatise explains the path that leads to "opening the eyes" as a journey from the teachings of the heretics to those of the HĪNAYĀNA, the MAHĀYĀNA, and finally culminating in the teachings of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI). According to Nichiren tradition, because Nichiren claims at the conclusion of the text to be the "sovereign, teacher, and mother and father to all the people of Japan," he has thus revealed himself to be the Buddha of the degenerate age of the dharma (MAPPo).
Kaizen - A Japanese term meaning continuous improvement, through the elimination of waste
kakemono ::: A Japanese paper or silk wall hanging, usually long and narrow, with a picture or inscription on it and a roller at the bottom.
kakemono ::: a Japanese paper or silk wall hanging, usually long and narrow, with a picture or inscription on it and a roller at the bottom.
Kakuban. (覺鑁) (1095-1143). Japanese monk and putative founder of the Shingi branch of the SHINGONSHu, also known as Mitsugon Sonja (Venerable Secret Adornment). Kakuban was a native of Fujitsu no sho in Hizen (present-day Saga). In 1107, Kakuban became a monk at the monastery NINNAJI in Kyoto and studied the fundamentals of esoteric teachings (MIKKYo) under the eminent master Kanjo (1052-1125). Kakuban spent the next year in Nara, where he is said to have immersed himself in doctrinal studies at the monasteries of KoFUKUJI and ToDAIJI. In 1110, he returned to Ninnaji and was tonsured by Kanjo. In 1112, Kakuban began studying the eighteen ritual procedures according to KuKAI's Juhachi geiin, and the next year he received the KONGoKAI and TAIZoKAI MAndALAs. In 1114, Kakuban received the full monastic precepts at Todaiji, and later that year he climbed KoYASAN where he met the monk Shoren (d.u.). The next year, Kakuban studied a ritual known as the kumonjiho dedicated to ĀKĀsAGARBHA under the monk Myojaku (d.u.), and, during his stay on Mt. Koya, Kakuban is said to have also received the consecration (ABHIsEKA) of DHARMA transmission (J. denbo kanjo) eight times. In 1121, Kakuban received the three SAMAYA precepts and consecration of the two mandalas from Kanjo at the sanctuary (dojo) located in Ninnaji. In 1130, Kakuban established the temple Denboin on Mt. Koya with the support of retired Emperor Toba (1107-1123). There he attempted to reinstate a ritual of esoteric transmission known as the denboe. When the temple proved to be too small to hold a great assembly, Kakuban again established the larger temples Daidenboin and Mitsugon'in on Koyasan in 1132. Kakuban subsequently devoted himself to developing a new esoteric ritual tradition that could incorporate the disparate ritual traditions that had developed in Kyoto, Nara, HIEIZAN, and other monastic centers. This new ritual tradition came to be known as the Denboinryu. In 1134, Kakuban was appointed the head (zasu) of the monasteries of Daidenboin and Kongobuji on Mt. Koya, but Kakuban's rise to power was soon contested by the conservative factions of Kongobuji monks with ties to the monasteries of ToJI and Daigoji. As a result, Kakuban retired to his monastery of Mitsugon'in. In 1140, the monks of Kongobuji launched a violent attack on Daidenboin and Mitsugon'in, which forced Kakuban to flee to Mt. Negoro in Wakayama. In 1288, the split between Kakuban's new ritual tradition (later known as Shingi or "new meaning") and the old traditions of Toji and Kongobuji was formalized by the monk Raiyu's (1226-1304) move of Daidenboin and Mitsugon'in to Mt. Negoro. Kakuban is particularly well known for his efforts towards reestablishing the study of Kukai's writings as the central organizing principle for the study of mikkyo ritual traditions. Kakuban is commonly regarded as having developed a new approach to nenbutsu (see NIANFO), or invocation of the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA, known as the "esoteric recitation," or himitsu nenbutsu. However, by Kakuban's time nenbutsu practice in esoteric Buddhist contexts had already become a nearly ubiquitous feature of monastic and lay practice in Japan, and it would therefore be more accurate to regard Kakuban's writings on this topic as an attempt to propose a unified nenbutsu perspective for the diverse factions of monks and ascetics (HIJIRI) who had come to Mt. Koya in search of rebirth in the pure lands and abodes of MAITREYA, Amitābha, MANJUsRĪ, AVALOKITEsVARA, etc. Long after his death, Emperor Higashiyama (r. 1687-1709) in 1690 gave Kakuban the title Kogyo Daishi.
Kakukai. [alt. Kakkai] (覺海) (1142-1223). An early Kamakura-period Japanese scholar-monk from Keoin temple on Mt. Koya (see KoYASAN), and the thirty-seventh temple administrator (J. kengyo) of Kongobuji; his sobriquet was Nanshobo. Kakukai is especially known for his "immanentalist" SHINGON pure land thought, emphasizing the position that this very world is itself the PURE LAND, and that seeking rebirth in the pure land as a post-mortem destination should not be the main goal of Buddhist practice. His views on the pure land are similar to those of KAKUBAN. However, Kakuban, like Kakukai's student DoHAN, viewed the post-mortem attainment of rebirth in a pure land as a worthwhile goal. Many of Kakukai's students, such as Dohan, Hossho, Shinben, and others, came to be regarded as paragons of the Shingon academic tradition on Mt. Koya. Kakukai is also the author of an important medieval dharma lecture (J. hogo) written in vernacular Japanese entitled Kakukai hokkyo hogo.
Kakunyo. (覺如) (1270-1351). A Japanese priest of the JoDO SHINSHu tradition, also known by his posthumous name Shusho. Kakunyo was the great-grandson of the Jodo Shinshu patriarch SHINRAN. As a young man, Kakunyo first studied on HIEIZAN and in Nara, and later studied Jodo Shinshu teachings under Nyoshin (1239-1300), the second main priest of HONGANJI. In 1310, Kakunyo became the third main priest of Honganji. Thereafter, he spent much of his time traveling to spread Shinran's teachings, before passing away in 1351. He authored a number of texts, including the Hoonko shiki, the Shinran shonin den e, the Shui kotokuden, the Kudensho, the Kaijasho, the Shujisho, the Hongansho, the Gangansho, the Shusse gan'i, and the Saiyosho.
Kālacakratantra. (T. Dus kyi 'khor lo rgyud). A late ANUTTARAYOGATANTRA that was highly influential in Tibet. Although the title of the tantra is often translated as "Wheel of Time," this translation is not attested in the text itself. Kālacakra is the name of the central buddha of the tantra, and the tantra deals extensively with time (kāla) as well as various macrocosmic and microcosmic cycles or wheels (CAKRA). According to legend, King SUCANDRA came to India from his kingdom of sAMBHALA and asked that the Buddha set forth a teaching that would allow him to practice the dharma without renouncing the world. In response, the Buddha, while remaining at Vulture Peak (GṚDHRAKutAPARVATA) in RĀJAGṚHA in the guise of a monk, set forth the Kālacakratantra at Dhānyakataka in southern India (near present-day Amarāvatī) in the guise of the buddha Kālacakra. The king returned to sambhala, where he transcribed the tantra in twelve thousand verses. This text is referred to as the root tantra (mulatantra) and is no longer extant. He also wrote a commentary in sixty thousand verses, also lost. He built a three-dimensional Kālacakra MAndALA at the center of the country, which was transformed into an ideal realm for Buddhist practice, with 960 million villages. The eighth king of sambhala, MaNjusrīkīrti, condensed the original version of the tantra into the abridged version (the Laghukālacakra). A later king of sambhala, Pundarīka, composed the VIMALAPRABHĀ commentary, considered crucial for understanding the tantra. These two texts were eventually transported from sambhala to India. Internal evidence in the text makes it possible to date the composition of the tantra rather precisely to between the dates 1025 and 1040 CE. This was the period of Muslim invasions of northern India under Mahmud of Ghazni, during which great destruction of Buddhist institutions occurred. The tantra, drawing on Hindu mythology, describes a coming apocalyptic war in which Buddhist armies will sweep out of sambhala, defeat the barbarians (mleccha), described as being followers of Madhumati (i.e., Muhammad), and restore the dharma in India. After its composition in northern India, the tantra was promulgated by such figures as Pindo and his disciple ATIsA, as well as NĀROPA. From India, it spread to Nepal and Tibet. The millennial quality of the tantra has manifested itself at particular moments in Tibetan history. Prior to World War II, the PAn CHEN LAMA bestowed the Kālacakra initiation in China in an effort to repel the Japanese invaders. The fourteenth DALAI LAMA has given the initiation many times around the world to promote world peace. ¶ The tantra is an anuttarayogatantra dedicated to the buddha Kālacakra and his consort Visvamātā. However, it differs from other tantras of this class in several ways, including its emphasis on the attainment of a body of "empty form" (sunyatābimba) and on its six-branched yoga (sadangayoga). The tantra itself, that is, the Laghukālacakra or "Abridged Kālacakra," has five chapters, which in the Tibetan commentarial tradition is divided into three sections: outer, inner, and other or alternative. The outer, corresponding to the first chapter, deals with the cosmos and treats such topics as cosmology, astrology, chronology, and eschatology (the story of the apocalyptic war against the barbarians is told there). For example, this section describes the days of the year; each of the days is represented in the full Kālacakra mandala as 360 golden (day/male) and dark (night/female) deities in union, with a single central Kālacakra and consort (YAB YUM) in the center. The universe is described as a four-tiered mandala, whose various parts are homologous to the cosmic body of a buddha. This section was highly influential in Tibetan astrology and calendrics. The new calendar of the Tibetans, used to this day, starts in the year 1027 and is based on the Kālacakra system. The inner Kālacakra, corresponding to the second chapter, deals with human embryology, tantric physiology, medicine, yoga, and alchemy. The human body is described as a microcosm of the universe. The other or alternative Kālacakra, corresponding to the third, fourth, and fifth chapters, sets forth the practice of Kālacakra, including initiation (ABHIsEKA), SĀDHANA, and knowledge (JNĀNA). Here, in the stage of generation (UTPATTIKRAMA), the initiate imagines oneself experiencing conception, gestation, and birth as the child of Kālacakra and Vismamātā. In the stage of completion (NIsPANNAKRAMA), one practices the six-branched yoga, which consists of retraction (pratyāhāra), concentration (DHYĀNA), breath control (PRĀnĀYĀMA), retention (dhāranā), recollection (ANUSMṚTI), and SAMĀDHI. In the last of these six branches, 21,600 moments of immutable bliss are created, which course through the system of channels and CAKRAS to eliminate the material aspects of the body, resulting in a body of "empty form" and the achievement of buddhahood as Kālacakra. The Sekoddesatīkā of Nadapāda (or Nāropa) sets forth this distinctive six-branched yoga, unique to the Kālacakra system. ¶ BU STON, the principal redactor of the canon in Tibetan translation, was a strong proponent of the tantra and wrote extensively about it. DOL PO PA SHES RAB RGYAL MTSHAN, a fourteenth-century JO NANG PA writer, championed the Kālacakra over all other Buddhist writings, assigning its composition to a golden age (kṛtayuga). Red mda' ba gzhon nu blo gros, an important scholar associated with SA SKYA sect, regarded the tantra as spurious. TSONG KHA PA, who was influenced by all of these writers, accepted the Kālacakratantra as an authentic ANUTTARAYOGATANTRA but put it in a category by itself.
Kamakura daibutsu. (鎌倉大佛). In Japanese, "Great Buddha of Kamakura"; a colossal bronze buddha image located at KoTOKUIN, a JoDOSHu temple in Kamakura City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The Kamakura daibutsu is a huge bronze statue of Amida (S. AMITĀBHA) and is one of Japan's most renowned buddha images. It is forty-four feet high and weighs about ninety-three tons. The first Kamakura shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), saw the colossal buddha image at ToDAIJI (see NARA DAIBUTSU) that had been restored in 1185 and, inspired, proposed erecting a similar image in his capital of Kamakura. After his premature death, the building campaign was carried out by his court lady Ineda no Tsubone (d.u.) and the monk Joko (d.u.) and the image cast by ono Goroemon and Tanji Hisatomo from eight separate bronze plates that were ingeniously pieced together. Casting and gilding of the bronze image began in 1252 and took some twelve years to complete; the new image replaced an earlier wooden statue from 1243 that had been badly damaged in a storm. It was originally located inside a huge wooden shrine hall; the building was destroyed by a tsunami that demolished the entire temple in 1495 but that was not strong enough to budge the massive statue. Without funds for repairs, the image was neglected for years until the Jodo monk Yuten Ken'yo (1637-1718) arranged for needed restorations in 1712; just behind the image are four bronze plates in the shape of lotus petals, on which are engraved the names of the donors who contributed to the restoration project. The image's head is covered with 656 stylized curls and is disproportionately large so that it will not look small to people viewing it from the ground; the hands are in the meditation gesture (DHYĀNAMUDRĀ) typical of Amitābha images, with both hands displaying encircled thumb and index fingers. The image was repaired in 1923 after the Great Kanto earthquake and once again in 1960-1961. The image is one of the most famous sites in Japan and draws well over a million visitors a year.
Kami: A Japanese word translated as deity, god, goddess, etc. The original significance of kami is occult power, more or less like the meaning of mana (q.v.).
Kami: (Japanese) Originally denoting anything that inspires and overawes man with a sense of holiness, the word assumed a meaning in Japanese equivalent to spirit (also ancestral spirit), divinity, and God. It is a central concept in the pre-Confucian and pre-Buddhistic native religion which holds the sun supreme and still enjoys national support, while it may also take on a more abstract philosophic significance. -- K.F.L.
kami. (神). In Japanese, "spirits," "gods," or "deities" (the term is not gender-specific and can be used as either singular or plural). Kami worship preceded the arrival of Buddhism in Japan and much later came to be regarded as the putative indigenous religion of SHINTo. Kami is a complicated concept in Japanese religion, because the term applies to several different entities. Kami were perhaps most commonly considered to be spirits associated with physical objects; in the natural world, this meant that kami inhabited everything from rocks and trees to rivers and mountains. Kami could also designate ancestors or ancient heroes. The early historical record Kojiki (712), for example, recorded the names of various gods (kami) who created Japan and the Japanese people. In this text, all recognized clans (J. uji) had ancestries that linked themselves back to these local spirits. The tutelary deity of the ruling family, for example, was an anthropomorphized solar spirit named Amateru/Amaterasu omikami (lit. "Great Honorable Spirit Heavenly Radiance"), who was claimed to reside at the Ise shrine. From the Heian (794-1185) through the Tokugawa (1600-1868) periods, in conjunction with the ongoing Buddhist appropriation of native cults, kami were largely regarded as the local physical manifestations of buddhas and BODHISATTVAs, a theory of correlation known as HONJI SUIJAKU. In addition, local kami were also presumed to have converted to Buddhism and become protectors of specific shrines (both portable and fixed) and monasteries. The nativist (J. kokugaku) movement during the Tokugawa period, which developed as a reaction against such so-called foreign elements in Japanese culture as Buddhism and Confucianism, began to explore ways of distinguishing Buddhism from indigenous cults and held up the kami as something uniquely Japanese. From the inception of the Meiji period (1868-1912) up until 1945, the notion of kami became heavily politicized due to the government-mandated separation of buddhas and kami (J. SHINBUTSU BUNRI) and the proposition that the emperor (J. tenno) was a kami whose lineage could be traced back to the gods of the Kojiki. During this period, Japanese soldiers who died for the empire were interred at the Yasukuni shrine where they were venerated as kami; with the Japanese defeat in World War II, the Japanese government was compelled publicly to renounce this position. See also SHINBUTSU SHuGo, HAIBUTSU KISHAKU.
kana "Japanese" The two Japanese syllabaries, {hiragana} and {katakana}. (2001-03-18)
kana ::: (Japanese) The two Japanese syllabaries, hiragana and katakana.(2001-03-18)
kanhua Chan. (J. kannazen/kanwazen; K. kanhwa Son 看話禪). In Chinese, "Chan of investigating the topic of inquiry," or, more freely, "questioning meditation." The systematization of this meditative practice is commonly traced back to the writings of the Song-dynasty CHAN master DAHUI ZONGGAO. The kanhua Chan technique grew out of the growing interest in the study of "public cases" (GONG'AN), viz., old stories and anecdotes of Chan masters, which flourished during the Song dynasty. Dahui's teacher YUANWU KEQIN is also known to have lectured on numerous public cases, and his anthology of gong'an, along with his analysis of them, was recorded in the famous collection the BIYAN LU ("Blue Cliff Records"). Dahui further elaborated upon Yuanwu's investigation of public cases and applied this process to the practice of Chan meditation. In his lectures and letters (DAHUI PUJUE CHANSHI SHU), Dahui urged his students (many of whom were educated literati) to use the gong'an as a "topic of meditative inquiry" (HUATOU, K. hwadu), rather than interpret it from purely intellectual or conceptual perspectives. Perhaps the most famous huatou is the topic "no" (WU) attributed to the Chan master ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN: A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have buddha-nature (FOXING), or not?" to which Zhaozhou replied "WU" ("no"; lit. "it does not have it"). (See WU GONG'AN; GOUZI WU FOXING.) (Because of the popularity of this one-word meditative topic, kanhua Chan is often interpreted to mean the investigation of the "critical phrase" or "keyword," in which the "keyword" "wu" is presumed to have been extracted from the longer gong'an exchange.) The investigation of this huatou starts by "investigating the meaning" (C. canyi; K. ch'amŭi) of the huatou: what could Zhaozhou have meant by answering "no" to this question, when the right answer should be "yes"? The mainstream of East Asian Buddhist doctrine insists that all sentient beings, including dogs, are inherently enlightened and thus do in fact possess the buddha-nature, so this question promotes inquiry. Examining what Zhaozhou might have meant by saying "no" has what Dahui termed "taste" (C. wei, K. mi), meaning intellectual interest. As one's intellectual inquiry into this question continues, however, the student is ultimately left with "doubt" (YIQING), viz., the inability of the (unenlightened) mind to understand Zhaozhou's motive in giving this response to the student's question. Doubt, Dahui says, renders the mind "puzzled, frustrated, and tasteless" (viz., lacking intellectual interest), just as if you were gnawing on an iron rod." Once doubt arises, there is no longer any conceptual support for the meditation, and the student moves on to "investigating the word" (C. canju; K. ch'amgu), viz., just sitting with the huatou wu and no longer trying to understand Zhaozhou's motive in offering this response. At this point, the huatou becomes a "live word" (C. huoju; K. hwalgu) that helps to free the mind from conceptualization and to lead the meditator forward toward liberation. As the sense of doubt becomes more and more intense, it finally "explodes" (C. po; K. p'a), bringing an end to the deluded processes of thought and removing the limiting point of view that is the self. Once the distinctions between self and other disintegrate, the meditator experiences the interconnection between himself or herself and all the phenomena in the universe (SHISHI WU'AI). Kanhua Chan, therefore, employs the inevitable doubt that a benighted person would have about the sayings of the enlightened Chan masters of old to create a powerful sense of inquiry that leads the meditator toward the experience of nonconceptualization and finally enlightenment. ¶ Dahui's system of kanhua Chan was first taught in Korea by POJO CHINUL, where it is known as kanhwa Son, and popularized by Chinul's successor, CHIN'GAK HYESIM. Kanhwa Son continues to be the most common contemplative technique practiced in Korean Son halls. Korean Son monks typically work on one hwadu-often Zhaozhou's "no"-for much of their career, continually deepening their experience of that topic. In China, after the Ming dynasty, kanhua Chan merged with the recitation of the buddha AMITĀBHA's name (NIANFO), so that Chan meditators would turn the recitation into a huatou by reflecting on the topic "Who is reciting the Buddha's name?" In Japanese Zen, due in large part to the efforts of HAKUIN EKAKU and his disciples, kannazen became widespread within the RINZAI ZEN tradition, where it was incorporated into an elaborate system of koan training, involving the systematic investigation of many different koans.
kanji ::: (human language, character) /kahn'jee/ (From the Japanese kan - the Chinese Han dynasty, and ji - glyph or letter of the alphabet. Not Japanese language in written, printed and displayed form. The term is also used for the collection of all kanji letters.US-ASCII doesn't include kanji characters, but some character encodings, including Unicode, do.The Japanese writing system also uses hiragana, katakana, and sometimes romaji (Roman alphabet letters). These characters are distinct from, though commonly used in combination with, kanji. Furigana are also added sometimes.(2000-12-30)
kanji "human language, character" /kahn'jee/ (From the Japanese "kan" - the Chinese Han dynasty, and "ji" - {glyph} or letter of the alphabet. Not capitalised. Plural "kanji") The Japanese word for a {Han character} used in Japanese. Kanji constitute a part of the {writing system} used to represent the Japanese language in written, printed and displayed form. The term is also used for the collection of all kanji {letters}. {US-ASCII} doesn't include kanji characters, but some {character encodings}, including {Unicode}, do. The Japanese writing system also uses hiragana, katakana, and sometimes romaji ({Roman alphabet} letters). These characters are distinct from, though commonly used in combination with, kanji. {Furigana} are also added sometimes. (2000-12-30)
Kanzan Egen. (關山慧玄) (1277-1360). Japanese ZEN master of the RINZAI ZEN tradition and founder of the influential monastery of MYoSHINJI in Kyoto. Kanzan was a native of Shinano in present-day Nagano prefecture and at a young age was ordained at the monastery KENCHoJI in Kamakura. In 1307, he met the eminent Zen master NANPO JoMYo when the latter was appointed the abbot of Kenchoji. In 1327, Kanzan visited Nanpo's leading disciple SoHo MYoCHo, also known as Daito, to continue his studies with him at the monastery DAITOKUJI in Kyoto. In 1303, Kanzan is said to have attained awakening while struggling with the koan (C. GONG'AN) of YUNMEN WENYAN's "barrier" (case 8 of the BIYAN LU). Daito himself had penetrated this koan earlier at Kenchoji under Nanpo's guidance. In recognition of his disciple's achievement, Daito gave him the name Kanzan (Barrier Mountain). In place of his teacher Daito, Kanzan later became the personal instructor to Emperor Godaigo (r. 1318-1339) and Hanazono (r. 1308-1318). After Daito's death in 1337, Emperor Hanazono converted his country villa into a monastery and invited Kanzan to serve as its founding abbot (kaisan, C. KAISHAN); this monastery was subsequently given the name Myoshinji.
Kapleau, Philip. (1912-2004). Influential twentieth-century American teacher of Zen Buddhism. Kapleau worked as a court reporter at the war crimes trials following World War II, first in Nuremberg and then in Tokyo. He met D. T. SUZUKI in Japan in 1948 and later attended his lectures at Columbia University in 1950. He returned to Japan in 1953, where he spent the next thirteen years practicing Zen, the last ten under YASUTANI HAKUUN (1885-1973), a Zen priest who had severed his ties to the SoTo sect in order to form his own organization, called Sanbokyodan, the "Three Treasures Association," which taught Zen meditation to laypeople. Kapleau returned to the United States in 1965 and in the following year founded the Zen Center of Rochester, New York. While in Japan, Kapleau drew on his training as a court reporter to transcribe and translate Yasutani's instructions on Zen meditation, along with his formal interviews (DOKUSAN) with his students, and testimonials of their enlightenment experiences. These were compiled into The Three Pillars in Zen, first published in Japan in 1965, a work that influenced many Westerners to undertake Zen practice; it is widely recognized as a classic of the nascent American tradition of Zen Buddhism. As one of the first non-Japanese Zen teachers in America, Kapleau set out in this book to adapt some of the forms of Zen practice that he thought would be better suited to an American audience. Kapleau's modifications included an English translation of the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA ("Heart Sutra"). Yasutani was strongly opposed to the use of the translation, arguing that the sound of the words was more important than their meaning. Teacher and student broke over this question in 1967 and never spoke again. Kapleau, however, remained dedicated to Yasutani, and the Rochester Zen Center flourished under Kapleau's direction.
katakana "Japanese" The square-formed Japanese {kana} syllabary. Katakana is mostly used to write foreign names, foreign words, and loan words as well as many onomatopeia, plant and animal names. (2001-03-18)
katakana ::: (Japanese) The square-formed Japanese kana syllabary. Katakana is mostly used to write foreign names, foreign words, and loan words as well as many onomatopeia, plant and animal names.(2001-03-18)
Katsuragisan. (J) (葛城山). Mountain practice site on the border between the present-day Japanese prefectures of Nara and osaka, which was an important center of SHUGENDo practice. The semilegendary founder of Shugendo, EN NO OZUNU (b. 634), is said to have lived for some thirty years in a cave on this mountain. Since En no Ozunu was considered to be a manifestation of Hoki Bosatsu (DHARMODGATA) who, according to the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, lived in the Diamond Mountains, the Katsuragi range includes the appositely named KONGoSAN (Mt. Kongo; see also KŬMGANGSAN). Like many sacred mountains around Japan, there are encased sutras known to be interred in Katsuragisan region. Twenty-eight buried scrolls (J. kyozuka) of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra")-corresponding to its twenty-eight chapters-were presumed to have been buried at Mt. Katsuragi, according to the late twelfth-century Shozan engi text. Also purportedly interred on the mountain are twenty-nine scrolls of the Nyohokyo (C. *Rufa jing) and eight hannyakyo (PRAJNAPĀRAMITĀ) scrolls. During the Heian period, burying Buddhist scriptures at mountains in Japan served the dual role of physically sacralizing the mountain and also preserving the dharma in the face of the religion's predicted demise (J. mappo; C. MOFA).
kechimyaku sojo. (血脈相承). In Japanese, "transmission of the bloodline"; a term used to refer to the unbroken transmission of the dharma from master to disciple down through the generations, which is like the bloodline in a family being passed from parents to child. The term is especially used in the ZEN (CHAN) and esoteric Buddhist sects in Japan, but later is adopted by the JoDOSHu and NICHIRENSHu as well. Cf. XUEMO LUN.
Keizan Jokin. (瑩山紹瑾) (1268-1325). Japanese ZEN master and putative second patriarch of the SoTo Zen tradition. Keizan was a native of Echizen in present-day Fukui prefecture. Little is known of his early years, but Keizan is said to have been influenced by his mother, who was a pious devotee of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA. Keizan went to the nearby monastery of EIHEIJI and studied under the Zen master Gikai (1219-1309), a disciple of DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253). He was later ordained by the monk Ejo (1198-1280). After Ejo's death, Keizan went to the nearby monastery of Hokyoji and continued his studies under another disciple of Dogen, Jakuen (1207-1299). At age twenty-eight, Keizan was invited as the founding abbot (kaisan; C. KAISHAN) of the monastery of Jomanji in Awa (present-day Tokushima prefecture). The next year, Keizan briefly visited Eiheiji to train in the conferral of bodhisattva precepts (bosatsukai; PUSA JIE; see also BODHISATTVAsĪLA) under the guidance of the abbot Gien (d. 1313). Keizan returned to Jomanji the very same year and began to confer precepts. Several years later, Keizan joined Gikai once more at the latter's new temple of Daijoji in Ishikawa and became his disciple. Three years later, Keizan succeeded Gikai as abbot of Daijoji. In 1300, Keizan began his lectures on what would eventually come to be known as the DENKoROKU. In 1311, while setting the regulations for Daijoji, Keizan composed the ZAZEN YoJINKI and Shinjinmei nentei. He also entrusted Daijoji to his disciple Meiho Sotetsu (1277-1350) and established the monastery of Jojuji in nearby Kaga. In 1317, Keizan established the monastery of Yokoji on Mt. Tokoku. Keizan also came into possession of a local temple known as Morookadera, which was renamed SoJIJI. In 1322, Yokoji and Sojiji were sanctioned as official monasteries by Emperor Godaigo (r. 1318-1339). This sanction is traditionally considered to mark the official establishment of Soto as an independent Zen institution. Keizan later entrusted the monastery of Sojiji to his disciple Gasan Joseki (1276-1366) and retired to Yokoji. In the years before his death, Keizan built a buddha hall, founder's hall, dharma hall, and monk's hall at Yokoji.
Khemā, Ayya. (1923-1997). Prominent THERAVĀDA Buddhist nun, meditation teacher, and advocate of women's rights, born Ilse Ledermann to Jewish parents in Germany. In 1938, she fled from Nazi Germany to Scotland along with two hundred child refugees and two years later was reunited with her parents, who had escaped to Shanghai, China. The family was subsequently interned by the Japanese in World War II. She immigrated to the United States in 1949, where she married and had two children. In the early 1960s, she toured Asia with her husband and children, and it was at this time that she learned Buddhist meditation. She began teaching meditation in the 1970s and established Wat Buddha Dhamma, a Theravāda forest monastery near Sydney, Australia, in 1978. Soon thereafter, she was ordained a Buddhist nun by Nārada Mahāthera in Sri Lanka in 1979, receiving the name Khemā. In Colombo, she founded both the International Buddhist Women's Center as a training center for Sri Lankan nuns and the Parappuduwa Nuns' Island Hermitage at Dodanduwa. In 1987, Ayya Khemā organized the first international conference of Buddhist nuns held in BODHGAYĀ, India, and helped found Sakyadhita, the first global Buddhist women's organization. Also in 1987, she was the first Buddhist invited to address the United Nations. In 1989, she established Buddha Haus in Germany and served as its first director. A prolific writer, she authored over a dozen books on Buddhist meditation and teachings. She died in 1997 while in residence at Buddha Haus.
Kim Iryop. (金一葉) (1896-1971). In Korean, Kim "single leaf," influential Korean Buddhist nun during the mid-twentieth century and part of the first generation of Korean women intellectuals, or "new women" (sin yosong), thanks to her preordination career as a leading feminist writer, essayist, and poet. Her secular name was Wonju, and her Buddhist names were Hayop and Paengnyon Toyop; Iryop is her pen name, which Yi Kwangsu (1892-1955?), a pioneer of modern Korean literature, gave her in memory of the influential Japanese feminist writer Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896) (J. Ichiyo = K. Iryop). Kim's early years were influenced by Christianity and her father even became a Protestant minister. Her mother died when Kim was very young and her father also passed away while she was still in her teens. Kim was educated at the Ihwa Haktang, a women's academy (later Ewha University), and later studied abroad in Japan. She and other Ihwa graduates participated in the first female-published magazine in Korea, "New Women" (Sinyoja), which began and ended in 1920. Kim was a feminist intellectual who sought self-liberation and the elevation of women's status through her writing. After her first marriage ended in divorce, she continued to pursue her search for her "self" and was involved in much-publicized relationships with men such as Oda Seijo and Im Nowol, a writer of "art-for-art's sake." But Kim's ideal of female liberation based on individual self-identity appears to have undergone a profound transformation, thanks to her associations with Paek Songuk (1897-1981), a Buddhist intellectual who worked to revitalize Korean Buddhism during the Japanese colonial period and eventually became a monk himself in 1929. Through her encounter with Buddhism, Iryop's pursuit of self-liberation seems to have shifted from an emphasis on a self-centered identity based on feminism to the release from the self (ANĀTMAN). After Paek Songuk entered into the Diamond Mountains (KŬMGANGSAN) to become a monk, she again married, seemingly in an attempt both to keep her self-identity as a female and to realize the Buddhist release of self, by combining secular life with Buddhist practice. But a few years later, in 1933, she ultimately decided to become a nun under the tutelage of the Son master MAN'GONG WoLMYoN (1871-1946) and became a long-time resident of SUDoKSA. There, she became an outspoken critic of secularized Japanese-style Buddhism and particularly of its sanction of married monks and eating meat. But most notable were her writings on the pursuit of self-liberation, which she expressed as "becoming one body" (ilch'ehwa) with all people and everything in the universe. Iryop is credited for her contributions to popularizing Buddhism through her accessible writings in the Korean vernacular, as well as for elevating the position of nuns in Korean Buddhism.
Kinkakuji. (金閣寺). In Japanese, "Golden Pavilion monastery"; a Japanese temple located in northern Kyoto, the ancient capital city of Japan, formally known as Rokuonji (Deer Park temple, cf. MṚGADĀVA). It was originally built as a retirement villa for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), the third shogun of the Muromachi (1337-1573) shogunate. However, following his father's wishes, his son converted it to a ZEN temple of the RINZAI school after the shogun's death in 1408. The temple inspired the building of Ginkakuji (Silver Pavilion monastery), which was constructed about sixty years later on the other side of the city. The name Kinkaku derived from the pavilion's extravagant use of gold leaf, typical of Muromachi style, which covers the entire top two stories of the three-story pavilion. The pavilion uses three different architectural styles on each floor: the first emulates the residential style of Heian aristocracy; the second, warrior aristocracy; the third, Chinese CHAN style. The second floor enshrines the image of the BODHISATTVA Kannon (AVALOKITEsVARA), surrounded by the statues of the four heavenly kings (CĀTURMAHĀRĀJAN), the guardian divinities (DEVA) of Buddhism. The pavilion burned down several times, including twice during the onin war (1467-1477) and most recently by arson in 1950; the present structure was reconstructed in 1955. Kinkakuji is currently a branch temple of the RINZAI ZEN monastery of SHoKOKUJI.
kirigami. (切紙). In Japanese, "secret initiation documents" (lit. "strips of paper"), ; secret instructions or formulas written on individual pieces of paper, which were used in the medieval Japanese traditions, including the SoTOSHu, to transmit esoteric knowledge and monastic routines. Kirigami were a central pedagogical feature in many fields involving apprenticeships in medieval Japan and were used to transmit knowledge about acting, poetic composition, martial arts, and religious practice. Soto Zen kirigami were also elaborations of the broader Chinese monastic codes (shingi; see QINGGUI) and focused on the secret rituals that a Zen abbot would perform in private, including consecration, funerals, and transmission of precepts or a dharma lineage. Many kirigami also provide short, targeted instruction on individual Zen cases (koan; C. GONG'AN), such as the correct sequence of questions and answers, or the appropriate "capping phrase" (JAKUGO), that would prove mastery of a specific koan. Because kirigami were also kept hidden away in Soto monasteries and were known only to the abbots, access to them was a potent symbol of the abbots' enhanced religious authority.
Kissa yojoki. (喫茶養生). In Japanese, "Record of Drinking Tea for Health," composed by the Japanese monk MYoAN EISAI in 1211. After Eisai returned to Japan from his pilgrimage in China, he is said to have transplanted in Uji the tea seeds that he had brought back with him from the mainland. The Kissa yojoki is a record of the method that he used to transplant and care for the tea plants. The names of different types of tea, the ideal time and techniques for harvesting the leaves, and the proper way of preparing tea are carefully explained. Eisai also discusses the health and spiritual benefits of drinking tea in the text. The Kissa yojoki is a seminal text in the development of tea culture in Japan.
Kiyomizudera. (清水寺). In Japanese, "Pure Water Monastery"; an important monastery of the Japanese HoSSo school of YOGĀCĀRA Buddhism, located in the Higashiyama (Eastern Mountains) District of Kyoto. The monastery claims to have been founded in 778 by a monk named Enchin and the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, who stopped on the site for a drink from a waterfall fed by a natural spring, where he met the monk. Together, they contracted to create a magnificent image of an eleven-faced and forty-armed Kannon (AVALOKITEsVARA), which was enshrined in 798 in a temporary hall that was given the name Kiyomizudera. The monastery became a state shrine in 810 and a focus of state-protection Buddhism (see HUGUO FOJIAO) in Japan. The current buildings date from the latest reconstruction of the monastery in 1633. The monastery is perhaps best known for its long veranda that juts over the hillside in front of the main shrine hall; there is a folk tradition dating back to the Edo period that anyone who survives a plunge off the veranda is granted whatever one wishes. The monastery was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
Kiyozawa Manshi. (清沢満之) (1863-1903). Meiji-era Japanese Buddhist leader in the HIGASHI-HONGANJIHA of JoDO SHINSHu. Kiyozawa was born into a poor warrior class family in a small town east of Nagoya and ordained in 1878 as a Higashi-Honganji priest. After studying Western philosophy at college and graduate school in Tokyo, he served his sect as an educator. In 1888, he was appointed principal of a Higashi-Honganji middle school in Kyoto and taught Western philosophy at a Higashi-Honganji seminary. In 1890, however, Kiyozawa left his position as principal to lead a rigorous ascetic life, wearing Buddhist robes, separating himself from his family, and living on simple food. Around this time, Kiyozawa launched a reform movement within Higashi-Honganji to return the school to the spirit of its founder, SHINRAN (1173-1262), and to make its ecclesiastical structure conform better to modern secular society, such as by having its deacons elected democratically. However, his movement failed and he was excommunicated in 1897. After being reinstated a year later, Kiyozawa again played an important role in the sect's education, serving in 1901 and 1902 as a dean of Higashi-Honganji's newly founded college (present-day otani University). He died at the age of forty from the tuberculosis he had contracted during his practice of asceticism. Kiyozawa is credited with popularizing the TANNISHo, a short collection of Shinran's sayings that previously were not widely known. Kiyozawa emphasized individual religious experience, in which the adherent's self-awareness of his or her incapacity for moral perfection would instead prompt the adept to realize the truth of salvation through absolute reliance on the infinite. Kiyozawa argued that such individual spiritual realization could contribute to the welfare of society at large. Although Kiyozawa's thought was not widely accepted during his own age, it influenced a younger generation of Higashi-Honganji scholars, such as Akegarasu Haya (1877-1967), Soga Ryojin (1875-1971), and Kaneko Dai'ei (1881-1976), who later became leading intellectual figures in the sect.
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koan. Romanization of the Japanese term koan, now entered into the English language to refer (not quite correctly) to an impenetrable or even nonsensical "question" or "paradox." See GONG'AN.
Kofukuji. (興福寺). In Japanese, "Flourishing Merit Monastery"; an ancient monastery in Nara, Japan, which is currently the headquarters (honzan) of the Hosso (see YOGĀCĀRA) tradition. Kofukuji was first established in Yamashina (present-day Kyoto) in 669 as the merit cloister of the Fujiwara clan and was moved to the old capital of Fujiwarakyo in 672. When the new capital Heijokyo was established, Kofukuji was moved to its current location in Nara. After the death of Fujiwara no Fuhito (659-720), maternal grandfather of Emperor Shomu (r. 724-749), Kofukuji was formally designated an official state monastery. Under Fujiwara patronage, Kofukuji came to dominate the early Buddhist community in Japan and has been traditionally considered one of the six great temples of Nara. Kofukuji was destroyed during the war between the Taira and Minamoto clans in the twelfth century, and there were periodic attempts to rebuild the temple. Following the Meiji persecution of Buddhism (HAIBUTSU KISHAKU), major restorations on the monasteries were made. Kofukuji is famous for its exquisite five-story pagoda and ancient icons, which testify to the aesthetic glory of Nara Buddhism.
Koho Kennichi. (高峰顯日) (1241-1316). Japanese ZEN master of the RINZAI ZEN tradition, who is known to have been the son of Emperor Gosaga (r. 1242-1246). Kennichi was ordained by the Japanese monk ENNI BEN'EN at the monastery of Tofukuji. In 1260, when the émigré CHAN master Wu'an Puning (1197-1276) was appointed abbot of the monastery of KENCHoJI in Kamakura, Kennichi visited the master and became his student. Later, his patrons built the monastery of Unganji in Nasu and invited him to serve as abbot. In 1279, he also visited the émigré Chan master WUXUE ZUYUAN and continued to study under him at Kenchoji. Kennichi eventually received transmission (YINKE) from Wuxue and inherited his Rinzai (LINJI ZONG) lineage. With the support of the powerful regents Hojo Sadatoki (1271-1311) and Takatoki (1303-1333), Kennichi also came to serve as abbot of the influential monasteries Jomyoji, Manjuji, and Kenchoji. See also MUGAI NYODAI.
Koji-ki: The oldest extant Japanese historical document, compiled in 712 A.D. It begins with the myth of Creation and ends with 628 A.D.
kokubunji. (國分寺). In Japanese, lit. "nationally distributed monasteries"; a network of centrally controlled provincial monasteries established during the Nara and Heian periods in Japan. During the reign of Emperor Shomu (r. 724-749), he ordered that monasteries be established in every province of Japan, which would each have seven-story pagodas enshrining copies of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"). In 741, these provincial monasteries were organized into a national network as a means of bringing local power centers under the control of a centralized state government. The nunneries or convents that were also established as part of this same strategy were known as kokubunniji. The first headquarters of this kokubunji system was DAIANJI, which was based on the capital of Nara; the headquarters later moved to the major Kegon (HUAYAN) monastery of ToDAIJI, which was constructed at Shomu's behest. By the time of Shomu's death in 756, there were at least twenty of these provincial monasteries already established.
kongokai. (S. vajradhātu; T. rdo rje dbyings; C. jingang jie; K. kŭmgang kye 金剛界). In Japanese, "diamond realm" or "diamond world"; one of the two principal diagrams (MAndALA) used in the esoteric traditions of Japan (see MIKKYo), along with the TAIZoKAI ("womb realm"); the Sanskrit reconstruction for this diagram is *vajradhātumandala. The teachings of the kongokai are said to derive in part from two seminal scriptures of the esoteric traditions, the MAHĀVAIROCANĀBHISAMBODHISuTRA and SARVATATHĀGATATATTVASAMGRAHA, but its construction as a mandala relies on no known written instructions and more likely evolved pictorially. KuKAI (774-835), the founder of the SHINGONSHu, used the kongokai mandala in combination with the taizokai mandala in a variety of esoteric rituals designed to awaken the individual adept. However, Japanese TENDAI Buddhism as well as various SHUGENDo complexes also heavily incorporated their own rituals into the two mandalas. ¶ The kongokai consists of nine smaller, nearly square-shaped mandalas, or "assemblies" (J. e), some of which are sometimes isolated for worship and visualized independently. It is said that, by visualizing the mandala, the kongokai ultimately demonstrates that the universe as a whole is coextensive with the body of the DHARMAKĀYA or cosmic buddha, Mahāvairocana (SEE VAIROCANA). In the center of the mandala, Mahāvairocana sits on a lotus flower, surrounded by four female figures, who symbolize the four perfections. Immediately outside are four discs, each encompassing a directional buddha: AMITĀBHA to the west, AKsOBHYA to the east, AMOGHASIDDHI to the north, and RATNASAMBHAVA to the south. Each is, in turn, surrounded by four BODHISATTVAs. This ensemble of buddhas, bodhisattvas, and female figures is repeated in the first four mandala of outward trajectory and its structure repeated in the lower six. Below the center mandala is the mandala of physical objects, each representing the buddhas and bodhisattvas. The next one in outward trajectory are figures residing inside a three-pointed vajra, representing the sounds of the world. The fourth mandala displays all figures (excluding buddhas) in their female form, each exhibiting specific bodily movements. Arriving next at the upper-left mandala, the group is reduced to Mahāvairocana and four surrounding bodhisattvas. In the top-center mandala sits only a large Mahāvairocana. The last three mandalas in the outward spiral shift toward worldly affairs. The top right reveals passions and desire. In the next to last are horrific demons and deities. The last mandala represents consciousness. ¶ Looking at the depictions in the kongokai individually, the nine smaller mandalas are arrayed in a clockwise direction as follows. (1) The perfected-body assembly (jojinne) is the central assembly of the entire mandala. In the center of this assembly sits Mahāvairocana, displaying the gesture (MUDRĀ) of the wisdom fist (BODHYAnGĪMUDRĀ; J. chiken-in), surrounded by the four directional buddhas (Aksobhya, Ratnasambhava, Amitābha, and Amoghasiddhi), who embody four aspects of Mahāvairocana's wisdom. Each of these buddhas, including Mahāvairocana, is in turn attended by four bodhisattvas. (2) The SAMAYA assembly (J. sammayae; S. samayamandala) replaces the buddhas and bodhisattvas with physical objects, such as VAJRAS and lotuses. (3) The subtle assembly (J. misaime; S. suksmamandala) signifies the adamantine wisdom of Mahāvairocana. (4) In the offerings assembly (J. kuyo-e; S. pujāmandala), bodhisattvas make offerings to the five buddhas. (5) The four-mudrās assembly (J. shiinne; S. caturmudrāmandala) depicts only Mahāvairocana and four bodhisattvas. (6) The single-mudrā assembly (J. ichiinne; S. ekamudrāmandala) represents Mahāvairocana sitting alone in the gesture of wisdom. (7) In the guiding-principle assembly (J. rishu-e; S. nayamandala), VAJRASATTVA sits at the center, surrounded by four female figures, representing craving, physical contact, sexual desire, and fulfillment. (8) In the assembly of the descent into the three realms of existence (J. gozanze-e; S. trailokyavijayamandala), Vajrasattva assumes the ferocious appearance of Gosanze (TRAILOKYAVIJAYA). (9) The samaya of the descent into the three-realms assembly (J. gozanzesammayae; S. trailokyavijayasamaya mandala) has the same structure as the previous one. ¶ In one distinctively Shingon usage, the mandala was placed in the east and the kongokai stood in juxtaposition across from it. The initiate would then invite all buddhas, bodhisattvas, and divinities into the sacred space, invoking all of their power and ultimately unifying with them. In SHUGENDo, the two mandalas were often spatially superimposed over mountain geography or worn as robes on the practitioner while entering the mountain. See TAIZoKAI.
Kongosan. (J) (金剛山). In Japanese, "Diamond Mountain(s)"; the highest peak in the KATSURAGISAN region, on the border between the present-day Japanese prefectures of Nara and osaka. The mountain was likely visited by EN NO OZUNU, the putative founder of the SHUGENDo school of Japanese esoterism, who spent three decades practicing in the Katsuragi mountains. Its name may refer to the belief that En no Ozunu was a manifestation of Hoki Bosatsu (DHARMODGATA), who resided in the Diamond Mountains (see KŬMGANGSAN), according to the account in the AVATAMSAKASuTRA.
Konjaku monogatarishu. (今昔物語集). In Japanese, "Tales of Times Now Past"; a collection of Buddhist tales compiled by the Japanese monk Minamoto no Takakuni (1004-1077). The Konjaku monogatarishu is claimed to have originally been composed in thirty-one rolls, but rolls eight, eighteen, and twenty-one are not extant. Rolls one through five are Buddhist tales from India, six through ten from China, and eleven through twenty from Japan. The Konjaku monogatarishu contains stories about the life of the Buddha and the events that occurred after his PARINIRVĀnA, the transmission of Buddhism to China, the merits that accrue from worshipping the three jewels (RATNATRAYA), and moralistic tales of filial piety and karmic retribution. The tales of Japan provide a narrative of the transmission of Buddhism and the various Chinese schools to Japan, SHoTOKU TAISHI's support of Buddhism, the establishment of Buddhist monasteries, the merit of constructing Buddhist images and studying SuTRAS, and the lives of eminent Japanese monks. Fascicles twenty-two to thirty-one deal with worldly tales about the Fujiwara clan, arts, battles, and ghosts.
Kon-ton, Konton (Japanese) The primordial chaotic essence of the Shinto cosmogony.
Kotani Kimi. (小谷喜美) (1901-1971). Cofounder along with KUBO KAKUTARo (1892-1944) of the REIYuKAI school of modern Japanese Buddhism, which derives from the teachings of the NICHIRENSHu school of Buddhism. Kotani Kimi was the wife of Kotani Yasukichi, Kubo's elder brother. She and her husband became two of the earliest and most active proponents of Reiyukai. After her husband died, she became the first official president of the group in 1930, and after Kubo's death in 1944, she ran the organization successfully on her own, although many splinter groups formed in reaction to her leadership. Kotani focused on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), but because ancestor worship was her primary religious practice, she used the sutra rather idiosyncratically as a path to the spiritual realm. Kotani also focused the group's energies on social welfare programs, and especially youth education, for she felt that Japan's rapid modernization was neglecting the needs of the youth.
Kotokuin. (高德院). In Japanese, "High Virtue Cloister"; located in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan. Kotokuin is best known as the home of the colossal buddha image of Kamakura (see KAMAKURA DAIBUTSU), a huge bronze statue of AMITĀBHA Buddha; as a consequence, the temple is often called Daibutsuji. The temple is associated with the Jodoshu, or Pure Land sect. After one crosses the threshold of the entrance gate into the temple compound, the site appears more like a park dedicated to the colossal buddha image than a temple; in fact, the real Kotokuin temple buildings are now located to the east of the image and are off-limits to most tourists. Toward the back of the temple is now located the Kangetsudo, or Moon-Viewing Hall, which was brought from Korea in 1934; it enshrines an Edo-period (1603-1868) statue of Kannon (AVALOKITEsVARA). To the right of the Moon-Viewing Hall is a stone stele on which is inscribed a famous tanka poem by Akiko Yosano (1878-1942) describing her impression on first seeing the Kamakura Daibutsu (although she mistakenly presumes she is viewing sĀKYAMUNI, not Amitābha).
koun ryusui. (C. xingyun liushui; K. haengun yusu 行雲流水). In Japanese, "moving clouds and flowing water"; the phrase from which the term "clouds and water" (J. unsui; C. yunshui; K. unsu) derives, referring to an itinerant Zen monk in training. See YUNSHUI.
Kounsa. (孤雲寺). In Korean, "Solitary Cloud Monastery"; the sixteenth district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism, located on Mount Tŭngun in North Kyongsang province. The monastery was founded in 681 by great Hwaom (C. HUAYAN) master ŬISANG (625-702), during the reign of the Silla king Sinmun (r. 681-692). The original Chinese characters for Kounsa meant "High Cloud Monastery," but during the Unified Silla period, the monastery adopted the homophonous name "Solitary Cloud," after the pen name of the famous literatus Ch'oe Ch'iwon (b. 857). During the reign of King Hon'gang (r. 875-886), a famous stone image of BHAIsAJYAGURU was enshrined at the monastery. During the Koryo dynasty, the monk Ch'onhae (fl. c. 1018) is said to have seen a Kwanŭm (AVALOKITEsVARA) statue in a dream; later, he found an identical image on Mount Taehŭng in Songdo and enshrined it in the Kŭngnak chon at Kounsa. The monastery was rebuilt and repaired several times during the Choson period. The large-scale rebuilding project that began in 1695 and continued through the eighteenth century helped raise the monastery's overall status within the ecclesia. Kounsa suffered severe damage from fires that broke out in 1803 and 1835, but the monastery was soon reconstructed. During the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), Kounsa became one of thirty-one head monasteries (ponsa) and managed fifty-four branch monasteries (MALSA).
Koyasan. (高野山). In Japanese, "Mt. Koya"; a Japanese sacred mountain in Wakayama prefecture. Currently, the monastery Kongobuji on Mt. Koya serves as the headquarters (honzan) of the Koyasan SHINGONSHu sect of the Shingon tradition. While traveling through the lands southwest of Yoshino, the Japanese monk KuKAI is said to have stumbled upon a flat plateau named Koya (High Field) on a mountain. Kukai determined that Koya was an ideal site of self-cultivation, as it appeared to be an uninhabited area surrounded on four sides by high mountain peaks. It is said that the mountain was revealed to Kukai by a hunter who was an incarnation of the god (KAMI) of the mountain, Koya Myojin. This deity is still worshipped on Mt. Koya in his hunter form as Kariba Myojin. In 816, Kukai received permission from the emperor to establish a practice center dedicated to the study of MIKKYo ritual and doctrine at Koya. Kukai first sent his disciples Jitsue (786-847) and Enmyo (d. 851) to survey the entire area and went to the site himself in 818. Due to his activities at the official monastery, ToJI, and his business at the monasteries Jingoji and Muroji, Kukai's involvement with Mt. Koya was limited. In 835, he retired to Mt. Koya due to his deteriorating health and finally died there, purportedly while in a deep meditative state. Kukai's body is housed in the mausoleum complex Okunoin near Kongobuji. According to legend, he remains there in a state of eternal SAMĀDHI. As a result of the developing cult of Kukai, who increasingly came to be worshipped as a bodhisattva, Mt. Koya came to be viewed as a PURE LAND on earth. Later, as a result of political contestations, as well as several fires on the mountain in 994, Mt. Koya entered a period of protracted decline and neglect. Through the efforts of Fujiwara and other aristocrats as well as the patronage of reigning and retired emperors, Mt. Koya reemerged as a powerful monastic and economic center in the region, and became an influential center of pilgrimage and religious cultivation famous throughout Japan. In 1114, KAKUBAN took up residence on the mountain and assiduously practiced mikkyo for eight years. In 1132, he established the monasteries of Daidenboin and Mitsugon'in on Mt. Koya. Despite his efforts to refocus Mt. Koya scholasticism around the doctrinal and ritual teachings of Kukai, his rapid rise through the monastic ranks was met with great animosity from the conservative factions on the mountain. In 1288, the monk Raiyu (1226-1304) moved Daidenboin and Mitsugon'in to nearby Mt. Negoro and established what came to be known as Shingi Shingon, which regarded Kakuban as its founder. In 1185, Myohen, a disciple of HoNEN, moved to Mt. Koya to pursue rebirth in the pure land, a common goal for many pilgrims to Mt. Koya. It is said that, around 1192, NICHIREN and Honen made pilgrimages to the mountain. MYoAN EISAI's senior disciple Gyoyu established Kongosanmai-in and taught Chinese RINZAI (LINJI) Zen on Mt. Koya. Zen lineages developed between Mt. Koya, Kyoto, and Kamakura around this time. In 1585, during the Warring States Period, the monk Mokujiki ogo was able to convince Toyotomi Hideyoshi not to burn down the mountain as Oda Nobunaga had done at HIEIZAN. As a result, Mt. Koya preserves ancient manuscripts and images that would have otherwise been lost. Mt. Koya's monastic structures shrank to less than a third of their original size during the Meiji persecution of Buddhism (HAIBUTSU KISHAKU). At that same time, Mt. Koya lost much of its former land holdings, which greatly reduced its economic base. In the twentieth century, Mt. Koya went through several modernization steps: the ban against women was lifted in 1905, its roads were paved, and Mt. Koya University was built on the mountain. At present, Mt. Koya is a thriving tourist, pilgrimage, and monastic training center.
Kozen gokokuron. (興禪護國論). In Japanese, "Treatise on the Promulgation of Zen as Defense of the State"; written by MYoAN EISAI in 1198 to legitimize the new ZEN teachings that he had imported from China. In ten sections, Eisai responds to the criticisms from the monks at HIEIZAN (see ENRYAKUJI and TENDAISHu) with extensive references to scriptures, Chan texts, and the writings of SAICHo, ENNIN, and ENCHIN. Eisai argued that the new teachings would protect the state and allow for the "perfect teachings" (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) of Tendai to flourish.
Ksitigarbha. (T. Sa yi snying po; C. Dizang; J. Jizo; K. Chijang 地藏). In Sanskrit, lit. "Earth Store," an important BODHISATTVA who has the power to rescue beings who have the misfortune to be reborn in the hells. Although Ksitigarbha is known in all Mahāyāna countries through his inclusion in the widely known grouping of eight great bodhisattvas (MAHOPAPUTRA; AstAMAHOPAPUTRA), he was apparently not the object of individual cultic worship in India or Tibet. It was in East Asian Buddhism that Ksitigarbha came into his own and became widely worshipped. In China, the cult of Ksitigarbha (C. Dizang) gained popularity by at least the fifth century, with the translation of the Dasheng daji Dizang shilun jing ("Mahāyāna Mahāsannipāta Sutra on Ksitigarbha and the Ten Wheels"), first in the Northern Liang dynasty and subsequently again by XUANZANG in 651 CE. The eponymous KsITIGARBHASuTRA, translated at the end of the seventh century, specifically relates the bodhisattva's vow to rescue all beings in the six realms of existence before he would attain buddhahood himself and tells the well-known prior-birth story of the bodhisattva as a young woman, whose filial piety after the death of her heretical mother saved her mother from rebirth in the AVĪCI hell. It was his ability to rescue deceased family members from horrific rebirths that became Dizang's dominant characteristic in China, where he took on the role of the Lord of Hell, opposite the Jade Emperor of native Chinese cosmology. This role may possibly have resulted from Dizang's portrayal as the Lord of Hell in the apocryphal (see APOCRYPHA) Foshuo Dizang pusa faxin yinlu shiwang jing and reflects Buddhist accommodations to the medieval Chinese interest in the afterlife. This specialization in servicing the denizens of hell seems also to have evolved alongside the emergence of Dizang's portrayal as a monk, whom the Chinese presume to reside on the Buddhist sacred mountain of JIUHUASHAN in Anhui province. (See also CHIJANG; KIM KYUGAK.) Ksitigarbha is easily recognizable in Chinese iconography because he is the only bodhisattva who wears the simple raiments of a monk and has a shaved head rather than an ornate headdress. In Japan, where Ksitigarbha is known as Jizo, the bodhisattva has taken on a different significance. Introduced to Japan during the Heian period, Jizo became immensely popular as a protector of children, patron of travelers, and guardian of community thresholds. Jizo is typically depicted as a monk carrying a staff in his left hand and a chaplet or rosary in his right. The boundaries of a village beyond which children should not wander were often marked by a stone statue of Jizo. Japanese fisherman also looked to Jizo for protection; statues of the bodhisattva erected by early Japanese immigrants to Hawaii are still found today at many popular shoreline fishing and swimming sites in the Hawaiian Islands. In modern Japan, Jizo continues to be regarded as the special protector of children, including the stillborn and aborted. In memory of these children, and as a means of requesting Jizo's protection of them, statues of Jizo are often dressed in a bib (usually red in color), sometimes wearing a knit cap or bonnet, with toys placed nearby (see MIZUKO KUYo). Tibetan iconography typically has Ksitigarbha seated on a lotus flower, holding a CINTĀMAnI in his right hand and displaying the VARADAMUDRĀ with his left.
Kubo Kakutaro. (久保角太郎) (1892-1944). Cofounder along with KOTANI KIMI of the REIYuKAI school of modern Japanese Buddhism, which derives from the teachings of the NICHIRENSHu school of Buddhism. Kubo Kakutaro was an orphan who by age thirteen was employed as a carpenter's apprentice in Tokyo. He began to work for the Imperial Household Ministry, where he met Count Sengoku, a bureaucrat who sponsored Kubo's marriage to a woman from the aristocratic Kubo family; he then took the family's surname. His parents-in-law were followers of Nichiren. After learning of the possibility of self-ordination through the teachings of Toki Jonin, he founded Rei No Tomo Kai with Wakatsuki Chise; this group became known as Reiyukai in 1924. Kubo also grew increasingly interested in ancestor veneration, a key component in the practice of the Reiyukai school.
Kukai. (空海) (774-835). In Japanese, "Sea of Emptiness"; monk who is considered the founder of the tradition, often referred to as the SHINGONSHu, Tomitsu, or simply MIKKYo. He is often known by his posthumous title KoBo DAISHI, or "Great Master Who Spread the Dharma," which was granted to him by Emperor Daigo in 921. A native of Sanuki province on the island of Shikoku, Kukai came from a prominent local family. At the age of fifteen, he was sent to Nara, where he studied the Chinese classics and was preparing to become a government official. However, he seems to have grown disillusioned with this life. At the age of twenty, Kukai was ordained, perhaps by the priest Gonso, and the following year he took the full precepts at ToDAIJI. He is claimed to have experienced an awakening while performing the Kokuzo gumonjiho, a ritual dedicated to the mantra of the BODHISATTVA ĀKĀsAGARBHA. While studying Buddhist texts on his own, Kukai is said to have encountered the MAHĀVAIROCANĀBHISAMBODHISuTRA and, unable to find a master who could teach him to read its MANTRAs, decided to travel to China to learn from masters there. In 804, he was selected as a member of a delegation to China that set sail in four ships; SAICHo was aboard another of the ships. Kukai eventually traveled to the Tang capital of Chang'an, where he studied tantric MIJIAO Buddhist rituals and theory under HUIGUO and Sanskrit under the Indian monk PRAJNA. Under the direction of his Chinese master, Kukai was initiated into the two realm (ryobu) MAndALA lineages of YIXING, sUBHAKARASIMHA, VAJRABODHI, and AMOGHAVAJRA. In 806, Kukai returned to Japan; records of the texts and implements he brought with him are preserved in the Shorai mokuroku. Little is known about his activities until 809, when he moved to Mt. Takao by imperial request. Kukai described his new teachings as mikkyo, or "secret teachings," VAJRAYĀNA (J. kongojo), and MANTRAYĀNA (J. shingonjo). At the core of Kukai's doctrinal and ritual program was the belief that all acts of body, speech, and mind are rooted in, and expressions of, the cosmic buddha MAHĀVAIROCANA (see VAIROCANA), as the DHARMAKĀYA. Kukai argued that the dharmakāya itself teaches through the artistic and ritual forms that he brought to Japan. Once his teachings gained some renown, Kukai conducted several ABHIsEKA ceremonies, including one for the TENDAI patriarch SAICHo and his disciples. However, Kukai and Saicho's relationship soured when Kukai refused to transmit the highest level of initiation to Saicho. In 816, Emperor Saga granted Kukai rights to KoYASAN, to serve as a training center for his Shingon mikkyo tradition. In early 823, Kukai was granted the temple of ToJI in Kyoto, which became a second center for the Shingon tradition. In the summer of 825, Kukai built a lecture hall at Toji, and in 827 he was promoted to senior assistant high priest in the Bureau of Clergy. In 829, he built an abhiseka platform at Todaiji. In early 834, he received permission to establish a Shingon chapel within the imperial palace, where he constructed a mandala altar. Kukai passed into eternal SAMĀDHI (J. nyujo) in 835 on Mt. Koya, and it is said that he remains in his mausoleum in meditation waiting for the BODHISATTVA MAITREYA to appear. Kukai authored a number of important texts, including the BENKENMITSU NIKYoRON, a treatise outlining the inherent differences of kengyo (revealed) and mikkyo (inner) teachings; Sokushin jobutsugi, a treatise on the doctrine of attainment of buddhahood in "this very body" (J. SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU); Unjigi, a text describing the contemplation of Sanskrit syllables (S. BĪJA, J. shuji); Shojijissogi, a text outlining Kukai's theory of language in which all sounds and letters are themselves full embodiments of the dharmakāya's teachings; and his magnum opus, the HIMITSU MANDARA JuJuSHINRON, in which Kukai makes his case for recognizing Shingon mikkyo as the pinnacle of Buddhist wisdom. Kukai was an accomplished calligrapher, poet, engineer, and sculptor and is also said to have invented kana, the Japanese syllabary.
Kumano. (熊野). In Japanese, lit. "Ursine Wilderness"; a mountainous region in Wakayama prefecture on the Kii Peninsula; Kumano is an important site in the history and development of SHUGENDo, a syncretistic tradition of mountain asceticism in Japan. Artifacts from the seventh century provide the earliest traces of Kumano's sacred roots, although worship there likely predated this time. Throughout the medieval period, the area developed ties with the powerful institutions of Japanese Tendai (TIANTAI), SHINGON, the Hosso monastery KoFUKUJI, and the imperial family, with additional influences from PURE LAND Buddhism. By the eleventh century, its three major religious sites, collectively known as Kumano Sanzan (the three mountains of Kumano), were well established as centers of practice: the Hongu Shrine, home to Amida (AMITĀBHA); the Shingu Shrine, home to Yakushi (BHAIsAJYAGURU); and Nachi Falls and its shrine, the residence of the thousand-armed BODHISATTVA Kannon (AVALOKITEsVARA; see SĀHASRABHUJASĀHASRANETRĀVALOKITEsVARA). Following the principle of HONJI SUIJAKU (buddhas or bodhisattvas appearing in the world as spirits), Buddhist deities were readily adopted into the local community of gods (KAMI). Hence, Amida took the form of the god Ketsumiko no kami, Yakushi manifested as Hayatama no kami, and Kannon appeared as Fusubi no kami. Kumano developed close ties with the aristocratic elite in Kyoto from the tenth through the twelfth centuries. After the ex-Emperor Uda's pilgrimage to Kumano in 907, a long line of monarchs, often retired, made one or multiple journeys to the sacred destination. In the early twelfth century, ex-Emperor Shirakawa granted Shogoin-a Japanese Tendai (TIANTAI) monastery in Kyoto-to the monk Zoyo, whose appointment included responsibility for overseeing Kumano. Later in the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), it was Shogoin that regulated Tendai-affiliated Shugen centers around the country, consequently making a large impact on their doctrine and practice. The nearby Yoshino mountains of Kinbu and omine, where Shugendo's semilegendary founder EN NO OZUNU regularly practiced, share much history with Kumano. A text known as the Shozan Engi (1180?) describes Kumano as the garbhadhātu (J. TAIZoKAI, or "womb realm") MAndALA and the northern Yoshino mountains as the vajradhātu (J. KONGoKAI, or "diamond realm") mandala. These two geographic mandalas, now superimposed over the physical landscape, became the basis of the well-known Yoshino-Kumano pilgrimage route, which is still followed today. As the prestige and patronage of the court began to wane in the late twelfth century, revenue from visitors to the area became an important source of income for the local economy. In the following centuries, increasing numbers of pilgrims, including aristocrats, warriors, and ordinary people, undertook the journey, accompanying Kumano Shugen guides (sendatsu).
Kŭmgangsan. (C. Jingangshan; J. Kongosan; 金剛山). In Korean, "Diamond (S. VAJRA) Mountains," Buddhist sacred mountains and important Korean pilgrimage site. The mountains are located in Kangwon Province, North Korea, on the east coast of the Korean peninsula in the middle of the Paektu Taegan, the mountain range that is regarded geographically and spiritually as the geomantic "spine" of the Korean peninsula. The mountains are known for their spectacular natural beauty, and its hundreds of individual peaks have been frequent subjects of both literati and folk painting. During the Silla dynasty, Kŭmgangsan began to be conceived as a Buddhist sacred site. "Diamond Mountains," also known by its indigenous name Hyollye, is listed in the Samguk sagi ("History of the Three Kingdoms") and SAMGUK YUSA ("Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms") as one of the three mountains (samsan) and five peaks (o'ak) that were the objects of cultic worship during the Silla period; scholars, however, generally agree that this refers to another mountain closer to the Silla capital of KYoNGJU rather than what are now known as the Diamond Mountains. The current Diamond Mountains have had several names over the course of history, including Pongnae, P'ungak, Kaegol, Yolban, Kidal, Chunghyangsong, and Sangak, with "Kŭmgang" (S. VAJRA) becoming its accepted name around the fourteenth century. The name "Diamond Mountains" appears in the AVATAMSAKASuTRA as the place in the middle of the sea where the BODHISATTVA DHARMODGATA (K. Popki posal) resides, preaching the dharma to his congregation of bodhisattvas. The Huayan exegete CHENGGUAN (738-839), in his massive HUAYAN JING SHU, explicitly connects the AvataMsakasutra's mention of the Diamond Mountains to Korea (which he calls Haedong, using its traditional name). The AstASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ also says that the Dharmodgata (K. Tammugal; J. Donmuketsu; C. Tanwujian) preaches the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ at GANDHAVATĪ (K. Chunghyangsong; C. Zhongxiangcheng; J. Shukojo, "City of Multitudinous Fragrances"), one of the alternate names of the Diamond Mountains and now the name of one of its individual peaks. According to the Koryo-period Kŭmgang Yujomsa sajok ki by Minji (1248-1326), on a visit to the Diamond Mountains made by ŬISANG (625-702), the vaunt-courier of the Hwaom (C. Huayan) school in Korea, Dharmodgata appeared to him and told him that Kŭmgangsan was the place in Korea where even people who do not practice could become liberated, whereas only religious virtuosi would be able to get enlightened on the Korean Odaesan (cf. C. WUTAISHAN). For all these reasons, Popki Posal is considered to be the patron bodhisattva of Kŭmgangsan. Starting in the late-Koryo dynasty, the Diamond Mountains became a popular pilgrimage site for Korean Buddhists. Before the devastation of the Korean War (1950-1953), it is said that there were some 108 monasteries located on Kŭmgangsan, including four primary ones: P'YOHUNSA, CHANGANSA, SIN'GYESA, and Mahayonsa. Mahayonsa, "Great Vehicle Monastery," was built by Ŭisang in 676 beneath Dharmodgata Peak (Popkibong) and was considered one of the ten great Hwaom monasteries (Hwaom siptae sach'al) of the Silla dynasty. Currently, the only active monasteries are P'yohunsa and its affiliated branch monasteries, a few remaining buildings of Mahayonsa, and Sin'gyesa, which was rebuilt starting in 2004 as a joint venture of the South Korean CHOGYE CHONG and the North Korean Buddhist Federation. In the late twentieth century, the Diamond Mountains were developed into a major tourist site, with funding provided by South Korean corporate investors, although access has been held hostage to the volatile politics of the Korean peninsula. ¶ In Japan, Diamond Mountains (KONGoSAN) is an alternate name for KATSURAGISAN in Nara, the principal residence of EN NO OZUNU (b. 634), the putative founder of the SHUGENDo school of Japanese esoterism, because he was considered to be a manifestation of the bodhisattva Dharmodgata.
Kŭmsansa. (金山寺). In Korean, "Gold Mountain Monastery," the seventeenth district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE order of Korean Buddhism; located on Moak Mountain near Kimje in North Cholla province. The monastery was founded in 600 CE and grew quickly. The Silla monk CHINP'YO (fl. c. 800), one of the early figures associated with the transmission of the monastic regulations (VINAYA) to Korea, was responsible for a major expansion of the monastery that took place between 762 and 766. Chinp'yo dedicated the monastery to the BODHISATTVA MAITREYA and built a three-story main shrine hall, or TAEUNG CHoN, which is dominated by the golden 39-ft. high statue of Maitreya, standing in the gesture of fearlessness (ABHAYAMUDRĀ) between two attendants who are both 29-ft. high. The south wall of the hall is decorated with a T'AENGHWA painting of Maitreya conferring the monastic rules (vinaya) on Chinp'yo. The monastery was expanded again in 1079 by the Koryo YOGĀCĀRA monk Hyedok Sohyon (1038-1096), who added several additional hermitages and sanctuaries; a STuPA reputed to enshrine his sARĪRA is located on the monastery grounds. In 1596, the Japanese burned the monastery, whose monks had organized a 1,500-man force to resist the Hideyoshi invasion force. The oldest buildings currently on the site date to 1635, when the monastery was reconstructed under the leadership of the monk Sumun (d.u.). The scriptural repository (Taejang chon) at Kŭmsansa was built in 1652 but moved to its current site in 1922; inside can be found images of sĀKYAMUNI and the two ARHATs MAHĀKĀsYAPA and ĀNANDA. The wooden building is quite ornate and is one of the best-preserved examples of its type from the Choson period. There are various other items of note on the monastery campus, including a hexagonal stone pagoda made from slate capped by granite, another five-story pagoda, and a stone bell resembling those at T'ONGDOSA and Silluksa. Carvings on the bell date it to the Koryo dynasty and depict buddhas, dharma protectors (DHARMAPĀLA), and lotus flowers (PADMA).
Kuya. (空也) (903-972). Japanese monk and itinerant holy man (HIJIRI) renowned for his efforts to spread the practice of nenbutsu (C. NIANFO) or invocation of the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA among the common people. Little is known of his early life, but legends of his building bridges and roads and producing images of buddhas and BODHISATTVAs abound. He is also famous for preaching at the marketplace, for which he came to be known as the "holy man (hijiri) of the marketplace." Kuya is said to have received full ordination from the TENDAISHu monk Ensho (880-964) on HIEIZAN in 948. A famous statue of Kuya practicing nenbutsu is now housed at his temple Rokuharamitsuji. It shows the syllables of the nenbutsu emerging from this mouth in the form of buddhas.
Kwallŭk. (J. Kanroku 觀勒) (d.u.). Early seventh-century Korean monk from the kingdom of Paekche, who arrived in Japan in 602 CE and was instrumental in transmitting Buddhism and Sinitic civilization to the Japanese isles. According to the account in the Nihon shoki, Kwallŭk was a specialist in the MADHYAMAKA school of MAHĀYĀNA philosophy, who arrived in Japan also bringing documents on calendrics, astronomy, geometry, divination, and numerology to the Japanese court, which placed many students under his tutelage. Kwallŭk's interests were so diverse, in fact, that he was later chastised by the Japanese ruler for paying too much attention to astronomy and geography and confusing them with the "true vehicle" of Buddhism. Kwallŭk became arguably the most influential monk of his time and was eventually appointed in 624 by Queen Suiko (r. 593-628) to the new position of SoJo (saMgha primate), one of the earliest ecclesiastical positions created within the Japanese Buddhist church. His appointment to this position also indicates the prestige that monks from the Paekche kingdom enjoyed at the incipiency of Buddhism in Japan.
Kyo. (C. jiao; J. kyo 敎). In Korean, "doctrine" or "teaching," generally referring to doctrinally oriented Buddhist schools and their tenets, as distinguished from meditation-oriented Buddhist schools and practices (SoN; C. CHAN). While the Chinese and Japanese Buddhist traditions appear to have used the term doctrine only to describe one of two generic approaches to Buddhism, in Korea Buddhist schools have often been categorized as belonging to either the Doctrine (Kyo) or the Meditation (Son) schools; indeed, during the period of Buddhist suppression under the Choson dynasty, Kyo and Son became the specific designations for the two officially sanctioned schools of the tradition. During the stable political environment of the Unified Silla period (668-935), five major Kyo schools are traditionally presumed to have developed in Korean Buddhism: NIRVĀnA (Yolban chong), VINAYA (Kyeyul chong), Dharma-nature (PoPSoNG CHONG), Hwaom [alt. Wonyung chong], and YOGĀCĀRA (Popsang chong). Toward the end of the Unified Silla period, however, the newly imported Son (C. Chan, Meditation) lineages, which were associated with local gentry on the frontier of the kingdom, began to criticize the main doctrinal school, Hwaom, that was supported by the old Silla aristocracy in the capital of KYoNGJU; these schools came to be called the "Nine Mountains School of Son" (KUSAN SoNMUN). These various doctrine and meditation schools were collectively referred to as the "Five Doctrinal [Schools] and Nine Mountains [Schools of Son]" (OGYO KUSAN). The Ogyo Kusan designation continued to be used into the succeeding Koryo dynasty (937-1392), which saw the first attempts to bring together these two distinct strands of the Korean Buddhist tradition. Attempts to find common ground between the Kyo and Son schools are seen, for example, in ŬICH'oN's "cultivation together of scriptural study and contemplation" (kyogwan kyomsu) and POJO CHINUL's "cultivation in tandem of concentration [viz., Son] and wisdom [viz., scripture]" (chonghye ssangsu). The Ch'ont'ae (C. TIANTAI) and CHOGYE schools that are associated respectively with these two monks were both classified as Son schools during the mid- to late-Koryo dynasty; together with the five previous Kyo schools, these schools were collectively called the "Five Kyo and Two [Son] Traditions" (OGYO YANGJONG). This designation continued to be used into the early Choson dynasty (1392-1910). The Confucian orientation of the new Choson dynasty led to an increasing suppression of these Buddhist traditions. In 1407, King T'aejong (r. 1400-1418) restructured the various schools then current in Korean Buddhism into three schools of Son and four of Kyo; subsequently, in 1424, King Sejong (r. 1418-1450) reduced all these remaining schools down to, simply, the "Two Traditions, Son and Kyo" (SoN KYO YANGJONG), a designation that continued to be used through the remainder of the dynasty. The modern Chogye order of Korean Buddhism claims to be a synthetic tradition that combines both strands of Son meditation practice and Kyo doctrinal study into a single denomination.
Kyogyo shinsho. (教行信証). In Japanese, "Teaching, Practice, Faith, and Realization," composed by the Japanese JoDO SHINSHu teacher SHINRAN (1173-1263), also known as the Ken jodo shinjitsu kyogyosho monrui. The Kyogyo shinsho is considered one of the most important texts of the Jodo Shinshu tradition. The exact dates of its compilation are unknown, but it seems to have gradually developed into its current shape over the first half of the thirteenth century. Several other similar works were also composed during this period by disciples of HoNEN, largely in response to the monk MYoE KoBEN's criticism of exclusive nenbutsu (C. NIANFO), the hallmark of the Jodo traditions. The Kyogyo shinsho largely consists of citations of scriptural passages on the practice of nenbutsu or invocation of the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA. Perhaps the most important section of the Kyogyo shinsho is that on faith (shinjin; C. XINXIN), where Shinran attempted to demonstrate that faith is based on the practice of nenbutsu and comes not from the effort made by the practitioner but from Amitābha himself (see TARIKI). Citing the SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA's teachings on the original vows (hongan) of the BODHISATTVA DHARMĀKARA (the future Amitābha), Shinran also emphasized the importance of the "single nenbutsu" (ĪCHINENGI) in attaining rebirth in the PURE LAND. He also sought to legitimize the practice of nenbutsu through recourse to the notion of the "final age of the DHARMA" (J. mappo, C. MOFA) when other types of Buddhist practice were ineffective.
Kyongju. (慶州). Ancient capital of the Korean Silla dynasty and location of hundreds of important Buddhist archeological sites-for example, South Mountain (NAMSAN) in central modern Kyongju. Among the many monasteries in Kyongju, HWANGNYONGSA (Yellow Dragon monastery) was one of the most renowned. It was built during the reign of King Chinhung (r. 540-576), and its campus had seven rectangular courtyards, each with three buildings and one pagoda, covering an area of around eighteen acres; in 645, a 262 ft. high nine-story pagoda was added. Hwangnyongsa was destroyed during the Mongol invasion in 1238 and was never rebuilt. PULGUKSA (Buddha Land monastery) was built in 535 during the reign of the Silla King Pophŭng (r. 514-540). The main courtyard is dedicated to the buddha sĀKYAMUNI and includes on either end the highly decorative Pagoda of Many Treasures (Tabot'ap), resembling the form of a reliquary (sARĪRA) shrine and symbolizing the buddha PRABHuTARATNA, and the Pagoda of sākyamuni (Sokkat'ap). During a 1966 renovation of the Sokka t'ap, the world's oldest printed document was discovered sealed inside the stupa: the MUGUJoNGGWANG TAEDARANI KYoNG (S. Rasmivimalavisuddhaprabhādhāranī; "Great DHĀRAnĪ Scripture of Immaculate Radiance"). The terminus ad quem for the printing of the Dhāranī is 751 CE, when the text was sealed inside the Sokkat'ap, but it may have been printed even earlier. Four kilometers up T'oham Mountain to the east of Pulguksa is its affiliated SoKKURAM grotto temple, which was built in the late eighth century. In contrast to the cave temples of ancient India and China, the rotunda of Sokkuram was assembled with granite. The central image is a stone buddha (probably of sākyamuni) seated cross-legged on a lotus throne, surrounded by BODHISATTVAs, ARHATs, and Indian divinities carved in relief on the surrounding circular wall. A miniature marble pagoda, which is believed to have stood in front of the eleven-faced Avalokitesvara, disappeared in the early years of the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula in the early twentieth century.
kyosaku. (C. jingce; K. kyongch'aek 警策). In Japanese, "admonition," also pronounced keisaku by the RINZAI ZEN tradition. The term kyosaku came to refer to the long wooden stick used by the SoTo Zen tradition for waking, alerting, and instructing monks during meditation sessions.
Kyoto school. An influential school of modern and contemporary Japanese philosophy that is closely associated with philosophers from Kyoto University; it combines East Asian and especially MAHĀYĀNA Buddhist thought, such as ZEN and JoDO SHINSHu, with modern Western and especially German philosophy and Christian thought. NISHIDA KITARo (1870-1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), and NISHITANI KEIJI (1900-1991) are usually considered to be the school's three leading figures. The name "Kyoto school" was coined in 1932 by Tosaka Jun (1900-1945), a student of Nishida and Tanabe, who used it pejoratively to denounce Nishida and Tanabe's "Japanese bourgeois philosophy." Starting in the late 1970s, Western scholars began to research the philosophical insights of the Kyoto school, and especially the cross-cultural influences with Western philosophy. During the 1990s, the political dimensions of the school have also begun to receive scholarly attention. ¶ Although the school's philosophical perspectives have developed through mutual criticism between its leading figures, the foundational philosophical stance of the Kyoto school is considered to be based on a shared notion of "absolute nothingness." "Absolute nothingness" was coined by Nishida Kitaro and derives from a putatively Zen and PURE LAND emphasis on the doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ), which Kyoto school philosophers advocated was indicative of a distinctive Eastern approach to philosophical inquiry. This Eastern emphasis on nothingness stood in contrast to the fundamental focus in Western philosophy on the ontological notion of "being." Nishida Kitaro posits absolute nothingness topologically as the "site" or "locale" (basho) of nonduality, which overcomes the polarities of subject and object, or noetic and noematic. Another major concept in Nishida's philosophy is "self-awareness" (jikaku), a state of mind that transcends the subject-object bifurcation, which was initially adopted from William James' (1842-1910) notion of "pure experience" (J. junsui keiken); this intuition reveals a limitless, absolute reality that has been described in the West as God or in the East as emptiness. Tanabe Hajime subsequently criticized Nishida's "site of absolute nothingness" for two reasons: first, it was a suprarational religious intuition that transgresses against philosophical reasoning; and second, despite its claims to the contrary, it ultimately fell into a metaphysics of being. Despite his criticism of what he considered to be Nishida's pseudoreligious speculations, however, Tanabe's Shin Buddhist inclinations later led him to focus not on Nishida's Zen Buddhist-oriented "intuition," but instead on the religious aspect of "faith" as the operative force behind other-power (TARIKI). Inspired by both Nishida and such Western thinkers as Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) (with whom he studied), Nishitani Keiji developed the existential and phenomenological aspects of Nishida's philosophy of absolute nothingness. Concerned with how to reach the place of absolute nothingness, given the dilemma of, on the one hand, the incessant reification and objectification by a subjective ego and, on the other hand, the nullification of reality, he argued for the necessity of overcoming "nihilism." The Kyoto school thinkers also played a central role in the development of a Japanese political ideology around the time of the Pacific War, which elevated the Japanese race mentally and spiritually above other races and justified Japanese colonial expansion. Their writings helped lay the foundation for what came to be called Nihonjinron, a nationalist discourse that advocated the uniqueness and superiority of the Japanese race; at the same time, however, Nishida also resisted tendencies toward fascism and totalitarianism in Japanese politics. Since the 1990s, Kyoto school writings have come under critical scrutiny in light of their ties to Japanese exceptionalism and pre-war Japanese nationalism. These political dimensions of Kyoto school thought are now considered as important for scholarly examination as are its contributions to cross-cultural, comparative philosophy.
lacquer ::: n. --> A varnish, consisting of a solution of shell-lac in alcohol, often colored with gamboge, saffron, or the like; -- used for varnishing metals, papier-mache, and wood. The name is also given to varnishes made of other ingredients, esp. the tough, solid varnish of the Japanese, with which ornamental objects are made. ::: v. t.
Lanxi Daolong. (J. Rankei Doryu; K. Nan'gye Toryung 蘭溪道隆) (1213-1278). Chinese CHAN monk in the Mi'an collateral branch of the LINJI ZONG. Lanxi was a native of Fujiang in present-day Sichuan province. At a young age, he became a monk at the nearby monastery of Dacisi in Chengdu and later visited the Chan masters WUZHUN SHIFAN (1178-1249) and Chijue Daochong (1169-1250). Lanxi eventually became the disciple of Wuming Huixing (1162-1237), who in turn was a disciple of the eminent Chan master Songyuan Chongyue (1132-1202). In 1246, Lanxi departed for Japan, eventually arriving in Hakata (present-day Kyushu) with his disciple Yiweng Shaoren (1217-1281). At the invitation of the powerful regent Hojo Tokiyori (1227-1263), Lanxi served as abbot of the monastery Jorakuji in Kamakura. In 1253, Tokiyori completed the construction of a large Zen monastery named KENCHoJI in Kamakura and appointed Lanxi its founding abbot (kaisan; C. KAISHAN). Lanxi soon had a large following at Kenchoji where he trained students in the new SAMGHA hall (C. SENGTANG) according to the Chan monastic regulations (C. QINGGUI) that he brought from China. In 1265, he received a decree to take up residence at the powerful monastery of KENNINJI in Kyoto, but after three years in Kyoto, he returned to Kenchoji. Lanxi also became the founding abbot of the temple of Zenkoji in Kamakura. Retired emperor Kameyama (r. 1259-1274) bestowed upon him the title Zen Master Daikaku (Great Enlightenment); Lanxi's lineage in Japan thus came to be known as the Daikaku branch of the Japanese Rinzai Zen tradition (RINZAISHu).
La Vallée Poussin, Louis de. (1869-1938). Pioneering Belgian scholar of Buddhism, who is considered the founder of the Franco-Belgian school of European Buddhist Studies and one of the foremost European scholars of Buddhism during the twentieth century. La Vallée Poussin studied Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese under SYLVAIN LÉVI at the Sorbonne in Paris and HENDRIK KERN at Leiden, before becoming a professor of comparative Greek and Latin grammar at the University of Ghent in 1895, where he taught for the next three decades. La Vallée Poussin became especially renowned for his multilingual approach to Buddhist materials, in which all available recensions of a text in the major canonical languages of the Buddhist tradition were carefully studied and compared. Indicative of this approach is La Vallée Poussin's massive French translation of VASUBANDHU's ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA (later translated into English in four volumes), which uses the Chinese recension (in an annotated Japanese edition) as the textus receptus but draws heavily on Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan materials in order to present a comprehensive, annotated translation of the text, placed squarely within the broader context of the SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA. La Vallée Poussin also published the first complete renderings in a Western language of DHARMAPĀLA/XUANZANG's CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimātratāsiddhi) and sĀNTIDEVA's BODHICARYĀVATĀRA. He also published editions, translations, and studies of central YOGĀCĀRA, MADHYAMAKA, and tantric texts, in addition to a number of significant topical studies, including one on the Buddhist councils (SAMGĪTI). In 1916, his Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, were published as The Way to Nirvāna: Six Lectures on Ancient Buddhism as a Discipline of Salvation. Of his many students, perhaps the most renowned was the Belgian ÉTIENNE LAMOTTE.
Lévi, Sylvain. (1863-1935). Influential nineteenth-century European scholar of the YOGĀCĀRA school of Buddhism. Born in Paris to Alsatian parents, Lévi had a conservative Jewish education and held his first teaching position at a conservative seminary in Paris. Educated in Sanskrit at the University of Paris, Lévi became a lecturer at the École des Hautes Études in Paris in 1886. There, he taught Sanskrit until he became professor of Sanskrit language and literature at the Collège de France in 1894, a position that he would hold until 1935. Lévi went to India and Japan to carry out his research and also traveled extensively in Korea, Nepal, Vietnam, and Russia. He eventually became the director of the École des Hautes Études. In addition to Sanskrit, Lévi also read classical Chinese, Tibetan, and Kuchean and was one of the first Western scholars to study Indian Buddhism through translations that were extant only in those secondary canonical languages. Perhaps his most significant translations were of seminal texts of the YOGĀCĀRA school, including renderings of VASUBANDHU's twin synopses, the VIMsATIKĀ and TRIMsIKĀ (1925), and ASAnGA's MAHĀYĀNASuTRĀLAMKĀRA, thus introducing the major writings of this important Mahāyāna scholastic school to the Western scholarly world. Lévi also published on classical Indian theater, the history of Nepal, and Sanskrit manuscripts from Bali. Together with TAKAKUSU JUNJIRo, Lévi was the cofounder of the joint Japanese-French Hobogirin, an encyclopedic dictionary of Buddhism, the compilation of which continues to this day.
Linji zong. (J. Rinzaishu; K. Imje chong 臨濟宗). In Chinese, the "Linji school"; one of the so-called Five Houses and Seven Schools (WU JIA QI ZONG) of the mature Chinese CHAN school. Chan genealogical records (see CHUANDENG LU) describe a lineage of monks that can be traced back to the eponymous Tang-dynasty Chan master LINJI YIXUAN. Linji's lineage came to dominate the Chan tradition in the southern regions of China, largely through the pioneering efforts of his Song-dynasty spiritual descendants Fengxue Yanzhao (896-973), Fenyang Shanshao (947-1024), and Shishuang Chuyuan (986-1040). Shishuang's two major disciples, HUANGLONG HUINAN (1002-1069) and YANGQI FANGHUI (992-1049), produced the two most successful collateral lines within the Linji lineage: the HUANGLONG PAI and YANGQI PAI. Few monks had as significant an impact on the Chan tradition as DAHUI ZONGGAO, a successor in the Yangqi branch of the Linji lineage. Dahui continued the efforts of his teacher YUANWU KEQIN, who is credited with compiling the influential BIYAN LU ("Blue Cliff Record") and developed the use of Chan cases or precedents (GONG'AN) as subjects of meditation (see KANHUA CHAN). Dahui and his spiritual descendants continued to serve as abbots of the most powerful monasteries in China, such as WANSHOUSI (see GOZAN). During Dahui's time, the Linji lineage came into brief conflict with the resurgent CAODONG ZONG lineage over the issue of the latter's distinctive form of meditative practice, which Dahui pejoratively labeled "silent-illumination meditation" (MOZHAO CHAN). Other famous masters in the Linji lineage include WUZHUN SHIFAN, GAOFENG YUANMIAO, and ZHONGFENG MINGBEN. For the Korean and Japanese counterparts, see IMJE CHONG; RINZAISHu.
lock-in "standard" When an existing standard becomes almost impossible to supersede because of the cost or logistical difficulties involved in convincing all its users to switch something different and, typically, {incompatible}. The common implication is that the existing standard is notably inferior to other comparable standards developed before or since. Things which have been accused of benefiting from lock-in in the absence of being truly worthwhile include: the {QWERTY} keyboard; any well-known {operating system} or programming language you don't like (e.g., see "{Unix conspiracy}"); every product ever made by {Microsoft Corporation}; and most currently deployed formats for transmitting or storing data of any kind (especially the {Internet Protocol}, 7-bit (or even 8-bit) {character sets}, analog video or audio broadcast formats and nearly any file format). Because of {network effects} outside of just computer networks, {Real World} examples of lock-in include the current spelling conventions for writing English (or French, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.); the design of American money; the imperial (feet, inches, ounces, etc.) system of measurement; and the various and anachronistic aspects of the internal organisation of any government (e.g., the American Electoral College). (1998-01-15)
Lod Massacre ::: Three Japanese Red Army members, acting on behalf of the PFLP, attacked passengers in Lod International Airport. The attack marked the first Palestinian attempt to enlist non-Middle East terrorist support.
loquat ::: n. --> The fruit of the Japanese medlar (Photinia Japonica). It is as large as a small plum, but grows in clusters, and contains four or five large seeds. Also, the tree itself.
Madhav: “A kakemono is a Japanese painting which is hung on the wall. It is a print in many colours, many designs. And this world picture is compared to a kakemono of significant forms. Each form is significant, each line is meaningful.” The Book of the Divine Mother
Magoksa. (麻谷寺). In Korean, "Hemp Valley Monastery"; the sixth district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism, located on T'aehwasan (Exalted Splendor Mountain) outside the city of Kongju in South Ch'ungch'ong province. The origins of the monastery and its name are obscure. One record claims that Magoksa was established by the Silla VINAYA master CHAJANG (fl. c. 590-658) in 643; because so many people attended Chajang's dharma lecture at the monastery's founding, the audience was said to have been "as dense as hemp stalks," so the Sinograph for "hemp" (ma) was given to the name of the monastery. This claim is, however, suspect since the monastery is located in what was then the territory of Silla's rival Paekche. A second theory is that the monastery was founded in 845 by Muju Muyom (799-888), founder of the Songjusan school of the Nine Mountains school of Son (KUSAN SoNMUN). When Muyom returned to Silla in 845 from his training in China, he is said to have named the monastery after his Chinese CHAN teacher Magu Baoche (K. Magok Poch'ol; b. 720?). Finally, it is also said that the monastery's name simply derives from the fact that hemp was grown in the valley before the monastery's establishment. In 1172, during the Koryo dynasty, Magoksa was significantly expanded in scope by POJO CHINUL (1158-1210) and his disciple Suu (d.u.), who turned it into a major monastery in the region. Following the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions of 1592-1598, the monastery sat destroyed for some sixty years until several of its shrine halls were reconstructed by Kakch'ong (d.u.) in 1651 and the monastery returned to prominence. The Taegwang pojon (Basilica of Great Brightness) is Magoksa's central sanctuary and enshrines an image of the buddha VAIROCANA; the building was reconstructed in 1172 by Pojo Chinul and again in 1651. In front of the basilica is a juniper tree planted by the independence fighter Kim Ku (1876-1949), who later lived at the monastery as a monk. Magoksa's main buddha hall (taeung pojon; see TAEUNG CHoN) enshrines a sĀKYAMUNI Buddha statue that is flanked by AMITĀBHA and BHAIsAJYAGURU, and the calligraphy hanging outside this hall is reported to be that of Kim Saeng (711-790/791), one of Silla's most famous calligraphers. One of Magoksa's unique structures is its five-story, Koryo-era stone pagoda, which is built upon a two-story-high stone base; its bronze cap suggests Tibetan influences that may have entered Korea via the Mongol Yuan dynasty. It is one of only three STuPAs of similar style known to exist worldwide. The Yongsan chon (Vulture Peak Hall) is decorated with paintings of the eight stereotypical episodes in the life of the Buddha (p'alsang; see C. BAXIANG); it is also called the Ch'onbul chon, or Thousand Buddhas Hall, for the many buddha statues enshrined around the inside perimeter of the hall. The building, which was reconstructed by Kakch'ong in 1651, is today's Magoksa's oldest extant building, with a plaque that may display the calligraphy of King Sejo (r. 1455-1468).
Mahasi, Sayadaw. (1904-1982). In Burmese, "Senior Monk from Mahasi," also known as Sobhana Mahāthera; honorific title of U Thobana (P. Sobhana), a prominent Burmese (Myanmar) scholar-monk and influential promoter of insight meditation (VIPASSANĀ). He was born in Seikkhun village near Shwebo in Upper Burma to a prosperous peasant family. At the age of twelve, he was ordained as a novice (P. sāmanera; S. sRĀMAnERA) at Pyinmana monastery in Saikkhun and in 1923 he took higher ordination (UPASAMPADĀ) as a monk (P. BHIKKHU; S. BHIKsU). Trained in Pāli and Buddhist scriptures at both Saikkhun and a number of monastic colleges in Mandalay, U Thobana alternated his own studies with teaching duties in Moulmien, Lower Burma, where he also encountered and trained under the meditation master Mingun Jetavan Sayadaw in the neighboring town of Thaton. U Thobana received his Dhammācāriya degree in 1941, just prior to the outbreak of World War II and the Japanese occupation of Burma. During the war, he returned to his native village in Upper Burma and settled in a monastery named Mahasi, whence his toponym. There he devoted himself to the practice and teaching of vipassanā meditation and wrote the Manual of Vipassanā Meditation, the first of his many treatises on the subject. In 1949, the Prime Minister of Burma, U Nu, invited Mahasi Sayadaw to head the newly founded Thathana Yeiktha (meditation hermitage) in Rangoon (Yangon). Since that time, affiliate branches of the Thathana Yeiktha headed by teachers trained in the Mahasi method of vipassanā have been established throughout the country and internationally, particularly in Thailand and Sri Lanka. Mahasi Sayadaw was an erudite scholar and the author of sixty-seven works on Buddhism in Burmese and Pāli. The Burmese government awarded him the title Aggamahāpandita for his scholarship in 1952. In 1954, he was appointed to the dual position of pucchaka (questioner) and osana (editor) in the sixth Buddhist Council (See COUNCIL, SIXTH) convened in Rangoon in 1954-56. Among other duties during the council, he oversaw the preparation of a new Burmese edition of the Pāli tipitaka (S. TRIPItAKA), its commentaries, and sub-commentaries for publication. Mahasi Sayadaw headed numerous Buddhist missions to countries in Asia, Europe, and America, and included among his disciples are many contemporary meditation teachers in Myanmar and internationally.
Mahāsthāmaprāpta. (T. Mthu chen thob; C. Dashizhi; J. Daiseishi; K. Taeseji 大勢至). In Sanskrit, "He who has Attained Great Power"; a BODHISATTVA best known as one of the two attendants (along with the far more popular AVALOKITEsVARA) of the buddha AMITĀBHA in his buddha-field (BUDDHAKsETRA) of SUKHĀVATĪ. Mahāsthāmaprāpta is said to represent Amitābha's wisdom, while Avalokitesvara represents his compassion. According to the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, the light of wisdom emanating from Mahāsthāmaprāpta illuminates all sentient beings, enabling them to leave behind the three unfortunate destinies (APĀYA; DURGATI) and attain unexcelled power; thus, Mahāsthāmaprāpta is considered the bodhisattva of power or strength. There is also a method of contemplation of the bodhisattva, which is the eleventh of the sixteen contemplations described in the Guan jing. An adept who contemplates Mahāsthāmaprāpta comes to reside in the lands of all the buddhas, being relieved from innumerable eons of continued birth-and-death. In the suRAMGAMASuTRA, the bodhisattva advocates the practice of BUDDHĀNUSMṚTI. Mahāsthāmaprāpta also appears in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") as one of the bodhisattvas who assembled on Vulture Peak (GṚDHRAKutAPARVATA) to hear the teachings of the buddha sĀKYAMUNI. Iconographically, the bodhisattva is rarely depicted alone; he almost always appears in a triad together with Amitābha and Avalokitesvara. Mahāsthāmaprāpta can often be recognized by a small jar on his jeweled crown, which is believed to contain pure water to cleanse sentient beings' afflictions (KLEsA). He is also often described as holding a lotus flower in his hand or joining his palms together in ANJALI. Mahāsthāmaprāpta is one of the twenty-five bodhisattvas who protects those who recite Amitābha's name and welcomes them on their deathbed to the Buddha's PURE LAND. Serving as one of the thirteen bodhisattvas of the Japanese SHINGONSHu of esoteric Buddhism, Mahāsthāmaprāpta is believed to preside over the special ceremony marking the first year anniversary of one's death. He is also depicted in the Cloister of the Lotus Division (Rengebu-in) in the TAIZoKAI MAndALA.
Mahāvyutpatti. (T. Bye brag tu rtogs par byed pa chen po; C. Fanyi mingyi daji; J. Hon'yaku myogi taishu; K. Ponyok myongŭi taejip 翻譯名義大集). In Sanskrit, the "Great Detailed Explanation"; an important Sanskrit-Tibetan lexicon dating from the ninth century. In order to provide consistency in the translation of Indian SuTRAs and sĀSTRAs, the Tibetan king RAL PA CAN convened a meeting of scholars in 821 and charged them with providing standard Tibetan equivalents for a wide range of terms encountered in Sanskrit Buddhist texts. The result was a lexicon known as the Mahāvyutpatti, which contains (in one version) 9,565 terms. The king is said to have instructed its compilers not to include tantric vocabulary. The work is organized into 283 categories, the purpose of some of which (the eighteen kinds of suNYATĀ, the ten virtuous actions, the thirty-two marks of a MAHĀPURUsA) are more self-evident than others ("names of strange things," "various terms"). During the seventeenth century, Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchurian equivalencies were added to the lexicon so that the terms would be available in the four major languages used in the Qing empire (Manchu, Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian). The first English translation was made by ALEXANDER CSOMA DE KŐRÖS, but it was not published until long after his death. The Mahāvyutpatti continues to be consulted in editions produced by Japanese scholars that include additional Chinese equivalencies and various indexes.
Maitreya. (P. Metteya; T. Byams pa; C. Mile; J. Miroku; K. Mirŭk 彌勒). In Sanskrit, "The Benevolent One"; the name of the next buddha, who now abides in TUsITA heaven as a BODHISATTVA, awaiting the proper time for him to take his final rebirth. Buddhists believed that their religion, like all conditioned things, was inevitably impermanent and would eventually vanish from the earth (cf. SADDHARMAVIPRALOPA; MOFA). According to one such calculation, the teachings of the current buddha sĀKYAMUNI would flourish for five hundred years after his death, after which would follow a one-thousand-year period of decline and a three-thousand-year period in which the dharma would be completely forgotten. At the conclusion of this long disappearance, Maitreya would then take his final birth in India (JAMBUDVĪPA) in order to reestablish the Buddhist dispensation anew. According to later calculations, Maitreya will not take rebirth for some time, far longer than the 4,500 years mentioned earlier. He will do so only after the human life span has decreased to ten years and then increased to eighty thousand years. (Stalwart scholiasts have calculated that his rebirth will occur 5.67 billion years after the death of sākyamuni.) Initially a minor figure in early Indian Buddhism, Maitreya (whose name derives from the Indic MAITRĪ, meaning "loving-kindness" or "benevolence") evolved during the early centuries of the Common Era into one of the most popular figures in Buddhism across Asia in both the mainstream and MAHĀYĀNA traditions. He is also known as AJITA, although there are indications that, at some point in history, the two were understood to be different deities. As the first bodhisattva to become a figure of worship, his imagery and cult set standards for the development of later bodhisattvas who became objects of cultic worship, such as AVALOKITEsVARA and MANJUsRĪ. Worship of Maitreya began early in Indian Buddhism and became especially popular in Central and East Asia during the fifth and sixth centuries. Such worship takes several forms, with disciples praying to either meet him when he is reborn on earth or in tusita heaven so that they may then take rebirth with him when he becomes a buddha, a destiny promised in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") to those who recite his name. Maitreya is also said to appear on earth, such as in a scene in the Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG's account of his seventh-century travels to India: attacked by pirates as he sailed on the Ganges River, Xuanzang prayed to and was rescued by the bodhisattva. Maitreya also famously appeared to the great Indian commentator ASAnGA in the form of a wounded dog as a means of teaching him the importance of compassion. Devotees across the Buddhist world also attempt to extend their life span in order to be alive when Maitreya comes, or to be reborn at the time of his presence in the world, a worldly paradise that will be known as ketumati. His earliest iconography depicts him standing or sitting, holding a vase (KUndIKĀ), symbolizing his imminent birth into the brāhmana caste, and displaying the ABHAYAMUDRĀ, both features that remain common attributes of his images. In addition, he frequently has a small STuPA in his headdress, believed to represent a prophecy regarding his descent to earth to receive the robes of his predecessor from MAHĀKĀsYAPA. Maitreya is also commonly depicted as a buddha, often shown sitting in "European pose" (BHADRĀSANA; see also MAITREYĀSANA), displaying the DHARMACAKRAMUDRĀ. He is said to sit in a chair in "pensive" posture in order to be able to quickly stand and descend to earth at the appropriate time. Once he is reborn, Maitreya will replicate the deeds of sākyamuni, with certain variations. For example, he will live the life of a householder for eight thousand years, but having seen the four sights (CATURNIMITTA) and renounced the world, he will practice asceticism for only one week before achieving buddhahood. As the Buddha, he will first travel to Mount KUKKUtAPĀDA near BODHGAYĀ where the great ARHAT Mahākāsyapa has been entombed in a state of deep SAMĀDHI, awaiting the advent of Maitreya. Mahākāsyapa has kept the robes of sākyamuni, which the previous buddha had entrusted to him to pass on to his successor. Upon his arrival, the mountain will break open, and Mahākāsyapa will come forth from a stupa and give Maitreya his robes. When Maitreya accepts the robes, it will only cover two fingers of his hands, causing people to comment at how diminutive the past buddha must have been. ¶ The cult of Maitreya entered East Asia with the initial propagation of Buddhism and reached widespread popularity starting in the fourth century CE, a result of the popularity of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra and several other early translations of Maitreya scriptures made in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Saddharmapundarīkasutra describes Maitreya's present abode in the tusita heaven, while other sutras discuss his future rebirth on earth and his present residence in heaven. Three important texts belonging to the latter category were translated into Chinese, starting in the fifth century, with two differing emphases: (1) the Guan Mile pusa shangsheng doushuo tian jing promised sentient beings the prospect of rebirth in tusita heaven together with Maitreya; and (2) the Guan Mile pusa xiasheng jing and (3) the Foshuo Mile da chengfo jing emphasized the rebirth of Maitreya in this world, where he will attain buddhahood under the Dragon Flower Tree (Nāgapuspa) and save numerous sentient beings. These three texts constituted the three principal scriptures of the Maitreya cult in East Asia. In China, Maitreya worship became popular from at least the fourth century: DAO'AN (312-385) and his followers were among the first to propagate the cult of Maitreya and the prospect of rebirth in tusita heaven. With the growing popularity of Maitreya, millenarian movements associated with his cult periodically developed in East Asia, which had both devotional and political dimensions. For example, when the Empress WU ZETIAN usurped the Tang-dynasty throne in 690, her followers attempted to justify the coup by referring to her as Maitreya being reborn on earth. In Korea, Maitreya worship was already popular by the sixth century. The Paekche king Mu (r. 600-641) identified his realm as the world in which Maitreya would be reborn. In Silla, the hwarang, an elite group of male youths, was often identified with Maitreya and such eminent Silla monks as WoNHYO (617-686), WoNCH'ŬK (613-696), and Kyonghŭng (fl. seventh century) composed commentaries on the Maitreya scriptures. Paekche monks transmitted Maitreya worship to Japan in the sixth century, where it became especially popular in the late eighth century. The worship of Maitreya in Japan regained popularity around the eleventh century, but gradually was replaced by devotions to AMITĀBHA and KsITIGARBHA. The worship of Maitreya has continued to exist to the present day in both Korea and Japan. The Maitreya cult was influential in the twentieth century, for example, in the establishment of the Korean new religions of Chŭngsan kyo and Yonghwa kyo. Maitreya also merged in China and Japan with a popular indigenous figure, BUDAI (d. 916)-a monk known for his fat belly-whence he acquired his now popular East Asian form of the "laughing Buddha." This Chinese holy man is said to have been an incarnation of the bodhisattva Maitreya (J. Miroku Bosatsu) and is included among the Japanese indigenous pantheon known as the "seven gods of good fortune"(SHICHIFUKUJIN). Hotei represents contentment and happiness and is often depicted holding a large cloth bag (Hotei literally means "hemp sack"). From this bag, which never empties, he feeds the poor and needy. In some places, he has also become the patron saint of restaurants and bars, since those who drink and eat well are said to be influenced by Hotei. Today, nearly all Chinese Buddhist monasteries (and many restaurants as well) will have an image of this Maitreya at the front entrance; folk belief has it that by rubbing his belly one can establish the potential for wealth.
Makiguchi Tsunesaburo. (牧口常三郎) (1871-1944). Founder of SoKA GAKKAI, a modern Japanese lay movement. Makiguchi was born in a small village in Niigata prefecture. Until 1928, he pursued a career as an educator and writer, serving as a teacher or a principal in several schools, and publishing articles on his educational philosophy, which focused on developing the creativity and personal experience of his students. Perhaps because of such personal misfortunes as the loss of four of his five children, Makiguchi converted in 1928 to NICHIREN SHoSHu, an offshoot of Nichiren Buddhism, after finding that its teachings resonated with his own ideas about engendering social and religious values. Together with his disciple Toda Josei (1900-1958), Makiguchi founded in 1930 the Soka Kyoiku Gakkai (Creating Educational Values), a lay organization under the umbrella of the Nichiren Shoshu, which focused on publicizing his pedagogical ideas, and led its first general meeting. The society subsequently began to take on a decidedly religious character, focusing on missionary work for Nichiren Shoshu. As the Pacific War expanded, Makiguchi and his followers refused to cooperate with state-enforced SHINTo practices, leading to a rift between them and TAISEKIJI, the head monastery of Nichiren Shoshu. As a result, Makiguchi was arrested in 1943 on charges of lèse-majesté and violations of the Public Order Act, and died in prison one year later. After Makiguchi's disciple Toda Josei was released from prison in July 1945, he took charge of the Soka Kyoiku Gakkai organization and renamed it Soka Gakkai in 1946, developing it into one of the largest lay Buddhist organizations in Japan.
makuragyo. (枕經). In Japanese, lit., "pillow scripture"; the deathbed recitation of Buddhist scriptures. In Japan, a monk is invited to offer prayers and recite scriptures for the recently deceased. Before the corpse is interred in the coffin, the makuragyo service is performed at the deceased's bedside or pillow, hence the service's name. Traditionally, the deathbed service was performed by a monk called the kaso, who chanted passages from the scriptures through the night.
Manam Chonghon. (曼庵宗憲) (1876-1957). Korean monk and educator during the Japanese occupation and postwar periods; also known as Mogyang. After losing his parents at an early age, Manam became a monk and studied under HANYoNG CHoNGHO (1870-1948). In 1900, he devoted himself to the study of SoN meditation at the monastery of Unmun Sonwon (UNMUNSA). In 1910, after Korea's annexation by Japan, Manam traveled throughout the southern regions of the peninsula and delivered lectures on Buddhism to the public until he settled down at the monastery of PAEGYANGSA in 1920 to serve as abbot. At a time when the Buddhist community was split over the issue of clerical marriage, Manam, for the first time, divided his monk-students between the celibate chongpop chung (proper-dharma congregation) and the married hobop chung (protecting-dharma congregation). Manam's actions were considered to be a formal recognition of clerical marriage and were heavily criticized by the rest of the Buddhist community led by YONGSoNG CHINJONG (1864-1940) and Namjon Kwangon (1868-1936). In 1945, the Koburhoe organization that Manam established clashed with the General Administrative Committee of the Choson Buddhist order over the issue of the laxity of Buddhist practice in Korea, with Manam arguing for a return to the strict and disciplined lifestyle of the past as a means of preventing the corruption of Buddhism. After the end of the Japanese occupation, Manam organized the Kobul Ch'ongnim gathering and initiated what later came to be called the "purification movement" (chonghwa undong) in Korean Buddhism. In 1952, he succeeded his teacher Hanyong and became head (kyojong) of the Choson Buddhist order. As head, he gave the order a new name, the "Chogye Order of Korean Buddhism" (Taehan Pulgyo Chogye Chong; see CHONGYE CHONG), and created a new entry in its constitution, formally delineating the distinction between married monks (kyohwasŭng) and celibate monks (suhaengsŭng). He attempted to initiate a new plan for the organization of monasteries that would give priority to the celibate monks, but his plan was never put into practice. When President Syngman Rhee showed his support for the purification movement in May 1954, the monks of the Chogye order held a national convention and appointed Manam, Tongsan Hyeil (1890-1965), and Ch'ongdam Sunho (1902-1971) as the new leaders of the order and initiated a nationwide Buddhist reformation movement. Manam, however, was ultimately unable to mediate the different opinions of the representatives of the Buddhist community concerning the specific details and goals of the purification movement.
Man'gong Wolmyon. (滿空月面) (1871-1946). In Korean, "Replete in Emptiness, Moon-Face"; the cognomen and ordination name of an important SoN (C. Chan) monk of the late Choson and Japanese colonial periods. Man'gong was born in T'aein county, North Cholla province, and became a novice monk in 1884. After enlightenment experiences in 1895 and 1901, he became in 1904 a dharma heir of KYoNGHo SoNGU (1849-1912), the preeminent Son master of his generation who was renowned for his efforts to revitalize Korean Son practice. Like Kyongho, Man'gong was also a well-known iconoclast, who practiced an "unconstrained practice" (K. muae haeng; C. WU'AI XING) that was not bound by the customary restrictions of monastic discipline. After 1905, Man'gong often resided at SUDoKSA on Mt. Toksung in South Ch'ungch'ong province, and he and his lineage are closely associated with that monastery. Man'gong also collaborated with such contemporary Buddhist leaders as HAN YONGUN (1879-1944) and Soktu Pot'aek (1882-1954) in attempting to rejuvenate Korean Buddhist practice. Man'gong established the Sonhagwon (Cloister for Son Learning) in 1921 in order to promote Korean Son meditation training. Man'gong emphasized training in "questioning meditation" (K. kanhwa Son; C. KANHUA CHAN), using the meditative topic (K. hwadu; C. HUATOU) "no" (K. mu; C. WU; see WU GONG'AN; GOUZI WU FOXING). Man'gong was also publicly critical of the Japanese colonial government. There is a well-known anecdote that, at a conference of abbots from the thirty-one Korean head monasteries (PONSA) in 1937, he chided the Japanese governor-general by telling him that only Korean Buddhists would be able to save him once he had fallen into hell for destroying their tradition. In his later years, Man'gong retreated to the hermitage of Chonwolsa, near Sudoksa on Mt. Toksung. Man'gong had several renowned disciples who constitute the Toksung transmission lineage, including the monks Kobong (1890-1961), Ch'unsong (1891-1977), and Pyokch'o (1899-1986), and the nuns KIM IRYoP (1896-1971) and Pophŭi (1887-1975); Sungsan Haengwon (1927-2004), a major propagator of the Korean Son tradition in the West, was Man'gong's dharma successor through Kobong.
Manpukuji. (萬福寺). In Japanese, "Myriad Blessings Monastery"; located in Uji, outside Kyoto, Japan. Currently, Manpukuji is the headquarters (honzan) of the oBAKUSHu of the ZEN tradition. The monastery was founded by the émigré CHAN (Zen) master YINYUAN LONGXI with the support of the shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna (1639-1680). Construction began in 1661 and the dharma hall was completed the next year with the help of the grand counselor Sakai Tadakatsu (1587-1662). In 1664, Yinyuan left his head disciple MU'AN XINGTAO in charge and retired to his hermitage at Manpukuji. Mu'an thus became the second abbot of Manpukuji and oversaw the construction of the buddha hall, the bell tower, the patriarchs' hall, and so forth. For several generations, émigré Chinese monks dominated the abbacy of Manpukuji. The construction of Manpukuji was modeled after Yinyuan's old monastery of Wanfusi (which is pronounced Manpukuji in Japanese) in Fuzhou (present-day Fujian province). The major icons were also prepared by émigré Chinese artists and, along with the famous portrait of Yinyuan, are now considered important cultural artifacts. Mu'an's disciple Tetsugen Doko (1630-1682) led a project to carve a complete set of xylographs of the Ming dynasty edition of the Buddhist canon, which is now housed at Manpukuji; this edition, commonly called the obaku canon, is one of the few complete xylographic canons still extant in East Asia (cf. the second carving of the Korean Buddhist canon, KORYo TAEJANGGYoNG).
mantra. (T. sngags; C. zhenyan; J. shingon; K. chinon 眞言). In Sanskrit, "spell," "charm," or "magic formula"; a syllable or series of syllables that may or may not have semantic meaning, most often in a form of Sanskrit, the contemplation or recitation of which is thought to be efficacious. Indian exegetes creatively etymologized the term with the paronomastic gloss "mind protector," because a mantra serves to protect the mind from ordinary appearances. There are many famous mantras, ranging in length from one syllable to a hundred syllables or more. They are often recited to propitiate a deity, and their letters are commonly visualized in tantric meditations, sometimes within the body of the meditator. Although mantras are typically associated with tantric texts, they also appear in the SuTRAs, most famously in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA ("Heart Sutra"). Numerous tantric SĀDHANAs require the recitation of a particular mantra a specific number of times, with the recitations counted on a rosary (JAPAMĀLĀ). In Tibetan Buddhism, mantras are also repeated mechanically by turning "prayer wheels" (MA nI 'KHOR LO). Perhaps the most famous of all such spells is the six-syllable mantra of the bodhisattva AVALOKITEsVARA, OM MAnI PADME HuM, which is recited throughout the Tibetan Buddhist world. The Japanese SHINGONSHu takes its name from the Sinitic translation of mantra as "true word" (C. zhenyan; J. shingon).
Manzan Dohaku. (卍山道白) (1636-1715). In Japanese, "Myriad Mountains, Purity of the Path"; ZEN master and scholar of the SoToSHu. Manzan is said to have become a monk at the age of nine and to have experienced a deep awakening at sixteen. After his awakening, he left the following verse: "The night is deep and the clouds have cleared from the sky as if it had been washed; throughout the world, nowhere is the radiance of my eyes defiled or obstructed." In 1678, he met the Soto Zen master Gesshu Soko (1618-1696) and inherited his dharma (shiho). Two years later Manzan took over the abbacy of the temple Daijoji from Gesshu and remained there for ten years. In 1700, Manzan went to the city of Edo (Tokyo) in hopes of reforming the custom of IN'IN EKISHI, or "changing teachers according to temple." Instead, he called for a direct, face-to-face transmission (menju shiho) from one master to his disciple (isshi insho). After several failed attempts he finally succeeded in persuading the bakufu government to ban the in'in ekishi and GARANBo ("temple dharma lineage") practice in 1703. Manzan was also a consummate scholar who is renowned for his efforts to edit Zen master DoGEN KIGEN's magnum opus, SHoBoGENZo. He based his arguments for the abandonment of garanbo and in'in ekishi on his readings of the Shobogenzo. Manzan left many works. His Zenkaiketsu and Taikaku kanna offered a Zen perspective on the meaning of precepts. He also wrote the Tomon enyoshu, which explains various matters related to Zen, including face-to-face transmission (menju shiho). His teachings can also be found in the Manzan osho goroku. His most eminent disciple was the Tokugawa reformer MENZAN ZUIHo (1683-1769).
Matsuo Basho. (松尾芭蕉) (1644-1694). A renowned Japanese Buddhist author of the Edo period. Although famous in the West especially for his haiku poetry, Basho is also known for his renga, or linked verse, prose works, literary criticism, diaries, and travelogues, which also contain many famous poems. His most celebrated work is his travel diary, a work in mixed prose and verse entitled Oku no Hosomichi ("Narrow Road to the Deep North"), published posthumously in 1702. He was born in Iga Province (present-day Mie prefecture) to a family of the samurai class, but abandoned that life in favor of living as a Buddhist monk, much like the Heian period (794-1185) SHINGONSHu monk SAIGYo (1118-1190), with whom he is often compared. Basho received instruction from the RINZAISHu master Butcho (1643-1715), and his work is commonly regarded as conveying a ZEN aesthetic, as in the famous haiku poem he wrote at his moment of awakening: "A timeless pond, the frog jumps, a splash of water" (J. furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto).
Menzan Zuiho. (面山瑞方) (1683-1769). Japanese reformer of the SoToSHu of ZEN during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867), who is largely responsible for establishing DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253) as the font of orthodoxy for the Soto school and, during the modern and contemporary periods, as an innovative religious thinker. Born in Higo province in the Kumamoto region, Menzan studied with MANZAN DoHAKU (1636-1715) and later Sonno Soeki (1649-1705). At a thousand-day retreat Menzan led following Sonno's death, Menzan read texts by Dogen that had been neglected for centuries and subsequently used them as the scriptural authority from which he forged an entirely new vision of the Sotoshu; he then deployed this revisioning of Dogen to justify a reformation of long-held practices within the school. Menzan was a prolific author, with over a hundred works attributed to him, sixty-five of which have been published in modern Soto school collections; these works include everything from detailed philological commentaries to extended discussions of monastic rules and regulations. He remains best known for his Shobogenzo shotenroku, an eleven-roll encyclopedic commentary to Dogen's magnum opus, the SHoBoGENZo.
mikkyo. (密教). In Japanese, lit. "esoteric teachings"; often translated as "esoteric Buddhism." The term mikkyo is used collectively today to refer to a large body of texts, liturgies, implements, and rituals that were imported from China to Japan during the Heian period (794-1185) by influential Japanese monk-pilgrims in the Japanese TENDAISHu and SHINGONSHu traditions. These new teachings and objects in turn were largely, but not exclusively, based on the teachings of late medieval Indian Buddhism (see TANTRA and VAJRAYĀNA) that had reached Central Asia and China. SAICHo (762-822) and KuKAI (774-835) played the most notable roles in introducing esoteric Buddhism to the Japanese isles. Their trips to Tangdynasty China (618-907) coincided with the height of esoteric practice on the continent. While Saicho's brief voyage to China in 804 focused on TIANTAI practice, he also learned a limited number of MANTRA practices toward the end of his stay, which he introduced to Japan. In 806, KuKAI returned from a three-year stay in the Tang capital of Chang'an, bringing back with him the extensive training he had received in esoteric Buddhism from the prominent tantric master HUIGUO (746-805), as well as a large collection of esoteric texts and MAndALAs. In the following years, Saicho and Kukai's esoteric rituals quickly gained favor with the Japanese court, gradually becoming dominant among the political elite over the course of the Heian period. Alongside Kukai's Shingon school of mikkyo (known as ToMITSU), Tendai Buddhism increasingly developed its own set of tantric practices (known as TAIMITSU) under such successors of Saicho as ENNIN (794-864), ENCHIN (814-891), and ANNEN (b. 841). These practices were further adopted by the Nara Buddhist institutions and heavily influenced the growth and development of SHUGENDo. Many local cultic practices, now collectively referred to as SHINTo, also incorporated esoteric rituals. The primary deity of worship in mikkyo is the universal buddha MAHĀVAIROCANA. Concrete goals of esoteric practice included maintaining power, attaining good fortune, warding off evil, and becoming a buddha in one's very body (SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU). Common ritual implements included mandalas (see KONGoKAI and TAIZoKAI); icons, sometimes hidden, that were presented in the ritual hall (see HIBUTSU); and various ritual objects such as wands, bells, and the VAJRA.
mizuko kuyo. (水子供養). In Japanese, lit., "offering to a child of the waters," viz., "ceremony for an aborted fetus"; a memorial ceremony performed by women and their families on behalf of the spirits of aborted, miscarried, and stillborn fetuses. Abortion is legal and widely practiced in contemporary Japan and this ceremony has become increasingly common since the 1970s as a way both to placate the potentially malevolent spirit of an aborted fetus and to comfort the woman who chose to undertake the procedure. Images of the BODHISATTVA Jizo (KsITIGARBHA) in the form of a child are enshrined at temples, roadside shrines, or even family altars, and dedicated to the spirit of the fetus. In temples where this ceremony is common, small images of the bodhisattva are made available, which will then be typically garbed in either red bibs and caps or baby clothes so as to represent the fetus, with chanting performed and offerings made before the image. The mizuko kuyo ceremony was originally performed as an offering service to Jizo, the patron bodhisattva of children, but evolved during the Edo period in Japan into a ceremony for aborted fetuses or victims of infanticide, along the lines of other rituals performed for the ancestors of a family lineage. (Given the widespread famines of the time, some parents may have thought it better to offer children the prospect of a better rebirth than the suffering of continued starvation or unremitting sickness.) Because of this connection to Jizo, a hymn commonly sung at contemporary ceremonies is an indigenous Japanese Buddhist composition that calls on Jizo to protect the spirit of a deceased child and lead him or her to buddhahood. The mizuko kuyo may be performed at any time of the year but is especially prevalent on days dedicated to rituals for deceased ancestors, such as the Bon Festival in August.
monsan. (門参). In Japanese, lit. "lineage instructions," probably an abbreviation of monto hissan (the secret instructions of this lineage); secret koan (GONG'AN) manuals used in medieval Japanese SoToSHu monasteries of the ZEN tradition, which provide detailed descriptions of the koan curriculum taught in the various Soto lineages. As a record of the secret instructions transmitted in a particular lineage, the possession of these manuals often served as proof of the inheritance of that particular dharma lineage. The manuals contain names of koans and a series of standardized questions and answers (WENDA) for each koan. The monsan provide the required responses to the master's questions, which are in the form of Chinese verses and phrases known as AGYO and JAKUGO. The earliest extant monsan texts date from the sixteenth century, but they seem to represent long-established traditions within Zen lineages.
mu 1. "networking" The {country code} for Mauritius. 2. "philosophy" /moo/ The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word "mu" is actually from Chinese, meaning "nothing"; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense, but native speakers do not recognise the Discordian question-denying use. It almost certainly derives from overgeneralisation of the answer in the following well-known Rinzei Zen teaching riddle: A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu retorted, "Mu!" See also {has the X nature}, {AI Koan}. [Douglas Hofstadter, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"]. [{Jargon File}] (2000-11-22)
Muchu mondo. (夢中問答). In Japanese, "Questions and Answers in Dreams," a primer on ZEN (C. CHAN) training attributed to the RINZAISHu master MUSo SOSEKI (1275-1351). The Muchu mondo is a record of the answers given by Muso to the questions regarding Zen asked by Ashikaga Tadayoshi (1306-1352), the brother of the shogun Ashikaga Takauji (1305-1358). In total, Tadayoshi and Muso exchanged ninety-three sets of questions and answers that covered a wide range of subjects, including everything from praying for merit to the study of koans (C. GONG'AN) and the practice of seated meditation (J. zazen; C. ZUOCHAN). Due to its simple and clear discussion of topics relevant to a lay audience, the Muchu mondo has been widely read within the tradition and republished often.
Mugai Nyodai. (無外如大) (1223-1298). Influential nun, who became Japan's first female ZEN master. A daughter of the powerful Adachi clan, Mugai entered the cloister and became a student of émigré teacher WUXUE ZUYUAN (J. Mugaku Sogen, 1226-1286). Wuxue was a Chinese CHAN master in the LINJI ZONG (J. RINZAISHu), who reluctantly came to Japan in 1279 at the invitation of Hojo Tokimune (1251-1284), the eighth regent of the Kamakura shogunate, to escape the depredations of the Mongol troops then invading China. Nyodai eventually became a dharma heir (J. hassu; C. FASI) in WUXUE's Rinzai lineage, together with the imperial scion and monk KoHo KENNICHI (1241-1316). Nyodai later founded Keiaiji, a Rinzai Zen convent in the Japanese capital of Kyoto, which eventually became the leading cloister of the five mountain convent system (amadera gozan), the nun's counterpart of the five mountain (GOZAN) monastery system of the Kamakura.
Mujaku Dochu. (無着道忠) (1653-1744). Japanese ZEN master and historian of the RINZAISHu. Mujaku was a native of Tajima in present-day Hyogo prefecture. He entered the monastery at a young age and was ordained by the monk Jikuin Somon (d.u.) at the monastery of Ryugein. At the age of twenty-two, Mujaku followed his teacher Jikuin to Daijoji, where the latter was invited as its founding abbot (kaisan; C. KAISHAN). Later that same year, Jikuin was invited to MYoSHINJI as its abbot and again Mujaku followed. In 1707, Mujaku himself became the abbot of Myoshinji and served again as abbot in 1714. He retired to Ryugein in 1722 and devoted much of his time to his writing. Mujaku was a prolific writer who is said to have composed more than 370 works. His works include commentaries on various scriptures and discourse records (YULU) of CHAN and Zen masters, monastic regulations for the Zen community (see QINGGUI), histories of temples and monasteries, and dictionaries of Zen terms and vernacular phrases. His work thus serves as an invaluable tool for studying the history, doctrine, ritual, daily behavior, and language of the Zen tradition.
Muju Ichien. (無住一圓) (1227-1312). A Japanese monk during the Kamakura period; also known as Muju Dogyo. He was born into a warrior family and became a monk at the age of eighteen. Muju studied the doctrines of various sects, including the Hossoshu, SHINGONSHu, TENDAISHu, and JoDOSHu, and received ZEN training from the RINZAISHu monk ENNI BEN'EN (1202-1280). In 1262, Muju built Choboji (Matriarchal Longevity Monastery) in Owari (present-day Nagoya, a port city in the center of the main Japanese island of Honshu), where he spent the rest of his life. Although affiliated with the Rinzaishu, Muju took an ecumenical approach to Buddhism, arguing that all the different teachings of Buddhism were skillful means of conveying the religion's ultimate goal; he even denounced NICHIREN (1222-1382) for his contemporary's exclusivist attitude toward his own eponymous sect. Muju was also famous for his collections of Japanese folklore, such as the SHASEKISHu ("Sand and Pebbles Collection"), written between 1279 and 1283; his Tsuma kagami ("Mirror for Wives") of 1300; and his 1305 Zodanshu ("Collection of Random Conversations"). In particular, in the Shasekishu, Muju introduced the idea of the "unity of spirits and buddhas" (SHINBUTSU SHuGo), describing the Japanese indigenous gods, or KAMI, as various manifestations of the Buddha.
Mukai nanshin. [alt. Bukai nanshin] (霧海南針). In Japanese, "A Compass on the Misty Sea"; a Japanese vernacular sermon (kana hogo) written in 1666 for a lay woman by the Japanese oBAKUSHu monk CHoON DoKAI and published in 1672. The Mukai nanshin provides an explanation of ZEN practice with reference to the four great vows (SI HONGSHIYUAN) and the six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) of the BODHISATTVA. The Mukai nanshin also contains criticisms of other contemporary teachings, especially that of Zen koan (C. GONG'AN) training as then practiced in Japanese Zen. Both the RINZAISHu and SoToSHu of the Zen school during the Tokugawa period relied heavily upon the rote memorization of koans and capping phrases (JAKUGO) and tended to ignore the study of the literary content of the koans due to their lack of formal training in classical Chinese. obaku monks like Choon, under the influence of their Chinese émigré teachers, began to criticize this tendency within the Zen community in Japan.
Mukan Fumon. (無關普門) (1212-1291). Japanese proper name of RINZAISHu monk and first abbot of NANZENJI; also known as Gengo. Mukan was born in Hoshina in Shinano province (present-day Nagano prefecture) and received the BODHISATTVA precepts around 1230 at a monastery affiliated with MYoAN EISAI's (1141-1215) lineage. He became versed at Japanese exoteric and esoteric Buddhist teachings, and traveled around the eastern part of Japan, especially the Kanto and Tohoku regions, to lecture. Between 1243 and 1249, Mukan studied under ENNI BEN'EN (1202-1280). Mukan traveled to China in 1251, where he received transmission from Duanqiao Miaolun (1201-1261), the tenth-generation master in the YANGQI PAI collateral lineage of the LINJI ZONG, before returning to Japan in 1263. Mukan became the third abbot of Tohukuji in 1281 and was later appointed in 1291 by the cloistered Emperor Kameyama (r. 1260-1274) to be the founding abbot (J. kaisan; C. KAISHAN) of Nanzenji. There is a well-known story about his appointment as the Nazenji abbot. The monastery was originally built as a royal palace, but soon after the emperor moved there, ghosts began to haunt it. After several other monks failed to exorcise the ghosts, the emperor finally invited Mukan to try. Mukan succeeded in removing the ghosts by conducting Zen meditation with his disciples. In gratitude, the emperor turned the palace into a Rinzai monastery and appointed Mukan its abbot.
Mule "text, tool" A multi-lingual enhancement of {GNU Emacs}. Mule can handle not only {ASCII} characters (7 bit) and {ISO Latin 1} characters (8 bit), but also {16-bit characters} like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Mule can have a mixture of languages in a single buffer. Mule runs under the {X window system}, or on a {Hangul terminal}, {mterm} or {exterm}. {(ftp://etlport.etl.go.jp/pub/mule)}. (1996-01-28)
Mule ::: (text, tool) A multi-lingual enhancement of GNU Emacs. Mule can handle not only ASCII characters (7 bit) and ISO Latin 1 characters (8 bit), but also 16-bit characters like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Mule can have a mixture of languages in a single buffer.Mule runs under the X window system, or on a Hangul terminal, mterm or exterm.Latest version: 2.3. . (1996-01-28)
Müller, Friedrich Max. (1823-1900). Arguably the most famous Indologist of the nineteenth century, born in Dessau, the capital of the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, son of the famous Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller. He studied Sanskrit in Leipzig, receiving a doctorate in philology in 1843 at the age of twenty. In Berlin, he attended the lectures of Franz Bopp and Schelling. He went to Paris in 1846 where he studied with EUGÈNE BURNOUF, who suggested the project that would become his life's work, a critical edition of the Ṛgveda. In order to study the available manuscripts, he traveled to London and then settled in Oxford, where he would spend the rest of his life, eventually being appointed to a newly established professorship in comparative philology. Although best known for his work in philology, Indology, and comparative religion, Müller wrote essays and reviews on Buddhism throughout his career. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Buddhist studies came through his role as editor-in-chief of the Sacred Books of the East series, published between 1879 and 1910. Ten of the forty-nine volumes of the series were devoted to Buddhist works. Reflecting the opinion of the day that Pāli texts of the THERAVĀDA tradition represented the most accurate record of what the Buddha taught, seven of these volumes were devoted to Pāli works, with translations by THOMAS W. RHYS DAVIDS and HERMANN OLDENBERG, as well as a translation of the DHAMMAPADA by Müller himself. Among other Indian works, AsVAGHOsA's famous life of the Buddha appeared twice, translated in one volume from Sanskrit by E. B. Cowell and in another from Chinese by SAMUEL BEAL. HENDRIK KERN's translation of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") was included in another volume. The final volume of the series, entitled Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts (1894), included such famous works as the VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA ("Diamond Sutra"), the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA ("Heart Sutra"), and the three major PURE LAND sutras, all Indian works (or at least so regarded at the time) but selected because of their importance for Japanese Buddhism. Müller's choice of these texts was influenced by two Japanese students: TAKAKUSU JUNJIRo and NANJo BUN'Yu, both JoDO SHINSHu adherents who had gone to Oxford in order to study Indology with Müller. Upon their return, they introduced to Japanese academe the philological study of Buddhism from Sanskrit and Pāli sources. The works in Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts were translated by Müller, with the exception of the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING (*Amitāyurdhyānasutra), which was translated by Takakusu. In his final years, with financial support of the King of Siam, Müller began editing the Sacred Books of the Buddhists series, which was taken over by T. W. Rhys Davids upon Müller's death in 1900.
Muso Soseki. (夢窓疎石) (1275-1351). Japanese ZEN master in the RINZAISHu. A native of Ise, he became a monk at a young age and studied the teachings of the TENDAISHu. Muso's interests later shifted toward Zen and he became the student of the Zen master KoHo KENNICHI. After receiving dharma transmission from Koho, Muso led an itinerant life, moving from one monastery to the next. In 1325, he received a decree from Emperor Godaigo (r. 1318-1339) to assume the abbotship of the powerful monastery of NANZENJI in Kyoto. The following year, he went to Kamakura, where he served as abbot of the influential monasteries of Jochiji, Zuisenji, and ENGAKUJI. Later, he returned to Nanzenji at the request of the emperor. In 1333, Emperor Godaigo triumphantly returned to Kyoto and gave Muso the monastery Rinsenji and the title of state preceptor (kokushi; C. GUOSHI). After the emperor's death in 1339, Muso established the new monastery of TENRYuJI with the help of the shogun Ashikakga Takauji (1305-1358) and became its founding abbot (J. kaisan; C. KAISHAN). In this manner, Muso came to serve as abbot of many of the top-ranking monasteries of the GOZAN system. His disciples came to dominate the medieval Zen community and played important roles in the rise of gozan culture. His teachings are recorded in the Musoroku, Muso hogo, and MUCHu MONDo.
Myoan Eisai. (明庵榮西) (1141-1215). Japanese monk associated with the TENDAISHu (C. TIANTAI ZONG) and ZENSHu (C. CHAN ZONG) traditions; a successor in the HUANGLONG PAI collateral lineage of the Chinese LINJI ZONG, he was also the first monk to introduce the Chan school to Japan. Eisai became a monk at a young age and received the full monastic precepts on HIEIZAN, studying the Tendai teachings at the monastery of MIIDERA. In 1168, he left for China and made a pilgrimage to Mt. Tiantai and Mt. Ayuwang in present-day Zhejiang province. He returned to Japan that same year with numerous Tiantai texts of and made an effort to revitalize the Tendai tradition in Japan. In 1187, Eisai set out on another trip to China. This second time, he stayed for five years and studied under the Chan master Xu'an Huaichang (d.u.) on Mt. Tiantai. Eisai followed Xu'an to the monastery of Jingdesi on Mt. Tiantong when the latter was appointed its abbot in 1189. After receiving dharma transmission from Xu'an, Eisai returned to Japan in 1191. Eisai's efforts to spread the teachings of Zen was suppressed by his fellow Tendai monks of ENRYAKUJI despite his claim that the denial of Chan meant the denial of the teachings of SAICHo, the spiritual progenitor of Tendai. In 1198, Eisai composed his KoZEN GOKOKURON, wherein he defended Zen and argued for its usefulness in governing the nation and protecting Japan from foreign invasion. In 1199, he traveled to Kamakura where he won the support of the new shogunate and became the founding abbot (J. kaisan; C. KAISHAN) of the monastery of Jufukuji. Three years later, the shogun Minamoto Yoriie (1182-1204) established KENNINJI and appointed Eisai as its founding abbot. In 1214, he composed his treatise on tea, the KISSA YoJoKI, for Minamoto Sanetomo (1192-1219) who suffered from ill health. At Kenninji, Eisai taught a form of Zen that reflected his training in the esoteric (MIKKYo) teachings of Tendai.
Myoe Koben. (明慧高弁) (1173-1232). A Japanese SHINGONSHu monk who sought to revitalize the Kegonshu (C. HUAYAN ZONG) in Japan; commonly known as Myoe Shonin. Koben promoted traditional Buddhist values over the newer approaches of so-called Kamakura Buddhism. Against the prevailing tide of belief that the world was in terminal decline (J. mappo; C.MOFA), he took a positive stance on Buddhist practice by arguing that salvation could still be attained through traditional means. Koben was born in Kii province (present-day Wakayama Prefecture) and orphaned at the age of eight when both parents died in separate incidents. He went to live under the care of his maternal uncle Jogaku Gyoji, a Shingon monk at Jingoji on Mt. Takao, northwest of Kyoto. In 1188, at the age of sixteen, he was ordained by Jogaku at ToDAIJI. He took the ordination name Joben and later adopted the name Koben. After ordination, he studied Shingon, Kegon, and esoteric Buddhism (MIKKYo) at one of Todaiji's subtemples, Sonshoin. Koben tried twice to travel on pilgrimage to India, first in the winter of 1202-1203 and second in the spring of 1205, but was unsuccessful. On his first trip, Kasuga, a spirit (KAMI) associated with the Fujiwara family shrine in Nara, is said to have possessed the wife of Koben's uncle, Yuasa Munemitsu, and insisted that Koben not leave Japan. In the second attempt, he fell ill before he set out on his trip. In both instances, Koben believed that the Kasuga deity was warning him not to go, and he consequently abandoned his plans. These portents were supported by Fujiwara opposition to his voyage. In 1206, the retired emperor Gotoba gave Koben a plot of land in Toganoo. Gotoba designated the temple there as Kegon, renamed it Kozanji, and requested that Koben revive the study of Kegon doctrine. A year later, Gotoba appointed him headmaster of Sonshoin with the hope of further expanding Koben's promotion of the Kegon school. Despite this generous attention, Koben focused little of his efforts on this mission. He initially built a hermitage for himself at Toganoo, and it was not until 1219 that he constructed the Golden Hall at Kozanji. Koben dismissed the newer schools of Buddhism in his day, particularly HoNEN's (1122-1212) reinterpretation of pure land practice in the JoDOSHu. In 1212, he denounced Honen's nenbutsu (C. NIANFO) practice in Zaijarin ("Refuting the False Vehicle"), a response to Honen's earlier work, Senchaku hongan nenbutsu shu ("Anthology of Selections on the Nenbutsu and the Original Vow"; see SENCHAKUSHu). In contrast to the Jodoshu's exclusive advocacy of the single practice of reciting the Buddha's name, Koben defended the traditional argument that there were many valid methods for reaching salvation. Koben spent the last several decades of his life experimenting with ways to make Kegon doctrine accessible to a wider audience. In the end, however, his efforts were largely unsuccessful. He was unable to garner popular support, and his disciples never founded institutionally independent schools, as did the disciples of the other teachers of Kamakura Buddhism. Koben was fascinated by his dreams and recorded many of them in a well-known text known as the Yume no ki, or "Dream Diary." Like most Japanese of his day, Koben regarded many of these dreams to be portents coming directly from the buddhas, bodhisattvas, and gods.
Myokoninden. (妙好人傳). In Japanese, "Record of Sublimely Excellent People"; a JoDO SHINSHu collection of the biographies of the MYoKoNIN, viz., devoted practitioners of the practice of nenbutsu (C. NIANFO; recitation of the Buddha's name). The anthology was first compiled by a NISHI HONGANJIHA priest Gosei (1721-1794) and edited by Gosei's disciple Rizen (1753-1819). The Nishi Honganji priest Sojun (1791-1872) made additional editorial changes to this earlier edition and first published the Myokoninden in 1842. Sojun's original edition collected the biographies of twenty-two myokonin, in two rolls. Sojun added more biographies between 1843 and 1858, and eventually published four additional chapters, adding biographies of thirty-seven myokonin in 1843, nineteen in 1847, thirty-seven in 1856, and twenty-one in 1858. In 1852, Zo'o (fl. nineteenth century) also published the Zoku Myokoninden ("Supplement to the Myokoninden") with additional biographies of twenty-three myokonin. The present version of the text was first published in 1898, combining in a single volume all six chapters (viz., Gosei's original first chapter, Sojun's four additional chapters, and Zo'o's supplement). The myokonin featured in the collection comes from various social classes, although most of them are common people, such as peasants and merchants. The accounts of their lives emphasize such traditional social virtues as filial piety, loyalty, and generosity, as well as the rewards of exclusive nenbutsu practice and the dangers of KAMI (spirit) worship.
myokonin. (妙好人). In Japanese, "sublimely excellent people"; a term used especially in the JoDO SHINSHu tradition of Japanese PURE LAND Buddhism to refer to a devout practitioner of nenbutsu (C. NIANFO; recitation of the Buddha's name). The Chinese exegete SHANDAO (613-681) was the first to use the term myokonin (C. miaohaoren) in his commentary on the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING ("Book of the Contemplation of the Buddha of Limitless Life"), where he explains that the SuTRA uses the term lotus flower (PUndARĪKA) to refer to a "sublimely excellent" nianfo practitioner; HoNEN similarly used the term to refer to nenbutsu practitioners in general. But it was SHINRAN (1173-1263), the founder of Jodo Shinshu, who adopted the term in such writings as his Mattosho ("Lamp for the Latter Age"), to refer to Jodo Shinshu adherents whose virtuous conduct, prompted by their sincere faith in the buddha AMITĀBHA, could serve as a model for their colleagues. The term was popularized during the mid-nineteenth century with the publication of the MYoKoNINDEN, edited by the NISHI HONGANJIHA priest Sojun (1791-1872). This collection of tales about various myokonin demonstrates how the acceptance of Amitābha's grace leads to virtuous deeds that are worthy of emulation. The myokonin could be farmers, fishermen, merchants, warriors, doctors, or priests, but many of them were illiterate peasants. The Jodo Shinshu tradition is somewhat ambivalent toward the myokonin: despite the myokonin's sincere faith in Amitābha, they did not necessarily accept the authority of the school's head or some of its doctrines. Hence, despite being pure expressions of pure land faith, the myokonin are not necessarily a proper model for Jodo Shinshu followers and may even be heretical. Because many of myokonin were uneducated common people, few left any writings, with the prominent exception of the modern myokonin Asahara Saichi (1850-1932).
Myoshinji. (妙心寺). In Japanese, "Sublime Mind Monastery"; an influential ZEN monastery in Kyoto that is currently the headquarters (HONZAN) of the Myoshinji branch of the RINZAISHu. After the eminent Zen master Daito's (see SoHo MYoCHo) death in 1337, Emperor Hanazono (r. 1308-1318) converted his country villa into a monastery, which he named Myoshinji, and installed Daito's disciple KANZAN EGEN as its founding abbot (J. kaisan; C. KAISHAN). During the Muromachi period, Myoshinji was excluded from the powerful GOZAN ranking system and became the subject of harsh persecution during Ashikaga's rule. In the early half of the fifteenth century, the monk Nippo Soshun (1358-1448) oversaw the restoration of Myoshinji, but the monastery was consumed in a conflagration during the onin war (1467-1469). In 1477, with the support of Emperor Gotsuchimikado (r. 1464-1500) the monastery was restored once more under the supervision of its abbot Sekko Soshin (1408-1486). At the decree of Emperor Gokashiwabara (r. 1500-1526), Myoshinji was included in the gozan system and enjoyed the financial support of a high-ranking official monastery. Largely through its tight fiscal management and active proselytizing efforts, Myoshinji expanded quickly to control over fifty branch temples and became one of the most influential monasteries of the Rinzai Zen tradition. During the Edo period, a renowned Zen master of the Myoshinji lineage named HAKUIN EKAKU played an important role in the revitalization of the koan (C. GONG'AN) training system.
Naganuma Myoko. (長沼妙佼) (1889-1957). Cofounder, with NIWANO NIKKYo (1906-1999), of Rissho Koseikai, a Japanese "new religion" associated with the REIYuKAI and NICHIREN schools. See RISSHo KoSEIKAI.
Nakagawa Soen. (中川宋淵) (1907-1984). Japanese ZEN monk in the RINZAISHu who was influential in the early transmission of that Zen tradition to North America. Born in Taiwan to a Japanese military family, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1931 and was ordained as a monk at Kogakuji in 1933. After hearing the MYoSHINJI Zen master Yamamoto Genpo (1866-1961) speak at Ryutakuji, he became his disciple and trained under him at the latter monastery, eventually becoming abbot there. In 1935, Nakagawa began corresponding with Nyogen Senzaki (1876-1958), a Rinzai missionary in California, and eventually traveled to San Francisco to visit Senzaki in 1949; he made ten more such visits over the next three decades. Nakagawa helped to establish the Zen Studies Society in New York in 1965 and the Daibosatsu Zendo in the Catskills in 1971.
namu Amidabutsu. (C. namo Amituo fo; K. namu Amit'a pul 南無阿彌陀佛). In Japanese, "I take refuge in the buddha AMITĀBHA." Chanting of the name of the buddha Amitābha as a form of "buddha-recollection" (J. nenbutsu; see C. NIANFO) is often associated with the PURE LAND traditions. In Japan, nenbutsu practice was spread throughout the country largely through the efforts of itinerant holy men (HIJIRI), such as KuYA and IPPEN. With the publication of GENSHIN's oJo YoSHu, the practice of nenbutsu and the prospect of rebirth in Amitābha's pure land came to play an integral role as well in the TENDAI tradition. HoNEN, a learned monk of the Tendai sect, inspired in part by reading the writings of the Chinese exegete SHANDAO, became convinced that the nenbutsu was the most appropriate form of Buddhist practice for people in the degenerate age of the dharma (J. mappo; C. MOFA). Honen set forth his views in a work called Senchaku hongan nenbutsushu ("On the Nenbutsu Selected in the Primal Vow," see SENCHAKUSHu). The title refers to the vow made eons ago by the bodhisattva DHARMĀKARA that he would become the buddha Amitābha, create the pure land of bliss (SUKHĀVATĪ), and deliver to that realm anyone who called his name. To illustrate the power of the practice of nenbutsu, Honen contrasted "right practice" and the "practice of sundry good acts." "Right practice" refers to all forms of worship of Amitābha, the most important of which is the recitation of his name. "Practice of sundry good acts" refers to ordinary virtuous deeds performed by Buddhists, which are meritorious but lack the power of "right practice" that derives from the grace of Amitābha. Indeed, the power of Amitābha's vow is so great that those who sincerely recite his name, Honen suggests, do not necessarily need to dedicate their merit toward rebirth in the land of bliss because recitation will naturally result in rebirth there. Honen goes on to explain that each bodhisattva makes specific vows about the particular practice that will result in rebirth in their buddha-fields (BUDDHAKsETRA). Some buddha-fields are for those who practice charity (DĀNA), others for those who construct STuPAs, and others for those who honor their teachers. While Amitābha was still the bodhisattva Dharmākara, he compassionately selected a very simple practice that would lead to rebirth in his pure land of bliss: the mere recitation of his name. Honen recognized how controversial these teachings would be if they were widely espoused, so he instructed that the Senchakushu not be published until after his death and allowed only his closest disciples to read and copy it. His teachings gained popularity in a number of influential circles but were considered anathema by the existing sects of Buddhism in Japan because of his promotion of the sole practice of reciting the name. His critics charged him with denigrating sĀKYAMUNI Buddha, with neglecting virtuous deeds other than the recitation of the name, and with abandoning the meditation and visualization practices that should accompany the chanting of the name. Some years after Honen's death, the printing xylographs of the Senchakushu were confiscated and burned as works harmful to the dharma. However, by that time, the teachings of Honen had gained a wide following among both aristocrats and the common people. Honen's disciple SHINRAN came to hold even more radical views. Like Honen, he believed that any attempt to rely on one's own powers (JIRIKI) to achieve freedom from SAMSĀRA was futile; the only viable course of action was to rely on the power of Amitābha. But for Shinran, this power was pervasive. Even to make the effort to repeat silently "namu Amidabutsu" was a futile act of hubris. The very presence of the sounds of Amitābha's name in one's heart was due to Amitābha's compassionate grace. It was therefore redundant to repeat the name more than once in one's life. Instead, a single utterance (ICHINENGI) would assure rebirth in the pure land; all subsequent recitation should be regarded as a form of thanksgiving. This utterance need be neither audible nor even voluntary; instead, it is heard in the heart as a consequence of the "single thought-moment" of faith (shinjin, see XINXIN), received through Amitābha's grace. Shinran not only rejected the value of multiple recitations of the phrase namu Amidabutsu; he also regarded the deathbed practices advocated by Genshin to bring about rebirth in the pure land as inferior self-power (jiriki). Despite harsh persecution by rival Buddhist traditions and the government, the followers of Honen and Shinran came to form the largest Buddhist community in Japan, known as the JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu.
namu Myohorengekyo. (C. namo Miaofa lianhua jing; K. namu Myobop yonhwa kyong 南無妙法蓮華經). In Japanese, lit. "Homage to the Lotus Flower of the Sublime Dharma Scripture," the phrase chanted as the primary practice of the various subtraditions of the NICHIRENSHu, including NICHIREN SHOSHu and SOKKA GAKKAI. The first syllable of the phrase, "namu," is a transcription of the Sanskrit term "namas," meaning "homage"; "Myohorengekyo" is the Japanese pronunciation of the title of KUMĀRAJĪVA's (344-413) Chinese translation of the influential SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"). The phrase is also known in the Nichiren tradition as the DAIMOKU (lit. "title"). Chanting or meditating on the title of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra seems to have had a long history in the TENDAISHu (TIANTAI ZONG) in Japan. The practice was further developed and popularized by the Tendai monk NICHIREN, who placed this practice above all others. Relying on the FAHUA XUANYI, an important commentary on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra by the Chinese monk TIANTAI ZHIYI (538-597), Nichiren claimed that the essence of the scripture is distilled in its title, or daimoku, and that chanting the title can therefore lead to the attainment of buddhahood in this very body (SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU). He also drew on the notion that the dharma was then in decline (J. mappo; see C. MOFA) to promote the chanting of namu Myohorengekyo as the optimal approach to enlightenment in this degenerate age. The ONGI DUDEN ("Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings"), the transcription of Nichiren's lectures on the sutra compiled by his disciple Nichiko (1246-1332), gives a detailed exegesis of the meaning of the phrase. In the Nichiren interpretation, namu represents the dedication of one's whole life to the essential truth of Buddhism, which is the daimoku Myohorengekyo. Myoho refers to the "sublime dharma" of the nonduality of enlightenment and ignorance. Renge is the "lotus flower" (PUndARĪKA), which, because it is able to bear seeds and yet bloom at the same time, symbolizes the simultaneity of cause and effect. Finally, kyo represents the voices and sounds of all sentient beings, which affirm the universal presence of the buddha-nature (C. FOXING). The chanting of the phrase is therefore considered to be the ultimate means to attain buddhahood, regardless of whether or not one knows its meaning. In addition to its soteriological dimension, the chanting of the phrase is believed by some to convey such practical benefits as good health and financial well-being.
Nanatsudera. (七寺). Japanese vernacular name of the monastery of Toenzan Chofukuji in downtown Nagoya; famous as the repository of a massive twelfth-century manuscript canon of East Asian Buddhist works that was designated an Important Cultural Property after World War II. The monastery, which is affiliated with the SHINGONSHu, was founded by GYoGI in 735 and was originally named Shogakuin. The monastery was destroyed in an air raid in March 1945, but its canon survived, stored in lacquered chests called karabitsu. In 1990, scholarly investigation of the 4,954 juan (3,398 in rolls, 1,556 in folded books) of Nantsudera's canon identified scores of juan of scriptures that were long believed to have been lost. Especially important were several previously unknown Chinese Buddhist APOCRYPHA, including seminal works of the proscribed SANJIE JIAO school. The Nanatsudera collection is considered by many scholars of East Asian Buddhism to be the most important discovery of Buddhist textual materials since the unearthing of the DUNHUANG cache in the early twentieth century.
Nanjo Bun'yu. (南条文雄) (1849-1927). Japanese Buddhist scholar who helped to introduce the modern Western discipline of Buddhist Studies to Japan; he is usually known in the West by his own preferred transcription of Nanjio Bunyiu. Nanjo was the third son of the abbot of a temple in the HIGASHI HONGANJIHA (see oTANIHA; HONGANJI) of JoDO SHINSHu, and was eventually ordained as a priest in that sect. In 1876, the Higashi Honganjiha sent Nanjo to England, where he studied Sanskrit and other Buddhist canonical languages with FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER (1823-1900). After eight years overseas, he returned to Japan in 1884, teaching Sanskrit and Buddhism at Tokyo Imperial University, where he was an important Japanese pioneer in Sanskrit pedagogy and the study of Indian Buddhist literature. He also held a succession of posts as professor and president of several Buddhist universities in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nagoya. Nanjo played a critical role in reviving the study of Buddhist literature in China. While he was in Oxford, Nanjo met YANG WENHUI (1837-1911; cognomen Yang Renshan) and later arranged to send Yang copies of some three hundred Chinese Buddhist texts that had been lost in China during the depredations of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1865). Yang was able to reprint and distribute these scriptures from his personal publication house, the Jinling Sutra Publishing Center, in Nanjing. Nanjo is best known in the West for publishing in 1883 the first comprehensive catalogue of the East Asian Buddhist canon, A Catalogue of the Chinese Translation of the Buddhist Tripitaka, the Sacred Canon of the Buddhists in China and Japan, compiled by order of the Secretary of State for India. This catalogue is especially important for making one of the first attempts to correlate the Chinese translations of Buddhist texts with their Sanskrit and Tibetan recensions. Nanjo also edited the Sanskrit recensions of such texts as the LAnKĀVATĀRASuTRA and the larger and smaller SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA (which he translated in collaboration with F. Max Müller) and assisted HENDRIK KERN in preparing his Sanskrit edition of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA.
Nanpo Jomyo. [alt. Shomyo] (南浦紹明) (1235-1308). Japanese ZEN master in the RINZAISHu; a native of Suruga in present-day Shizuoka Prefecture. He studied under the émigré Chinese Chan master LANXI DAOLONG (1213-1278) at the monastery of KENCHoJI in Kamakura. In 1259, Nanpo left for China, where he studied with the LINJI ZONG Chan master XUTANG ZHIYU (1185-1269). Before returning to Japan, Nanpo is said to have received Xutang's seal of approval (see YINKE) and thus inherited Xutang's Linji lineage. In 1267, Nanpo returned to Japan and served his teacher Lanxi. Nanpo later moved to the monastery of Sufukuji in Hakata (present-day Kyushu), where he continued to reside for the next thirty-three years. In 1305, he was invited to the influential monastery of Manjuji in Kyoto and was installed as its abbot. Later, he served as abbot of his home monastery of Kenchoji. In 1309, he received the posthumous title State Preceptor Entsu Daio (Perfect Penetration, Great Resonance). Among his disciples SoHo MYoCHo (1282-1337), also known as Daito, is most famous. Currently, virtually all monks in the Rinzai Zen tradition trace their lineages back to Nanpo via HAKUIN EKAKU (1685-1768). The lineages that originated from Nanpo came to be known collectively as the otokan, which is a combination of Sinographs taken from the names of Dai-o, Dai-to, and Kan-zan (see KANZAN EGEN).
Nanshan lü zong. (J. Nanzan risshu; K. Namsan yulchong 南山律宗). In Chinese, the "South Mountain School of Discipline," the name for a loose affiliation of Chinese exegetes who traced their lineage back to the Chinese VINAYA master DAOXUAN (596-667). (The name Nanshan, or South Mountain, refers to Daoxuan's residence at ZHONGNANSHAN in present-day Shanxi province.) This tradition is largely concerned with the exegesis of the SIFEN LÜ ("Four-Part Vinaya") of the DHARMAGUPTAKA school. This VINAYA text, which came to be adopted widely throughout East Asia, was translated into Chinese in 405 by the Kashmīri monk BUDDHAYAsAS (c. early fifth century CE) and is still followed today in the East Asian Buddhist traditions. It taught a code of discipline that involved 250 principal monastic precepts for monks, 348 for nuns. The central scripture of the Nanshan lü zong is Daoxuan's influential commentary on the Sifen lü, the Sifen lü shanfan buque xingshi chao, which was composed in 626. Although the Nanshan lü zong remained the dominant tradition of vinaya exegesis in China, other groups such as the DONGTA LÜ ZONG (East Pagoda) and Xiangbu (Xiang Region) vinaya schools also flourished. The interpretations of the Nanshan lü zong were introduced into Japan by the Chinese monk GANJIN (C. Jianzhen; 687-763), who helped established the School of Discipline (J. RISSHu), one of the six schools of the Nara tradition of early Japanese Buddhism (see NARA BUDDHISM, SIX SCHOOLS OF).
Nanto shichidaiji. (南都七大寺). In Japanese, "seven great monasteries of Nara," seven of the major Buddhist monasteries founded in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara. See individual entries for DAIANJI, GANGoJI, HoRYuJI, KoFUKUJI, SAIDAIJI, ToDAIJI, and YAKUSHIJI.
Nanzenji. (南禪寺). In Japanese, "Southern ZEN Monastery," major monastery in Kyoto, Japan, that is currently the headquarters (honzan) of the Nanzenji branch of the RINZAISHu. In 1264, Emperor Kameyama (r. 1259-1274) built a country villa, which he later converted to a Zen monastery named Nanzenji. He invited the monk Mukan Fumon (1212-1291), a disciple of ENNI BEN'EN (1202-1280), to serve as the monastery's founding abbot (J. kaisan; C. KAISHAN). After Fumon's departure, the monk Soen (1261-1313) succeeded Mukan and oversaw additional construction at the monastery. As the first Zen monastery constructed by an emperor, many eminent Zen masters were appointed to its abbacy. In 1325, Emperor Godaigo (r. 1318-1339) invited MUSo SoSEKI (1275-1351) to serve as abbot of Nanzenji. After his triumphant return to Kyoto in 1334, Godaigo elevated Nanzenji to the first rank in the influential GOZAN system. Nanzenji maintained this rank, even after political power was handed over to the Ashikaga shogunate. During the Muromachi period, the abbacy of Nanzenji came to be restricted only to those who had already served as abbot of another gozan monastery. For this reason, Nanzenji became the center of gozan culture and Zen practice. The monastery suffered from a series of conflagrations in 1393, 1447, and 1467. Although the monastery never fully recovered from these fires, some restoration efforts were made by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598).
Nara Buddhism, Six Schools of. A traditional grouping of six major scholastic schools of Japanese Buddhism active during the Nara period (710-794 CE): (1) Sanronshu (see SAN LUN ZONG), an East Asian counterpart of the MADHYAMAKA school; (2) Kegonshu (see HUAYAN ZONG), an East Asian exegetical tradition focused on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA; (3) RISSHu, or VINAYA exegesis; (4) Jojitsushu (see CHENGSHI LUN) the TATTVASIDDHI exegetical tradition; (5) Hossoshu (see FAXIANG ZONG), an East Asian strand of YOGĀCĀRA; and (6) Kushashu, focused on ABHIDHARMA exegesis using the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA. These six schools are presumed to have been founded during the initial phase of Buddhism's introduction into Japan, between c. 552 and the end of the Nara period in 794. These learned schools were eventually supplanted by the practice and meditative schools of TENDAISHu and SHINGONSHu, which were introduced during the succeeding Heian period (794-1185), and the later schools of the ZENSHu, the pure land schools of JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu, and NICHIRENSHu of the Kamakura period (1185-1333).
Nara daibutsu. [alt. Birushana Nyorai] (奈良大佛/毘遮那如來). In Japanese, lit. "The Great Buddha of Nara"; a colossal image of the buddha VAIROCANA located at ToDAIJI in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara. At about forty-eight feet (14.98 meters) high, this image is the largest extant gilt-bronze image in the world, and the Daibutsuden (Great Buddha Hall) where the image is enshrined is the world's largest surviving wooden building. Despite its massive size, however, the current Daibutsuden, which was reconstructed during the middle of the Edo period (1603-1867) to a height of 156 feet (forty-eight meters), is only two-thirds the size of the original structure. The Indian monk BODHISENA (J. Bodaisenchi) (704-760), who traveled to Japan in 736 at the invitation of Emperor Shomu (r. 724-749), performed the "opening the eyes" (KAIYAN; NETRAPRATIstHĀPANA) ceremony for the 752 dedication of the great buddha image. The bronze body of the image was restored in 1185, and the massive head (seventeen feet, or 5.3 meters, in size) was repaired in 1692. See also KAMAKURA DAIBUTSU.
Nembutsu: In Japanese Buddhism, “thinking of Buddha,” the process of repeating the name of Buddha and meditating on him.
nenbutsu. [alt. nembutsu] (念佛). In Japanese, "recollection of the Buddha's name." See NIANFO; NAMU AMIDABUTSU; ICHINENGI; TANENGI.
nianfo. (J. nenbutsu; K. yombul 念佛). In Chinese, "recollection, invocation, or chanting of [the name of] the Buddha." The term nianfo has a long history of usage across the Buddhist tradition and has been used to refer to a variety of practices. The Chinese term nianfo is a translation of the Sanskrit term BUDDHĀNUSMṚTI (recollection of [the qualities of] the Buddha), one of the common practices designed to help develop meditative absorption (DHYĀNA) in the mainstream traditions. Buddhānusmṛti is listed as the first of six fundamental contemplative practices, along with recollection of the DHARMA, SAMGHA, giving (DĀNA), morality (sĪLA), and the divinities (DEVA). Buddhānusmṛti (P. buddhānussati) is also the first in the Pāli list of ten "recollections" (P. anussati; S. ANUSMṚTI), which are included among the forty meditative exercises (see KAMMAttHĀNA) discussed in the VISUDDHIMAGGA. The meditator is instructed to reflect on the good qualities of the Buddha, often through contemplating a series of his epithets, contemplation that is said to lead specifically to "access concentration" (UPACĀRASAMĀDHI). In early Mahāyāna texts, the term seems to refer to the meditative practice of recollecting, invoking, or visualizing an image of a buddha or advanced BODHISATTVA, such as sĀKYAMUNI, MAITREYA, or AMITĀBHA. In East Asia, the term nianfo came to be used primarily in the sense of reciting the name of the Buddha, referring especially to recitation of the Chinese phrase namo Amituo fo (K. namu Amit'abul; J. NAMU AMIDABUTSU; Homage to the buddha Amitābha). This recitation was often performed in a ritual setting and accompanied by the performance of prostrations, the burning of incense, and the intonation of scriptures, all directed toward gaining a vision of Amitābha's PURE LAND of SUKHĀVATĪ, a vision that was considered proof that one would be reborn there in the next lifetime. New forms of chanting Amitābha's name developed in China, such as WUHUI NIANFO (five-tempo intonation of [the name of] the Buddha), which used leisurely and increasingly rapid tempos, and YINSHENG NIANFO (intoning [the name of] the Buddha by drawing out the sound). Nianfo practice was often portrayed as a relatively easy means of guaranteeing rebirth in Amitābha's pure land. Many exegetes referred to the vows of the bodhisattva DHARMĀKARA (the bodhisattva who became Amitābha) as set forth in the SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, as evidence of the efficacy of nianfo practice in the degenerate age of the dharma (MOFA). In China, these various forms of nianfo were advocated by such famous monks as TANLUAN, DAOCHUO, and SHANDAO; these monks later came to be retroactively regarded as patriarchs of a so-called pure land school (JINGTU ZONG). In fact, however, nianfo was widely practiced across schools and social strata in both China and Korea and was not exclusively associated with a putative pure land tradition. In Japan, nenbutsu, or repetition of the phrase "namu Amidabutsu" (homage to Amitābha Buddha) became a central practice of the Japanese PURE LAND schools of Buddhism, such as JoDOSHu, JoDO SHINSHu, and JISHu. The practice spread rapidly among common people largely through the efforts of such itinerant holy men (HIJIRI) as KuYA and IPPEN. Influential pure land teachers, such as HoNEN and his disciple SHINRAN, also promoted the exclusive practice of chanting the phrase NAMU AMIDABUTSU and debated whether multiple recitations of the Buddha's name (TANENGI) were expected of pure land adherents or whether a single recitation (ICHINENGI) would be enough to ensure rebirth. Despite periodic suppressions of this movement, Honen and Shinran's schools, known as the Jodoshu and Jodo Shinshu, became the largest Buddhist communities in Japan.
Nichiren Shoshu. (日蓮正宗). In Japanese, "Orthodox School of Nichiren"; one of the principal Japanese Buddhist schools based on the teachings of NICHIREN (1222-1282). Nichiren Shoshu is descended from Nichiren through Nichiko (1246-1332), the alleged sole heir of Nichiren among his six chief disciples. Nichiko was a loyal student and archivist of Nichiren's writings, who established in 1290 what was then called the Fuji school at TAISEKIJI, a monastery on Mt. Fuji in Shizuoka prefecture. Nichiko's school later divided into eight subbranches, known collectively as the Fuji Monryu (Fuji schools) or Nichiko Monryu (Nichiko schools). The monk Nichikan (1665-1726), a noted commentator and teacher, was instrumental in resurrecting the observance of Nichiren's teachings at Taisekiji. He was also the person who systematized and established many of the innovative features of the school, particularly the school's unique view that Nichiren was the Buddha (see below). The eight associated temples that remained in the Fuji school reunited in 1876 as the Komon sect, later adopting a new name, the Honmon. However, in 1899, Taisekiji split from the other temples and established an independent sect, renaming itself Nichiren Shoshu in 1912. In 1930, MAKIGUCHI TSUNESABURO and Toda Josei established the SoKA GAKKAI (then called Soka Kyoiku Gakkai), a lay organization for the promotion of Nichiren Shoshu thought, but quickly ran afoul of the Japanese government's promotion of the cult of state Shintoism. Makiguchi refused to comply with government promulgation of Shinto worship and was imprisoned for violating the Peace Preservation Law; he died in prison in 1944. Toda was eventually released, and he devoted himself after World War II to promoting Soka Gakkai and Nichiren Shoshu, which at that time were closely connected. The two groups acrimoniously separated in 1991, Nichiren Shoshu accusing Soka Gakkai of forming a personality cult around their leader IKEDA DAISAKU (b. 1928) and of improper modifications of Nichiren practice; Soka Gakkai accusing the Nichiren Shoshu leader Abe Nikken of trying to dominate both organizations. The two groups now operate independently. Nichiren Shoshu has grown to over seven hundreds temples in Japan, as well as a few temples in foreign countries. Nichiren Shoshu distinguishes itself from the other Nichiren schools by its unique view of the person of Nichiren: it regards the founder as the true buddha in this current degenerate age of the dharma (J. mappo; C. MOFA), a buddha whom sĀKYAMUNI promised his followers would appear two thousand years in the future; therefore, they refer to Nichiren as daishonin, or great sage. Other Nichiren schools instead regard the founder as the reincarnation of Jogyo Bosatsu (the BODHISATTVA VIsIstACĀRITRA). Nichiren Shoshu's claim to orthodoxy is based on two documents, not recognized by other Nichiren schools, in which Nichiren claims to transfer his dharma to Nichiko, viz., the Minobu sojosho ("Minobu Transfer Document") and the Ikegami sojosho ("Ikegami Transfer Document"), which are believed to have been written in 1282 by Nichiren, the first at Minobu and the second on the day of his death at Ikegami. Nichiren Shoshu practice is focused on the dai-gohonzon mandala, the ultimate object of devotion in the school, which Nichiren created. The DAI-GOHONZON (great object of devotion), a MAndALA (here, a cosmological chart) inscribed by Nichiren in 1279, includes the DAIMOKU (lit., "title"), viz., the phrase "NAMU MYoHoRENGEKYo" (Homage to the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA), which is considered to be the embodiment of Nichiren's enlightenment and the ultimate reason for his advent in this world. The gohonzon is placed in a shrine or on a simple altar in the homes of devotees of the sect. This veneration of the gohonzon to the exclusion of all other deities and images of the Buddha distinguishes Nichiren Shoshu from other Nichiren schools. The school interprets the three jewels (RATNATRAYA) of the Buddha, DHARMA, and SAMGHA to refer, respectively, to Nichiren (the buddha); to namu Myohorengekyo and the gohonzon (the dharma); and to his successor Nichiko (the saMgha). By contrast, other Nichiren schools generally consider sākyamuni to be the Buddha and Nichiren the saMgha, and do not include the gohonzon in the dharma, since they question its authenticity. All schools of Nichiren thought accept Nichiren's acknowledgment of the buddhahood that is latent in all creatures and the ability of all human beings of any class to achieve buddhahood in this lifetime.
Nichirenshu. (日蓮宗). In Japanese, "schools [associated with] Nichiren." There was and is no single "Nichiren School," but the term is used to designate all of the different schools that trace their origins back to the life and teachings of NICHIREN (1222-1282). At the time of his death, Nichiren left no formal institution in place or instructions for the formation of any such institution. Thus, a number of groups emerged, led by various of his disciples. These groups, which can collectively be referred to as Nichirenshu, disagreed on a number of important points of doctrine and theories of propagation. However, they all shared the fundamental convictions that the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") was the highest of the Buddha's teachings; that during the degenerate age (J. mappo; C. MOFA) liberation could be achieved by chanting the title (DAIMOKU) of that scripture; that Nichiren was the true teacher of this practice and Japan its appropriate site; and that all other forms of Buddhist practice were ineffective in this degenerate age and thus should be repudiated. However, Nichiren's disciples and his followers disagreed on such questions as whether they should have any connections with other Buddhist groups; how aggressively they should proselytize Nichiren's teachings; and whether the two sections of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra-the "SHAKUMON" (Chapters 1-14), or trace teaching, and the "HONMON" (Chapters 15-28), or essential teaching-are of equal importance or whether the "Honmon" is superior. During the Meiji period, specific schools of Nichiren's teachings were recognized, with six different schools institutionalized in 1874. One of these, which called itself the Nichirenshu, declared the two parts of the sutra to be of equal importance; the other five declared the superiority of the "Honmon." One of these five eventually became the NICHIREN SHoSHu.
Nichiren. (日蓮) (1222-1282). Japanese founder of the NICHIRENSHu, one of the so-called new schools of Kamakura Buddhism. Nichiren is said to have been born into a commoner family in present-day Chiba prefecture. At the age of twelve he entered the priesthood and was ordained at the age of sixteen. In 1239, he left his rural temple and went first to Kamakura and then to the capital of Kyoto to study at the great monasteries there. Although he draws heavily on TENDAI and TAIMITSU teachings in his own writings, Nichiren seems to have been acquainted with other traditions of Buddhism as well. During this period, Nichiren began to question what he perceived as inconsistencies in the doctrines of the various schools he was studying. In particular, Nichiren disagreed with the JoDOSHu pure land tradition of HoNEN (1133-1212), and the practice of reciting the buddha's name (NENBUTSU; C. NIANFO). Nichiren eventually concluded that the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") contained the Buddha's ultimate teaching, relegating all other teachings to a provisional status. Armed with this new insight, Nichiren proclaimed in 1253 that people should place their faith in the Saddharmapundarīkasutra by reciting its "title" (J. DAIMOKU), viz., NAMU MYoHoRENGEKYo (Homage to the Saddharmapundarīkasutra), an act that he claimed was sufficient for gaining liberation in the time of the decline of the dharma, or mappo (C. MOFA). It was at this point that he adopted the name "Nichiren" ("Lotus of the Sun,": i.e., Japan) Although Nichiren was a controversial figure, he attracted a large number of followers in Kamakura. In 1260, he wrote the Rissho Ankokuron ("Treatise on Establishing the Right [Teaching] for Securing the Peace of Our Country"), a tract that encouraged the Kamakura military government (bakufu) to rely on the teachings of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra in order to avert political disaster and social upheaval and, in turn, to patronize Nichiren's school over other Buddhist sects. As a result of his lobbying, and his challenge to the pure land tradition, Nichiren was arrested and exiled to Shizuoka prefecture in 1261 but was pardoned two years later. In 1271, a failed assassination plot against Nichiren hardened his resolve. He was arrested again in 1272 and banished to the island of Sado, where he wrote many of his most important treatises, including Kaimokusho ("Opening the Eyes") and Kanjin no honzonsho ("The Object of Devotion for Observing the Mind"). In 1274, he was once again pardoned and subsequently returned to Kamakura. Failing for a third time to convince the Kamakura bakufu to turn to the Saddharmapundarīkasutra for protection and salvation, he retired to Mt. Minobu in Yamanashi prefecture. There, he devoted his time to educating his disciples and writing essays, including Senjisho "(On the Selection of the Time") and Ho'onsho ("Repaying Indebtedness"). Nichiren died at the age of sixty in the year 1282, leaving behind hundreds of works and divisive infighting for control of his legacy.
Ninnaji. (仁和寺). In Japanese, "Monastery of Humane Peace," located in the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto and affiliated with the SHINGONSHu. The construction of the monastery began in 886 under the patronage of Emperor Koko (r. 884-887) and continued through the reign of Emperor Uda (r. 887-897). The main hall was completed in 888 by Emperor Uda and today contains an important Amida (S. AMITĀBHA) triad that has been designated a national treasure. In 904, Emperor Uda established a residence for himself at Ninnaji and assumed control of the monastery. Monks of royal blood began serving thereafter as abbots of Ninnaji.
Nintendo "company, games" A Japanese {video game} hardware manufacturer and software publisher. Nintendo started by making playing cards, but was later dominant in video games throughout the 1980s and early 1990s worldwide. They make lots of games consoles including the Gameboy, Gameboy Advance SP, DS, DS Lite and the Wii. {Nintendo home (http://nintendo.com/)}. (2008-03-08)
nio. (仁王/二王). In Japanese, "humane kings," a pair of muscular wrathful guardian deities, often depicted as massive wooden statues flanking a separate entrance gate, called the Niomon in Japanese Buddhist monasteries. (In Korea, this gate is known as the Kŭmgangmun, or Vajra Gate.) They are also sometimes known as the "two kings" (nio), the Kongojin, or the Kongorikishi. They are considered to be manifestations of VAJRAPĀnI. The first figure is known as either Naraen Kongo (see NĀRĀYAnA) or Agyo; he is usually depicted with his mouth open and holding a VAJRA in his right hand. The second figure is called either Misshaku Kongo or Ungyo; he usually has his mouth closed and is either wielding a sword or has nothing in his hands.
Nishida Kitaro. (西田幾太郎) (1870-1945). Influential Japanese philosopher of the modern era and founder of what came to be known as the KYOTO SCHOOL, a contemporary school of Japanese philosophy that sought to synthesize ZEN Buddhist thought with modern Western, and especially Germanic, philosophy. Nishida was instrumental in establishing in Japan the discipline of philosophy as practiced in Europe and North America, as well as in exploring possible intersections between European philosophy and such Buddhist ontological notions as the idea of nonduality (ADVAYA). Nishida was born in 1870, just north of Ishikawa prefecture's capital city of Kanazawa. In 1894, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University with a degree in philosophy and eventually took an appointment at Kyoto University, where he taught from 1910 until his retirement in 1927. At Kyoto University, Nishida attracted a group of students who would later become known collectively as the "Kyoto School." These philosophers addressed an array of philosophical concerns, including metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology, using Western critical methods but in conjunction with Eastern religious concepts. Nishida's influential 1911 publication Zen no kenkyu ("A Study of Goodness") synthesized Zen Buddhist and German phenomenology to explore the unity between the ordinary and the transcendent. He argued that, through "pure experience" (J. junsui keiken), an individual human being is able to come in contact with a limitless, absolute reality that can be described either as God or emptiness (suNYATĀ). In Nishida's treatment, philosophy is subsumed under the broader soteriological quest for individual awakening, and its significance derives from its effectiveness in bringing about this goal of awakening. Other important works by Nishida include Jikaku ni okeru chokkan to hansei ("Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness," 1917), Geijutsu to dotoku ("Art and Morality," 1923), Tetsugaku no konpon mondai ("Fundamental Problems of Philosophy," 1933), and Bashoteki ronri to shukyoteki sekaikan ("The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview," 1945). Nishida's Zen no kenkyu also helped lay the foundation for what later became regarded as Nihonjinron, a nationalist discourse that advocated the uniqueness and superiority of the Japanese race. Prominent in Nishida's philosophy is the idea that the Japanese-as exemplified in their exceptional cultivation of Zen, which here can stand for both Zen Buddhism and the homophonous word for "goodness"-are uniquely in tune with this concept of "pure experience." This familiarity, in part influenced by his longtime friend DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI, elevates the Japanese race mentally and spiritually above all other races in the world. This view grew in popularity during the era of Japanese colonial expansion and remained strong in some quarters even after the end of World War II. Since at least the 1970s, Nishida's work has been translated and widely read among English-speaking audiences. Beginning in the 1990s, however, his writings have come under critical scrutiny in light of their ties with Nihonjinron and Japanese nationalism.
Nishi Honganjiha. [alt. Honganjiha] (西本願寺派). In Japanese, "Western Honganji school"; the largest subsect of JoDO SHINSHu. After the death of SHINRAN in 1263, the HONGANJI institution emerged as the dominant subsect of Jodo Shinshu, administered by the descendants of Shinran's patriarchal line. In the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) grew suspicious of Honganji, which during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had grown not only to be the largest sect of Japanese Buddhism but also one of the largest landholding institutions in Japan. By involving himself in a succession dispute, the shogun was successfully able to cause a split within the Honganji into East (higashi; see HIGASHI HONGANJIHA; oTANIHA) and West (nishi) factions, with Kyonyo (1558-1614) heading the Higashi faction, and Junnyo (1577-1631) leading the Nishi faction. In 1639, Nishi Honganji established its own seminary college in Kyoto that was renamed Ryukoku University in 1922. Important modern Nishi Honganji Buddhists include oTANI KoZUI (1868-1948), the famed explorer and collector.
Nishitani Keiji. (西谷啓治) (1900-1990). Japanese philosopher and member of what came to be known as the KYOTO SCHOOL, a contemporary school of Japanese philosophy that sought to synthesize ZEN Buddhist thought with modern Western, and especially Germanic, philosophy. Nishitani was schooled in Ishikawa prefecture and Tokyo and graduated from Kyoto University in 1924 with a degree in philosophy. A student of NISHIDA KITARo (1870-1945), the founder of the Kyoto School, Nishitani became a professor in the Department of Religion at Kyoto University in 1935 and from 1937 to 1939 studied with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, Germany. He later chaired the Department of Modern Philosophy at Kyoto Prefectural University from 1955 to 1963. In such works as his 1949 Nihirizumu (translated in 1990 as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism) and Shukyo to wa nani ka ("What Is Religion?," 1961, translated in 1982 as Religion and Nothingness), Nishitani sought to synthesize German existentialism, Christian mysticism, and what he considered to be Zen experience. Where German philosophy, which is governed by logic and cognitive thinking, addressed ontological questions regarding the self, he argued that such means as Christian mysticism and Zen meditation could complement German philosophy in constructing a path to a complete realization of the self. Nishitani took issue with Nietzsche's nihilism by borrowing from the Buddhist concept of emptiness (suNYATĀ) to argue that recognition of the self as empty brings one to an understanding of things as they are (viz., the Buddhist concept of suchness, or TATHATĀ), and hence a true understanding and affirmation of oneself. Nishitani's philosophical justification of Japan's wartime activities, notably his contributions to the well-known journal Chuokoron ("Central Review") in the early 1940s, has become a controversial aspect of his work.
Nitto guho junrei gyoki. (入唐求法巡行). In Japanese, "Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Dharma"; a renowned travel diary, in four rolls, by the Japanese TENDAISHu monk ENNIN (794-864) of his nine years sojourning in Tang China. In 838, Ennin sailed to China with his companions Engyo (799-852) and Jokyo (d. 866), arriving in Yangzhou (present-day Jiangsu province) at the mouth of the Yangzi River. The next year, he found himself at the monastery of Kaiyuansi, where he received the teachings and rituals of the various KONGoKAI (vajradhātu) deities from the monk Quanya (d.u.). When adverse winds kept him from returning to Japan, he remained behind at the monastery of Fahuayuan on Mt. Chi in Dengzhou (present-day Shandong province). From there, Ennin made a pilgrimage to WUTAISHAN, where he studied TIANTAI ZONG doctrine and practice. In 840, Ennin arrived in the capital Chang'an, where he studied under the master (ĀCĀRYA) Yuanzheng (d.u.) of the monastery of Daxingshansi. The next year, Ennin also studied the teachings of the TAIZoKAI (garbhadhātu) and the SUSIDDHIKARASuTRA under the ācārya Yizhen (d.u.) of the monastery of Qinglongsi. In 842, Ennin furthered his studies of the taizokai under the ācārya Faquan (d.u.) at the monastery Xuanfasi, SIDDHAM under Yuanjian (d.u.) of Da'anguosi, and siddham pronunciation under the Indian ācārya Baoyue (d.u.). In 845, Ennin fled the Huichang persecution of Buddhism (HUICHANG FANAN) that was then raging in Chang'an, and arrived back in Japan in 847. Ennin's record includes not only detailed information on the routes he took between Japan and China, but also the procedures and expenses required in order to obtain travel permits. In addition, his diary contains detailed descriptions of the daily rituals followed at a Korean monastery in Shandong province where he (and other foreign travelers) stayed for some time. The Nitto guho junrei gyoki is therefore an important source for studying the daily lives of travelers, merchants, officials, and monks in medieval China.
Niwano Nikkyo. (庭野日敬) (1906-1999). Cofounder of RISSHo KoSEIKAI, a Japanese lay Buddhist organization that was an offshoot of REIYuKAI and was strongly influenced by NICHIRENSHu doctrine. Niwano was born into a poor family in a small town in Nigata prefecture in northern Japan. After going to work in Tokyo in 1923, Niwano led a typical working-class life, running such small businesses as rice, charcoal, and Japanese-pickle shops, while also showing an intense interest in astrology, numerology, and divination. Niwano became an ardent adherent of Reiyukai in 1934, when his nine-month-old daughter recovered from a serious illness after he followed the organization's practice of ancestor worship. Niwano soon became a leading evangelist for Reiyukai, recruiting many new followers, one of whom was NAGANUMA MYoKo (1899-1957). In 1938, Niwano and Naganuma left Reiyukai and cofounded Rissho Koseikai, together with about thirty other followers. According to Niwano, the group seceded because of Reiyukai's overemphasis on the miraculous benefit, rather than the teachings, of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), although others say that the split occurred because the leader of Reiyukai publicly criticized Niwano's interest in divination. After establishing the organization, Naganuma served as a spirit medium, while Niwano focused on teaching and administration. After Naganuma's death in 1957, Niwano became the president of the million-member organization and declared the end of the organization's first era of "skillful means" (J. hoben; S. UPĀYAKAUsALYA), which had been characterized by spirit mediumship and divine instructions, and the dawn of a new era of "manifesting the truth" (shinjitsu kengen). Niwano affirmed that henceforth the central objects of the organization's faith would be the Saddharmapundarīkasutra and sĀKYAMUNI Buddha, which were eternal and universal. Based on his understanding of the sutra, Niwano emphasized the spiritual development of individuals along the BODHISATTVA path, whose salvific efforts should be dedicated not just to one's own family and ancestors, but also to Japanese society and the world at large. Niwano also dedicated himself to promoting world peace through interreligious cooperation, one example of which was the establishment of the Niwano Peace Foundation in 1978. Niwano resigned from the presidency of Rissho Koseikai in 1991 and was succeeded by his eldest son Niwano Nichiko (b. 1938).
norimon ::: n. --> A Japanese covered litter, carried by men.
Norito: Japanese prayers recited by Shinto priests in religious ceremonies, and high state officials in state ceremonies. These stately, dignified prayers, standardized in form, give thanks to Shinto deities, invoke their blessings, and are believed to have magical effect.
No single language crosses all of the linguistic and cultural boundaries of the Buddhist tradition. However, in order to present Buddhist terms that are used across this diverse expanse, it is convenient to employ a single linguistic vocabulary. For this reason European and North American scholars have, over the last century, come to use Sanskrit as the lingua franca of the academic discipline of Buddhist Studies. Following this scholarly convention we have used Sanskrit, and often Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit forms, in our main entry headings for the majority of Indic-origin terms that appear across the Buddhist traditions. PAli, Tibetan, or Chinese terms are occasionally used where that form is more commonly known in Western writings on Buddhism. We have attempted to avoid unattested Sanskrit equivalents for terms in PAli and other Middle Indic languages, generally marking any hypothetical forms with an asterisk. These main entry headings are accompanied by cognate forms in PAli, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (abbreviated as P., T., C., J., and K., respectively), followed by the Sinographs (viz., Chinese characters) commonly used in the East Asian traditions. For those Indian terms that are known only or principally in the PAli tradition, the main entry heading is listed in PAli (e.g., bhavanga). Terms used across the East Asian traditions are typically listed by their Chinese pronunciation with Japanese and Korean cross-references, with occasional Japanese or Korean headings for terms that are especially important in those traditions. Tibetan terms are in Tibetan, with Sanskrit or Chinese cognates where relevant. In order that the reader may trace a standard term through any of the languages we cover in the dictionary, we also provide cross-references to each of the other languages at the end of the volume in a section called Cross-References by Language. In both the main entries and the Cross-References by Language, words have been alphabetized without consideration of diacritical marks and word breaks.
Nu, U. (1907-1995). Burmese (Myanmar) political leader and patron of Buddhism. (U is a Burmese honorific.) As a young man, U Nu became active in anti-British agitation and in 1936 was expelled by British authorities from the University of Rangoon law school for his political activities. Thereafter, he became a leader of the Burmese nationalist movement, adopting the nationalist title "Thakin" (master), along with his comrades Aung San, Ne Win, and others. On the eve of the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942, he was imprisoned by the British as a potential agent. He was released by the Japanese occupation forces and served as the foreign minister of their puppet regime. With growing disenchantment at Japanese mistreatment of Burmese citizens, U Nu helped to organize a clandestine guerilla resistance force that assisted the British when they retook Burma. At the conclusion of World War II, he participated in negotiations with the British for Burmese independence. He became Burma's first prime minister and served three terms in office (1948-1956, 1957-1958, 1960-1962). A devout Buddhist, he organized under government auspices national monastic curricula, promoted the practice of insight meditation (VIPASSANĀ), and, in 1956, sponsored the convention of the sixth Buddhist council (according to Burmese reckoning; see COUNCIL, SIXTH) in celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's parinibbāna (S. PARINIRVĀnA). The council prepared a new Burmese edition of the Pāli canon (P. tipitaka; S. TRIPItAKA), together with its commentaries and sub-commentaries, which is currently used in Burmese monastic education. U Nu also attempted, unsuccessfully, to unite the several noncommensal fraternities (Burmese GAING) of the Burmese SAMGHA into a single body. While achieving much in the religious sphere, U Nu proved unable to cope with the political crises confronting his government, and Burma descended into civil war. He resigned as prime minister in 1956, returned to office in 1957, abdicated civilian government to General Ne Win in 1958, returned to office in 1960, and finally was deposed and arrested by Ne Win in a coup d'état in 1962. U Nu was released in 1968, and a year later he organized a resistance army from exile in Thailand. A rapprochement between U Nu and Ne Win was reached in 1980, and he was allowed to return to Burma, where he devoted himself to religious affairs, in particular as director of a Buddhist translation bureau located at Kaba Aye in Rangoon (Yangon). He again entered politics during the democracy uprising of 1988, setting up a symbolic provisional government when the then-ruling Burmese Socialist government collapsed. He was placed under house arrest in 1989 by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), a group composed of generals who succeeded Ne Win. He was released in 1992. A prolific writer on politics and Buddhism, his works include Buddhism: Theory and Practice, Burma under the Japanese, Unite and March, Towards Peace and Democracy, and his autobiography, Saturday's Son.
obakushu. (黄檗宗). In Japanese, "obaku school"; one of the three main ZEN traditions in Japan, along with the RINZAISHu and SoToSHu. The émigré Chinese CHAN master YINYUAN LONGQI (1594-1673) is credited with its foundation. In 1654, Yinyuan fled the wars that accompanied the fall of the Ming dynasty and the establishment of the Manchu Qing dynasty, and arrived in Nagasaki, Japan, where he first served as abbot of the monastery of Kofukuji. With the support of the shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna (1639-1680) and Emperor Gomizunoo (r. 1611-1629), in 1661, Yinyuan traveled to a mountain he named obaku (after Mt. Huangbo in China), where he began construction of a new monastery that he named MANPUKUJI (C. Wanfusi), after his old monastery in Fujian, China. The monastery and the broader obaku tradition retained many of the exotic Chinese customs that Yinyuan and his Chinese disciples MU'AN XINGTAO, Jifei Ruyi (1616-1617), and Huilin Xingji (1609-1681) had brought with them from the mainland, including the latest monastic architecture and institutional systems, the use of vernacular Chinese as the official ritual language in the monastery, and training in Chinese artistic and literary styles. In addition, for thirteen generations after Yinyuan, Manpukuji's abbots continued to be Chinese, and only later began to alternate between Chinese and Japanese successors. These Chinese monastic customs that Yinyuan introduced were met with great ambivalence by such Japanese Rinzai leaders as Gudo Toshoku (1577-1661) and later HAKUIN EKAKU. Although Yinyuan himself was affiliated with the YANGQI PAI in the Chinese LINJI ZONG, Chinese Chan traditions during this period had also assimilated the widespread practice of reciting of the Buddha's name (C. NIANFO; J. nenbutsu) by transforming it into a form of "questioning meditation" (C. KANHUA CHAN; J. kannazen): e.g., "Who is it who is reciting the Buddha's name?" Raising this question while engaging in nenbutsu was a technique that initially helped to concentrate the mind, but would also subsequently help raise the sense of doubt (C. YIQING; J. gijo) that was central to Linji school accounts of authentic Chan meditation. However, since buddha-recitation was at this time closely associated in Japan with pure land traditions, such as JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu, this approach to Chan practice was extremely controversial among contemporary Japanese Zen adepts. The Chinese style of Zen that Yinyuan and his followers promulgated in Japan prompted their contemporaries in the Rinzai and Soto Zen traditions to reevaluate their own practices and to initiate a series of important reform movements within their respective traditions (cf. IN'IN EKISHI). During the Meiji period, obaku, Rinzai, and Soto were formally recognized as separate Zen traditions (ZENSHu) by the imperial government. Currently, the monastery Manpukuji in Uji serves as the headquarters (honzan) of the obaku school.
Oharai; ohoharahi: Literally, great expulsion. The Japanese ritual of purification.
ojo yoshu. (C. Wangsheng yao ji 往生要集). In Japanese, "Collection of Essentials on Going to Rebirth" [in the pure land]; one of the most influential Japanese treatises on the practice of nenbutsu (C. NIANFO) and the soteriological goal of rebirth in the PURE LAND, composed by the Japanese TENDAISHu monk GENSHIN at the Shuryogon'in at YOKAWA on HIEIZAN in 985. The ojo yoshu offers a systematic overview of pure land thought and practice, using extensive passages culled from various scriptures and treatises, especially the writings of the Chinese pure land monks DAOCHUO and SHANDAO. Genshin's collection is divided into ten sections: departing from the defiled realm, seeking (rebirth) in the pure land; evidence for (the existence of) SUKHĀVATĪ; the proper practice of nenbutsu methods for assisting mindfulness; special nenbutsu (betsuji nenbutsu); the benefits of nenbutsu; evidence for the results forthcoming from nenbutsu; the fruits of rebirth in the pure land; and a series of miscellaneous questions and answers. Genshin contends that the practice of nenbutsu is relatively easy for everyone and is appropriate for people during the degenerate age of the final dharma (J. mappo; see MOFA), especially as a deathbed practice. Genshin also recommended the chanting of the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA to those of lower spiritual capacity (a total of nine spiritual capacities are posited by Genshin; cf. JIUPIN), and he regarded this practice as inferior to the contemplative practices described in the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING. Genshin's work was also famous for its description of SAMSĀRA, especially its vivid depiction of the hells (cf. NĀRAKA); his description inspired lurid paintings of the hells on Japanese screens. The ojo yoshu became popular among the Heian aristocracy; the text's view of the degenerate age (J. mappo; cf. C. MOFA) may have provided an explanation for the social upheaval at the end of the Heian period. The text also exerted substantial influence over the subsequent development of the pure land movements in the Tendai tradition on Mt. Hiei. The ojo yoshu also played an important role in laying the groundwork for an independent pure land tradition in Japan a century later. Several important commentaries on the ojo yoshu were prepared by the Japanese JoDOSHu monk HoNEN. In addition, the ojo yoshu was one of the few texts written in Japan that made its way to China, where it influenced the development of pure land Buddhism on the mainland.
Oldenburg, Sergey. (1863-1934). Russian scholar of Buddhism, known especially as the founder of the Bibliotheca Buddhica, based in St. Petersburg. The series, published in thirty volumes between 1897 and 1936, was composed primarily of critical editions (and in some cases translations) by the leading European and Japanese scholars of some of the most important texts of Sanskrit Buddhism, including the sIKsĀSAMUCCAYA, MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ, AVADĀNAsATAKA, and ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA. The series also included indexes as well as independent works, such as FYODOR IPPOLITOVICH STCHERBATSKY's Buddhist Logic. In the 1890s, Oldenburg published Sanskrit fragments discovered in Kashgar, and he led Russian expeditions to Central Asia in 1909-1910 and 1914-1915 in search of Buddhist manuscripts and artifacts. His research interests were wide-ranging; he published articles on Buddhist art, on JĀTAKA literature, and on the Mahābhārata in Buddhist literature.
Ongi kuden. (御義口傳). In Japanese, "Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings"; transcription of the lectures on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") by NICHIREN, compiled by his disciple Nichiko (1246-1333). See NAMU MYoHoRENGEKYo.
Onokoro, Onogoro (Japanese) In Japanese cosmogony, the island-world fashioned by the divine hero Isanagi when he thrust his jeweled spear into the primeval chaotic mass of cloud and water.
osho. (和尚). One of the common Japanese pronunciations of the Chinese term HESHANG, which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit term UPĀDHYĀYA, meaning "preceptor." The term is now used generally in the Japanese Buddhist tradition to refer to an abbot, teacher, or senior monk. The pronunciation of the term varies according to tradition. In the ZENSHu, the term is pronounced "osho," in the TENDAISHu "kasho," in RISSHu, SHINGONSHu, and JoDO SHINSHu "wajo." In the Zen context, osho refers to those monks who have been in training for ten years or more. In the SoToSHu of the Zen school, monks who have received formal dharma transmission are referred to as osho.
otaniha. (大谷派). Also known as otanishu and Higashi Honganjiha, the second largest subsect of JoDO SHINSHu in the Japanese PURE LAND tradition. After SHINRAN's founding of Jodo Shinshu, the HONGANJI emerged as the dominant subsect and was administered by the descendants of Shinran's patriarchal line. During the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) grew suspicious of Honganji, which during the fifteen and sixteenth centuries had not only grown to be the largest sect of Japanese Buddhism but also one of the largest landholding institutions in Japan. By involving himself in a succession dispute, the shogun was successfully able to blunt its power by causing a schism within the Honganji into east (higashi) and west (nishi) factions, with Kyonyo (1558-1614) heading the Higashi faction and Junnyo (1577-1631) leading the Nishi faction. Because the eastern faction maintained control of Shinran's mausoleum in the otani area of Kyoto, HIGASHI HONGANJI has also come to be called the otaniha. otani University developed from the Higashi Honganji seminary, which was founded in 1665. Several of the most important Buddhist thinkers of the Meiji period were affiliated with the otaniha, including NANJo BUN'Yu (1849-1927), Inoue Enryo (1858-1919), and KIYOZAWA MANSHI (1863-1903). DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI (1870-1966) founded the journal The Eastern Buddhist at otani University, and the author Kanamatsu Kenryo (1915-1986) was also affiliated with the otaniha. See also NISHI HONGANJIHA.
otani Kozui. (大谷光瑞) (1876-1948). Modern Japanese explorer to Buddhist archeological sites in Central Asia, and especially DUNHUANG; the twenty-second abbot of the NISHI HONGANJIHA, one of the two main sub-branches of the JoDO SHINSHu of the Japanese pure land tradition. otani was sent to London at the age of fourteen by his father, the twenty-first abbot of Nishi Honganji in Kyoto, to study Western theology. Inspired by the contemporary expeditions to Central Asia then being conducted by European explorers such as SIR MARC AUREL STEIN (1862-1943) and Sven Hedin (1865-1952), otani decided to take an overland route on his return to Japan so that he could survey Buddhist sites along the SILK ROAD. otani embarked on his first expedition to the region in 1902, accompanied by several other Japanese priests from Nishi Honganji. While en route, otani received the news of his father's death and returned to Japan to succeed to the abbacy; the expedition continued and returned to Japan in 1904. Even though his duties subsequently kept him in Japan, otani dispatched expeditions to Chinese Turkestan in 1908-1909 and between 1910 and 1914. The artifacts recovered during these three expeditions include manuscripts, murals, sculpture, textiles, etc., and are known collectively as the "otani collection." These materials are now dispersed in Japan, Korea, and China, but they are still regarded as important sources for the study of Central Asian Buddhist archeology.
Ouyi Zhixu. (J. Goyaku/Guyaku Chigyoku; K. Uik Chiuk 益智旭) (1599-1655). One of the four eminent monks (si da gaoseng) of the late-Ming dynasty, along with YUNQI ZHUHONG (1535-1615), HANSHAN DEQING (1546-1623), and DAGUAN ZHENKE (1543-1604); renowned for his mastery of a wide swath of Confucian and Buddhist teachings, particularly those associated with the TIANTAI, PURE LAND, and CHAN traditions. In his youth, he studied Confucianism and despised Buddhism, even writing anti-Buddhist tracts. He had a change of heart at the age of seventeen, after reading some of Zhuhong's writings, and burned his previous screeds. According to his autobiography, Zhixu had his first "great awakening" at the age of nineteen while reading the line in the Lunyu ("Confucian Analects") that "the whole world will submit to benevolence" if one restrains oneself and returns to ritual. After his father's death that same year, he fully committed himself to Buddhism, reading sutras and performing recollection of the Buddha's name (NIANFO) until he finally was ordained under the guidance of Xueling (d.u.), a disciple of Hanshan Deqing, at the age of twenty-four. At that time, he began to read extensively in YOGĀCĀRA materials and had another great awakening through Chan meditation, in which he experienced body, mind, and the outer world suddenly disappearing. He next turned his attention to the bodhisattva precepts and the study of vinaya. Following his mother's death when he was twenty-seven, Zhixu rededicated himself to Chan meditation, but after a serious illness he turned to pure land teachings. In his early thirties, he devoted himself to the study of Tiantai materials, through which he attempted to integrate his previous research in Buddhism and began to write commentaries and treaties on Buddhist scriptures and on such Confucian classics as the Zhouyi ("Book of Changes"). In the late-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries such as Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) had reintroduced Christianity to China and sought "to complement Confucianism and to replace Buddhism." This emerging religious challenge led Zhixu to publish his Bixie ji ("Collected Essays Refuting Heterodoxy") as a critique of the teachings of Christianity, raising specifically the issue of theodicy (i.e., why a benevolent and omnipotent god would allow evil to appear in the world); Zhixu advocates instead that good and evil come from human beings and are developed and overcome respectively through personal cultivation. After another illness at the age of fifty-six, his later years were focused mostly on pure land teachings and practice. In distinction to Japanese pure land teachers, such as HoNEN (1133-1212) and SHINRAN (1173-1262), who emphasized exclusively Amitābha's "other-power" (C. tali; J. TARIKI), Zhixu, like most other Chinese pure land teachers, advocated the symbiosis between the other-power of Amitābha and the "self-power" (C. jiri; J. JIRIKI) of the practitioner. This perspective is evident in his equal emphasis on the three trainings in meditation (Chan), doctrine (jiao), and precepts (lü) (cf. TRIsIKsĀ). Ouyi's oeuvre numbers some sixty-two works in 230 rolls, including treatises and commentaries on works ranging from Tiantai, to Chan, to Yogācāra, to pure land. His pure land writings have been especially influential, and his Amituojing yaojie ("Essential Explanations" on the AMITĀBHASuTRA) and Jingtu shiyao ("Ten Essentials on the Pure Land") are regarded as integral to the modern Chinese Pure Land tradition.
Pan chen Lama. A Tibetan title given to members of an important line of incarnate lamas (SPRUL SKU), commonly identified as second in stature in Tibet after the DALAI LAMAs. Their seat is BKRA SHIS LHUN PO monastery in Gtsang in western Tibet. Pan chen is a common abbreviation for the mixed Sanskrit and Tibetan appellation "pandita chen po" (literally "great scholar"), and is an honorific title granted to scholars of great achievement. It was also used as an epithet for the abbot of Bkra shis lhun po monastery, beginning with its founder and first abbot DGE 'DUN GRUB. The fifth Dalai Lama gave the abbacy of Bkra shis lhun po to his tutor, BLO BZANG CHOS KYI RGYAL MTSHAN. As abbot of the monastery, he was called Pan chen, but he came to receive the distinctive title "Pan chen Lama" when the fifth Dalai Lama announced that, upon his teacher's death, his teacher would reappear as an identifiable child-successor. Blo bzang chos kyi rgyal mtshan thus had conferred on him the title "Pan chen Lama." The Pan chen Lama is considered the human incarnation of the buddha AMITĀBHA, while the Dalai Lama is considered the human incarnation of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA. Blo bzang chos kyi rgyal mtshan is traditionally viewed as the fourth member of the lineage, with his previous incarnations recognized posthumously, beginning with TSONG KHA PA's disciple MKHAS GRUB DGE LEGS DPAL BZANG PO. For this reason, there is some confusion in the numbering of the lamas of the lineage; Blo bzang chos kyi rgyal mtshan is sometimes referred to as the fourth Pan chen Lama, but more commonly in Tibetan sources as the first. Blo bzang dpal ldan ye shes is sometimes referred to as the sixth Pan chen Lama, but more commonly in Tibetan sources as the third. (In the discussion below, the higher numerical designation will be employed, since it is used in the contemporary controversy over the identity of the Pan chen Lama.) The fifth Dalai Lama apparently hoped that the Dalai Lama and Pan chen Lama could alternate as teacher and student in lifetime after lifetime. This plan required, however, that each live a long life, which was not to be the case. Subsequent incarnations were recognized and installed at Bkra shis lhun po and eventually grew to wield considerable religious and political power, at times rivaling that of the Dalai Lama himself. This was particularly true in the nineteenth century, when few Dalai Lamas reached their majority. The sixth Pan chen Lama, Blo bzang dpal ldan ye shes (Losang Palden Yeshe, 1738-1780), was a skilled politician who secured Tibet's first relationship with a European power when he befriended George Bogle, British emissary to the East India Company under Warren Hastings. The ninth Pan chen Lama (1883-1937) did not enjoy close relations with the thirteenth Dalai Lama; the Dalai Lama felt that the Pan chen Lama was too close to both the British and the Chinese. They also disagreed over what taxes the Pan chen Lama owed the LHA SA government. The Pan chen Lama went to China in 1925, and his supporters became aligned with the nationalist Guomindang party. While in China, he gave teachings and performed rituals, including some intended to repulse the Japanese invaders then on the Chinese mainland. After the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, he served in an advisory capacity in the search for the fourteenth Dalai Lama and died shortly thereafter, while en route back to Tibet. His successor, the tenth Pan chen Lama 'Phrin las lhun grub chos kyi rgyal mtshan (Trinle Lhündrup Chokyi Gyaltsen, 1938-1989) was selected by the Chinese, with the Lha sa government providing only tacit support. He was drawn into the official Chinese administration as a representative of the Communist party and remained in China when the Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959. In 1964, he was arrested and imprisoned for his outspoken opposition to the Communist party's harsh policies in Tibet, and was subjected to public humiliation and physical abuse. After fourteen years in prison, he was released in 1978, and played a key role in fostering the cultural reconstruction that helped to reestablish religious life in Tibet. Despite his role in the Communist administration, many Tibetans continue to view his life as a heroic struggle for the cause of liberalization in Tibet. His death led to the recognition of two child incarnations: one, Dge 'dun chos kyi nyi ma (Gendün Chokyi Nyima, b. 1989), chosen by the fourteenth Dalai Lama in exile and favored by the majority of Tibetan people, and another, Rgyal mtshan nor bu (b. 1990), installed by the Chinese government. The disappearance of the Dalai Lama's candidate in China has led to a significant increase in tension between the two factions. The lineage of Pan chen Lamas includes:
Pascal P4 ::: compiler and interpreterVersion ? 1compiler, assembler/interpreter, documentationUrs Ammann, Kesav Nori, Christian Jacobi .A compiler for Pascal written in Pascal, producing an intermediate code, with an assembler and interpreter for the code.reference: Pascal Implementation, by Steven Pemberton and Martin Daniels, published by Ellis Horwood, Chichester, UK (an imprint of Prentice Hall), ISBN: 0-13-653-0311. Also available in Japanese.E-mail: . (1993-07-05)
Pascal P4 compiler and interpreter Version ? 1 compiler, assembler/interpreter, documentation Urs Ammann, Kesav Nori, Christian Jacobi {(ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pascal/)}. A compiler for Pascal written in Pascal, producing an intermediate code, with an assembler and interpreter for the code. reference: Pascal Implementation, by Steven Pemberton and Martin Daniels, published by Ellis Horwood, Chichester, UK (an imprint of Prentice Hall), ISBN: 0-13-653-0311. Also available in Japanese. E-mail: "Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl". (1993-07-05)
Pohwa. (普化) (1875-1958). Influential SoN master and ecclesiastical leader in the modern Korean Buddhist tradition; also known as Sogu. In 1912, while he was studying the writings of POJO CHINUL (1158-1210) at the monastery of POMoSA, he decided to become a monk and subsequently went to CHANGANSA, where he was ordained by Yondam Ŭngsin (d.u.). The same year Pohwa received the precepts from Tongson Chongŭi (1856-1936) at YUJoMSA. After spending twenty years at Yongwonsa, he subsequently moved to Ch'ilbul hermitage on CHIRISAN, established the Haegwan hermitage in Namhae, and taught at the major monastery of HAEINSA. In 1955, at the end of the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), Pohwa was appointed the first supreme patriarch (CHONGJoNG) of the new Korean Buddhist CHOGYE CHONG after it was reorganized by MANAM CHONGHoN. During his three years as patriarch, he led a "purification movement" (chonghwa undong) that sought to purge the Chogye order of what were considered to be the vestiges of nontraditional practices foisted on Korean Buddhism during the Japanese colonial period, such as clerical marriage and meat eating. Pohwa passed away at TONGHWASA near Taegu at the age of eighty-four.
Pomosa. (梵魚寺). In Korean, "BRAHMĀ Fish Monastery"; the fourteenth district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism, located on Kŭmjong (Golden Well) Mountain outside the southeastern city of Pusan. According to legend, Pomosa was named after a golden fish that descended from heaven and lived in a golden well located beneath a rock on the peak of Kŭmjong mountain. The monastery was founded in 678 by ŬISANG (625-702) as one of the ten main monasteries of the Korean Hwaom (C. HUAYAN) school, with the support of the Silla king Munmu (r. 661-680), who had unified the three kingdoms of the Korean peninsula in 668. Korea was being threatened by Japanese invaders, and Munmu is said to have had a dream that told him to have Ŭisang go to Kŭmjong mountain and lead a recitation of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA (K. Hwaom kyong) for seven days; if he did so, the Japanese would be repelled. The invasion successfully forestalled, King Munmu sponsored the construction of Pomosa. During the Koryo dynasty the monastery was at the peak of its power, with more than one thousand monks in residence, and it actively competed for influence with nearby T'ONGDOSA. The monastery was destroyed during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions of the late-sixteenth century, but it was reconstructed in 1602 and renovated after another fire in 1613. The only Silla dynasty artifacts that remain are a stone STuPA and a stone lantern. Pomosa has an unusual three-level layout with the main shrine hall (TAEUNG CHoN) located at the upper level and the Universal Salvation Hall (Poje nu) anchoring the middle level. The lower level has three separate entrance gates. Visitors enter the monastery through the One-Pillar Gate (Ilchu mun), built in 1614; next they pass through the Gate of the Four Heavenly Kings (Sach'onwang mun), who guard the monastery from baleful influences; and finally, they pass beneath the Gate of Nonduality (Puri mun), which marks the transition from secular to sacred space. The main shrine hall was rebuilt by Master Myojon (d.u.) in 1614 and is noted for its refined Choson-dynasty carvings and its elaborate ceiling of carved flowers. In 1684, Master Hyemin (d.u.) added a hall in honor of the buddha VAIROCANA, which included a famous painting of that buddha that now hangs in a separate building; and in 1700, Master Myonghak (d.u.) added another half dozen buildings. Pomosa also houses two important stupas: a three-story stone stupa located next to the Poje nu dates from 830 during the Silla dynasty; a new seven-story stone stupa, constructed following Silla models, enshrines relics (K. sari; S. sARĪRA) of the Buddha that a contemporary Indian monk brought to Korea. After a period of relative inactivity, Pomosa reemerged as an important center of Buddhist practice starting in 1900 under the abbot Songwol (d.u.), who opened several hermitages nearby. Under his leadership, the monastery became known as a major center of the Buddhist reform movements of the twentieth century. Tongsan Hyeil (1890-1965), one of the leaders of the reformation of Korean Buddhism following the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), who also served as the supreme patriarch (CHONGJoNG) of the CHOGYE CHONG from 1958 to 1961, resided at Pomosa.
Pongsonsa. (奉先寺). In Korean, "Respecting Ancestors Monastery"; the twenty-fifth district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism, located on Mount Unak in Kyonggi province. The monastery was constructed by T'anmun (d.u.) in 968, in the twentieth year of the reign of Koryo King Kwangjong (r. 949-975), and was originally named Unaksa, after the mountain on which it was built. In 1469, the first year of the reign of King Yejong (r. 1468-1469), Queen Chonghŭi (1418-1483) decided that the tomb of her deceased husband, King Sejo (r. 1445-1468), should be established on this mountain, and she therefore had the monastery renamed "Respecting Ancestors Monastery" (Pongsonsa). The monastery became the headquarters of the KYO school when the two schools of Kyo (Doctrine) and SoN (Meditation) were restored in 1551, during the reign of the Choson king Myongjong (r. 1545-1567). The monastery was repeatedly destroyed by fire during several wars, including the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions of the late-sixteenth century, the Manchu invasions of the seventeenth century, and the Korean War.
ponsa. (C. bensi; J. honji 本寺). In Korean, lit. "foundational monastery"; the major district or parish monasteries of the CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism; also referred to as ponsan, or "foundational mountain [monastery]." The institution of ponsa was started by the Korean state as one means of exerting state control over the Buddhist ecclesiastical community. When the Choson king T'aejong (r. 1400-1418) in 1407 combined the preexisting eleven Buddhist schools into seven, a ponsa was designated for each school, all of them located in the vicinity of the Choson capital of Hanyang (Seoul). King Sejong (r. 1418-1450) reduced the number of schools again in 1424 to the two schools of Doctrine (KYO) and Meditation (SoN) (SoN KYO YANGJONG) and designated HŬNGCH'oNSA and HŬNGDoKSA as the ponsa of the Kyo and Son schools, respectively. The institution of ponsa was discontinued during the reign of the Choson king Myongjong (r. 1545-1567) because of the abolition of the two schools of Kyo and Son. The institution was revived in 1911 during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), when the "Monastery Act" (Sach'allyong) of the Japanese government-general divided the colony into thirty districts, with a ponsa heading each of them. One more was added in 1924, creating a total of thirty-one ponsa. After Korea was liberated in 1945, the South Korean Buddhist community established an independent Chogye order, which organized the monasteries of the peninsula into twenty-four districts, each headed by a ponsa. Each district monastery loosely presides over several affiliated "branch monasteries" (MALSA), each located in the geographical vicinity of its ponsa. The twenty-five ponsa of the contemporary Chogye order are (1) CHOGYESA, (2) YONGJUSA, (3) SINHŬNGSA, (4) WoLCH'oNGSA, (5) PoPCHUSA, (6) MAGOKSA, (7) SUDoKSA, (8) CHIKCHISA, (9) TONGHWASA, (10) ŬNHAESA, (11) PULGUKSA, (12) HAEINSA, (13) SSANGGYESA, (14) PoMoSA, (15) T'ONGDOSA, (16) KOUNSA, (17) KŬMSANSA, (18) PAEGYANGSA, (19) HWAoMSA, [(20) SoNAMSA (control ceded to the rival T'AEGO CHONG)], (21) SONGGWANGSA, (22) TAEHŬNGSA, (23) KWANŬMSA, (24) SoNUNSA, and (25) PONGSoNSA.
PrajNa. [alt. PrajNā] (C. Bore; J. Hannya; K. Panya 般若). The proper name of a northwest Indian monk who arrived in the Chinese capital of Chang'an during the middle of the ninth century. PrajNa is best known for his forty-roll translation of the GAndAVYuHASuTRA, the lengthy final chapter of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA; his rendering, which was finished in 798, is thus considered the third and final (though shortest) translation of the AvataMsakasutra made in China. Five other translations are also attributed to PrajNa and collaborators. While in China, PrajNa was also associated with the Japanese monk KuKAI (774-835), the founder of the SHINGONSHu of Japanese esoteric Buddhism.
prasāda. (P. pasāda; T. dad pa/dang ba; C. chengjing; J. chojo; K. chingjong 澄淨). In Sanskrit, "clarity," or "trust." As "clarity," the term is used to describe both the serene sense consciousnesses of someone whose mind is at peace as well as such a state of mind itself. As "trust," the term is central to Buddhism, where it is employed in explanations of the psychology of faith or belief (see sRADDHĀ); it leads to zest or "desire-to-act" (CHANDA) that in turn leads to the cultivation of sAMATHA (serenity or calmness). These meanings of prasāda overlap when the term denotes the serenity or joy that results from trust. In the theology of the JoDO SHINSHu school of Japanese PURE LAND Buddhism, it refers to a serene acceptance of the grace of AMITĀBHA.
Puhyu Sonsu. (浮休善修) (1543-1615). Korean Son master of the Choson dynasty. Sonsu was a native of Osu in present-day North Cholla province. In 1562, he went to CHIRISAN, where he became the student of a certain Sinmyong (d.u.) and later continued his studies under the Son master Puyong Yonggwan (1485-1571). He was especially renowned for his calligraphy. Sonsu survived the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions from 1592 to 1598 and resided after the war at the monastery of HAEINSA. Sonsu and his disciple PYoGAM KAKSoNG were once falsely accused by another monk and were subsequently imprisoned; they were released later when the king learned of their innocence. In 1614, Sonsu went to the hermitage of Ch'ilburam at the monastery of SONGGWANGSA and passed away the next year after entrusting his disciples to Kaksong. He was given the posthumous title Honggak Tŭnggye (Expansive Enlightenment, Mastery of All). He left over seven hundred disciples, seven of whom became renowned Son masters in their own right and formed separate branches of Sonsu's lineage. His writings can be found in the Puhyudang chip.
Pulguksa. (佛國寺). In Korean, "Buddha Land Monastery," located outside KYoNGJU, the ancient capital of the Silla dynasty, on the slopes of T'oham Mountain; this Silla royal monastery is the eleventh district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism and administers over sixty subsidiary monasteries and hermitages. According to the SAMGUK YUSA ("Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms"), Pulguksa was constructed in 751 by Kim Taesong (700-774), chief minister of King Kyongdok (r. 742-765), and completed in 774; it may have been constructed on the site of a smaller temple that dated from c. 528, during the reign of the Silla King Pophŭng (r. 514-539). Although it was a large complex, Pulguksa was not as influential within the Silla Buddhist tradition as other Kyongju monasteries, such as HWANGNYONGSA and PUNHWANGSA. The monastery has since been renovated numerous times, one of the largest projects occurring at the beginning of the seventeenth century, after the monastery was burned during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions of 1592-1598. Pulguksa's temple complex is built on a series of artificial terraces that were constructed out of giant stone blocks and is entered via two pairs of stone "bridges" cum staircases, which are Korean national treasures in their own right and frequently photographed. The main level of the monastery centers on two courtyards: one anchored by the TAEUNG CHoN, or the main shrine hall, which houses a statue of sĀKYAMUNI Buddha, the other by the kŭngnak chon, or hall of ultimate bliss (SUKHĀVATĪ), which houses an eighth-century bronze statue of the buddha AMITĀBHA. The taeung chon courtyard is graced with two stone pagodas, the Sokka t'ap (sākyamuni STuPA) and the Tabo t'ap (Prabhutaratna stupa), which are so famous that the second of them is depicted on the Korean ten-won coin. The juxtaposition of the two stupas derives from the climax of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), where the buddha PRABHuTARATNA (Many Treasures) invites sākyamuni to sit beside him inside his bejeweled stupa, thus validating the teachings sākyamuni delivered in the scripture. The Sokka t'ap represents sākyamuni's solitary quest for enlightenment; it is three stories tall and is notable for its bare simplicity. This stupa is in marked contrast to its ornate twin, the Tabo t'ap, or Pagoda of the buddha Prabhutaratna, which is modeled after a reliquary and has elaborate staircases, parapets, and stone lions (one of which was removed to the British Museum). During a 1966 renovation of the Sokka t'ap, the world's oldest printed document was discovered sealed inside the stupa: the MUGUJoNGGWANG TAEDARANI KYoNG (S. Rasmivimalavisuddhaprabhādhāranī; "Great DHĀRAnĪ of Immaculate Radiance"). The terminus ad quem for the printing of the Dhāranī is 751 CE, when the text was sealed inside the Sokka t'ap, but it may have been printed even earlier. Other important buildings include the Piro chon (VAIROCANA Hall) that enshrines an eighth-century bronze statue of its eponymous buddha, which is presumed to be the oldest bronze image in Korea; the Musol chon (The Wordless Hall), a lecture hall located directly behind the taeung chon, which was built around 670; and the Kwanŭm chon (AVALOKITEsVARA hall), built at the highest point of the complex. Two and a half miles (4 kms) up T'oham Mountain to the east of Pulguksa is its affiliated SoKKURAM grotto temple. Pulguksa and Sokkuram were jointly listed in 1995 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
pure land. (C. jingtu; J. jodo; K. chongt'o 浄土). An English term with no direct equivalent in Sanskrit that is used to translate the Chinese JINGTU (more literally, "purified ground"); the Chinese term may be related to the term PARIsUDDHABUDDHAKsETRA (although this latter term does not appear in the SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, the text most closely aligned with pure land thought). The term "pure land" has several denotations in English, which have led to some confusion in its use. These include (1) a buddha-field (BUDDHAKsETRA) purified of transgressions and suffering by a buddha and thus deemed an auspicious place in which to take rebirth; (2) the specific (and most famous) of these purified fields, that of the buddha AMITĀBHA, named SUKHĀVATĪ; (3) the tradition of texts and practices in MAHĀYĀNA Buddhism dedicated to the description of a number of buddha-fields, including that of Amitābha, and the practices to ensure rebirth there; (4) a tradition of texts and practice in East Asian and Tibetan Buddhism, associated specifically with the goal of rebirth in the purified buddha-field of Amitābha; (5) the JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu schools of Japanese Buddhism, deriving from the teachings of HoNEN and SHINRAN, which set forth a "single practice" for rebirth in sukhāvatī. It is important to note that, although the Sukhāvatīvyuhasutra (and other sutras describing other buddha-fields) originated in India, there was no "pure land school" in Indian Buddhism; rebirth in a buddha-field, and especially that of sukhāvatī, was one of the many generalized goals of Mahāyāna practice. Although there was an extensive tradition in China of scriptural exegesis of the major pure land sutras, this was not enough in itself to constitute a self-consciously "pure land school"; indeed, techniques for rebirth in sukhāvatī became popular in many strands of Chinese Buddhism (see NIANFO), especially in light of theories of the disappearance of the dharma (see MOFA). Finally, it is important to note that the goal of rebirth in sukhāvatī was an important practice in Japan prior to the advent of Honen, and remained so in schools other than Jodoshu and Jodo Shinshu.
Putuoshan. (J. Fudasen; K. Pot'asan 普陀山/補陀山). In Chinese, "Mount POTALAKA"; a mountainous island in the Zhoushan Archipelago, about sixty-two miles off the eastern coast of Zhejiang province; also known as Butuoshan, Butuoluojiashan, Xiaobaihuashan, etc. Putuoshan is considered one of the four Buddhist sacred mountains in China, along with WUTAISHAN in Shanxi, EMEISHAN in Sichuan, and JIUHUASHAN in Anhui. Each of the mountains is said to be the residence of a specific BODHISATTVA, and Putuoshan is regarded as the sacred mountain of AVALOKITEsVARA, known in Chinese as GUANYIN pusa, the revered "bodhisattva of compassion." There are many legends told about Putuoshan. During the Tang dynasty, an Indian monk is said to have come to Putuoshan and immolated his ten fingers, after which Avalokitesvara appeared and preached the dharma to him. As this legend spread, Putuoshan gained fame as the sacred site of Avalokitesvara. In 916 CE, a Japanese monk was bringing a statue of Avalokitesvara back to Japan from Wutaishan, but was delayed on Putuoshan by fierce storms. He built a monastery for Avalokitesvara on the island and named it Baotuo monastery, an abbreviated Chinese transcription for the Sanskrit word Potalaka, an Indian holy mountain that, according to the GAndAVYuHA of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, is thought to be the abode of Avalokitesvara. Since that sutra said that Mt. Potalaka was an isolated mountainous island rising out of the ocean, the sacred geography seemed to match Putuoshan's physical geography. After the Southern Song dynasty, the scale of monasteries, nunneries, monks and nuns in Putuoshan increased significantly through donations from the imperial court and lay Buddhists. Many people came to Putuoshan, especially to pray for safe voyages. It was also popular for the emperor to perform religious rites on Putuoshan. In 1131, during the Southern Song dynasty, all Buddhist schools on Putuoshan were designated as CHAN monasteries. In 1214, Putuoshan was ordered to emphasize the worship of Avalokitesvara. At the height of its prestige, there were as many as 218 monasteries on the island, housing more than two thousand monks and nuns. There are now three major monasteries on Putuoshan-Pujisi, Fayusi, and Huijisi-all affiliated with either the LINJI ZONG or the CAODONG ZONG of CHAN Buddhism, and seventy-two smaller temples. Pious pilgrims come to Putuoshan from all over China to worship Avalokitesvara, and Putuoshan continues to be one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in China. See also POTALAKA; PO TA LA.
Pyogam Kaksong. (碧巖覺性) (1575-1660). Korean SoN master of the Choson dynasty; also known as Chingwon. Kaksong was a native of Poŭn (in present-day North Ch'ungch'ong province). After losing his father at an early age, Kaksong became a monk under Solmuk (d.u.) at the hermitage of Hwasanam. Kaksong received the full monastic precepts in 1588 from a certain Pojong (d.u.) and subsequently became the disciple of the eminent Son master PUHYU SoNSU, whom he accompanied from one mountain monastery to another. When Japanese troops stormed the Korean peninsula in 1592 during the Hideyoshi invasions, Kaksong served in the war in place of his teacher, who had been recommended earlier to the king by the eminent monk SAMYoNG YUJoNG. Kaksong launched a successful sea campaign against Japanese naval forces. Kaksong was once falsely accused of a crime and imprisoned, but was later released and appointed prelate (p'ansa) of both the Son and KYO traditions and abbot of the monastery Pongŭnsa in the capital of Seoul. In 1624, he was appointed the supreme director of the eight provinces (p'alto toch'ongsop) and oversaw the construction of Namhansansong. Kaksong then spent the next few years in Cholla province, restoring the monasteries of HWAoMSA, SONGGWANGSA, and SSANGGYESA, which had been burned during the Hideyoshi invasions. He also taught at HAEINSA, PAEGUNSA, and Sangsonam, but eventually returned to Hwaomsa, where he passed away in 1660. He produced many famous disciples, such as Ch'wimi Such'o (1590-1668), Paekkok Ch'onŭng (1617-1680), Moun Chinon (1622-1703), and Hoeŭn Ŭngjun (1587-1672). Kaksong's lineage expanded into eight branches, and his influence on the subsequent development of Korean Son rivalled that of CH'oNGHo HYUJoNG, the preeminent Korean monk during the Choson dynasty. Kaksong also composed many treatises, including the Sonwonjipto chung kyorŭi, Kanhwa kyorŭi, Songmun sangŭi ch'o, and others.
P'yohunsa. (表訓寺). In Korean, "P'yohun's monastery"; one of the four major monasteries on the Buddhist sacred mountain of KŬMGANGSAN (Diamond Mountains), now in North Korea. The monastery is said to have been built in 598 during the Silla dynasty by Kwallŭk (d.u.) and Yungun (d.u.), and rebuilt in 675 by P'yohun (d.u.), one of the ten disciples of ŬISANG (625-702), the vaunt-courier of the Korean HWAoM (C. HUAYAN) school. The present monastery was rebuilt after the Korean War (1950-1953) on the model of an earlier reconstruction project finished in 1778 during the late-Choson dynasty. The main shrine hall of the monastery is named Panya Pojon (PrajNā Jeweled Basilica), rather than the typical TAEUNG CHoN (basilica of the great hero [the Buddha]), and the image of the bodhisattva DHARMODGATA (Popki Posal) that used to be enshrined therein was installed facing Dharmodgata Peak (Popkibong) to the northeast of the hall, rather than toward the front. The relics (sARĪRA) of NAONG HYEGŬN (1320-1376), a late-Koryo period Son monk who introduced the orthodox LINJI ZONG (K. IMJE CHONG) lineage to Korea from China, were enshrined at P'yohunsa. The monastery also was famous for its iron pagoda (STuPA) with fifty-three enshrined buddha images, but these were lost sometime during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), along with Naong's relics. Chongyangsa, one of the branch monasteries of P'yohunsa, is said to have been built at the spot where Dharmodgata and his attendant bodhisattvas appeared before the first king of the Koryo dynasty, Wang Kon, T'aejo (877-943; r. 918-943), on his visit to Kŭmgangsan. The peak where Dharmodgata made his appearance is named Panggwangdae (Radiant Terrace), and the spot where T'aejo prostrated himself before Dharmodgata is called Paejom (Prostration Hill). Podogam, a hermitage affiliated with P'yohunsa, is notable for its peculiar construction: for four hundred years it has been suspended off a cliff, supported by a single copper foundation pillar.
Rashomon Effect, Rashomon Syndrome, the: Term for the realization that everyone has different perceptions of reality, and that no definitive form of reality exists. From the Japanese play and movie of the same name.
reigen. (驗). In Japanese, lit. "numinous verification," a term used to refer to the miraculous efficacy of a prayer, vow, or religious praxis. The benefits are often understood as the result of the "sympathetic resonance" (C. GANYING) between buddhas and/or deities who are the objects of the prayer and the subject who engages in prayer. The term can also refer to the miraculous power and virtue of the buddhas and deities to respond to the prayers of people.
Reiyukai. (霊友会/靈友會). In Japanese, lit. "Numinous Friends Society," or "Society of Friends of the Spirits"; a Japanese Buddhist lay organization, deriving from the teachings of the NICHIRENSHu. It was founded in 1925 by KUBO KAKUTARo (1892-1944) and KOTANI KIMI (1901-1971), the wife of Kubo's elder brother, who took over leadership of the organization and became president in 1944 upon Kubo's death. Kubo insisted that everyone keep a family death register and give posthumous names to venerated ancestors; these activities were formerly the domain of monks, who would be paid for their services. His other ideas included the classical directive to convert the world into a PURE LAND for Buddhism and the need to teach others the truth. He particularly emphasized the ability of each individual to improve him or herself. Kubo's ideas appealed to the poor and he began to attract converts quickly, including his brother Kotani Yasukichi and Kotani's wife, Kotani Kimi. In 1971 after Kotani Kimi died, Kubo's son Kubo Tsugunari took over as the leader of the group. For years he had prepared for this future, including studying Indian philosophy and Buddhism at Rissho University. Despite this preparation, Reiyukai was rocked by what some viewed as his personal failings and political maneuverings and Kubo Tsugunari eventually lost his leadership post. More recent leaders have been elected democratically. Some noted activities in recent years include opening the Lumbinī International Research Institute in Nepal and the International College for Advanced Buddhist Studies in Tokyo. The organization reached its peak during the years surrounding the Second World War, when it claimed some three million members, and was the source of numerous Nichiren-related new religious movements, of which the RISSHo KoSEIKAI, founded in 1938, became the most prominent. Reiyukai continues to be an active lay organization in both Japan and abroad. The Reiyukai organization has no clergy and no formal affiliation with any other Buddhist school, but instead relies on volunteer lay teachers who lead informal group meetings and discussions. Reiyukai focuses on the human capacity for lifelong self-cultivation in order to become ever more wise and compassionate. All its adherents must have a personal sponsor in order to join the order. The school stresses ancestor worship, believing that personal and social ills are the result of inadequate veneration of ancestor spirits who have been unable to attain buddhahood and instead became guardian spirits until the proper rites are performed so they may be liberated. Its followers believe that reciting the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") in abridged form during daily morning and evening services or a group meeting transfers merit to their ancestors.
relevance "information science" A measure of how closely a given object (file, {web page}, database {record}, etc.) matches a user's search for information. The relevance {algorithms} used in most large web {search engines} today are based on fairly simple word-occurence measurement: if the word "daffodil" occurs on a given page, then that page is considered relevant to a {query} on the word "daffodil"; and its relevance is quantised as a factor of the number of times the word occurs in the page, on whether "daffodil" occurs in title of the page or in its META keywords, in the first {N} words of the page, in a heading, and so on; and similarly for words that a {stemmer} says are based on "daffodil". More elaborate (and resource-expensive) relevance algorithms may involve thesaurus (or {synonym ring}) lookup; e.g. it might rank a document about narcissuses (but which may not mention the word "daffodil" anywhere) as relevant to a query on "daffodil", since narcissuses and daffodils are basically the same thing. Ditto for queries on "jail" and "gaol", etc. More elaborate forms of thesaurus lookup may involve multilingual thesauri (e.g. knowing that documents in Japanese which mention the Japanese word for "narcissus" are relevant to your search on "narcissus"), or may involve thesauri (often auto-generated) based not on equivalence of meaning, but on word-proximity, such that "bulb" or "bloom" may be in the thesaurus entry for "daffodil". {Word spamming} essentially attempts to falsely increase a web page's relevance to certain common searches. See also {subject index}. (1997-04-09)
relevance ::: (information science) A measure of how closely a given object (file, web page, database record, etc.) matches a user's search for information.The relevance algorithms used in most large web search engines today are based on fairly simple word-occurence measurement: if the word daffodil occurs on a or in its META keywords, in the first N words of the page, in a heading, and so on; and similarly for words that a stemmer says are based on daffodil.More elaborate (and resource-expensive) relevance algorithms may involve thesaurus (or synonym ring) lookup; e.g. it might rank a document about to a query on daffodil, since narcissuses and daffodils are basically the same thing. Ditto for queries on jail and gaol, etc.More elaborate forms of thesaurus lookup may involve multilingual thesauri (e.g. knowing that documents in Japanese which mention the Japanese word for word-proximity, such that bulb or bloom may be in the thesaurus entry for daffodil.Word spamming essentially attempts to falsely increase a web page's relevance to certain common searches.See also subject index. (1997-04-09)
Rennyo. (蓮如) (1415-1499). In Japanese, "Lotus Suchness"; proper name of the Japanese monk who played a crucial role in the consolidation of JoDO SHINSHu tradition. Rennyo was born at the monastery of HONGANJI in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto. He was the son of Zonnyo (1396-1457), himself a descendent of SHINRAN and the seventh abbot of Honganji. Despite some opposition from his stepmother and her son Nyojo (1412-1460), Rennyo succeeded his father as abbot of Honganji after his father's death in 1457. Rennyo began expanding his sphere of influence by proselytizing in the outskirts of Kyoto. In 1465, the monks of HIEIZAN (see ENRYAKUJI) destroyed Honganji in order to restrict the spread of Rennyo's influence in regions under TENDAI control. Rennyo was able to save the portrait of Shinran (goei) from destruction and installed it temporarily at the temple of MIIDERA. After the attack, Rennyo wandered from region to region until he settled down far away from Mt. Hiei in Hokuriku (present-day Echizen), where he acquired a large following (of mostly peasants) through active proselytizing and the writing of pastoral letters (ofumi). In 1475, Rennyo returned to Kyoto, where he began the construction of a new Honganji in the district of Yamashina the following year. Rennyo also restored the hoonko memorial service for Shinran and established the nenbutsu (C. NIANFO; see NAMU AMIDABUTSU) inscriptions as an important object of worship. In his writings, Rennyo also systematized the teachings of Shinran and criticized priestly corruption and "heretical" teachings that did not emphasize exclusive faith in the buddha AMITĀBHA and his name. Under Rennyo's tenure as abbot, the Honganji complex grew into one of the most powerful monasteries of its era, controlling a vast network of subtemples. This period is traditionally considered to represent the institutional formation of Jodo Shinshu.
Rinzaishu. (濟宗). In Japanese, "Rinzai School"; one of the major Japanese ZEN schools established in the early Kamakura period. The various branches of the Japanese Rinzai Zen tradition trace their lineages back to the Chinese CHAN master LINJI YIXUAN (J. Rinzai Gigen) and his eponymous LINJI ZONG; the name Rinzai, like its Chinese counterpart, is derived from Linji's toponym. The tradition was first transmitted to Japan by the TENDAISHu monk MYoAN EISAI (1141-1215), who visited China twice and received training and certification in the HUANGLONG PAI collateral line of the Linji lineage on his second trip. Eisai's Zen teachings, however, reflected his training in the esoteric (MIKKYo) teachings of the Tendai school; he did not really intend to establish an entirely new school. After Eisai, the Rinzai tradition was transferred through Japanese monks who trained in China and Chinese monks who immigrated to Japan. Virtually all of the Japanese Rinzai tradition was associated with the YANGQI PAI collateral line of the Linji lineage (see YANGQI FANGHUI), which was first imported by the Japanese vinaya specialist Shunjo (1166-1227). According to the early-Edo-period Nijushiryu shugen zuki ("Diagrammatic Record of the Sources of the Twenty-Four Transmissions of the Teaching"), twenty-four Zen lineages had been transmitted to Japan since the Kamakura period, twenty-one of which belonged to the Rinzai tradition; with the exception of Eisai's own lineage, the remaining twenty lineages were all associated with the Yangqi collateral line. Soon after its introduction into Japan, the Rinzai Zen tradition rose to prominence in Kamakura and Kyoto, where it received the patronage of shoguns, emperors, and the warrior class. The Rinzai teachers of this period included monks from Tendai and SHINGONSHu backgrounds, such as ENNI BEN'EN (1202-1280) and SHINCHI KAKUSHIN (1207-1298), who promoted Zen with an admixture of esoteric elements. Chinese immigrant monks like LANXI DAOLONG (J. Rankei Doryu, 1213-1278) and WUXUE ZUYUAN (J. Mugaku Sogen, 1226-1286) also contributed to the rapid growth in the popularity of the Rinzai tradition among the Japanese ruling classes, by transporting the Song-style Linji Chan tradition as well as Song-dynasty Chinese culture more broadly. With the establishment of the Ashikaga shogunate in 1338, the major Zen temples were organized following the Song Chinese model into the GOZAN (five mountains) system, a tripartite state control system consisting of "five mountains" (gozan), "ten temples" (jissetsu), and several associated "miscellaneous mountains" (shozan). The powerful gozan monasteries located in Kamakura and Kyoto functioned as centers of classical Chinese learning and culture, and continued to influence the ruling classes in Japan until the decline of the Ashikaga shogunate in the sixteenth century. The disciples of Enni Ben'en and MUSo SOSEKI (1275-1351) dominated the gozan monasteries. In particular, Muso Soseki was deeply engaged in both literary endeavors and political activities; his lineage produced several famous gozan poets, such as Gido Shushin (1325-1388) and Zekkai Chushin (1336-1405). Outside the official gozan ecclesiastical system were the RINKA, or forest, monasteries. DAITOKUJI and MYoSHINJI, the two principal rinka Rinzai monasteries, belonged to the otokan lineage, which is named after its first three masters NANPO JoMYo (1235-1309), SoHo MYoCHo (1282-1337), and KANZAN EGEN (1277-1360). This lineage emphasized rigorous Zen training rather than the broader cultural endeavors pursued in the gozan monasteries. After the decline of the gozan monasteries, the otokan lineage came to dominate the Rinzai Zen tradition during the Edo period and was the only Rinzai line to survive to the present. Despite the presence of such influential monks as TAKUAN SoHo (1573-1645) and BANKEI YoTAKU (1622-1693), the Rinzai tradition began to decline by the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The monk credited with revitalizing the Rinzai tradition during the Edo period is the Myoshinji monk HAKUIN EKAKU (1685-1768). Hakuin systematized the KoAN (see GONG'AN; KANHUA CHAN) method of meditation, which is the basis of modern Rinzai Zen practice; it is also through Hakuin and his disciples that most Rinzai masters of today trace their lineages. The Rinzai tradition is currently divided into the fifteen branches named after each of their head monasteries, which represents the influence of the head and branch temple system designed in the Edo period. Of the fifteen branches, the Myoshinji branch has largely eclipsed its rivals and today is the largest and most influential of all the Rinzai lines.
Rissho Koseikai. (立正佼成会). In Japanese, "Society for Establishing Righteousness and Peaceful Relations," one of Japan's largest lay Buddhist organizations. Rissho Koseikai was founded in 1938 by NIWANO NIKKYo (1906-1999), the son of a farming family in Niigata prefecture, and NAGANUMA MYoKo (1889-1957), a homemaker from Saitama prefecture. In 2007, it claimed 1.67 million member households, with 239 churches in Japan and fifty-six churches in eighteen countries outside of Japan. Originally formed as an offshoot of REIYuKAI, Rissho Koseikai is strongly influenced by NICHIRENSHu doctrine, although it bears no organizational ties with the latter school. In terms of its ethos and organizational structure, it embodies many of the characteristics of Japan's so-called new religions. Rissho Koseikai emphasizes worship of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") as a means for self-cultivation and salvation as well as for the greater good of humanity at large. Religious practice includes recitation of chapters from the Saddharmapundarīkasutra every morning and evening and chanting of the Japanese title of the sutra, or DAIMOKU, viz., NAMU MYoHoRENGEKYo. As is common among schools associated with worship of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra, Rissho Koseikai believes that people share karmic links with their ancestors. Through recitation of Saddharmapundarīkasutra passages and its title, along with repentance for one's past transgressions, one can transfer merit to one's ancestors. This transference aims to subdue the troubled spirits of ancestors who did not attain buddhahood, as well as to eliminate any negative karmic bonds with them. Rissho Koseikai is headquartered in Tokyo. However, its organization is largely decentralized and it has no priesthood. This structure places more value and responsibility on its laity, who are presumed to be capable of transferring merit and conducting funerals and ancestral rites on their own. Group gatherings generally address counseling issues for individuals and families alongside the study of Buddhist doctrine. In contrast to Reiyukai, which emphasizes devotional faith to the Saddharmapundarīkasutra without the need for detailed doctrinal understanding of Buddhism, adherents of Rissho Koseikai, in line with the school's founders, include the analytic study of doctrine as complementary to their faith.
Risshu. [alt. Ritsushu] (律宗). In Japanese, "School of Discipline," one of the so-called six schools of the Nara tradition of early Japanese Buddhism (see NARA BUDDHISM, SIX SCHOOLS OF); the term is also sometimes seen transcribed as RITSUSHu. Although its origins are uncertain, a decree by the Grand Council of State (J. Daijokan) in 718 acknowledged Risshu as one of major schools of Buddhism in the Japanese capital of Nara. The school is dedicated to the exegesis and dissemination of the rules of Buddhist VINAYA, especially those associated with the SIFEN LÜ ("Four-Part Vinaya") of the DHARMAGUPTAKA school. Rather than an established religious institution, the Risshu, like the other contemporaneous schools of the Nara period (710-974), should instead be considered more of an intellectual tradition or school of thought. Risshu arose as an attempt to systematize monastic rules and practices on the basis of Chinese translations of Indian vinaya texts. Throughout the first half of the eighth century, Japanese monks relied on the Taiho Law Code (701), a set of government-mandated monastic regulations, to guide both their ordination ceremonies (J. jukai) and their conduct. Realizing that Japan lacked proper observance of the vinaya, Nara scholars who had studied monastic discipline in China sought the aid of GANJIN (C. Jianzhen; 687-763), a well-known Chinese master of the NANSHAN LÜ ZONG (South Mountain School of Discipline), the largest of the three vinaya traditions of China. Their attempts to use Ganjin to establish an orthodox ordination ceremony in Japan met with considerable resistance, first from the Chinese court, which did not want to part with Ganjin, and second with entrenched interests in Nara, which had grown accustomed to the Taiho regulations. After five failed attempts to travel to Japan at these monks' invitation, Ganjin finally arrived in Japan in 754. Then sixty-six and blind, Ganjin finally established an ordination platform that summer at the great Nara monastery of ToDAIJI. Soon thereafter, two more ordination platforms were erected under the jurisdiction of Risshu: one at Yakushiji in Shimotsuke province (in present-day Tochigi prefecture), and one at Kanzeonji in Chikuzen province (in present-day Fukuoka prefecture). In his later years, Ganjin also founded the monastery of ToSHoDAIJI in Nara, where he trained monks according to his own codification of the rules. Risshu and the other Nara schools fell into a period of decline over the course of the Heian period (794-1185), which ultimately set the stage for a restoration of Risshu in the early Kamakura period (1185-1333). Under the leadership of the Tendai priest Shunjo (1166-1227), who had studied in China, a group of monks with interests in vinaya assembled at Sennyuji in Kyoto. They would later become identified as the Hokkyo, or "northern capital," branch of the Risshu school, in contrast to the Nankyo (southern capital) branch in Nara. Monks in Nara also attempted to restore Risshu, as exemplified by Kakujo's (1194-1249) move to Toshodaiji and the efforts of Eizon (1201-1290), who incorporated esoteric practice (see MIKKYo) in his restoration of Risshu at Saidaiji in Nara. Today, Risshu survives in the two monasteries of Toshodaiji and Saidaiji, although the latter was officially joined with the SHINGONSHu during the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912).
rohatsu sesshin. (臘八攝心). In Japanese, lit. "retreat on the eighth [day] of the last [month]," typically refering to an intensive week-long session of meditation (SESSHIN) that ends on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month (rohatsu), the reputed day of the Buddha's enlightenment according to the East Asian calendar. The retreat begins with a ceremony on the first of the twelfth lunar month and ends on the morning of the eighth with another ceremony, which usually consists of a lecture by the abbot known as the rohatu jodo, and offerings made to an image of sĀKYAMUNI emerging from the mountains (shussan Shaka). (Cf. PRĀGBODHI[GIRI].) The rohatsu sesshin performed in the SAMGHA hall (SENGTANG) at ZEN monasteries often entails nonstop meditative practice with little or no sleep. See also YONGMAENG CHoNGJIN.
roshi. (老師). In Japanese, lit. "old master," an honorific typically used with reference to a senior Buddhist teacher or monk, sometimes interpreted to be a contraction of the compound rodaishushi ("elder teacher of the tradition"). In the Japanese ZEN schools, roshi is a technical term used to designate a senior teacher who is authorized to offer spiritual guidance and to hold higher ecclesiastical positions. Within the RINZAISHu, roshi specifically refers to a Zen master who has received certification to teach (J. inka; C. YINKE) from another roshi and who is thereafter authorized to sanction the awakening of others during private interviews known as sanzen. In the SoToSHu, one becomes a roshi through a shiho or series of ordination ceremonies with one's teacher, which acknowledge mastery of the precepts and receipt of dharma transmission, so that the recipient is then authorized to teach and receive appointment as abbot of a Soto monastery. Despite its literal denotation, the term roshi may also be used as an honorary appellation for older monks who are not yet teachers, or even to refer to monks in general. Thus the term roshi is not necessarily used to imply old age but rather respect or veneration.
Ryoanji. [alt. Ryuanji] (龍安寺). In Japanese, "Dragon Peace Monastery," located in northwest Kyoto and famous for its dry landscape garden (J. karesansui). Originally an estate of the Fujiwara clan, the site was converted into a ZEN temple in 1450 by order of the military leader Hosokawa Katsumoto (1430-1473), a vassal of the Ashikaga shogun. He installed Giten Gensho, the fifth abbot of MYoSHINJI, as its founding religious leader (see KAISAN); since that time the monastery has been affiliated with the Myoshinji branch of the RINZAISHu of Zen Buddhism. The site of bloody fighting during the onin civil war (1467-1477), Ryoanji had to be rebuilt by Hosokawa Katsumoto's son Hosokawa Masamoto between 1488 and 1499. Much of the monastery burned down in 1789 and was subsequently reconstructed. The monastery was a relatively obscure temple in the first half of the twentieth century, but the garden gained great fame in 1949 when it was used in a scene of Ozu Yasujiro's film Banshun (Late Spring). Beginning in the 1950s, the garden began to be described as a "Zen garden" and has since come to be considered one of Japan's cultural masterpieces. The garden has fifteen moss-covered boulders set in a sea of white pebbles. During the nineteenth century, the arrangement of the stones was called "tiger cubs crossing a river," referring to a Chinese folktale, although many other interpretations have been offered in more recent decades. The temple grounds are the burial site of seven Hosokawa lords. Ryoanji was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
Ryoben. [alt. Roben] (良辨) (689-773). Founder of the Japanese Kegonshu (C. HUAYAN ZONG) during the Nara period (710-784) and the first abbot of ToDAIJI, the major Kegon monastery and the headquarters of the KOKUBUNJI network of provincial temples. Ryoben originally studied the teachings of the Hosso (C. FAXIANG) school under Gien (d. 728) and resided at the monastery of Konshuji. Under the patronage of the emperor Shomu (r. 724-749), Todaiji and its network of provincial temples was completed and the colossal NARA DAIBUTSU consecrated in 752; Ryoben was appointed the monastery's first abbot and he formally established the Kegon school at the site. The Kegon school, one of the six major scholastic traditions of Nara Buddhism (see NARA BUDDHISM, SIX SCHOOLS OF), is said to date from 740, when Ryoben invited the Korean monk SIMSANG (J. Shinjo, d. c. 744), a disciple of FAZANG (643-712), to Konshoji to lecture on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA to Emperor Shomu. Simsang is therefore typically considered the first patriarch of the Kegon school and Ryoben the second.
ryobu. (兩部). In Japanese, the "two groupings," also known as ryokai ("two realms"); referring to the TAIZoKAI and KONGoKAI systems and their related MAndALAs in the esoteric tradition (MIKKYo) of Japan. See TAIZoKAI and KONGoKAI.
Ryogen. (良源) (912-985). In Japanese, "Virtuous Fount"; a tenth-century exponent of the TENDAISHu during the Heian Period, also known posthumously as Jie Daishi. Born in omi province (present-day Shiga prefecture), Ryogen became the eighteenth appointed head (zasu) of the Tendai school in 966 and spent the last nineteen years of his life at ENRYAKUJI reforming monastic discipline, promoting doctrinal studies, and writing works of his own. He used strategic political alliances to help what was then a marginalized Tendai school become the most powerful religious institution in Japan; in addition, he raised funds both to reconstruct burned monastic buildings on HIEIZAN and to construct new monasteries within its precincts. In response to escalating disputes among regional monastic communities, Ryogen also established in 970 the first permanent fighting force to defend and serve the interests of the Mt. Hiei monks. While this move appears to contradict a set of reforms he had previously issued that forbade his monks from carrying weapons, it seems that his first troops may actually have been hired mercenaries rather than "monk soldiers" (J. SoHEI). Among Ryogen's disciples, perhaps the best known is GENSHIN (942-1017), the author of the influential oJo YoSHu.
Ryokan. (良寛) (1758-1831). In Japanese, "Virtuous Liberality"; Edo-period ZEN monk in the SoToSHu, often known as Ryokan Taigu (lit. Ryokan, the Great Fool). Ryokan was associated with a reformist group within the contemporary Soto monastic community that sought to restore formal meditative practice and the study of the writings of DoGEN KIGEN. Ryokan grew up in Echigo province (present-day Niigata prefecture), the son of a SHINTo priest. He became a novice monk at age seventeen at the nearby Soto monastery of Koshoji and was ordained when he turned twenty-one under a Soto monk named Kokusen (d. 1791). He left for Kokusen's monastery in the Bitchu province (present-day Okayama prefecture) and subsequently inherited the temple after Kokusen died. Soon afterward, however, he departed from the monastery, choosing instead to follow an itinerant lifestyle for the next several years. In 1804, he settled down for twelve years in a hut on Mt. Kugami, situated near his hometown. In 1826 Ryokan met Teishin (d. 1872), a young nun who had been previously widowed, and the two remained close companions until Ryokan's death. Ryokan eventually chose for himself a radically simple existence, living much of his life as a hermit, owning few possessions and begging for alms. He was well regarded for his love of children and his compassion for people from all social strata, including prostitutes. His expression of compassion was so extreme that he is even said to have placed lice inside his robes so they would not get cold and to have exposed his legs to mosquitoes while he slept. Ryokan was a renowned calligrapher and poet (in both Chinese and vernacular Japanese). Most of his verses are written as thirty-one-syllable tanka, although he also wrote ninety choka (long poems) and at least twenty other verses in nonstandard form. Ryokan's poetry addressed his common everyday experiences in the world in direct, humble terms. Ryokan did not publish during his lifetime; rather, his verses were collected and published posthumously by his companion Teishin.
Ryonin. (良忍) (1072-1132). In Japanese, "Virtuous Forbearance"; founder of the YuZuNENBUTSUSHu, an early PURE LAND school in Japan. Ryonin traveled to HIEIZAN at the age of twelve to study the TENDAISHu (C. TIANTAI ZONG) teachings and was ordained at the age of fifteen. He retreated to ohara, a rural area north of Kyoto, in 1095, where he spent the next thirty years. There, Ryonin at first studied the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA and the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, but later concentrated on reciting the SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA. Through a revelation from the buddha AMITĀBHA that he received in 1117, Ryonin began teaching his principle of YuZuNENBUTSU (perfect-interpenetration recitation of the Buddha's name), in which every individual benefits from both his own and others' chanting of the Buddha's name (J. nenbutsu; C. NIANFO) through a mutual transfer of merit. In 1124, Ryonin began traveling throughout Japan to spread the practice. His decision to begin teaching evokes sākyamuni Buddha's own life story: after realizing this principle, Ryonin was content dwelling in solitude, but VAIsRAVAnA (J. Tabun tenno) appeared before Ryonin to ask him to teach his revelation and disseminate the chanting practice among the people. As Ryonin traveled around Japan, he carried with him a booklet in which he recorded the names of all the people who agreed to practice the chanting of the Buddha's name everyday. Soon after beginning his campaign, Ryonin received the imperial bell from the retired monarch Toba (r. 1107-1123), who also added his name to this register of adherents: both the bell and the register are now housed at Dainenbutsuji, the headquarters of the Yuzunenbutsu school. Such a sign of imperial support for Ryonin's campaign attracted many new followers to his school. Ryonin continued his evangelical efforts until his death in 1132 at Raigoin, one of the two cloisters (along with Jorengein) that he established in ohara. Ryonin also studied Buddhist "BRAHMĀ chanting" (J. bonbai; see C. FANBAI; K. pomp'ae) and founded his own lineage of bonbai chanting during his thirty years in ohara.
Sadāparibhuta. (T. Rtag tu mi brnyas pa; C. Changbuqing pusa; J. Jofukyo bosatsu; K. Sangbulgyong posal 常不輕菩薩). In Sanskrit, "Never Disparaging," the name of a BODHISATTVA described in the eponymous nineteenth or twentieth chapter (depending on the version) of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"). The Buddha explains that long ago there was a bodhisattva named Sadāparibhuta who did not study or recite the sutras. Whenever he saw a monk (BHIKsU), nun (BHIKsUnĪ), male lay disciple (UPĀSAKA), or female lay disciple (UPĀSIKĀ), he would say, "I dare not belittle you because you will all become buddhas." Arrogant monks, nuns, and male and female lay disciples began to sarcastically refer to him as "Never Disparaging." When the bodhisattva was about to die, he heard millions of verses of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra in the sky and as a result his life span was increased by many eons, during which he taught the sutra. Those who had mocked him were reborn in AVĪCI hell, but were eventually reborn as his disciples and later became the five hundred bodhisattvas in the assembly of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra. The Buddha reveals that he had been the bodhisattva Sadāparibhuta in a previous life. The bodhisattva's famous statement, "I dare not belittle you because you will all become buddhas," came to be known as the "twenty-four character 'Lotus Sutra'" because in KUMĀRAJĪVA's translation, the line is twenty-four Sinographs long. The chapter was especially important to the Japanese reformer NICHIREN, who noted the importance of developing even a negative relationship with the true teaching, as evidenced by the fact that those who slandered Sadāparibhuta eventually became bodhisattvas themselves.
Saddharmapundarīkasutra. (T. Dam pa'i chos padma dkar po'i mdo; C. Miaofa lianhua jing/Fahua jing; J. Myohorengekyo/Hokekyo; K. Myobop yonhwa kyong/Pophwa kyong 妙法蓮華經/法華經). In Sanskrit, "Sutra of the White Lotus of the True Dharma," and known in English simply as the "Lotus Sutra"; perhaps the most influential of all MAHĀYĀNA sutras. The earliest portions of the text were probably composed as early as the first or second centuries of the Common Era; the text gained sufficient renown in India that a number of chapters were later interpolated into it. The sutra was translated into Chinese six times and three of those translations are extant. The earliest of those is that made by DHARMARAKsA, completed in 286. The most popular is that of KUMĀRAJĪVA in twenty-eight chapters, completed in 406. The sutra was translated into Tibetan in the early ninth century. Its first translation into a European language was that of EUGÈNE BURNOUF into French in 1852. The Saddharmapundarīkasutra is perhaps most famous for its parables, which present, in various versions, two of the sutra's most significant doctrines: skill-in-means (UPĀYA) and the immortality of the Buddha. In the parable of the burning house, a father lures his children from a conflagration by promising them three different carts, but when they emerge they find instead a single, magnificent cart. The three carts symbolize the sRĀVAKA vehicle, the PRATYEKABUDDHA vehicle, and the BODHISATTVA vehicle, while the one cart is the "one vehicle" (EKAYĀNA), the buddha vehicle (BUDDHAYĀNA). This parable indicates that the Buddha's previous teaching of three vehicles (TRIYĀNA) was a case of upāya, an "expedient device" or "skillful method" designed to attract persons of differing capacities to the dharma. In fact, there is only one vehicle, the vehicle whereby all beings proceed to buddhahood. In the parable of the conjured city, a group of weary travelers take rest in a magnificent city, only to be told later that it is a magical creation. This conjured city symbolizes the NIRVĀnA of the ARHAT; there is in fact no such nirvāna as a final goal in Buddhism, since all will eventually follow the bodhisattva's path to buddhahood. The apparently universalistic doctrine articulated by the sutra must be understood within the context of the sectarian polemics in which the sutra seems to have been written. The doctrine of upāya is intended in part to explain the apparent contradiction between the teachings that appear in earlier sutras and those of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra. The former are relegated to the category of mere expedients, with those who fail to accept the consummate teaching of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra as the authentic word of the Buddha (BUDDHAVACANA) repeatedly excoriated by the text itself. In a device common in Mahāyāna sutras, the sutra itself describes both the myriad benefits that accrue to those who recite, copy, and revere the sutra, as well as the misfortune that will befall those who fail to do so. The immortality of the Buddha is portrayed in the parable of the physician, in which a father feigns death in order to induce his sons to commit to memory an antidote to poison. The apparent death of the father is compared to the Buddha's entry into nirvāna, something which he only pretended to do in order to inspire his followers. Elsewhere in the sutra, the Buddha reveals that he did not achieve enlightenment as the prince Siddhārtha who left his palace, but in fact had achieved enlightenment eons before; the well-known version of his departure from the palace and successful quest for enlightenment were merely a display meant to inspire the world. The immortality of the Buddha (and other buddhas) is also demonstrated when a great STuPA emerges from the earth. When the door to the funerary reliquary is opened, ashes and bones are not found, as would be expected, but instead the living buddha PRABHuTARATNA, who appears in his stupa whenever the Saddharmapundarīkasutra is taught. sĀKYAMUNI joins him on his seat, demonstrating another central Mahāyāna doctrine, the simultaneous existence of multiple buddhas. Other famous events described in the sutra include the miraculous transformation of a NĀGA princess into a buddha after she presents a gem to sākyamuni and the tale of a bodhisattva who immolates himself in tribute to a previous buddha. The sutra contains several chapters that function as self-contained texts; the most popular of these is the chapter devoted to the bodhisattva AVALOKITEsVARA, which details his ability to rescue the faithful from various dangers. The Saddharmapundarīkasutra was highly influential in East Asia, inspiring both a range of devotional practices as well as the creation of new Buddhist schools that had no Indian analogues. The devotional practices include those extolled by the sutra itself: receiving and keeping the sutra, reading it, memorizing and reciting it, copying it, and explicating it. In East Asia, there are numerous tales of the miraculous benefits of each of these practices. The practice of copying the sutra (or having it copied) was a particularly popular form of merit-making either for oneself or for departed family members. Also important, especially in China, was the practice of burning either a finger or one's entire body as an offering to the Buddha, emulating the self-immolation of the bodhisattva BHAIsAJYARĀJA in the twenty-third chapter (see SHESHEN). In the domain of doctrinal developments, the Saddharmapundarīkasutra was highly influential across East Asia, its doctrine of upāya providing the rationale for the systems of doctrinal taxonomies (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) that are pervasive in East Asian Buddhist schools. In China, the sutra was the central text of the TIANTAI ZONG, where it received detailed exegesis by a number of important figures. The school's founder, TIANTAI ZHIYI, divided the sutra into two equal parts. In the first fourteen chapters, which he called the "trace teaching" (C. jimen, J. SHAKUMON), sākyamuni appears as the historical buddha. In the remaining fourteen chapters, which Zhiyi called the "origin teaching" (C. benmen, J. HONMON), sākyamuni reveals his true nature as the primordial buddha who achieved enlightenment many eons ago. Zhiyi also drew on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra in elucidating two of his most famous doctrines: the three truths (SANDI, viz., emptiness, the provisional, and the mean) and the notion of YINIAN SANQIAN, or "the trichiliocosm in an instant of thought." In the TENDAISHu, the Japanese form of Tiantai, the sutra remained supremely important, providing the scriptural basis for the central doctrine of original enlightenment (HONGAKU) and the doctrine of "achieving buddhahood in this very body" (SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU); in TAIMITSU, the tantric form of Tendai, sākyamuni Buddha was identified with MAHĀVAIROCANA. For the NICHIREN schools (and their offshoots, including SoKA GAKKAI), the Saddharmapundarīkasutra is not only its central text but is also considered to be the only valid Buddhist sutra for the degenerate age (J. mappo; see C. MOFA); the recitation of the sutra's title is the central practice in Nichiren (see NAMU MYoHoRENGEKYo). See also SADĀPARIBHuTA.
Saicho. (最澄) (767-822). In Japanese, "Most Pure"; the monk traditionally recognized as the founder of the TENDAISHu in Japan; also known as Dengyo Daishi (Great Master Transmission of the Teachings). Although the exact dates and place of Saicho's birth remain a matter of debate, he is said to have been born to an immigrant Chinese family in omi province east of HIEIZAN in 767. At age eleven, Saicho entered the local Kokubunji and studied under the monk Gyohyo (722-797), a disciple of the émigré Chinese monk Daoxuan (702-766). In 785, Saicho received the full monastic precepts at the monastery of ToDAIJI in Nara, after which he began a solitary retreat in a hermitage on Mt. Hiei. In 788, he built a permanent temple on the summit of Mt. Hiei. After Emperor Kanmu (r. 781-806) moved the capital to Kyoto in 794, the political significance of the Mt. Hiei community and thus Saicho seem to have attracted the attention of the emperor. In 797, Saicho was appointed a court priest (naigubu), and in 802 he was invited to the monastery of Takaosanji to participate in a lecture retreat, where he discussed the writings of the eminent Chinese monk TIANTAI ZHIYI on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA. Saicho and his disciple GISHIN received permission to travel to China in order to acquire Tiantai texts. In 804, they went to the monastery or Guoqingsi on Mt. Tiantai and studied under Daosui (d.u.) and Xingman (d.u.), disciples of the eminent Chinese Tiantai monk JINGQI ZHANRAN. Later, they are also known to have received BODHISATTVA precepts (bosatsukai) from Daosui at Longxingsi. He is also said to have received tantric initiation into the KONGoKAI and TAIZoKAI (RYoBU) MAndALAs from Shunxiao (d.u.). After nine and a half months in China, Saicho returned to Japan the next year with numerous texts, which he catalogued in his Esshuroku. Emperor Kanmu, who had been ill, asked Saicho to perform the esoteric rituals that he had brought back from China as a therapeutic measure. Saicho received permission to establish the Tendai sect and successfully petitioned for two Tendai monks to be ordained each year, one for doctrinal study and one to perform esoteric rituals. After the death of Kanmu in 806, little is known of Saicho's activities. In 810, he delivered a series of lectures at Mt. Hiei on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra, the SUVARnAPRABHĀSOTTAMASuTRA, and the RENWANG JING ("Scripture for Humane Kings"). In 812, Saicho also constructed a meditation hall known as the Hokkezanmaido. Later, Saicho is also said to have received kongokai initiation from KuKAI at the latter's temple Takaosanji, but their relations soured after a close disciple of Saicho's left Saicho for Kukai. Their already tenuous relationship was sundered completely when Saicho requested a tantric initiation from Kukai, who replied that Saicho would need to study for three years with Kukai first. Saicho then engaged the eminent Hossoshu (FAXIANG ZONG) monk Tokuitsu (d.u.) in a prolonged debate concerning the buddha-nature (see BUDDHADHĀTU, FOXING) and Tendai doctrines, such as original enlightenment (see HONGAKU). In response to Tokuitsu's treatises Busshosho and Chuhengikyo, Saicho composed his Shogonjikkyo, Hokke kowaku, and Shugo kokkaisho. Also at this time, Saicho began a prolonged campaign to have an independent MAHĀYĀNA ordination platform established at Mt. Hiei. He argued that the bodhisattva precepts as set forth in the FANWANG JING, traditionally seen as complementary to monastic ordination, should instead replace them. He argued that the Japanese were spiritually mature and therefore could dispense entirely with the HĪNAYĀNA monastic precepts and only take the Mahāyāna bodhisattva precepts. His petitions were repeatedly denied, but permission to establish the Mahāyāna ordination platform at Mt. Hiei was granted a week after his death. Before his death Saicho also composed the Hokke shuku and appointed Gishin as his successor.
Saidaiji. (西大寺). In Japanese, "Great Monastery to the West"; one of the seven major monasteries in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara (J. NANTO SHICHIDAIJI); the headquarters of the True Word Precepts (SHINGON-Ritsu) school in Japan. As its name implies, Saidaiji is located in the western part of Nara and was first constructed in 765 in accordance with a decree from SHoTOKU TAISHI (572-622). The monastery originally had two main halls, one dedicated to the buddha BHAIsAJYAGURU and the other to the bodhisattva MAITREYA. After conflagrations in 846 and 860, the monastery began to decline, but revived when Eison (Kosho bosatsu; 1201-1290) moved there in 1235 and made it the center of his movement to restore the VINAYA. After another major fire in 1502, the Tokugawa Shogunate supported a rebuilding project. The monastery enshrines four bronze statues of the four heavenly kings (CATURMAHĀRĀJA), dating to the Nara (710-794) period. The main hall is dominated by a statue of sĀKYAMUNI said to have been carved cooperatively by eleven sculptors in 1249. To its right is a statue of MANJUsRĪ riding a lion, to its left, a statue of Maitreya dating from 1322.
Saigyo. (西行) (1118-1190). A Japanese Buddhist poet of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods, especially famous for his many waka poems, a traditional style of Japanese poetry; his dharma name literally means "Traveling West," presumably referring to the direction of the PURE LAND of AMITĀBHA. Born as Sato Norikiyo into a family of the warrior class, he served during his youth as a guard for the retired emperor Toba (r. 1107-1123) before becoming a monk at the age of twenty-two. Although relatively little is known about his life, Saigyo seems to have traveled around the country on pilgrimage before eventually settling in relative seclusion on KoYASAN, the headquarters of the SHINGONSHu. Virtually all of his poems are written in the thirty-one-syllable waka form favored at court and cover most of the traditional topics addressed in such poems, including travel, reclusion, cherry blossoms, and the beauty of the moon in the night sky. His poetry also reflects the desolation and despondency that Japanese of his time may have felt was inevitable during the degenerate age of the dharma (J. mappo; C. MOFA). Saigyo's Sankashu ("Mountain Home Collection") includes some fifteen hundred poems written in the course of his career; ninety-four of these poems were included in the imperially sponsored waka collection, the Shinkokinshu ("New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times"), compiled in 1205, making him one of Japan's most renowned and influential poets.
Samyong Yujong. (四溟惟政) (1544-1610). Influential Korean SoN master during the Choson dynasty and important resistance leader during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions of the late sixteenth century. Yujong was a native of Miryang in present-day South Kyongsang province. He was ordained by a monk named Sinmuk (d.u.) at the monastery of CHIKCHISA on Mt. Hwanghak (in present-day North Kyongsang province). In 1561, he passed the clerical examinations (SŬNGKWA) for Son monks and was appointed the abbot of Chikchisa in 1573. He later became the disciple of the eminent Son master CH'oNGHo HYUJoNG (a.k.a. SoSAN TAESA). When the Japanese invaded the Korean peninsula in 1592, Yujong took over his teacher Hyujong's place as leader of the monks' militia (ŭisŭnggun) against the invading troops. Leading several thousand monk-soldiers, Yujong's army played a crucial role in several battles where the Japanese were defeated. After the war ended, Yujong is also said to have gone to Japan as an emissary of the Korean king to negotiate peace with the new shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616); he also helped to negotiate the release of some three thousand Korean hostages and prisoners of war taken during the invasion. For his valor during the war, Yujong was appointed prelate (p'ansa) of the SoN (Meditation) and KYO (Doctrine) schools of the Choson-dynasty ecclesia. By the eighteenth century, Yujong had become the object of a popular cult in Korea, and shrines to Yujong and his teacher Hyujong were erected around the country.
Sanboe. (三宝絵). In Japanese, "The Three Jewels," a work composed by Minamoto Tamenori (d. 1011); also known as Sanboekotoba. In this preface, Tamenori laments the fact that the world has now entered into the age of the final dharma (J. mappo; see C. MOFA) and speaks of the need to honor the DHARMA. Tamenori's text largely consists of three sections corresponding to the three jewels (RATNATRAYA), namely the Buddha, dharma, and saMgha. In the buddha-jewel section, Tamenori provides JĀTAKA stories from various sources. In the dharma-jewel section, he describes the history of Buddhism in Japan from the rise of SHoTOKU TAISHI (574-622) to the end of the Nara period. In the saMgha-jewel section, Tamenori relies on many temple records and texts to speak of the representative ceremonies and rituals of Japanese Buddhism, their provenance, and the biographies of some important monks who carried out these events. The Sanboe serves as a valuable source for studying the history of Buddhism during the Nara period.
sandaihiho. (三大秘法). In Japanese, "three great esoteric laws," three secret teachings that are presumed to have been hidden between the lines of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") until NICHIREN (1222-1282) discovered them and revealed them to the world. The three are: (1) the DAI-GOHONZON (J. honmon no honzon), the main object of worship in the NICHIREN SHoSHu school, which is a cosmological chart (MAndALA) of the universe surrounding an inscription of homage to the title of the "Lotus Sutra" and Nichiren's own name; (2) the sanctuary (J. honmon no kaidan) where the dai-gohonzon is enshrined at KAISEKIJI, the head temple of Nichiren Shoshu; and (3) the teaching of NAM MYoHoRENGEKYo (J. honmon no DAIMOKU), "Homage to the 'Lotus Sutra,'" the recitation that is central to Nichiren practice.
Sanjusangendo. (三十三間堂). In Japanese, "Hall of Thirty-Three Bays"; a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, also known as "Hall of the Lotus King" (J. Rengeoin); it is part of the Myohoin (Sublime Dharma Hall), a temple affiliated with the Japanese TENDAISHu. The number thirty-three refers to the belief that the BODHISATTVA Kannon (S. AVALOKITEsVARA) saves humanity by transforming himself into thirty-three different figures. Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) completed the temple at the command of former emperor Goshirakawa (1127-1192) in 1164. After a fire destroyed the temple hall in 1249, the reconstruction of the building was completed in 1266 by former emperor Gosaga (1220-1272). The principal image of the temple is the "Eleven-Headed and Thousand-Armed Kannon" (see S. EKĀDAsAMUKHĀVALOKITEsVARA and SĀHASRABHUJASĀHASRANETRĀVALOKITEsVARA). This deity was made of Japanese cypress in the yosegi zukuri style (viz., using several blocks of wood) by the artist Tankei (1173-1256) during the Kamakura period. It has eleven faces on its head and twenty-one pairs of arms that symbolize his one thousand arms. On both sides of the central seated statue are one thousand more standing images of the same type of Kannon, in five rows, each about five feet five inches in height, each said to be different from the other. Along with these statues, the school of Unkei (1151-1223) and Tankei also made twenty-eight statues of guardian deities. Additionally, flanking the right and left side of this arrangement are the statues of the Wind God (J. Fujin) and the Thunder God (J. Raijin), respectively.
sanmitsu. (C. sanmi, K. sammil 三密). In Japanese, "three secrets" or "three mysteries"; an esoteric Buddhist teaching that posits that the body, speech, and mind of sentient beings, which are understood to be the source of the three forms of KARMAN in standard Buddhist doctrine, abide in a nondual relationship with the body, speech, and mind of MAHĀVAIROCANA, the DHARMAKĀYA buddha. All speech is therefore in actuality the speech of this buddha, all forms are his body, and all mental formations are at their root the mind of Mahāvairocana. The doctrine of the three mysteries appears in various strata of MAHĀYĀNA materials, but is featured most prominently in esoteric literature. In China, TIANTAI thinkers such as TIANTAI ZHIYI and ZHANRAN argued that the Buddha taught via his NIRMĀnAKĀYA, SAMBHOGAKĀYA, or dharmakāya, depending on the capacities of his audience. On another level, however, these three bodies of the Buddha were said to be nondual. In Japan, KuKAI argued that all beings had the capacity to experience the teaching of the dharmakāya directly, a position that later Japanese TENDAI thinkers argued was implicit in the earlier Chinese Tiantai teachings on the three mysteries. Kukai's sanmitsu theory held that ordinary beings may rapidly realize their buddha-nature through ABHIsEKA, or ritual initiation, and ADHIstHĀNA, or ritual empowerment, which allowed for the efficacious performance of MUDRĀ, the chanting of MANTRA and DHĀRAnĪ, and the contemplation of the MAndALA of a chosen object of devotion. These forms of initiation and empowerment, when followed by these three modes of ritual comportment, were said to reveal that the sublime reality of buddhahood is alive within the mundane reality that beings ordinarily inhabit. Once the body, speech, and mind of beings and buddhas are recognized as nondual, an ordinary being is then able to acquire SIDDHI, or supernatural powers, which may be used to effect change in the world, up to and including achieving buddhahood in this very body (J. SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU; C. JISHEN CHENGFO).
sanyao. (J. san'yo; K. samyo 三要). In Chinese, the "three essentials," of meditation practice in the CHAN school: (1) the faculty of great faith (da xingen; cf. sRADDHĀ and INDRIYA), (2) great ferocity or tenacity of purpose (da fenzhi), and (3) the sensation of great doubt (da YIQING). These essentials are specifically relevant to cultivation of the "Chan of observing the meditative topic" (KANHUA CHAN), or "questioning meditation." This list was first compiled by the Yuan-dynasty Chan monk GAOFENG YUANMIAO (1238-1295) in his Gaofeng heshang chanyao, better known as simply the CHANYAO ("Essentials of Chan"; K. Sonyo); the list figures prominently in the presentation of SoN in the SoN'GA KWIGAM by the Korean Son monk CH'oNGHo HYUJoNG (1520-1604), whence it enters into the Japanese ZEN tradition. As Gaofeng explains them, the faculty of great faith (sraddhendriya) refers to the steadfastness of belief in the inherency of the buddha-nature (FOXING) as the ground of enlightenment. Great ferocity means intense passion toward practice, which he compares to the emotions you would feel if you came across your father's murderer. Gaofeng describes the sensation of doubt (YIQING) regarding the intent behind Chan meditative topics (HUATOU) as like the anxiety and anticipation you feel when you are about to be exposed for some heinous act you committed. All three of these factors are essential, Gaofeng says, if the adept is to have any hope of mastering the kanhua Chan technique.
Sasaki, Ruth Fuller. (1892-1967). An influential Western scholar of the CHAN (ZEN) Buddhist tradition. Ruth Fuller Everett had been married to Charles Everett, who died in 1940. She was introduced to Asian religions while living in Nyack, New York, and more specifically to Buddhism while on a world cruise that took her and her husband to Japan in 1930. There, she met DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI. Two years later, she returned to Japan and spent more than three months at the monastery of NANZENJI, where she was allowed to practice with the monks. She met ALAN WATTS when she traveled to London with her daughter Eleanor, who married Watts in 1938, the same year that Fuller joined Sokei-an, Shigetsu Sasaki's Buddhist Society of America, and began to edit the Society's Journal (The Cat's Yawn). Fuller and Sasaki translated the YUANJUE JING ("Perfect Enlightenment Sutra") together. Sasaki was imprisoned in 1942 during the American internment of Americans of Japanese heritage in World War II. In prison, his health deteriorated. Fuller and Sasaki were married in 1944, but he died in 1945, at which time Fuller became the leader of the Zen Institute in New York City. She moved to Japan in 1949 in order to find a teacher for the Institute and finish translating her husband's work. Fuller was ordained in 1958, and traveled between Japan and the United States until her death in 1967. She published Zen Dust with Miura Isshu, and Zen: A Method for Religious Awakening.
Satori: The Japanese Zen Buddhist term for “enlightenment,” as the culmination of meditation.
satori. (悟). In Japanese, "awakening," "enlightenment." See WU; DUNWU; BODHI.
satsuma ware ::: --> A kind of ornamental hard-glazed pottery made at Satsuma in Kiushu, one of the Japanese islands.
seiban. (西班). In Japanese, "west rank"; the offices of the prefects (C. TOUSHOU) at a CHAN or ZEN monastery. These offices are often located on the west side of the monastery and are hence referred to as the west rank. On the east are the stewards (C. ZHISHI), who are thus referred to as the east section or rank. The CHANYUAN QINGGUI, for instance, refers to the stewards as the east section (C. dongxu) and the prefects as the west section (C. xixu).
sekishu koan. (隻手公案). In Japanese, "the case of one-hand [clapping]"; a famous koan (C. GONG'AN) attributed to the Japanese RINZAI ZEN master HAKUIN EKAKU (1685-1768), in which he asks, "What is the sound of one hand [clapping]?" The koan is included in his 1752 collection Yabukoji, along with Hakuin's autocommentary. The sekishu koan came to be used within some Rinzai kanna Zen (see KANHUA CHAN) systems as the first case given to neophytes in Zen training and, along with the mu koan (C. WU GONG'AN), continues to be one of the emblematic koans used in Japanese Rinzai Zen circles.
Senchakushu. (選擇集). In Japanese, "Collection of Selections," composed by the Japanese PURE LAND monk HoNEN in 1198; also known as Senjakushu or Senchaku hongan nenbutsushu ("Collection of Selections on Nenbutsu and the Original Vow"). Honen's Senchakushu is one of the most influential texts in Japan on the practice of nenbutsu (see NIANFO), i.e., the invocation of the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA; it is also traditionally regarded as the founding scripture of the JoDOSHu tradition of Japanese pure land. Relying on the three pure land sutras (JINGTU SANBUJING, viz., the longer and shorter SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA and the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING) and a number of important commentaries by SHANDAO and TANLUAN, Honen attempted to elucidate the importance of the practice of nenbutsu in the context of Amitābha's original vows as described in the Sukhāvatīvyuhasutra. He first cites DAOCHUO's division of Buddhist practice into that of the sacred path (that is, the traditional Buddhist path) and the pure land path, and then cites SHANDAO's division into proper and miscellaneous. These divisions are used as an argument for the practice of exclusive nenbutsu. Honen then demonstrates that exclusive nenbutsu is the practice advocated by Amitābha in his original vows. In the next few sections of his text, Honen also mentions the benefits of exclusive nenbutsu and explains why this practice is most appropriate for those in the age of the final dharma (J. mappo; see MOFA). The other sections of the Senchakushu provide further scriptural evidence for the importance of nenbutsu and discuss the proper method for practicing it. At Honen's request, the work was not widely circulated until after his death. Numerous commentaries on this text exist in Japanese.
Sengai Gibon. (仙崖義梵) (1750-1837). Japanese ZEN monk in the RINZAISHu, known for his whimsical teachings, his poetry, and especially for his calligraphy and sumi-e paintings. His best-known work in the West is a simple ink drawing of a circle, triangle, and square. He spent much of his life at SHoFUKUJI, where he served as abbot.
sengtang. (J. sodo; K. sŭngdang 僧堂). In Chinese, the "SAMGHA hall," or "monks' hall"; also known as the yuntang (lit. cloud hall; J. undo) or xuanfochang (site for selecting buddhas). The saMgha hall was the center of monastic practice in the Chinese CHAN school. The hall, often large enough to hold hundreds of monks, was traditionally built on the west side of a Chan monastery. The foundation of the saMgha hall is traditionally attributed to the Chan master BAIZHANG QINGGUI (749-814). According to Baizhang's CHANMEN GUISHI, Chan monks were obligated throughout the day and night to eat, sleep, and meditate in the saMgha hall. There, they would sit according to seniority on a long platform. A similar description of the saMgha hall is also found in the CHANYUAN QINGGUI of CHANGLU ZONGZE (d.u.; fl. c. late-eleventh to early-twelfth century). During the Song dynasty, the saMgha hall became incorporated into the monastic plans of all large public monasteries (SHIFANG CHA) in China, regardless of sectarian affiliation. The saMgha hall was introduced into Japan by the SoToSHu master DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253), who built the first sodo in 1236 at the monastery of Koshoji; for this reason, the sodo is most closely associated with the Soto tradition. Dogen also wrote detailed instructions in his BENDoHo ("Techniques for Pursuing the Way," 1246) on how to practice in the sodo. Stemming from a practice initiated by DAO'AN, an image of the ARHAT PIndOLA was usually placed in the middle of the saMgha hall. Sometimes an image of MANJUsRĪ, ĀJNĀTAKAUndINYA, or MAHĀKĀsYAPA was installed in lieu of Pindola. The Soto Zen tradition, for instance, often places a statue of MaNjusrī in the guise of a monk in its saMgha halls. The Japanese RINZAISHu chose to call their main monks' hall a zendo (meditation hall) rather than a saMgha hall. Unlike the Soto sodo, which was used for eating, sleeping, and meditating, the Rinzai zendo was reserved solely for meditation (J. ZAZEN). Japanese oBAKUSHu, following Ming dynasty (1368-1644) Chinese customs, also called their main hall a zendo. In Korea, the term sŭngdang is no longer used and the main meditation hall is typically known as a sonbang (lit. meditation room). See also PRAHĀnAsĀLĀ.
sen ::: n. --> A Japanese coin, worth about one half of a cent. ::: adv., prep., & conj. --> Since.
Sen-rin: In Japanese mystic lore, hermits of the mountains, masters of all magic arts.
Sensoji. (淺草寺). In Japanese, "Low Grass Monastery," located in the Asakusa (lit. Low Grass) district of Tokyo; it is the oldest monastery in the current Japanese capital. Legend says that in 628 a statue of the BODHISATTVA Kannon (AVALOKITEsVARA) was found by fishermen in the Sumida River and the village elder turned his home into a shrine for the image; this image remains an important object of veneration in Japanese Buddhism. Originally called Komagatado, the current monastery was built in 645 and is the oldest in Tokyo. Sensoji was formerly associated with the TENDAISHu (C. TIANTAI ZONG), but has been independent since after World War II. The monastery is entered through the Kaminarimon, or Thunder Gate, which is graced by a gigantic paper lantern that is vividly painted to evoke storm clouds and lightning. This gate was built by the governor of the Musashi District, Tairano Kinmasa, in 942, as was the inner Hozo gate; both have subsequently been reconstructed following fires. The main Kannondo hall at Sensoji is devoted to Avalokitesvara; it burned down during a World War II air raid but has been rebuilt. The monastery grounds also include a five-story pagoda, a beautiful garden, and many oracle stalls (omikuji). Next door is an important SHINTo shrine, the Asakusa Jinja, which may partially explain why Sensoji is the site of the biggest festival in Tokyo, the Sanja Matsuri, which is held annually in the late spring.
Sesshu Toyo. (雪舟等楊) (1420-1506). A Japanese monk-painter of the Muromachi (1337-1573) period, best known for his use of realism in landscape painting. He was born to a warrior family in Bitchu province (present-day Okayama Prefecture, in the southwestern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu) and became a ZEN monk in the RINZAISHu tradition in 1431. From early in his monastic career, however, Sesshu (lit. Snow Boat) showed more interest in painting than in Zen training. Around 1440, he moved to SHoKOKUJI, one of the GOZAN (five mountains) temples of Kyoto, where he received formal training in Chinese painting of the Song-dynasty (960-1279) style from Tensho Shubun (d. c. 1444-1450), the most famous monk-painter of his time. In 1467, Sesshu traveled to China, where he studied the emerging Ming style of painting. After returning to Japan in 1469, he established an atelier in present-day oita Prefecture in Kyushu; subsequently, he moved to present-day Yamaguchi prefecture in the far west of Honshu in 1486. Using his "splashed-ink" (haboku) style, he established a style of realism in landscape painting, which included bold brush strokes and splashes of ink, with subtle tones. Many students gathered around him, later forming what became known as the Unkoku-rin (Cloud Valley) school, after the name of the monastery where Sesshu served as abbot. Sesshu's best-known works include his 1486 Sansui chokan ("Long Landscape Scroll"), a fifty-foot-long scroll depicting the four seasons; Haboku sansui ("Splashed-Ink Landscape") of 1495; and the Ama-no-Hashidate zu ("View of Ama-no-Hashidate") of c. 1501-1505, which offers an unusual bird's-eye view of a picturesque sandbar, bay, and mountains in Tango province facing the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Sesshu is often judged to be the greatest of all Japanese painters.
shakumon. (C. jimen; K. chongmun 迹門). In Japanese, lit. "trace teaching," or "teaching involving traces"; the provisional teaching of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), which appears in the first half of the twenty-four chapters of the scripture; in distinction to HONMON (fundamental teaching), the definitive final fourteen chapters of the scripture. The term is especially important in both the TIANTAI (J. TENDAI) and NICHIREN-oriented schools of East Asian Buddhism. The Tiantai master TIANTAI ZHIYI (538-597) first applied the two terms to refer to these two distinctive parts of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra, adapting the terms traces (C. ji, J. shaku) and root (C. ben, J. hon) that had originally been used by SENGZHAO (374-414), a disciple of KUMĀRAJĪVA (344-413), to explain the inconceivable relationship between skillful means (UPĀYA) and enlightened wisdom (PRAJNĀ). Zhiyi made a distinction between the transient buddha who attained the buddhahood during his lifetime in India and the universal buddha who attained buddhahood infinite numbers of KALPAs ago. Zhiyi regarded shakumon to be the teaching of the transient buddha, and honmon the teaching of the universal buddha. The shakumon of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra is also called the practice or causal section of the sutra, since it details the stages of BODHISATTVA practices over countless lifetimes that serve as the prerequisites of future buddhahood. The shakumon thus emphasizes the various skillful means that lead to the one buddha vehicle (see YISHENG; EKAYĀNA).
Shaku Soen. (釋宗演) (1859-1919). Influential early ZEN figure in the West. Ordained as a novice in the RINZAISHu at the age of twelve, Shaku Soen studied under the Rinzai master Imakita Kosen (1816-1892). Shaku Soen trained under Kosen at the famous ENGAKUJI monastery in Kamakura, receiving dharma transmission, and the authority to teach, at the age of twenty-four. He attended Keio University and then traveled to Ceylon to study Pāli and live as a THERAVĀDA monk. Upon his return, he became chief abbot of Engakuji in 1892. He gave instruction in Zen meditation to laymen and laywomen, both in Kamakura and Tokyo. One of his most influential students was DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI. In 1893, Shaku Soen was chosen to represent the Zen tradition at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. While in the United States, he met PAUL CARUS, and later arranged for D. T. Suzuki to work with Carus in LaSalle, Illinois. He served as Buddhist chaplain to the Japanese First Army Division after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. He later lectured on Zen in Europe, America, India, and Ceylon. He spent the remainder of his life lecturing extensively on Zen to lay audiences. He served as president of Rinzai College of Hanazono University in Kyoto from 1914 to 1917, before returning as abbot of Engakuji. His 1906 Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot was the first book on Zen to appear in English.
Shandao. (J. Zendo; K. Sondo 善導) (613-681). In Chinese, "Guide to Virtue"; putative third patriarch of the Chinese PURE LAND tradition; also known as Great Master Zhongnan. At an early age, Shandao became a monk under a certain DHARMA master Mingsheng (d.u.), with whom he studied the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA and the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA; he later devoted himself to the study of the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, which became one of his major inspirations. In 641, Shandao visited the monk DAOCHUO (562-645) at the monastery of Xuanzhongsi, where he is said to have cultivated vaipulya repentance (fangdeng canfa). Shandao also continued to train himself there in the visualization practices prescribed in the Guan Wuliangshou jing, which led to a profound vision of the buddha AMITĀBHA's PURE LAND (JINGTU) of SUKHĀVATĪ. Shandao subsequently eschewed philosophical exegesis and instead devoted himself to continued recitation of the Buddha's name (NIANFO) and visualization of the pure land as detailed in the Guan jing. After Daochuo's death, he remained in the Zongnan mountains before eventually moving to the Chinese capital of Chang'an, where he had great success in propagating the pure land teachings at the monastery of Guangmingsi. Shandao is also known to have painted numerous images of the pure land that appeared in his vision and presented them to his devotees. He was also famous for his continuous chanting of the AMITĀBHASuTRA. Shandao's influential commentary on the Guan Wuliangshou jing was favored by the Japanese monk HoNEN, whose teachings were the basis of the Japanese pure land tradition of JoDOSHu.
Shasekishu. (沙石集). In Japanese, "Sand and Pebbles Collection"; an anthology of edifying folkloric tales from the Kamakura period (1185-1333). The collection was compiled by a RINZAISHu monk named MUJu ICHIEN (1227-1312) between 1279 and 1283 and contains 150 stories in a total of ten rolls. After finishing his initial compilation, Muju continued to add the stories to the collection, so there are different editions of varying length. The preface to the collection explains the title: "Those who search for gold extract it from sand; those who treasure jewels gather pebbles that they then polish." The collection, therefore, seeks to explain profound Buddhist truths as they are found in mundane affairs. Muju demonstrates throughout the collection his belief in "crazy words and embellished phrases" (kyogen kigo) as an expedient means of articulating ultimate religious goals. He even argues that the traditional waka style of Japanese poetry is in fact DHĀRAnĪ, a mystic code that encapsulates the essence of Buddhist teachings. Most of the stories in the collection offer edifying lessons in such basic Buddhist beliefs as nonattachment and karmic retribution and in such ethical values as loyalty, filial piety, and fidelity. The idea of expedient means (UPĀYA) is also applied to the various Buddhist schools and to Japanese traditional religion: all the various teachings of Buddhism are depicted as expedient means of conveying the religion's beliefs, and Muju denounces Buddhist practitioners who exclusively promote the teachings of only their own sects. The collection also introduced the idea of the "unity of SHINTo and Buddhism" (SHINBUTSU SHuGo) by describing Japanese indigenous spirits, or KAMI, as various manifestations of the Buddha. The humorous tone of the collection attracted many readers during the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), when it was reprinted several times.
shichido garan. (七堂伽藍). In Japanese, "seven-halled temple"; an early Japanese monastic layout consisting of seven main structures (shichido). The oldest extant example of this layout in Japan can be seen in the Kudara (viz., the Korean Paekche) layout at HoRYuJI. The seven halls of the monasteries built in the Nara period (646-794) generally included the golden hall (kondo), pagoda (to), lecture hall (kodo), bell tower (shuro), scriptorium (kyozo), monks' dormitories (sobo), and refectory (jikido). This term, however, does not seem to appear in any Chinese or Japanese materials predating its use by the Japanese monk Ichijo Kanera (1402-1481) to refer to the layout of ZEN monasteries. His list of the seven halls consists of the mountain gate (sanmon), buddha hall (butsuden), DHARMA hall (hatto), kitchen-office (kuin), SAMGHA hall (sodo; see SENGTANG), bathhouse (yokushitsu), and latrine (seijo or tosu). The seven-hall design is now commonly laid out in anthropomorphic form, consisting of a central axis-the mountain gate (the privates), buddha hall (heart), and dharma hall (head)-flanked by two pairs of buildings, namely (1) the latrine (left leg) and bathhouse (right leg) and (2) the saMgha hall (left arm) and kitchen-office (right arm).
Shichifukujin. (七福神). In Japanese, "Seven Gods of Good Fortune"; an assembly of seven deities dating from at least the fifteenth century, which gained popularity in Japan's folk religious setting and are still well known today. Those who have faith in the group are said to gain happiness and good fortune in their lives. Before their grouping, each of the individual gods existed independently and historically shared little in common. Of the seven, Ebisu is the only god with an identity linked to the Japanese islands. Daikokuten (C. Dahei tian; S. MAHĀKĀLA), Bishamonten (C. Pishamen tian; S. VAIsRAVAnA), and Benzaiten (C. Biancai tian; S. SARASVATĪ) originated in India, and Hotei (C. BUDAI, d. 917), Jurojin (C. Shoulaoren), and Fukurokuju (C. Fulushou) come from the Chinese Buddho-Daoist traditions. Their grouping into seven gods of good fortune likely occurred in the Japanese Kansai region, with the commerce-affiliated Daikoku and Ebisu gaining initial popularity among merchants. Early mention of them appears in a reference from 1420, when they were said to have been escorted in procession through Fushimi, a southern ward of Kyoto, in imitation of a daimyo procession. ¶ Ebisu (a.k.a. Kotoshiro-nushi-no-mikoto, the abandoned child of Izanami and Izanagi) is the god of fishermen and the sea, commerce, good fortune, and labor. Among its etymological roots, the term "ebisu" traces back to the Ainu ethnic group of Hokkaido, connecting them to fishermen who came from abroad. Ebisu is often depicted with a fishing rod in one hand and either a large red sea bream (J. tai) or a folding fan in the other. Since the inception of the Shichifukujin, he is often paired with Daikokuten as either son or brother. ¶ Daikokuten, or "Great Black Spirit," comes originally from India (where is he is called Mahākāla); among the Shichifukujin, he is known as the god of wealth, agriculture, and commerce. Typically portrayed as standing on two bales of rice, Daikokuten carries a sack of treasure over his shoulder and a magic mallet in one hand. He is also considered to be a deity of the kitchen and is sometimes found in monasteries and private kitchens. Prior to the Tokugawa period, he was called Sanmen Daikokuten (Three-Headed Daikokuten), a wrathful protector of the three jewels (RATNATRAYA). ¶ Bishamonten, also originally from India (where he is called Vaisravana), is traditionally the patron deity of the state and warriors. He is often depicted holding a lance in one hand and a small pagoda in the palm of his other hand with which he rewards those he deems worthy. Through these associations, he came to represent wealth and fortune. His traditional residence is Mt. SUMERU, where he protects the Buddha's dais and listens to the dharma. ¶ Benzaiten ([alt. Myoonten]; C. Miaoyin tian) is the Indian goddess Sarasvatī. She is traditionally considered to be a goddess of music, poetry, and learning but among the Shichifukujin, she also represents good fortune. She takes two forms: one playing a lute in both hands, the other with eight arms. ¶ Hotei is the Japanese name of Budai (d. 916), a Chinese thaumaturge who is said to have been an incarnation of the BODHISATTVA MAITREYA (J. Miroku bosatsu). The only historical figure among the Shichifukujin, Hotei represents contentment and happiness. Famous for his fat belly and broad smile, Hotei is often depicted holding a large cloth bag (Hotei literally means "hemp sack"). From this bag, which never empties, he feeds the poor and needy. In some places, he has also become the patron saint of restaurants and bars, since those who drink and eat well are said to be influenced by Hotei. ¶ Jurojin and Fukurokuju, often associated with one another and said to share the same body, originated within the Chinese Daoist tradition. Jurojin (lit. "Gaffer Long Life"), the deity of longevity within the Shichifukujin, is possibly a historical figure from the late eleventh through twelfth century. Depicted as an old man with a long, white beard, he is often accompanied by a crane or white stag. Fukurokuju (lit. "Wealth, Happiness, and Longevity") has an elongated forehead, a long, white beard and usually a staff in one hand; he is likely based on a mythical Daoist hermit from the Song period. ¶ This set of seven gods is most commonly worshipped in Japan. There are, however, other versions. Especially noteworthy is a listing found in the 1697 Nihon Shichifukujinden ("The Exposition on the Japanese Seven Gods of Good Fortune"), according to which Fukurokuju and Jurojin are treated as a single god named Nankyoku rojin and a new god, Kichijoten (C. Jixiang tian; S. srīmahādevī), the goddess of happiness or auspiciousness, is added to the group.
shikan taza. (C. zhiguan dazuo; K. chigwan t'ajwa 祇/只管打坐). In Japanese, "just sitting"; a style of meditation emblematic of the Japanese SoToSHu of ZEN, in which the act of sitting itself is thought to be the manifestation of enlightenment. The Soto school attributes the introduction of this style of practice to DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253), who claimed to have learned it from his Chinese CAODONG ZONG teacher TIANTONG RUJING (1162-1227). In this degenerate age of the dharma (J. mappo; C. MOFA), Soto claims, a radical simplification of practice was necessary. Rather than attempting to master the full range of meditative techniques used for concentrating the mind, such as counting the breaths (J. susokukan) or investigating a Zen question (J. kanna Zen; C. KANHUA CHAN), Dogen is claimed to have advocated "just sitting" in the posture that had been used by the buddhas (e.g., sĀKYAMUNI's seven days beneath the BODHI TREE) and the patriarchs of Zen (e.g., BODHIDHARMA's "wall contemplation," C. BIGUAN). As the later Soto school interprets shikan taza, by maintaining this posture of "just sitting," the mind would also become stabilized and concentrated in a state of full clarity and alertness, free from any specific content (i.e., "with body and mind sloughed off," J. SHINJIN DATSURAKU). By adopting this posture of the buddhas and patriarchs, the student's own body and mind would thus become identical to the body and mind of his spiritual ancestors. Shikan taza is therefore portrayed as the most genuine form of meditation in which a Buddhist adept can engage. The Soto tradition also deploys shikan taza polemically against the rival RINZAISHu, whose use of koans (C. GONG'AN) in meditation training was portrayed as an inferior, expedient attempt at concentration. In Dogen's own writings, however, there is little of this later Soto portrayal of the psychological dimensions of "just sitting"; instead, Dogen uses shikan taza simply as a synonym of "sitting in meditation" (zazen, C. ZUOCHAN), and may have spent most of his time while "just sitting" in the contemplation of koans.
shinbutsu bunri. (神佛分離). In Japanese, lit. "separation of spirits and buddhas" (spirits here referring to the deities, or KAMI, associated with the indigenous Japanese religion now referred to as SHINTo); an official policy established at the beginning of the Meiji period (1868-1912) to dissociate all aspects of indigenous Japanese religion, or Shinto, from Buddhism. Prior to this separation, Buddhist temples (J. tera) and Shinto shrines (J. jinja) were intimately connected complexes (J. jinguji; see SHINBUTSU SHuGo), as were the practice, beliefs, and vocations of the two traditions. The policy of shinbutsu bunri was based in part on an argument first broached by Nativist scholars during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868): viz., that Shinto reflected Japan's true spirit, while the "foreign" imports of Buddhism and Confucianism had corrupted Japanese culture and tainted Japanese indigenous religion. The Meiji government built its foundation on this rhetoric by making Shinto a state cult and asserting that the emperor was a descendant of the indigenous deities (kami) described in the Kojiki (712), an early historical collection. Shinbutsu bunri was a successful government policy in that it helped to strengthen Shinto and give the tradition its own identity independent from the Buddhist institutions that had been patronized by the earlier Tokugawa bakufu government. Moreover, shrines around the country were ranked in a national hierarchy and provided with state funding; all citizens were also required to register as adherents at these shrines. The policy, however, also had a damaging impact on both Shinto and Buddhism. By forcibly separating many practices that had previously been shared between Shinto and Buddhism, shinbutsu bunri ended up replacing many long-held traditions in local communities with a newly imposed set of national practices and beliefs. State-sponsored shrines were now expected to comply with nationally oriented ceremonies and carry out government-specific agendas. Many smaller Shinto shrines, which did not receive state sponsorship, were forced to merge with larger regional shrines, thus severely diminishing their presence in many communities. As for Buddhist institutions, the government remained silent as a wave of anti-Buddhist sentiment known as HAIBUTSU KISHAKU swept the country, leaving temples to face targeted violence and destruction. The mountain complexes of SHUGENDo, which had never differentiated between the two traditions, received the harshest treatment from the policy: all their established practices were abolished and Shugendo priests were forced either to laicize or to become Shinto priests.
shinbutsu shugo. (神佛習合). In Japanese, "unity of spirits and buddhas" (spirits here referring to the KAMI associated with the indigenous Japanese religion now referred to as SHINTo). The practice of associating local gods and spirits with buddhas and BODHISATTVAs is documented as early as the late seventh century. By the eighth century, Shinto shrines (J. jinja) and Buddhist temples (J. TERA) were being jointly constructed beside one another. Over the course of the Heian period (794-1185), Buddhism gradually became ingrained deeply within local belief systems in communities across Japan, requiring some sort of accommodation between local and imported religions. As Buddhism became central to Japanese religious practice, the kami were sometimes either categorized as inferior beings subject to suffering who therefore needed the guidance of the Buddhist teachings, or tasked with guarding Buddhist temples and shrines. Ultimately, kami were redefined, using the principle of HONJI SUIJAKU, as local manifestations of the universal deities of the Buddhist religion. The development of temple-shrine complexes (J. jinguji), which did not differentiate between the two traditions, followed, although the shrine priests were generally subservient to their better educated, and politically and socially connected, Buddhist counterparts. During the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), tensions appeared as Nativist scholars began identifying "Shinto" as Japan's pure, indigenous religion, which they advocated should be decontaminated of so-called "foreign" elements like Buddhism and Confucianism. When the Meiji government took power in 1868, it instituted a policy known as SHINBUTSU BUNRI, which forcibly separated the putative native "Shinto" tradition from Buddhism. See also HAIBUTSU KISHAKU.
Shinchi Kakushin. (心地覺心) (1207-1298). Japanese ZEN teacher in the RINZAISHu, who is retrospectively regarded as the founder of the small FUKESHu branch of the Zen tradition; also known by his posthumous title HOTTo KOKUSHI. He became a monk at the age of fourteen in the SHINGONSHu esoteric tradition, and received full ordination at twenty-nine at ToDAIJI in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan. Shinchi studied esoteric teachings at KoYASAN, the headquarters of the Shingon school, and engaged in Zen training under the Rinzai master Taiko Gyoyu (1163-1241) and the SoToSHu master DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253). Shinchi left for China in 1249 to study under the Chinese Linji master WUZHUN SHIFAN (1177-1249). Unfortunately, the master died before Shinchi arrived, so Shichi instead traveled to Hangzhou to study under WUMEN HUIKAI (1183-1260), in the YANGQI PAI of the LINJI ZONG. Wumen is said to have given Shinchi dharma transmission (CHUANFA) after just six months of training. Shinchi returned to Japan in 1254 with the master's robe and portrait, as well as a copy of the master's WUMEN GUAN, which was the first introduction of that famous GONG'AN (J. koan) collection to the Japanese isles. In present-day Wakayama prefecture, Shinchi built a monastery called Saihoji, which was later renamed Kokokuji. Shinchi resided there for the rest of his life, but often traveled to Kyoto to lecture on Buddhism before the retired monarchs Gofukakusa (r. 1246-1259), Kameyama (r. 1259-74) and Gouda (r. 1274-87). Kameyama granted him the honorary title "Hotto Zenji" (Zen Master Dharma Lamp). After his death, the Emperor Godaigo (r. 1318-1339) later bestowed on him the posthumous title of Hotto Enmyo Kokushi (State Preceptor Lamp of Dharma that is Perfectly Bright). Shinchi came to be regarded as the founder of the Fukeshu, a smaller secondary school of Japanese Zen, whose itinerant practitioners played the bamboo flute (shakuhachi) as a form of meditation and wore a distinctive bamboo hat that covered the entire face. The school was proscribed in 1871 and vanished from the scene.
Shingonshu. (眞言宗). In Japanese, lit. "True Word School." Shingon is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese term ZHENYAN (true word), which in turn is a translation of the Sanskrit term MANTRA. In Japan, Shingon has also come to serve as the name for the various esoteric (MIKKYo) traditions that traced their teachings back to the eminent Japanese monk KuKAI. In his voluminous oeuvre, such as the HIMITSU MANDARA JuJuSHINRON, HIZo HoYAKU, Sokushin jobutsugi, and Shoji jissogi, Kukai laid the foundations of a new esoteric discourse that allowed the Buddhist institutions of the Heian period to replace Confucian principles as the ruling ideology of Japan. Kukai was able to effect this change by presenting the court and the Buddhist establishment with an alternative conception of Buddhist power, ritual efficacy, and the power of speech acts. Through Kukai's newly imported ritual systems, monks and other initiated individuals were said to be able to gain access to the power of the cosmic buddha Mahāvairocana, understood to be the DHARMAKĀYA, leading to all manner of feats, from bringing rain and warding off disease and famine, to achieving buddhahood in this very body (SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU). Kukai taught the choreographed ritual engagement with MAndALA, the recitation of MANTRAs and DHĀRAnĪ, and the performance of MUDRĀ and other ritual postures that were said to transform the body, speech, and mind of the practitioner into the body, speech, and mind of a particular buddha. Kukai's ritual teachings grew in importance to the point that he was appointed to the highest administrative post in the Buddhist establishment (sogo). From this position, Kukai was able to establish ordination platforms at the major monasteries in Nara and the capital in Kyoto. Later, the emperor gave Kukai both ToJI in Kyoto and KoYASAN, which subsequently came to serve as important centers of esoteric Buddhism. Kukai's Shingon mikkyo lineages also flourished at the monasteries of Ninnaji and DAIGOJI under imperial support. Later, Toji rose as an important institutional center for the study of Kukai's esoteric Buddhist lineages under the leadership of the monk Kangen (853-925), who was appointed head (zasu) of Toji, Kongobuji, and Daigoji. The Mt. Koya institution also grew with the rise of KAKUBAN, who established the monasteries of Daidenboin and Mitsugonin on the mountain. Conflict brewed between the monks of Kongobuji and Daidenboin when Kakuban was appointed the head of both institutions, a conflict that eventually resulted in the relocation of Daidenboin to nearby Mt. Negoro in Wakayama. The Daidenboin lineage came to be known as the Shingi branch of Shingon esoteric Buddhism. Attempts to unify the esoteric Buddhist traditions that claimed descent from Kukai were later made by Yukai (1345-1416), who eradicated the teachings of the "heretical" TACHIKAWARYu from Mt. Koya, and worked to establish a Kukai-centered Shingonshu orthodoxy. By the late medieval period, the major monastic landholding institutions in Kyoto, Nara, and Mt. Koya, many of which were profoundly influenced by the teachings of Kukai, suffered economic hardship with the initiation of the Warring States period (1467-1573) and the growing popularity of the so-called "Kamakura Schools" (e.g., JoDOSHu, JoDO SHINSHu, ZENSHu, and NICHIRENSHu). In particular, Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) had crushed the major Buddhist centers on HIEIZAN. However, Mt. Koya, which was still a thriving center for the study of Kukai's Shingon esoteric Buddhism, was spared the same fate because the monks resident at the mountain successfully convinced Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598) not to burn down their center. Thanks to the political stability of the Tokugawa regime, studies of esoteric Buddhism thrived until the harsh persecution of Buddhism by the Meiji government (see HAIBUTSU KISHAKU). As an effort to recover from the Meiji persecution, the disparate traditions of esoteric Buddhism came together under the banner of the Shingonshu, but after World War II, the various sub-lineages reasserted their independence.
Shingon: The Japanese sect of Buddhism which claims that its esoteric doctrine was inspired by Vairochana, the greatest of all Buddhas who came to this earth.
shinjin datsuraku. (C. shenxin tuoluo; K. sinsim t'allak 身心落). In Japanese, lit. "body and mind sloughed off," the psychological state generated during the practice of "just sitting" (SHIKAN TAZA), a style of meditation emblematic of the Japanese SoToSHu of ZEN. The Soto school attributes this term to DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253), who claimed to have learned it from his Chinese CAODONG teacher TIANTONG RUJING (1162-1227). During the practice of "just sitting," the adept should sit with "body and mind sloughed off," that is, with the body and mind stabilized and concentrated in a state of full clarity and alertness that is free from any specific content. Once all conception of body and mind had fallen away, the "original face" (J. honrai menmoku, C. BENLAI MIANMU) of inherent enlightenment will then appear. Dogen is said to have achieved enlightenment through hearing his teacher Rujing describe practice as "the sloughing off of body and mind." This phrase is mentioned in only a single passage of Rujing's discourse record (YULU), however. Rujing's record also includes the homophonous phrase shinjin datsuraku (C. xinchen tuoluo), or "defilements of mind sloughed off." It is uncertain which form of the phrase Dogen might have heard, but it seems to have had much more significance for Dogen than for Rujing.
Shinran. (親鸞) (1173-1262). Japanese priest who is considered the founder of the JoDO SHINSHu, or "True PURE LAND School." After the loss of his parents, Shinran was ordained at age nine by the TENDAISHu monk Jien (1155-1225) and began his studies at HIEIZAN. There, he regularly practiced "perpetual nenbutsu" (J. nenbutsu; C. NIANFO), ninety-day retreats in which one circumambulated a statue of the buddha AMITĀBHA while reciting the nenbutsu. In 1201, he left Mt. Hiei and became the disciple of HoNEN, an influential monk who emphasized nenbutsu recitation. Shinran was allowed to copy Honen's most influential (and at that time still unpublished) work, the SENCHAKUSHu. When Honen was exiled to Tosa in 1207, Shinran was defrocked by the government and exiled to Echigo, receiving a pardon four years later. He did not see Honen again. Shinran would become a popular teacher of nenbutsu practice among the common people, marrying (his wife Eshinni would later write important letters on pure land practice) and raising a family (the lineage of the True Pure Land sect is traced through his descendants), although he famously declared that he was "neither a monk nor a layman" (hiso hizoku). While claiming simply to be transmitting Honen's teachings, Shinran made important revisions and elaborations of the pure land doctrine that he had learned from Honen. In 1214, he moved to the Kanto region, where he took a vow to recite the three pure land sutras (J. Jodo sanbukyo; C. JINGTU SANBU JING) one thousand times. However, he soon stopped the practice, declaring it to be futile. It is said that from this experience he developed his notion of shinjin. Although literally translated as "the mind of faith," as Shinran uses the term shinjin might best be glossed as the buddha-mind realized in the entrusting of oneself to Amitābha's name and vow. Shinran often would contrast self-power (JIRIKI) and other-power (TARIKI), with the former referring to the always futile attempts to secure one's own welfare through traditional practices such as mastering the six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) of the bodhisattva path to buddhahood, and the latter referring to the sole source of salvation, the power of Amitābha's name and his vow. Thus, Shinran regarded the Mahāyāna practice of dedicating merit to the welfare of others to be self-power; the only dedication of merit that was important was that made by the bodhisattva DHARMĀKARA, who vowed to become the buddha Amitābha and establish his pure land of SUKHĀVATĪ for those who called his name. He regarded the deathbed practices meant to bring about birth in the pure land to be self-power; he regarded multiple recitations of NAMU AMIDABUTSU to be self-power. Shinran refers often to the single utterance that assures rebirth in the pure land. This utterance need not be audible, indeed not even voluntary, but is instead heard in the heart as a consequence of the "single thought-moment" of shinjin, received through Amitābha's grace. This salvation has nothing to do with whether one is a monk or layperson, man or woman, saint or sinner, learned or ignorant. He said that if even a good man can be reborn in the pure land, then how much more easily can an evil man; this is because the good man remains attached to the illusion that his virtuous deeds will somehow bring about his salvation, while the evil man has abandoned this conceit. Whereas Honen sought to identify the benefits of the nenbutsu in contrast to other teachings of the day, Shinran sought to reinterpret Buddhist doctrine and practice in light of Amitābha's vow. For example, the important Mahāyāna doctrine of the EKAYĀNA, or "one vehicle," the buddha vehicle whereby all sentient beings will be enabled to follow the bodhisattva path to buddhahood, is interpreted by Shinran to be nothing other than Amitābha's vow. Indeed, the sole purpose of sĀKYAMUNI Buddha's appearance in the world was to proclaim the existence of Amitābha's vow. These doctrines are set forth in Shinran's magnum opus, an anthology of passages from Buddhist scriptures, intermixed with his own comments and arranged topically, entitled KYoGYo SHINSHo ("Teaching, Practice, and Realization of the Pure Land Way"), a work that he began in 1224 and continued to expand and revise over the next three decades. Shinran did not consider himself to be a master and did not establish a formal school, leading to problems of authority among his followers when he was absent. After he left Kanto for Kyoto, for example, problems arose among his followers in Kanto, leading Shinran to write a series of letters, later collected as TANNISHo ("Lamenting the Deviations").
Shintia: Japanese for god-body, the Shintoist name of material objects in which the divine spirit is said to dwell.
Shinto (Japanese) [from shin god + to, tao way, path] The way of the gods; applied to the popular religion in Japan prior to Buddhism. Japan was considered to be the land of the gods — a conception current among nearly all ancient peoples, each one of which looked upon its own land as the land of the original divine incarnations — and the ruler (mikado) as the direct descendant and actual representative of the sun goddess (Tensho Daijin). Spiritual agencies were attributed to all the processes of nature, and a reverential feeling inculcated toward the dead. Hero worship took the direction in the prevalent belief that noble-minded warriors should be exalted nearly to the position of demigods.
Shinto: The Japanese religion based on the worship of spirits and ancestors.
Shi-tenno: In Japanese terminology, the four guardians of the cardinal points of the compass.
soy ::: n. --> A Chinese and Japanese liquid sauce for fish, etc., made by subjecting boiled beans (esp. soja beans), or beans and meal, to long fermentation and then long digestion in salt and water.
The soja, a kind of bean. See Soja.
Supplementary Ideographic Plane "text, standard" (SIP) The third plane (plane 2) defined in {Unicode}/{ISO 10646}, designed to hold all the {ideographs} descended from Chinese writing (mainly found in Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Chinese) that aren't found in the {Basic Multilingual Plane}. The BMP was supposed to hold all ideographs in modern use; unfortunately, many Chinese dialects (like Cantonese and Hong Kong Chinese) were overlooked; to write these, characters from the SIP are necessary. This is one reason even non-academic software must support characters outside the BMP. {Unicode home (http://unicode.org)}. (2002-06-19)
tanka: Similar to the haiku, the tanka is a type of Japanese poetry. It contains thirty-one syllables set in five lines of five / seven / five / seven / seven syllables.
Tendai: The Japanese “Pure Land” sect of Buddhism, which regards Amitabha the greatest of all Buddhas and centers its doctrine around him.
Tenshoko Daijin or Ten Sho Dai Jiu (Japanese) The Shinto sun goddess, the first of the five generations of so-called earthly deities — two of which generations are yet to be evolved forth — these seven in their turn following the seven earlier generations of heavenly deities.
The dictionary uses the standard Romanization systems for East Asian languages: viz., pinyin for Chinese (rather than the now-superseded Wade-Giles system that most pre-1990s scholarship on Chinese Buddhism used), Revised Hepburn for Japanese, and McCune-Reischauer for Korean, with the transcriptions in some cases modified slightly to conform more closely to the Chinese parsing of compounds. While this dictionary was being compiled, the Korean government unveiled its latest iteration of a Revised Romanization system, but that system is still rarely used in academic writing in the West and its acceptance is uncertain; we therefore chose to employ McCune-Reischauer for this edition of the dictionary.
The Dojo Toolkit "library, programming" A modular, {open source} {JavaScript} library. Dojo is designed for easy development of JavaScript- or {AJAX} based applications and websites. It is supported by the Dojo Foundation, which is sponsored by {IBM}, {AOL}, {Sun} and others. The name is from the Japanese term meaning "place of the way", used for a formal place of training. (2008-07-23)
The Real-Time Operating System Nucleus ::: (project) (TRON) A project to develop an operating system and man-machine interface that can work with other operating systems to provide an environment by Dr. Ken Sakamura of the University of Tokyo and supported by most of the major Japanese computer makers and NTT. .(2003-05-23)
The Real-Time Operating System Nucleus "project" (TRON) A project to develop an {operating system} and {man-machine interface} that can work with other operating systems to provide an environment for many small distributed computers to cooperate in {real time}. TRON is headed by Dr. Ken Sakamura of the {University of Tokyo} and supported by most of the major Japanese computer makers and {NTT}. {(http://atip.org/public/atip.reports.91/tron.html)}. (2003-05-23)
The second Koryo canon was used as the basis of the modern Japanese TAISHo SHINSHu DAIZoKYo ("New Edition of the Buddhist Canon Compiled during the Taisho Reign Era"), edited by TAKAKUSU JUNJIRo and Watanabe Kaikyoku and published using movable-type printing between 1924 and 1935, which has become the standard reference source for East Asian Buddhist materials. The Taisho canon includes 2,920 texts in eighty-five volumes (each volume is about one thousand pages in length), along with twelve volumes devoted to iconography, and three volumes of bibliography and scriptural catalogues. The Taisho's arrangement is constructed following modern scholarly views regarding the historical development of the Buddhist scriptural tradition, with mainstream Buddhist scriptures opening the canon, followed by Indian Mahāyāna materials, indigenous Chinese writings, and Japanese writings:
This new dictionary seeks to address the needs of this present age. For the great majority of scholars of Buddhism, who do not command all of the major Buddhist languages, this reference book provides a repository of many of the most important terms used across the traditions, and their rendering in several Buddhist languages. For the college professor who teaches "Introduction to Buddhism" every year, requiring one to venture beyond one's particular area of geographical and doctrinal expertise, it provides descriptions of many of the important figures and texts in the major traditions. For the student of Buddhism, whether inside or outside the classroom, it offers information on many fundamental doctrines and practices of the various traditions of the religion. This dictionary is based primarily on six Buddhist languages and their traditions: Sanskrit, PAli, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Also included, although appearing much less frequently, are terms and proper names in vernacular Burmese, Lao, Mongolian, Sinhalese, Thai, and Vietnamese. The majority of entries fall into three categories: the terminology of Buddhist doctrine and practice, the texts in which those teachings are set forth, and the persons (both human and divine) who wrote those texts or appear in their pages. In addition, there are entries on important places-including monasteries and sacred mountains-as well as on the major schools and sects of the various Buddhist traditions. The vast majority of the main entries are in their original language, although cross-references are sometimes provided to a common English rendering. Unlike many terminological dictionaries, which merely provide a brief listing of meanings with perhaps some of the equivalencies in various Buddhist languages, this work seeks to function as an encyclopedic dictionary. The main entries offer a short essay on the extended meaning and significance of the terms covered, typically in the range of two hundred to six hundred words, but sometimes substantially longer. To offer further assistance in understanding a term or tracing related concepts, an extensive set of internal cross-references (marked in small capital letters) guides the reader to related entries throughout the dictionary. But even with over a million words and five thousand entries, we constantly had to make difficult choices about what to include and how much to say. Given the long history and vast geographical scope of the Buddhist traditions, it is difficult to imagine any dictionary ever being truly comprehensive. Authors also write about what they know (or would like to know); so inevitably the dictionary reflects our own areas of scholarly expertise, academic interests, and judgments about what readers need to learn about the various Buddhist traditions.
Toshiba Corporation ::: (company) A Japanese technology manufacturer with 364 subsidiaries worldwide. Toshiba makes and sells electronics for home, office, industry and components, heavy electrical apparatus, consumer products and medical diagnostic imaging equipment.In FY 2003-4, Toshiba employed 161,286 people and sales were � 5,579B (UK� 30B, US$ 50B). .(2005-01-19)
Toshiba Corporation "company" A Japanese technology manufacturer with 364 subsidiaries worldwide. Toshiba makes and sells electronics for home, office, industry and health care including information and communication systems, electronic components, heavy electrical apparatus, consumer products and medical diagnostic imaging equipment. In FY 2003-4, Toshiba employed 161,286 people. {Toshiba Home (http://toshiba.co.jp/)}. (2005-01-19)
tycoon ::: n. --> The title by which the shogun, or former commander in chief of the Japanese army, was known to foreigners.
xanthoxylene ::: n. --> A liquid hydrocarbon of the terpene series extracted from the seeds of a Japanese prickly ash (Xanthoxylum pipertium) as an aromatic oil.
Yamabushi (Japanese) A sect in Japan of ancient origin, but now inclining to Buddhism. Often regarded as the fighting monks, inasmuch as they have not hesitated to take up arms in case of necessity somewhat like certain yogis in Rajputana or the lamas in Tibet. They are perhaps most numerous near Kyoto, where they are famed for their healing powers. Yamabushi hold a “Japanese Secret Science of the Buddhist Mystics,” calling their seven mystery-teachings the seven precious things or jewels (SD 1:67).
Yamaha ::: (company) A Japanese company best known for consumer electronics and motorbikes. They make music synthesizers, CD-Rom Writers and HiFi sound equipment. . (1997-04-29)
Yamaha "company" A Japanese company best known for consumer electronics and motorbikes. They make music synthesizers, {CD-Rom Writers} and HiFi sound equipment. {(http://yamaha.com/)}. (1997-04-29)
Yo (Japanese) The male ethereal essence or substance of Shinto cosmogony, which in conjunction with In, the female essence, produces manifestation. Equivalent to the Chinese yang.
Yomi: In Japanese occultism, the spirit world or astral world.
Zen Buddhism: The Japanese “mediation school” of Buddhism, based on the theories of the “universality of Buddha-nature” and the possibility of “becoming a Buddha in this very body.” It teaches the way of attaining Buddhahood fundamentally by meditation.
KEYS (10k)
4 Japanese Proverb
2 Buddhist Meditations from the Japanese
2 Kobayashi Issa
1 Yekiwo
1 William Gibson
1 Takarai Kikaku
1 Shinran
1 Nanuo Sakaki
1 Mitsugi Saotome
1 Kenko Yoshida
1 Kamo no Chōmei
1 Kafu Nagai
1 Joseph Campbell
1 Jien
1 Izumi Shikibu
1 Eknath Easwaran
1 Dōgen Zenji
1 David Mitchell
1 Buddhist Writings in the Japanese
1 Buddhist Mediations from the Japanese
1 Boye De Mente
1 Allen Ginsberg
1 The Mother
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
28 Anonymous
19 Masaji Ishikawa
18 Vladimir Putin
17 Haruki Murakami
14 Niall Ferguson
14 Laura Hillenbrand
13 William Gibson
13 Barry Eisler
12 Donald Richie
11 Kakuz Okakura
10 Marie Kond
10 Jamie Dimon
9 Matt Goulding
9 Lafcadio Hearn
9 Dave Barry
7 Winston Groom
7 Cassandra Clare
6 Yann Martel
6 Viet Thanh Nguyen
6 Shinzo Abe
1:The reverse side also has a reverse side. ~ Japanese Proverb, #KEYS
2:The reverse side also has a reverse side.
~ Japanese Proverb,#KEYS
3:We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
~ Japanese Proverb,#KEYS
4:He who treads the path of love walks a thousand miles as if it were only one.
~ Japanese Proverb,#KEYS
5:How rueful, this world." ~ Jien, (1155-1225), a Japanese poet, historian, and Buddhist monk, Wikipedia., #KEYS
6:Wisdom is like unto a beacon set on high, which radiates its light even in the darkest night. ~ Buddhist Meditations from the Japanese, #KEYS
7:and the whole moon and entire sky are reflected in even one drop of water." ~ Dōgen Zenji, (1200 - 1253), Japanese Buddhist priest, Wikipedia., #KEYS
8:and look … The stars!" ~ Takarai Kikaku, (1661-1707), Japanese haikai poet and among the most accomplished disciples of Matsuo Bashō, Wikipedia., #KEYS
9:no part left out." ~ Izumi Shikibu, (b. 976?) a mid-Heian period Japanese poet. She is a member of the Thirty-six Medieval Poetry Immortals, Wikipedia, #KEYS
10:Leave undone whatever you hesitate to do." ~ Kenko Yoshida, (1284-1350) Japanese author and Buddhist monk. His most famous work: "Essays in Idleness," Wikipedia., #KEYS
11:But with only one heart we human beings are born." ~ Nanuo Sakaki, (1923-2008) Japanese poet,) from his poem "Homo Erectus Ambulant" in his book "Break the Mirror", (1987), #KEYS
12:Wisdom is like unto a beacon set on high, which radiates its light even in the darkest night. ~ Buddhist Meditations from the Japanese, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
13:Only in a hut built for the moment can one live without fear." ~ Kamo no Chōmei, (1153 or 1155-1216), a Japanese author, poet, and essayist. Became a Buddhist and lived as a hermit, Wikipedia., #KEYS
14:An attentive scrutiny of thy being will reveal to thee that it is one with the very essence of absolute perfection. ~ Buddhist Writings in the Japanese, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
15:If you are really desirous of mastering Zen, it is necessary for you to give up you life and plunge right into the pit of death." ~ Yekiwo, Zen master. Quote from "Zen and Japanese Culture" by Daisetz T. Suzuki, 1959, #KEYS
16:with a radish." ~ Kobayashi Issa, (1763 - 1828) Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-Tea, Wikipedia., #KEYS
17:He who contemplates the supreme Truth, contemplates the perfect Essence; only the vision of the spirit can see this nature of ineffable perfection. ~ Buddhist Mediations from the Japanese, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
18:It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning…We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth." ~ Mitsugi Saotome, (b. 1937) a Japanese aikido instructor currently living in the United States, Wikipedia., #KEYS
19:Flying out from the Great Buddha's nose: a swallow." ~ Kobayashi Issa, (1763 - 1828) Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, known for his haiku poems and journals, better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea, Wikipedia., #KEYS
20:182. To mingle the right action with the action that is not akin to it is called the confused practice. The man that erreth therein hath not attained unto the single heart. He knoweth not thankfulness for the grace of the Enlightened One. ~ Shinran, Wisdom of the East Buddhist Psalms translated from the Japanese of Shinran Shonin, #KEYS
21:No matter how much I wanted to sing Western songs, they were all very difficult. Had I, born in Japan, no choice but to sing Japanese songs? Was there a Japanese song that expressed my present sentiment - a traveler who had immersed himself in love and the arts in France but was now going back to the extreme end of the Orient where only death would follow monotonous life? ... I felt totally forsaken. I belonged to a nation that had no music to express swelling emotions and agonized feelings. ~ Kafu Nagai, #KEYS
22:In Japanese language, kata (though written as 方) is a frequently-used suffix meaning way of doing, with emphasis on the form and order of the process. Other meanings are training method and formal exercise. The goal of a painter's practicing, for example, is to merge his consciousness with his brush; the potter's with his clay; the garden designer's with the materials of the garden. Once such mastery is achieved, the theory goes, the doing of a thing perfectly is as easy as thinking it
~ Boye De Mente, Japan's Secret Weapon - The Kata Factor,#KEYS
23:Beneath the surface level of conditioned thinking in every one of us there is a single living spirit. The still small voice whispering to me in the depths of my consciousness is saying exactly the same thing as the voice whispering to you in your consciousness. 'I want an earth that is healthy, a world at peace, and a heart filled with love.' It doesn't matter if your skin is brown or white or black, or whether you speak English, Japanese, or Malayalam - the voice, says the Gita, is the same in every creature, and it comes from your true self. ~ Eknath Easwaran, #KEYS
24:People pontificate, Suicide is selfishness. Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.
~ David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas,#KEYS
25:The Japanese have a proverb: "The gods only laugh when men pray to them for wealth." The boon bestowed on the worshiper is always scaled to his stature and to the nature of his dominant desire: the boon is simply a symbol of life energy stepped down to the requirements of a certain specific case. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, whereas the hero who has won the favor of the god may beg for the boon of perfect illumination, what he generally seeks are longer years to live, weapons with which to slay his neighbor, or the health of his child. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon, #KEYS
26:A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. ~ William Gibson, Neuromancer, #KEYS
27:
"The beings who were always appearing and speaking to Jeanne d'Arc would, if seen by an Indian, have quite a different appearance; for when one sees, one projects the forms of one's mind.... You have the vision of one in India whom you call the Divine Mother; the Catholics say it is the Virgin Mary, and the Japanese call it Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy; and others would give other names. It is the same force, the same power, but the images made of it are different in different faiths." Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (21 April 1929)
And then? You are not very talkative today! Is that all?
You say that "each person has his own world of dreamimagery peculiar to himself." Ibid.
Each individual has his own way of expressing, thinking, speaking, feeling, understanding. It is the combination of all these ways of being that makes the individual. That is why everyone can understand only according to his own nature. As long as you are shut up in your own nature, you can know only what is in your consciousness. All depends upon the height of the nature of your consciousness. Your world is limited to what you have in your consciousness. If you have a very small consciousness, you will understand only a few things. When your consciousness is very vast, universal, only then will you understand the world. If the consciousness is limited to your little ego, all the rest will escape you.... There are people whose brain and consciousness are smaller than a walnut. You know that a walnut resembles the brain; well these people look at things and don't understand them. They can understand nothing else except what is in direct contact with their senses. For them only what they taste, what they see, hear, touch has a reality, and all the rest simply does not exist, and they accuse us of speaking fancifully! "What I cannot touch does not exist", they say. But the only answer to give them is: "It does not exist for you, but there's no reason why it shouldn't exist for others." You must not insist with these people, and you must not forget that the smaller they are the greater is the audacity in their assertions.
One's cocksureness is in proportion to one's unconsciousness; the more unconscious one is, the more is one sure of oneself. The most foolish are always the most vain. Your stupidity is in proportion to your vanity. The more one knows... In fact, there is a time when one is quite convinced that one knows nothing at all. There's not a moment in the world which does not bring something new, for the world is perpetually growing. If one is conscious of that, one has always something new to learn. But one can become conscious of it only gradually. One's conviction that one knows is in direct proportion to one's ignorance and stupidity.
Mother, have the scientists, then, a very small consciousness?
Why? All scientists are not like that. If you meet a true scientist who has worked hard, he will tell you: "We know nothing. What we know today is nothing beside what we shall know tomorrow. This year's discoveries will be left behind next year." A real scientist knows very well that there are many more things he doesn't know than those he knows. And this is true of all branches of human activity. I have never met a scientist worthy of the name who was proud. I have never met a man of some worth who has told me: "I know everything." Those I have seen have always confessed: "In short, I know nothing." After having spoken of all that he has done, all that he has achieved, he tells you very quietly: "After all, I know nothing." ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, [T8],#KEYS
28:Death & Fame
When I die
I don't care what happens to my body throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery
But I want a big funeral St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, the largest synagogue in Manhattan
First, there's family, brother, nephews, spry aged Edith stepmother 96, Aunt Honey from old Newark,
Doctor Joel, cousin Mindy, brother Gene one eyed one ear'd, sister-in-law blonde Connie, five nephews, stepbrothers & sisters their grandchildren, companion Peter Orlovsky, caretakers Rosenthal & Hale, Bill Morgan--
Next, teacher Trungpa Vajracharya's ghost mind, Gelek Rinpoche, there Sakyong Mipham, Dalai Lama alert, chance visiting America, Satchitananda Swami Shivananda, Dehorahava Baba, Karmapa XVI, Dudjom Rinpoche, Katagiri & Suzuki Roshi's phantoms Baker, Whalen, Daido Loorie, Qwong, Frail White-haired Kapleau Roshis, Lama Tarchen --
Then, most important, lovers over half-century Dozens, a hundred, more, older fellows bald & rich young boys met naked recently in bed, crowds surprised to see each other, innumerable, intimate, exchanging memories
"He taught me to meditate, now I'm an old veteran of the thousandday retreat --"
"I played music on subway platforms, I'm straight but loved him he loved me"
"I felt more love from him at 19 than ever from anyone"
"We'd lie under covers gossip, read my poetry, hug & kiss belly to belly arms round each other"
"I'd always get into his bed with underwear on & by morning my skivvies would be on the floor"
"Japanese, always wanted take it up my bum with a master"
"We'd talk all night about Kerouac & Cassady sit Buddhalike then sleep in his captain's bed."
"He seemed to need so much affection, a shame not to make him happy"
"I was lonely never in bed nude with anyone before, he was so gentle my stomach shuddered when he traced his finger along my abdomen nipple to hips-- "
"All I did was lay back eyes closed, he'd bring me to come with mouth & fingers along my waist"
"He gave great head"
So there be gossip from loves of 1948, ghost of Neal Cassady commin-gling with flesh and youthful blood of 1997 and surprise -- "You too? But I thought you were straight!"
"I am but Ginsberg an exception, for some reason he pleased me."
"I forgot whether I was straight gay queer or funny, was myself, tender and affectionate to be kissed on the top of my head, my forehead throat heart & solar plexus, mid-belly. on my prick, tickled with his tongue my behind"
"I loved the way he'd recite 'But at my back allways hear/ time's winged chariot hurrying near,' heads together, eye to eye, on a pillow --"
Among lovers one handsome youth straggling the rear
"I studied his poetry class, 17 year-old kid, ran some errands to his walk-up flat, seduced me didn't want to, made me come, went home, never saw him again never wanted to... "
"He couldn't get it up but loved me," "A clean old man." "He made sure I came first"
This the crowd most surprised proud at ceremonial place of honor--
Then poets & musicians -- college boys' grunge bands -- age-old rock star Beatles, faithful guitar accompanists, gay classical con-ductors, unknown high Jazz music composers, funky trum-peters, bowed bass & french horn black geniuses, folksinger fiddlers with dobro tamborine harmonica mandolin auto-harp pennywhistles & kazoos
Next, artist Italian romantic realists schooled in mystic 60's India, Late fauve Tuscan painter-poets, Classic draftsman Massa-chusets surreal jackanapes with continental wives, poverty sketchbook gesso oil watercolor masters from American provinces
Then highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate biblio-philes, sex liberation troops nay armies, ladies of either sex
"I met him dozens of times he never remembered my name I loved him anyway, true artist"
"Nervous breakdown after menopause, his poetry humor saved me from suicide hospitals"
"Charmant, genius with modest manners, washed sink, dishes my studio guest a week in Budapest"
Thousands of readers, "Howl changed my life in Libertyville Illinois"
"I saw him read Montclair State Teachers College decided be a poet-- "
"He turned me on, I started with garage rock sang my songs in Kansas City"
"Kaddish made me weep for myself & father alive in Nevada City"
"Father Death comforted me when my sister died Boston l982"
"I read what he said in a newsmagazine, blew my mind, realized others like me out there"
Deaf & Dumb bards with hand signing quick brilliant gestures
Then Journalists, editors's secretaries, agents, portraitists & photo-graphy aficionados, rock critics, cultured laborors, cultural historians come to witness the historic funeral Super-fans, poetasters, aging Beatnicks & Deadheads, autograph-hunters, distinguished paparazzi, intelligent gawkers
Everyone knew they were part of 'History" except the deceased who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive
February 22, 1997
~ Allen Ginsberg,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 2:If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. - Japanese Proverb ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 3:I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 4:When your Japanese lifetime is coming out, drink all the sake you want. Have a little bash. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 5:The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 6:I bought a new Japanese car, I turned on the radio ... I don't understand a word they're saying. ~ rodney-dangerfield, @wisdomtrove 7:As the Japanese Zen masters say, Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions. Drop your theories; don't seek the truth. ~ anthony-de-mello, @wisdomtrove 8:I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 9:Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 10:When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 11:If you're very, very conservative and you like that sort of practice, go find a very conservative Zen master and just do traditional Japanese practice, which is not that traditional actually. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 12:When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 13:The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 14:Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don't have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 15:The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn't preparation for work and never was. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 16:I do enjoy wearing Japanese and Italian clothing. I also enjoy my blue jeans or tennis shorts and running shoes. I like driving a Porsche because it is an elegant machine and it is a very beautiful experience to drive it. It's magnificently made. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 17:Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 18:Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 19:I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 20:Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 21:You have to find a group that really desperately cares about what it is you have to say. Talk to them. They have something I call otaku. It's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who's obsessed to, say, drive across Tokyo to try a new Ramen noodle place 'cause that's what they do, they get obsessed with it. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 22:When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 23:Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like& 24:The greatest victory in living memory – of the United States over the Soviet Union – was achieved without any major military confrontation. The United States then got a fleeting taste of old-fashioned military glory in the First Gulf War, but this only tempted it to waste trillions on humiliating military fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. China, the rising power of the early twenty-first century, has assiduously avoided all armed conflicts since its failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979, and it owes its ascent strictly to economic factors. In this it has emulated not the Japanese, German and Italian empires of the pre-1914 era, but rather the Japanese, German and Italian economic miracles of the post-1945 era. In all these cases economic prosperity and geopolitical clout were achieved without firing a shot. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 25:Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key to realising their disparate goals. Thus in 2014 the devout Hindu Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India thanks largely to his success in boosting economic growth in his home state of Gujarat, and to the widely held view that only he could reinvigorate the sluggish national economy. Analogous views have kept the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in power in Turkey since 2003. The name of his party – the Justice and Development Party – highlights its commitment to economic development, and the Erdoğan government has indeed managed to maintain impressive growth rates for more than a decade. Japan’s prime minister, the nationalist Shinzō Abe, came to office in 2012 pledging to jolt the Japanese economy out of two decades of stagnation. His aggressive and somewhat unusual measures to achieve this have been nicknamed Abenomics. Meanwhile in neighbouring China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do whatever it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city-state, they pursue this line of thinking even further, and peg ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, government ministers get a raise, as if that is what their jobs are all about. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Japanese fighter planes, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
2:My life was very Japanese. ~ Bryan Clay, #NFDB
3:Japanese sex cushion too? ~ Chelsea Field, #NFDB
4:That's Chinese, not Japanese ~ Lauren Myracle, #NFDB
5:The Japanese are hard to figure out. ~ Jerry Garcia, #NFDB
6:especially the Japanese and Russian ~ James A Michener, #NFDB
7:I've always been inspired by Japanese style. ~ Rihanna, #NFDB
8:The Japanese seem to be a loyal audience. ~ Herb Alpert, #NFDB
9:The Japanese fans always send weird things. ~ Tom Felton, #NFDB
10:I'm just very obsessed with Japanese stuff in general. ~ Grimes, #NFDB
11:Punctuality is an obsession with the Japanese, ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
12:There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
13:The reverse side also has a reverse side.
~ Japanese Proverb,#NFDB
14:We must not again underestimate the Japanese. ~ Chester W Nimitz, #NFDB
15:I believe, the Japanese film industry must be open. ~ Hiroyuki Sanada, #NFDB
16:I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late. ~ Utada Hikaru, #NFDB
17:Fall down seven times. Stand up eight. JAPANESE PROVERB ~ Phil Jackson, #NFDB
18:Japanese are very proud and workaholics. Proud workaholics. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
19:Opened a Japanese book and put the device in screen saver. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
20:I have a doggy, a Japanese Akita, who I live to play with. ~ Corey Haim, #NFDB
21:You see, in Japanese culture, ghosts do not have legs. ~ Monisha Rajesh, #NFDB
22:European travellers find the Japanese a smiling race. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
23:I especially love French, Italian and Japanese cuisines. ~ Eva Herzigova, #NFDB
24:I've always been fascinated by Japanese culture. ~ Sarah Michelle Gellar, #NFDB
25:If the Japanese are so smart, why do they eat with sticks? ~ Jerry Lawler, #NFDB
26:What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
27:There’s an old Japanese saying: Fall seven, rise eight. ~ Angela Duckworth, #NFDB
28:I've got lots of weird illustrations of me from Japanese fans. ~ Jamie Bell, #NFDB
29:My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it. ~ Nagisa Oshima, #NFDB
30:Sort of like, I have to make the Japanese lyrics really deep. ~ Utada Hikaru, #NFDB
31:Well, dojo is a traditional Japanese word for training hall. ~ Joseph Jarman, #NFDB
32:What kind of people do they [the Japanese] think we are? ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
33:My favorite kitchen was the Japanese and the Italian kitchen. ~ Karl Lagerfeld, #NFDB
34:Saw-Wielding Man Reportedly Slashes 2 Members Of Japanese Pop Group ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
35:What do Japanese Jews love to eat? Hebrew National Tsunami. ~ Gilbert Gottfried, #NFDB
36:Give me fifty DC-3's and the Japanese can have the Burma Road. ~ Chiang Kai shek, #NFDB
37:He's a novice - he should keep his opinions to Japanese football ~ Alex Ferguson, #NFDB
38:Old Japanese saying, live scorpion in pants makes life interesting. ~ Will Hobbs, #NFDB
39:In 1952 the father of Japanese primatology, Kinji Imanishi, first ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
40:The Japanese have a saying, “Eat until you are 80 percent full. ~ Robert H Lustig, #NFDB
41:A Japanese man festooned with cameras, a nun, a young girl in braids. ~ Anne Tyler, #NFDB
42:In Japanese sushi restaurants, a lot of sushi chefs talk too much. ~ Masa Takayama, #NFDB
43:Japanese businesspeople and companies are lacking in individuality. ~ Tadashi Yanai, #NFDB
44:Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
45:President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
46:The Japanese banks are not having an easy time as they once had. ~ David Rockefeller, #NFDB
47:EMBRACING THE EXISTING Japanese perspective on urban history and context ~ Kengo Kuma, #NFDB
48:We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
~ Japanese Proverb,#NFDB
49:Kanban, while Japanese, is less metaphorical than Drum-Buffer-Rope. ~ David J Anderson, #NFDB
50:What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers? ~ Walter F Mondale, #NFDB
51:The Japanese have a saying that all honest trades are equally honorable. ~ Project Itoh, #NFDB
52:Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine, and I can get around Japan with ease. ~ Dick Cavett, #NFDB
53:The Japanese say, if the flower is to be beautiful, it must be cultivated. ~ Lester Cole, #NFDB
54:I went to the Tokyo Film Festival in Japan because I love Japanese cinema. ~ Leslie Caron, #NFDB
55:When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell! ~ William Halsey, #NFDB
56:Without a huge shock, the sleepy-head, ignorant Japanese will never wake up. ~ Hiroo Onoda, #NFDB
57:Believe it or not, Japanese is actually easier than some European languages! ~ Phil Collins, #NFDB
58:I'm very into the japanese sensibility. Oversize coats and baggy trousers. ~ Milla Jovovich, #NFDB
59:Seppuku is Japanese for ritual suicide. I thought, What a cute name for a coat. ~ Lexa Doig, #NFDB
60:Technological things, that Germans and Japanese would get real excited about. ~ John Badham, #NFDB
61:The cat's purring was the motor that ran the Japanese woman's dreaming. ~ Richard Brautigan, #NFDB
62:The Japanese are hard to understand, but once you do the world is your oyster. ~ Paul Smith, #NFDB
63:If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. - Japanese Proverb ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
64:One of my favorite Japanese proverbs is "Fall down 7 times, stand up 8". ~ Georges St Pierre, #NFDB
65:The Japanese word for healing is te-ate, which literally means “to apply hands. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
66:They've certainly grown, the Japanese. I mean grown in stature, playing-wise. ~ Ron Atkinson, #NFDB
67:I made efforts to swallow tears and to protect the species of the Japanese nation. ~ Hirohito, #NFDB
68:When I go on Japanese Airlines, I really love it because I like Japanese food. ~ Phil Collins, #NFDB
69:I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
70:Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic. ~ David Cronenberg, #NFDB
71:My CIA godfather told me he'd never heard any American speak Japanese so well. ~ Steven Seagal, #NFDB
72:We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance. —Japanese proverb ~ Patti Digh, #NFDB
73:I'm half-Japanese, so I collect toys, like a Yayoi Kusama stuffed pumpkin. ~ Nicola Formichetti, #NFDB
74:In Japanese houses the interior melts into the gardens of the outside world. ~ Stephen Gardiner, #NFDB
75:For many years, my favorite director has been the Japanese giant Akira Kurosawa. ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
76:He who treads the path of love walks a thousand miles as if it were only one.
~ Japanese Proverb,#NFDB
77:I don't really do Japanese interviews. I don't think there's much call for me in Japan. ~ Nick Cave, #NFDB
78:If I need to buy a TV, I'll definitely buy a Japanese TV. A Chinese TV might explode. ~ Jackie Chan, #NFDB
79:If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. —Japanese proverb Dancing ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
80:The third rule underscores the Japanese proverb that adversity makes a jewel of you. ~ Ben Sherwood, #NFDB
81:the Japanese always ate half-cooked rice and had marvellous brains in consequence. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
82:The Japanese are a disease of the skin. The Communists are a disease of the heart. ~ Chiang Kai shek, #NFDB
83:I was crazy about silent comedy - in the old days, and crazy about Japanese movies. ~ Keith Johnstone, #NFDB
84:They learned that they should always call the restaurant first. Do you serve Japanese? ~ Julie Otsuka, #NFDB
85:Through these documents, many Japanese can trace their family as far back as 700. By ~ Mark Kurlansky, #NFDB
86:tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all. ~ Melissa Grey, #NFDB
87:Wabi Sabi", named after a Japanese notion of appreciating the perfection in imperfection. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
88:I don’t know anything about Japanese business or Japanese culture. Apart from sushi. ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
89:I was a dishwasher at one of those Japanese places that cook on your table. Not too fun. ~ Aziz Ansari, #NFDB
90:The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness. ~ Paul Theroux, #NFDB
91:The situation now is not easy. But I believe in the good sense of the Japanese people. ~ Katsuya Okada, #NFDB
92:In the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology. ~ Chuck Grassley, #NFDB
93:There are very few Japanese Jews. As a result, there is no Japanese word for Alan King. ~ Johnny Carson, #NFDB
94:One thing I've never said in my whole life is, 'Let's have dinner at a Japanese restaurant.' ~ Alan King, #NFDB
95:Rule No. 41. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
96:England understands good Chinese, Japanese and Indian cuisine; in France, we just get French. ~ Eva Green, #NFDB
97:I think I was a Japanese schoolgirl in another life. That's how much I love Hello Kitty. ~ Dakota Fanning, #NFDB
98:it was decorated with Japanese fans and Chinese lanterns, which gave it a very Old English effect. ~ Saki, #NFDB
99:Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. JAPANESE PROVERB ~ Dave Ramsey, #NFDB
100:If it weren't for the Japanese and the Germans, we wouldn't have any good war movies. ~ Stanley Ralph Ross, #NFDB
101:I'm totally addicted to Japanese anime, and spend way, way, way too much time watching it. ~ Connor Jessup, #NFDB
102:I want men to be more chic - and Japanese style has that kind of sophisticated elegance. ~ Roberto Cavalli, #NFDB
103:tactician. He also has a deep understanding of Japanese culture, believing that the nation ~ Bill O Reilly, #NFDB
104:The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral. ~ Simon Hoggart, #NFDB
105:Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” — Japanese Proverb ~ Pat Flynn, #NFDB
106:EAT MORE LIKE THE FRENCH. OR THE ITALIANS. OR THE JAPANESE. OR THE INDIANS. OR THE GREEKS. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
107:The Japanese actually approach the music on a high level. It's always been on a high level. ~ Billy Higgins, #NFDB
108:The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
109:There’s a beauty to imperfection. This is the essence of the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi. ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
110:concept defined by the Japanese word shoshin — which means beginner’s mind,[1] or open mind — ~ Scott Berkun, #NFDB
111:If the Japanese ever got a foothold, British bikes would quickly become only a nostalgic memory. ~ Ted Simon, #NFDB
112:I promise to protect Japan's land and sea, and the lives of the Japanese people no matter what. ~ Shinzo Abe, #NFDB
113:When your Japanese lifetime is coming out, drink all the sake you want. Have a little bash. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
114:You can't be citing Japanese internment camps for anything the president elect is going to do! ~ Megyn Kelly, #NFDB
115:As the rising sun melts thinly frozen ice, so the Japanese Army is overcoming Chinese troops. ~ Shunroku Hata, #NFDB
116:I had Japanese once. A business man I had run into in New York ... but that's not what he meant. ~ L M DeWalt, #NFDB
117:Is it white wine? Red tastes like vinegar.'
'Of course it's white wine, I'm Japanese. ~ Natasha Pulley,#NFDB
118:I was to Japanese visitors to Washington what the Mona Lisa is to Americans visiting Paris. ~ John C Danforth, #NFDB
119:I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead! ~ Clive James, #NFDB
120:The Japanese people are usually very prudent, even when they are convinced change is necessary. ~ Carlos Ghosn, #NFDB
121:Promises that you make to yourself are often like the Japanese plum tree - they bear no fruit. ~ Francis Marion, #NFDB
122:I don't purchase records. I do enjoy listening to things like Japanese folk music or Indian music. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
123:like a Picasso purchased at auction by a mysterious Japanese buyer, disappeared from public view. ~ Daniel Silva, #NFDB
124:Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest. ~ Stephen Gardiner, #NFDB
125:To hear the Japanese plead for free trade is like hearing the word love on the lips of a harlot. ~ Lane Kirkland, #NFDB
126:I cook everything. I love Mediterranean cooking, I love Asian cooking. I do lots of Japanese noodles. ~ Ted Allen, #NFDB
127:No aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu, as the Japanese saying goes. The hawk with talent hides its talons. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
128:Nobody says anything to me now when it comes to Japanese. They actually ask me things. I now have power! ~ Seungri, #NFDB
129:My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
130:Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open. ~ Gustav Klimt, #NFDB
131:The Japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. They're just like dead fish washing up on the shores. ~ Steve Jobs, #NFDB
132:Different cultures and all that, but it’s true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
133:I have in mind repeated statements by Japanese military men containing threats against other states. ~ Joseph Stalin, #NFDB
134:In Japanese art, space assumed a dominant role and its position was strengthened by Zen concepts. ~ Stephen Gardiner, #NFDB
135:I bought a new Japanese car, I turned on the radio ... I don't understand a word they're saying. ~ Rodney Dangerfield, #NFDB
136:The insistence on low-rise, sadly, has done nothing to make modern Japanese construction more attractive. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
137:We've seen the volatility at dollar-yen, U.S. Treasurys, JGBs (Japanese government bonds), German bunds. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
138:Americans really don't understand the Japanese nature, but it's not an easy thing to understand. ~ Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, #NFDB
139:I liked to watch anime in the original Japanese even though I couldn’t speak a single word of the language. ~ S M Reine, #NFDB
140:It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while. ~ Arthur Golden, #NFDB
141:Japanese architecture is traditionally based on wooden structures that need renovating on a regular basis. ~ Tadao Ando, #NFDB
142:The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self- sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. ~ Akira Kurosawa, #NFDB
143:as if you are already dead.’” “What’s that?” “A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
144:Even if there were hundred bad Japanese, if there was one good one, he refused to make a blanket statement ~ Min Jin Lee, #NFDB
145:I collect wrestling figures from overseas, like Japanese wrestling figures and Mexican wrestling figures. ~ Joseph Bruce, #NFDB
146:I have a lot of Japanese friends: I grew up in Vancouver, and there's this huge Japanese population over there. ~ Grimes, #NFDB
147:Not about the Japanese, but about moments of perfection. commit it to memory and make good use of it. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB
148:Today I met the girls for some lunch at my favourite Japanese restaurant, Ichiban on Queen Street. Lucy ~ Joanna Bolouri, #NFDB
149:We'll look at the japanese launch as a model and aspire to have things go as well as they did over there. ~ Trip Hawkins, #NFDB
150:There is a Japanese proverb that describes my formula for success: “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” You ~ Nick Vujicic, #NFDB
151:They [Japanese whalers] haven't produced a single peer-reviewed international scientific paper in 23 years. ~ Paul Watson, #NFDB
152:I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II. ~ Dan Rather, #NFDB
153:The moment the first American soldier sets foot on the Japanese mainland, all prisoners of war will be shot. ~ Hideki Tojo, #NFDB
154:This was what we Japanese called the “onion life”—peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while. ~ Arthur Golden, #NFDB
155:Unless it's done superbly, as in the Japanese film Gate of Hell, color can be a very distracting element. ~ Norman McLaren, #NFDB
156:The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature. ~ Isamu Noguchi, #NFDB
157:The Japanese put houses in among the trees and allowed nature to gain the ascendancy in any composition. ~ Stephen Gardiner, #NFDB
158:How sweet Japanese woman is! All the possibilities of the race for goodness seem to be concentrated in her. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
159:I first decided architecture was for me when I saw Le Corbusier's designs in a Japanese magazine in the 1930s. ~ Kenzo Tange, #NFDB
160:My Japanese isn’t much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid. ~ Gil Asakawa, #NFDB
161:I didn't understand the American fascination with the Japanese schoolgirl. No, I don't think I can, really. ~ Chiaki Kuriyama, #NFDB
162:I first had a version of this at a Japanese monastery during a silent retreat-don't ask, it's a long story. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow, #NFDB
163:To attract boyfriends, American girls pretend they are women, while Japanese women pretend they are girls. ~ Kittredge Cherry, #NFDB
164:V-J Day, or Victory in Japan Day, marks the date of the Japanese surrender that ended fighting in the Pacific. ~ Doc Hastings, #NFDB
165:watering the Japanese anemones naked again last week and you know what the police said about that. Liv x The last ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
166:Frankly, I was surprised at how generous the Japanese press has been to the idea of a foreigner running Sony. ~ Howard Stringer, #NFDB
167:Japanese is a baby talk - very, very hard to read, very, very, easy to talk. ... A very faint kind of language. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
168:The Japanese believe building a great organization is like growing a tree; it takes twenty-five to fifty years. ~ Peter M Senge, #NFDB
169:Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared? ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
170:by the end of the war American warplanes were dropping seventeen hundred tons of bombs a day on Japanese cities. ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
171:I don't mean to be a racist but if you're going to get raped by a Japanese guy, it's not going to hurt at all. ~ Chelsea Handler, #NFDB
172:In Japanese, 'four' and 'death' sound the same. It is appropriate that the Butcher's son should wear this number. ~ Nora Sakavic, #NFDB
173:Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either. ~ Frederik L Schodt, #NFDB
174:That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
175:My fake Japanese was smooth enough to earn me the title of 'The Emperor of Pleasing Graciousness' in that country. ~ Wolfman Jack, #NFDB
176:The Japanese have a saying that for every new food we try, we gain seven days of life. I may be immortal by now. ~ Firoozeh Dumas, #NFDB
177:According to the laws of early twenty-first century cinema, anyone speaking Japanese is in a horror movie. If ~ Seth Grahame Smith, #NFDB
178:My campaign to win her back is under way. I feel elated; the small blossom of hope is now a Japanese flowering cherry. ~ E L James, #NFDB
179:The Japanese samurai held the view that what was serious for the common man was but a game for the valiant. Noble ~ Johan Huizinga, #NFDB
180:Japanese movie "Be With You" served as inspiration for "Love Box." I couldn't fill up the album with just my experiences. ~ Seungri, #NFDB
181:My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese. ~ Fred Armisen, #NFDB
182:People don’t expect a small Japanese girl to be able to break a man’s arm. “They didn’t assume you were a ninja? ~ Demitria Lunetta, #NFDB
183:There is, in fact, no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense of “leaving the workforce for good ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
184:I assure you that interest in Japanese culture in Russia is just as strong as interest in Russian culture in Japan. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
185:Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
186:The Jap,” as MacArthur called the enemy—nearly everyone else called Japanese “Nips,” short for “Dai Nippon,” the ~ William Manchester, #NFDB
187:A Japanese proverb says fall seven times, stand up eight. We can also say this: Hate zero times, love infinitely! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
188:I love the Japanese director Shohei Imamura. His masterpiece in 1979 called, the English title was 'Vengeance is Mine'. ~ Bong Joon ho, #NFDB
189:People don’t expect a small Japanese girl to be able to break a man’s arm.
“They didn’t assume you were a ninja? ~ Demitria Lunetta,#NFDB
190:The Japanese Mafia. Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our thing as 'The Sicilian Yakuza'? Huh? ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
191:We represent companies from around the world who say, "I want to look at Japanese companies. I want to invest in Japan." ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
192:Wisdom is like unto a beacon set on high, which radiates its light even in the darkest night. ~ Buddhist Meditations from the Japanese, #NFDB
193:A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives. ~ Julie Otsuka, #NFDB
194:I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, “They’ll be another one floating by any minute now.” ~ Gilbert Gottfried, #NFDB
195:Part of the reason some Japanese companies have underperformed financially was corporate governance and board structures. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
196:The blurring of fantasy and reality is something that the Japanese herald in their life, in their day-to-day commercialism. ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
197:Wisdom is like unto a beacon set on high, which radiates its light even in the darkest night. ~ Buddhist Meditations from the Japanese, #NFDB
198:It has often been said that [...] the Japanese [are] geniuses at taking foreign ideas and adding a unique finishing touch. ~ Robert Reed, #NFDB
199:You can be a German, you can be a Greek or a Spanish or a Japanese etc, but your true nation is the whole humanity! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
200:Japanese moe relationships socially dysfunctional men develop deep attachments to body pillows with women painted on them. ~ James Franco, #NFDB
201:The Senkaku islands are inherently Japanese territory. I want to show my strong determination to prevent this from changing. ~ Shinzo Abe, #NFDB
202:When I was twenty-six, a Japanese healer felt my abdomen and told me I had a joyful uterus and I would have three children. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
203:We are a country of artisans and a country of manufacturing. I think Japanese textile technology is the best in the world. ~ Tadashi Yanai, #NFDB
204:I dont have a huge breakfast, and I sometimes forget to have lunch, so I focus on dinner. I love Thai and Japanese food. ~ Saffron Aldridge, #NFDB
205:I do think there will be more Japanese companies expanding out of Japan, and there will be more cross-border flow from Japan. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
206:Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
207:We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed? ~ Curtis LeMay, #NFDB
208:Big contrast: While the foreign media are obsessed with Apocalypses, the Japanese people are already talking of rebuilding. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
209:The drastic application of economic sanctions in July 1941 brought to a head the internal crisis in Japanese politics. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
210:Kaizen is Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. Its literal translation is: “continuous improvement. ~ Angela Duckworth, #NFDB
211:As the Japanese Zen masters say, “Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions”. Drop your theories; don't seek the truth. ~ Anthony de Mello, #NFDB
212:I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
213:The Chinese Communist rebels want twenty million dollars to purchase arms for themselves to battle China’s Japanese occupiers. ~ Bill O Reilly, #NFDB
214:The Japanese always arrive bearing a gift,’ whispered Anna, ‘but under no circumstances should you open it in their presence. ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
215:The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
216:The most complicated letters in English, like E and W, have four strokes. Many Japanese characters have more than 15 strokes ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
217:Endurance was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it. ~ Martha Gellhorn, #NFDB
218:I think America has the best assholes in the world. I defy the Belgians or the Japanese to produce something like a Donald Trump. ~ Matt Taibbi, #NFDB
219:Our ramshackle bath drove our neighbors wild. To them, it was a symbol of Japanese decadence. Bathing was an act of bourgeois ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
220:The garden of Dr. Harden was full of sunshine and bosomed with Japanese magnolia trees dropping pink tears over the grass. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
221:The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
222:The Japanese high command recognised the sexual needs of the men and provided for them. As a consequence, rape was not frequent. ~ Lee Kuan Yew, #NFDB
223:While the Japanese droned on in a high-pitched voice, I blinked out the desperate message over and over. TORTURE...TORTURE... ~ Jeremiah Denton, #NFDB
224:the Japanese school year begins in spring ... so mothers can send off their children as cherry blossoms fall from the branches. ~ Cathy Davidson, #NFDB
225:You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean? ~ Bill James, #NFDB
226:I could never understand how we could put 120,000 Japanese behind a fence in World War II. I remember being bewildered about that. ~ Phil Donahue, #NFDB
227:I love good food and I love to eat in nice restaurants. I love Japanese food. I love Gordon Ramsay in London; he is pretty amazing. ~ Isla Fisher, #NFDB
228:The word “to grieve” or “lament” in Japanese is actually made up of two different kanji characters — “sadness” and “resentment. ~ Takashi Hiraide, #NFDB
229:Everyone had a Japanese maple, although after Pearl Harbor most of these were patriotically poisoned, ringbarked and extirpated. ~ Barry Humphries, #NFDB
230:I get a lot of inspiration from Japanese manga, especially shoujo which tends to have elaborate and fantastical adventure plots. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
231:I try to be aware of technology and Japanese animation and old Belgian paintings, and get all my references from bits of everywhere. ~ Guido Palau, #NFDB
232:The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell because the Japanese had lost control of their own air. ~ Henry H Arnold, #NFDB
233:But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful. ~ George Takei, #NFDB
234:Everything can draw inspiration: a vintage cloth, a book, a street-when I was in Japan, I was deeply inspired by Japanese pharmacies. ~ Renzo Rosso, #NFDB
235:Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise, instead, seek what they sought.” –Matsuo Bashō Japanese poet of the Edo period ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
236:In pursuing a ‘way,’ Japanese typically move beyond an interest in craftsmanship to a kind of sacred search for the ultimate. ~ Morinosuke Kawaguchi, #NFDB
237:I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese. ~ Iain Banks, #NFDB
238:Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
239:Japanese people quickly grasp the pleasure that comes from folding clothes, almost as if they are genetically programmed for this task. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
240:Japanese women live in fear of making the least sound in a bathroom stall. Japanese men pay no attention to the subject whatsoever. ~ Amelie Nothomb, #NFDB
241:We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle - even if he can afford more. ~ Masaru Ibuka, #NFDB
242:If the Japanese want to be taken seriously as world financial powers, they'd better quit using the same tailor as variety show chimps. ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
243:There’s a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city. ~ Charles Stross, #NFDB
244:At the request of my Japanese colleagues, in 2000 we revisited the possibility of signing a peace treaty based on the 1956 agreement. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
245:It's a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody's arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere. ~ Quentin Tarantino, #NFDB
246:Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. ~ Curtis LeMay, #NFDB
247:A lot of Japanese use their cats,” she said. “They’re not in the photo with the cat?” I asked. “Nope. Just the cat. Or their rice cooker. ~ Aziz Ansari, #NFDB
248:An attentive scrutiny of thy being will reveal to thee that it is one with the very essence of absolute perfection. ~ Buddhist Writings in the Japanese, #NFDB
249:I respect the Japanese and especially like their execution and communication styles. Unlike the Koreans, they will not hit you from behind. ~ Terry Gou, #NFDB
250:I was born in Japan and raised in Japan, but those are the only things that make me Japanese, I've grown up reading books from all over. ~ Hideo Kojima, #NFDB
251:Japanese and Koreans to the east; Siamese, Annamites, and Cambodians to the south; and to the north the nomad Mongols and Manchus. ~ T Lothrop Stoddard, #NFDB
252: be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic: teenagers swoon over Japanese pop singers. ~ Oxford University Press, #NFDB
253:Four more times the Japanese strafed them, sending Louie into the water to kick and punch at the sharks until the bomber had passed. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
254:I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
255:Japanese children were kept out of California classrooms as late as 1907 on the theory that they lacked the aptitude for higher learning. ~ Colin Woodard, #NFDB
256:The Japanese Prime Minister has apologized for Japan's part in World War II. However, he still hasn't mentioned anything about karaoke. ~ David Letterman, #NFDB
257:A girl on North Fremont is discouraged by the postman, who tells her that only a traitor would dare exchange letters with the Japanese. NEW ~ Julie Otsuka, #NFDB
258:American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born japanese. ~ Ry Murakami, #NFDB
259:I play around with my Japanese Garden. Since Im half way to 70 today I need to start pruning trees and sharpening plants like an old fart. ~ Jason Bateman, #NFDB
260:My own family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. It took our nation over 40 years to apologize ~ Michael M Honda, #NFDB
261:As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed. ~ Glenn Reynolds, #NFDB
262:My father is Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino; my mother is half-Irish and half-Japanese; Greek last name; born in Hawaii, raised in Germany. ~ Mark Dacascos, #NFDB
263:But Ruby, my language of choice since NewBagel, was invented by a cheerful Japanese programmer, and it reads like friendly, accessible poetry. ~ Robin Sloan, #NFDB
264:It's a Samurai story [47 ronin], so if we change too much Japanese audiences will have strong against feelings to the film. It's not good. ~ Hiroyuki Sanada, #NFDB
265:The conquering army had perpetrated untold atrocities. The Japanese had occupied my home and twice forced us to leave the land I loved. ~ Katherine Paterson, #NFDB
266:He was as obsequious as a Japanese ivy plant. Wringing his hands as if he hoped to squeeze the milk of human kindness from his fingernails, ... ~ Philip Kerr, #NFDB
267:We played every bar, party, pub, hotel lounge, church hall, mining town - places that made Mad Max territory look like a Japanese garden. ~ Michael Hutchence, #NFDB
268:When he was a kid, Gibson had mispronounced George Abe’s name until his father corrected him: “Ah-bay. More Japanese, less Lincoln.” As ~ Matthew FitzSimmons, #NFDB
269:When [Japanese] women encouraged men to bask in public glory, it reminded me of the way you would indulge a child with a sweet-bean treat. ~ Kittredge Cherry, #NFDB
270:I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater. ~ George Takei, #NFDB
271:Japanese people wouldn't come up with ideas of blood splattering all over. Japanese focus more on the intricacies of the actions, the motion. ~ Satoshi Tajiri, #NFDB
272:Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture. ~ Tadao Ando, #NFDB
273:We call Japanese soldiers fanatics when they die rather than surrender, whereas American soldiers who do the same thing are called heroes. ~ Robert M Hutchins, #NFDB
274:Japanese people they hear my warmin' up and they start screamin'. They can tell it's me.It's my tone on the trumpet, it sounds like I'm speakin'. ~ Miles Davis, #NFDB
275:My American and Japanese personalities are distinct, and I carry myself differently depending on which language I’m using and which mode I’m in. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
276:Pikachu. 'Pika' is the sound Japanese say an electric spark makes. And 'chu' is the sound a mouse makes. So Pikachu is like an electric mouse. ~ Satoshi Tajiri, #NFDB
277:You wish,” I say. “I do,” he replies, fast and smooth as silk. Ugh. His voice is taking on a distinctly Japanese accent, and it’s maddeningly hot. ~ A R Kahler, #NFDB
278:At the root of Japanese manufacturing lies a feminine delicacy and shyness as well as a childlike curiosity and fantasy-filled worldview. ~ Morinosuke Kawaguchi, #NFDB
279:But of course I love my Japanese fans and the show must go on, no matter the daily aftershocks or husband kidnappings! It's not right but it's okay ~ Katy Perry, #NFDB
280:If I want Italian and you want Japanese, why can't you compromise and have Italian?" my husband once said to me, redefining the word "compromise. ~ Nell Scovell, #NFDB
281:In Japan, so many emoticons have been created that it’s reasonable to assume Japanese appreciate their convenience more than anyone else. ~ Morinosuke Kawaguchi, #NFDB
282:...Poetic injustice...having made over Japan in our own image. The Japanese, ...are now, next to us, the greatest consumers of meat in the world. ~ Mother Jones, #NFDB
283:After the tsunami in Japan, we were open for business. In fact, I flew there 10 days after the tsunami to show our support for the Japanese people. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
284:An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country. A Japanese proverb: Even an insect one-tenth of an inch long has five-tenths of a soul. ~ Jenny Offill, #NFDB
285:CHUNG-CHA HAD NEVER MET a westerner who could tell the difference between a Chinese and a Japanese, much less a North Korean and a South Korean. ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
286:Some audiences might find homosexuality an uncomfortable subject matter, and a character who is a Japanese collaborator is always uncomfortable. ~ Park Chan wook, #NFDB
287:As late as 1876, there were more than a hundred foreign industrial workers in the Japanese railroad industry alone and, of these, 94 were British. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
288:finally defeat Japanese imperialism only through the cumulative effect of many offensive campaigns and battles in both regular and guerrilla warfare, ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
289:I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play. ~ Philip Warren Anderson, #NFDB
290:In order to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand - or at least to learn to understand - the beauty of stone. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
291:Karaoke is itself the Japanese work for embarrassing oneself by singing in front of a room filled with strangers who are only there to laugh at you. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
292:soldiers on the banks of the canal, they looked carefully to see whether they were Japanese or Chinese so they’d know which pass to pull out. ~ Katherine Paterson, #NFDB
293:An old Japanese friend recently confided to me: ' I can't forgive to americans for the fact that Hiroshima wasn't an act of war, but an experiment'. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
294:I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools. ~ Bruce Feiler, #NFDB
295:If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro, #NFDB
296:I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation. ~ Pharrell Williams, #NFDB
297:Australia and New Zealand are now threatened by the might of the Imperial Japanese forces, and both of them should know that any resistance is futile. ~ Hideki Tojo, #NFDB
298:Paprika is evidence that Japanese animators are reaching for the moon, while most of their American counterparts remain stuck in the kiddie sandbox. ~ Manohla Dargis, #NFDB
299:The Japanese are a disease of the skin...the Communists are a disease of the heart. Everything personal was political... Two reds sandwiching a black... ~ Jung Chang, #NFDB
300:The secret of Soto Zen is just two words: not always so.... In Japanese, it's two words, three words in English. That is the secret of our practice. ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #NFDB
301:I started to listen to Japanese jazz musicians when I went to high school. Some people I listened to were Yosuke Yamashita, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sadao Watanabe. ~ Hiromi, #NFDB
302:As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness. ~ Andrew Sean Greer, #NFDB
303:Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
304:Hitler insisted on the superiority of the Aryan race, but his closest allies were the Italians, and he accorded the Japanese the dubious accolade of ~ Stephen E Ambrose, #NFDB
305:The Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U S consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
306:If you had a large vase with a big crack down the middle of it, a Japanese art museum would put the vase on a pedestal and shine a spotlight on the crack! ~ Arielle Ford, #NFDB
307:The next movie will be in Mandarin. I enjoyed shooting all the Japanese stuff in Kill Bill so much that this whole film will be entirely in Mandarin. ~ Quentin Tarantino, #NFDB
308:I know just enough Japanese to get by if I get lost and greet an audience properly, just from having a lot of Japanese friends and being there over the years. ~ Janis Ian, #NFDB
309:Japan is dealing us a dead hand. For two years we have watched the Japanese drag their feet and we can't let them continue to slam the door in our faces. ~ Craig L Thomas, #NFDB
310:What I worry about is not just Nissan, but Japanese manufacturers losing motivation to maintain production in Japan. The high yen is definitely a headwind. ~ Carlos Ghosn, #NFDB
311:For the NA market the focus tends to be on actions by game characters while for the Japanese market their characterization is more likely to be the main focus. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
312:I brought Bhagawad Gita as a gift for the Japanese PM...I don't have anything better than Gita to give & nor does the World has anything better to receive. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
313:Japanese affection is not uttered in words; it scarcely appears even in the tone of voice; it is chiefly shown in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
314:Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. ~ Denise Kiernan, #NFDB
315:We can take our Japanese clients around the world. We can take them to Brazil, Europe, anywhere. And we also take companies from around the world into Japan. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
316:Western clothes are our everyday wardrobe. But I do not think that it makes much of a difference anymore whether you are Japanese or American or European. ~ Junya Watanabe, #NFDB
317:but results are bad. This attempt to save time reminds me of a more fitting Japanese proverb: Nito o oumono wa itto mo ezu or “Chase two hares and get none. ~ Garr Reynolds, #NFDB
318:On my first days here I did not start work immediately but, as planned, I took it easy for a few days - flicked through books, studied Japanese art a little. ~ Gustav Klimt, #NFDB
319:The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II. ~ Steven Spielberg, #NFDB
320:The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan. ~ Chester W Nimitz, #NFDB
321:The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes. ~ David Rockefeller, #NFDB
322:There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action. ~ John Henrik Clarke, #NFDB
323:Echo looked around at her sea of tomes, and a single word came to mind: tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all. ~ Melissa Grey, #NFDB
324:I was on a Japanese designers' pedestal - considered a maestro. My design was getting closer to a couturier's work, and I felt like I was missing something. ~ Yohji Yamamoto, #NFDB
325:Saavik gazed calmly at the viewscreen. She was aesthetically elegant in the spare, understated, esoterically powerful manner of a Japanese brush-painting. ~ Vonda N McIntyre, #NFDB
326:Terri and her mother arrived. She was obviously a dedicated stage mother because she was loaded down with camera equipment, looking like a Japanese tourist. ~ Audrey Meadows, #NFDB
327:We were in negotiations, but then the Japanese side suspended them unilaterally. Now, at the request of our Japanese partners, we have reopened these talks. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
328:I don't know how many serious Christians exist here in America, but the Japanese, the younger generation is leaving the Buddhist religion mentality behind. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto, #NFDB
329:The method (of learning Japanese) recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan. And even then it's not easy. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
330:Japanese staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond “awesome” and “sucks”, which for a vast range of human endeavour, actually, is more than enough… ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
331:Once you understand the foundations of cooking - whatever kind you like, whether it's French or Italian or Japanese - you really don't need a cookbook anymore. ~ Thomas Keller, #NFDB
332:There's a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime - a whole word for just being sad - about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they're going to die. ~ Sarah Ruhl, #NFDB
333:There’s a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime – a whole word for just being sad – about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they’re going to die. ~ Sarah Ruhl, #NFDB
334:his shoes on the front porch before he came inside. “The Japanese do that,” he said. “They don’t bring the dirt of the world into another person’s house. ~ Benjamin Alire S enz, #NFDB
335:I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture. ~ Christian Marclay, #NFDB
336:The main selling appeal of NAFTA to US corporations is that it gives them an advantage in the North American market over their European and Japanese competitors. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
337:The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
338:I believe it is important that we Japanese write a constitution for ourselves that would reflect the shape of the country we consider desirable in the 21st century. ~ Shinzo Abe, #NFDB
339:I've never studied the Japanese. That's something that must have crept in there. But the Japanese are my biggest clients. They seem to like the elemental quality. ~ Andrew Wyeth, #NFDB
340:A few of the Japanese tourists looked over and then quickly away. I was a foreigner, so they made it their business to politely ignore the shenanigans I was causing. ~ Amanda Sun, #NFDB
341:And Philippe won't speak English. She's sure he can - he's got that European je ne sais quoi that usually means "Oh, I speak six languages. And a little Japanese. ~ Ellen Sussman, #NFDB
342:A series of howls and war cries echoed through the camp....The werewolves and Japanese had attacked."
-pg.353 Forbidden Nights with a Vampire Kerrelyn Sparks ~ Kerrelyn Sparks,#NFDB
343:Even if there are no new Mighty Atom manga or films created, the Mighty Atom character has become a permanent fixture of both Japanese and global pop culture. ~ Frederik L Schodt, #NFDB
344:The second is that the role of China trade in Japanese economy, important as it is, has often been exaggerated, as proven by our experience of the past 6 years. ~ Shigeru Yoshida, #NFDB
345:I knew the persona I was inhabiting—moneyed Japanese gaming enthusiast—would lack crucial verisimilitude if the persona in question had never set eyes on Las Vegas. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
346:In Japanese and Italian, the response to ["How are you?"] is "I'm fine, and you?" In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
347:The young Japanese, especially, love to wear the latest thing and when they come to London they head for my shops as part of what they want to find in Britain. ~ Vivienne Westwood, #NFDB
348:What I want for Christmas is to be a Japanese pop star. [Laughs] Santa can't exactly put that under the tree, but I'm hoping that some magic will happen overseas. ~ Candice Accola, #NFDB
349:When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me. ~ Jack Gilbert, #NFDB
350:I find that there are a lot of similarities between French and Japanese food. I think they're two countries that have really systemized their cuisine and codified it. ~ David Chang, #NFDB
351:If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
352:I got up the nerve to ask her if she remembered that first visit and my terrible faux pas. She pretended, in true Japanese fashion, that it had never happened. ~ Katherine Paterson, #NFDB
353:In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I'm just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make or how nice I am. So what the fuck? ~ Min Jin Lee, #NFDB
354:Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism. ~ Paul Samuelson, #NFDB
355:Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention? ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
356:My dad remembers being in school with my uncle, and the teacher would say outright to the class that the Japanese were second-class citizens and shouldn't be trusted. ~ Mike Shinoda, #NFDB
357:When I first left Oregon I was most excited about two things on my itinerary. I wanted to pitch the Japanese my Crazy Idea. And I wanted to stand before the Acropolis. ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
358:I believe it is no secret that I like Japan very much - Japanese culture, sport, including judo, but it will not offend anyone if I say that I like Russia even more. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
359:in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
360:while I walk on the moon keeps pace beside me: friend in the water [1852.jpg] -- from Japanese Death Poems, Translated by Yoel Hoffman
~ Masahide, Masahides Death Poem
,#NFDB
361:But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality. ~ Hayao Miyazaki, #NFDB
362:Knut, this is Jude. Remember I told you about him? He writes poetry.” Knut looked my half-Japanese self up and down. “Haiku?” he guessed. “Gesundheit,” I muttered sourly. ~ J L Merrow, #NFDB
363:The Japanese, if I understand them, are masters of the unsaid and the unstated, of subtlety and ambiguity, all of which constitute powerful stimulants to the imagination. ~ Semir Zeki, #NFDB
364:To be able to use the Japanese tongue as a Japanese uses it, one would need to be born again, and to have one's mind completely reconstructed, from the foundation upwards. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
365:Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
366:Nevertheless, China was unfortunately unable to understand Japan's real position, and it is greatly to be regretted that the Sino-Japanese War became one of long duration ~ Hideki Tojo, #NFDB
367:When a Japanese manufacturer was asked by his North American counterpart, What is the best language in which to do business?" the man responded: "My customer's language ~ Leonard Sweet, #NFDB
368:In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan - because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks. ~ Steve Sailer, #NFDB
369:My heart was beating like it was being played by a one-armed Japanese Ondekoza drummer pounding slowly on his seven-hundred-pound drum with a caveman’s club at twilight. ~ Walter Mosley, #NFDB
370:Singapore could only be taken after a siege by an army of at least 50,000 men. It is not considered possible that the Japanese would embark on such a mad enterprise. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
371:The strawberry game is an example of kokology, a Japanese pseudo-science that is supposed to tell you things you didn’t know about yourself by answering situational questions. ~ Roosh V, #NFDB
372:When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
373:1. Japan reshuffles Cabinet. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe reshuffled his inner circle on Wednesday, the first such move since he returned to office nearly two years ago. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
374:He who contemplates the supreme Truth, contemplates the perfect Essence; only the vision of the spirit can see this nature of ineffable perfection. ~ Buddhist Mediations from the Japanese, #NFDB
375:The way my father saw it, whether the Manchus on the mainland or the Japanese were in charge didn't much matter, since they all left us alone except when it came time for taxes. ~ Ken Liu, #NFDB
376:We have even done a weekend on Japanese grammar! Not that I know anything about Japanese grammar, but it was Kaz's idea, and it was a bit of an adventure, to say the least. ~ Joan Halifax, #NFDB
377:For the 1,300 years prior to the Japanese occupation, Korea had been a unified country governed by the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies in world history ~ Barbara Demick, #NFDB
378:The garden stretched out in a soft drift, colors jumbled any way, an unmade bed of red and yellow and pink. Then came the trees. Apple, plum, and the Japanese black pine. ~ Cathleen Schine, #NFDB
379:What are you? German? American? English? Greek? Japanese? Turkish? French? Indian? Chinese? These are not real, these are virtual! You are human! This is what is real! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
380:The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested. ~ Utada Hikaru, #NFDB
381:And $18 million in three Japanese banks, completely false. That I have two factories in Panama, also completely false. This is part of the counter campaign of some people. ~ Alberto Fujimori, #NFDB
382:Faust was this mythical figure who sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power. The Japanese have made that Faustian bargain because they don't have coal, oil or hydro power. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
383:I am sure that the Japanese, the Chinese and the peoples of Islam will always be closer to us than, for example, France, in spite of the fact that we are related by blood (...) ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
384:They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races. ~ Hirohito, #NFDB
385:As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past. ~ Arthur Golden, #NFDB
386:Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage. ~ Nick Harkaway, #NFDB
387:In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins? ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
388:Then came upon an incredible essay by Lafcadio Hearn, something entitled “Gaki,” detailing the curious Japanese belief that insects are really demons or the ghosts of evil men. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
389:There’s a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime – a whole word for just being sad – about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they’re going to die.”
— Sarah Ruhl ~ Sarah Ruhl,#NFDB
390:Being Taiwanese in Japan was like being a guitar-playing monkey: their fluent Japanese elicited awe from the people they met, yet they were considered not-quite-whole people. ~ Shawna Yang Ryan, #NFDB
391:Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
392:Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture. ~ Tadao Ando, #NFDB
393:I had to trick people into giving me money for my first film. Making a romantic comedy is easier and more expected from a woman than it is to make a drama about a Japanese warrior. ~ Julie Delpy, #NFDB
394:I have to decide Japanese strategy - shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade? That is my hardest decision to date. But I'll make it when I have all the facts. ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
395:Japanese ideas about religion, architecture, theater, and literature are based on wa and shunyata—concepts of plentitude and uncertainty, of togetherness framed by impermanence. ~ Gretel Ehrlich, #NFDB
396:Many Japanese painters and calligraphers would change their names intentionally to keep their relationship to the art always fresh. This way, others' expectations can be avoided. ~ Tina Weymouth, #NFDB
397:I am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenly pressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons for disliking Japanese civilization. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
398:The quintessential Japanese balance, I thought: to surrender all of yourself to an illusion, and yet somewhere, in some part of yourself, to know all the while that it is an illusion. ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
399:When the Japanese mend broken objects, they fill the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.—Barbara Bloom ~ Arielle Ford, #NFDB
400:haragei—the art of balance and power emanating from the lower belly. Haragei was the basis of all Japanese martial arts, from sumo to karate to the almost extinct harakei. The ~ Eric Van Lustbader, #NFDB
401:In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
402:With suicide, it's a strange thing in Japanese culture. It's acceptable. My parents would have been devastated if my attempt had been successful, but they would have somehow accepted it. ~ Ken Ono, #NFDB
403:I would like to hook up with one of the great Japanese filmmakers, like the master that made Ringu, and I would like to take 'The Wicker Man' to Japan, except this time he's a ghost. ~ Nicolas Cage, #NFDB
404:During one raid alone in 1945, using conventional bombs, it was estimated that eighty-eight thousand Japanese were killed and six square miles of Tokyo were completely destroyed. But ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
405:I have read that, on the average, the Japanese are getting taller, but at the moment they seem to be about the same height as American junior-high-school students, only with fewer guns. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
406:It is simply that we treat Japanese history, the history of the Japanese people and its unique culture with greater respect and interest. This generates enormous interest in Russia! ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
407:When I was in my early 20s, I was quite into Japanese animation. It's like the same thing that I end up always saying which is, imagery based stuff is the thing that really gets me. ~ Neill Blomkamp, #NFDB
408:drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
409:In direct confrontation, the [Japanese] women might yield like blades of grass -- and spring back just as quickly. One of them compared this flexibility to the Vietcong guerrillas… ~ Kittredge Cherry, #NFDB
410:The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese. ~ John McGahern, #NFDB
411:I am so happy and proud to learn of Hideo Nomo's election to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. He was quite a pitcher and competitor, but he is also a very special and caring person. ~ Tommy Lasorda, #NFDB
412:I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, "Whoah! What's that?" that I have with Japanese popular culture. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
413:she had stood at the gate of her compound and told the Japanese soldiers there that if they tried to come in and get her girls, they would have to do it across her dead body. This ~ Katherine Paterson, #NFDB
414:The Encounter"
All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin. ~ Ezra Pound,#NFDB
415:The way I formed my studio and how I organize things actually came out of the model of the Japanese animation studio and the manga industry. The manga industry is gigantic in Japan. ~ Takashi Murakami, #NFDB
416:The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
417:Even if I'm in Japan and I don't speak Japanese and the woman facing me doesn't speak French but she's dressed in Rykiel, and she recognizes me, then we have a common language right away. ~ Sonia Rykiel, #NFDB
418:I feel responsible to make something original as a Japanese artist. There are lots of singers and guitarists, but I feel that on stage its meaningless to copy something someone has done before. ~ Miyavi, #NFDB
419:Every year far more people kill themselves in Japan than die through war or terrorism in Iraq. We go on and on about other countries, but I think Japanese society is pretty cruel too. ~ Fuminori Nakamura, #NFDB
420:There are other ways to get back at your phone you know, if it's being naughty, you could simply make it communicate in Japanese,put it on silent, or even take away its battery privileges. ~ Holly Denham, #NFDB
421:There is a Japanese proverb that literally goes 'Raise the sail with your stronger hand,' meaning you must go after the opportunities that arise in life that you are best equipped to do. ~ Soichiro Honda, #NFDB
422:In Japanese culture it is said that if a vase is accidently broken and then glued back together, it becomes even more beautiful... regardless of its defects. It can be the same with people. ~ Jos N Harris, #NFDB
423:the Japanese experience, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble ended up triggering an 80 per cent stock market sell-off and a decade of economic stagnation. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
424:This poster, which I still have on my wall 20 years later, contains all 1,945 of the jōyō kanji , the characters designated for basic literacy by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Most ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
425:We do not trade territories although concluding a peace treaty with Japan is certainly a key issue and we would like to find a solution to this problem together with our Japanese friends. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
426:Ro, he's human and he cares about you. He has no way of knowing you're like this super-human, Goddess-channelling Vessel of death and destruction worthy of one very cool Japanese anime series ~ Lauren Dane, #NFDB
427:All of a sudden, there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films. It's usually because there are a number of people that cross-pollinated each other. ~ Francis Ford Coppola, #NFDB
428:I hope that the mistakes made and suffering imposed upon Japanese Americans nearly 60 years ago will not be repeated against Arab Americans whose loyalties are now being called into question. ~ Daniel Inouye, #NFDB
429:Japanese gamers aren't really into action games right now. They're into role-playing or strategy games with a lot of stats, but action titles are still really popular across the US and Europe. ~ Hideo Kojima, #NFDB
430:There are also a number of humans living up there (Canada), and in many ways they have a lifestyle quite similar to ours, including such traditional American activities as driving Japanese cars. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
431:If you're very, very conservative and you like that sort of practice, go find a very conservative Zen master and just do traditional Japanese practice, which is not that traditional actually. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
432:There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
433:Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun; The Japanese don't care to, the Chinese wouldn't dare to; Hindus and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve to one, But Englishmen detest a siesta. ~ Noel Coward, #NFDB
434:My Japanese designed, vacuum-sealed thermos was one of my most prized possessions. I had filled it up before I went to sleep so there were no worries. This baby laughed in the face of entropy. ~ B Justin Shier, #NFDB
435:Japanese researchers at Chiba University found that a daily fifteen-minute walk in the woods caused significant decreases in cortisol, along with a modest drop in blood pressure and heart rate. ~ Michael Finkel, #NFDB
436:My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
437:On the news that the Tsar had sent the troops icons to boost their morals, General Dragomirov quipped: 'The Japanese are beating us with machine-guns, but never mind: we'll beat them with icons. ~ Orlando Figes, #NFDB
438:The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them. ~ Ralph Bakshi, #NFDB
439:At its best, [Japanese cooking] is inextricably meshed with aesthetics, with religion, with tradition and history. It is evocative of seasonal changes, or of one's childhood, or of a storm at sea. ~ M F K Fisher, #NFDB
440:komono, a Japanese term that the dictionary defines variously as “small articles; miscellaneous items; accessories; gadgets or small tools, parts, or attachments; an insignificant person; small fry. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
441:Depending on one’s point of view, Hagakure represents a mystical beauty intrinsic to the Japanese aesthetic experience, and a stoic but profound appreciation of the meaning of life and death. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #NFDB
442:This isn't a hunt that's going to kill just four or five gray whales. The repercussions of this will have an effect on tens of thousands of whales that will be killed by the Japanese and Norwegians. ~ Paul Watson, #NFDB
443:All through the years since World War II, the Japanese people have, I am convinced, made strenuous efforts to preserve and promote world peace, contributing to the progress and prosperity of mankind. ~ Eisaku Sato, #NFDB
444:So we are now still dependent on foreign oil, have a problem with global warming, and are losing jobs rapidly to the Japanese in fuel-efficient vehicles as a result of that very shortsighted progress. ~ Jay Inslee, #NFDB
445:The contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West - say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase - are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation. ~ Hirokazu Koreeda, #NFDB
446:The one that came really easy was the Japanese lover, because he's like a ghost in the book. He's always in the background like a spirit, like a shadow, almost. There's a very delicate line there. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
447:The Germans are clear about what they do - cars and machine tools; the Japanese are clear about what they do - electronics; the Chinese are clear about what they do - they're the workshop of the world. ~ Evan Davis, #NFDB
448:The power and depth of Japanese acting certainly inspired me, so I was determined that Hollywood was going to get a taste of that, that Americans were going to get a taste of Japanese action. ~ Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, #NFDB
449:Wikipedia is so dangerous. You go online to look up the definition of eclampsia, and three hours later you find yourself reading this earnest explanation of tentacle porn in [Japanese] anime. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
450:I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro, #NFDB
451:In Japanese, there is a term, “forest bathing,” where you take a walk under the trees and the coolness, the smell, and the silence wash over you. I feel relaxed, cleansed, and clear-minded afterward. ~ Timothy Ferris, #NFDB
452:I think that the Japanese culture is one of the very few cultures left that is its own entity. They're just so traditional and so specific in their ways. It's kind of untouched, it's not Americanized. ~ Toni Collette, #NFDB
453:Japanese animation tends to need high budgets. If I have a high budget for a movie, I usually make animation, but if the project has a low budget, then I would ask the producer to consider live action. ~ Mamoru Oshii, #NFDB
454:The Japanese have become so smitten with the Western condiment - its texture as silky as a kimono, its tang as understated as the tang of Zen - that today they have a word for mayonnaise junkie: mayora. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
455:My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another. ~ Sandra Cisneros, #NFDB
456:Tantric Zen is for someone who is really broad-minded. It is Bodhidharma's Zen, your Zen, my Zen. Which doesn't mean I have a problem with Japanese Zen. Most Japanese Zen is minding your p's and q's. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
457:For instance, Visser, the Dutchman, had sold German machine guns to the Chinese, spied for the Japanese and served a term of imprisonment for killing a coolie in Batavia. He was not an easy man to handle. ~ Eric Ambler, #NFDB
458:From the point of the view of the nation's power, it was obvious that while we were fighting the Sino-Japanese war, every effort was to be made to avoid adding to our enemies and opening additional fronts ~ Hideki Tojo, #NFDB
459:Pandora had no idea how fortunate she was that he didn't insist on sending her out with a bodyguard of assorted marksmen, cavalry, Scottish archers, and a few Japanese samurai thrown in for hood measure. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
460:The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
461:If a movie is nominated for, say, an Academy award, that movie will instantly become popular in Japan. There's always been a bit of a complex the Japanese have about being taken seriously in the West. ~ Hirokazu Koreeda, #NFDB
462:That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. Mono no aware, the Japanese call it. ~ Tan Twan Eng, #NFDB
463:But what stands out in Japanese history, as well as in today’s Japanese management behavior, is the capacity for making 180-degree turns—that is, for reaching radical and highly controversial decisions. ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
464:Did you know that the word 'tsunami,' which is now being used worldwide, is a Japanese word? This is indicative of the extent to which Japan has been subject to frequent tsunami disasters in the past. ~ Junichiro Koizumi, #NFDB
465:I would say keep supporting space flight, keep telling the public and the politicians why it's important to advance science and explore the galaxy. I encourage the Japanese to keep doing what they're doing. ~ Leroy Chiao, #NFDB
466:Explaining the $1000 in cash and two watches he was given by two Japanese journalists after he helped arrange a private interview for them with First Lady Nancy Reagan: I didn't accept it. I received it. ~ Richard V Allen, #NFDB
467:If we don't do it, somebody else will. The Chinese, the Europeans and the Japanese all have the goal of going to the moon. Certainly we don't want to wake up and see that they have a base there before we do. ~ Bart Gordon, #NFDB
468:I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
469:of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
470:There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it. ~ Mark Doty, #NFDB
471:I don't want people to see what I've been doing at Play Cloths for nine years and built from a streetwear independence standpoint through Japanese streetwear - I don't want that to be shifted into something else. ~ Pusha T, #NFDB
472:The Japanese always started with the market share of components first. So one would dominate, let's say, sensors, and someone else would dominate memory, and someone else hard drives and things of that sort. ~ John Sculley, #NFDB
473:The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism, often leaving important things unsaid; whereas Americans tend to think they're being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
474:The Prime Minister [Shinzō Abe] also highlighted the need to address general humanitarian issues. We already mentioned one of these issues: visa-free travel by Japanese citizens to the South Kuril Islands. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
475:It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience. ~ Alain Ducasse, #NFDB
476:Japanese people cut their energy use by 25 percent immediately after Fukushima. They showed there was huge opportunity there. And instead, the government simply wants to get those plants up and running again. ~ David Suzuki, #NFDB
477:At some point a few years ago Japan unilaterally stopped those talks and broke off contacts with us. It was not we who broke off contacts with Japan, it was the Japanese side that broke off contacts with us. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
478:I was in Japan a couple of months ago, I saw a preview for the movie Pearl Harbor. And they showed the Japanese airplanes coming in to bomb Pearl Harbor, and I applauded. Nobody else in the theater applauded. ~ Bobby Fischer, #NFDB
479:The difficulty of learning spoken English for a person profoundly deaf from an early age has been likened to a hearing American trying to learn spoken Japanese while locked within a soundproof glass cubicle. ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
480:Every morning, the Omori POWs were assembled and ordered to call out their number in Japanese. After November 1, 1944, the man assigned number twenty-nine would sing out “Niju ku!” at the top of his lungs. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
481:Half my family was from the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the other half was U.S. Army, and I was raised on Army posts during my childhood, so I pretty much began my life with a split-brain sort of thing. ~ Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, #NFDB
482:Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945. ~ William Manchester, #NFDB
483:Since I am a Japanese man who's been building through the experience of Japanese architecture, my actual designs come from Japanese architectural concepts, although they're based on Western methods and materials. ~ Tadao Ando, #NFDB
484:The real benefit is that you must handle each piece of clothing. As you run your hands over the cloth, you pour your energy into it. The Japanese word for healing is te-ate, which literally means “to apply hands. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
485:We do all that [ represent companies], because we have a lot of research in Japanese companies, and that research educates investors around the world. It allows us to sell stocks and bonds in Japanese companies. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
486:At the request of our Japanese partners, we have reopened these talks [about territories]. What command is given in this case in judo? You probably know better than I do: Yoshi (continue). So we will continue. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
487:Grey Sparrow Addresses The Mind's Ear
In the Japanese tongue of the mind's eye one two syllable word tells of the fringe
of rain clinging to the eaves and of the grey-green fronds of wild parsley.
~ Denise Levertov,#NFDB
488:It was also during my tenure of office that the Japanese Government agreed to the conclusion of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and signed it, pursuing a policy in harmony with the avowed desire of the people. ~ Eisaku Sato, #NFDB
489:When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
490:All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will. ~ Antoni Tapies, #NFDB
491:I got a DJ stage name: “Hana-bi” – Japanese name. You know what it means?’ Emily obviously didn’t look like much of a linguist because Midori didn’t wait for her to reply before supplying the answer. ‘“Fireworks”. ~ Helen Smith, #NFDB
492:I really like the idea of being utilitarian. My dream is to edit down my wardrobe and be very Japanese, where you have one rolling rack and it's like your four T-shirts, your five dresses, your two pairs of jeans. ~ Erin Wasson, #NFDB
493:I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
494:The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
495:Dad says there are more than three thousand letters in the Japanese alphabet, which could pose a problem. There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and I get into enough trouble with them as it is. ~ Rin Chupeco, #NFDB
496:Today, the US spends less on defense as a percentage of our economy than we did at any time since he Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the world's only superpower, that is an invitation to very serious trouble. ~ Steve Forbes, #NFDB
497:Human ambitions are like Japanese carp; they grow proportional to the size of their environment. Our achievements grow according to the size of our dreams and the degree to which we are in touch with our mission. ~ Keith Ferrazzi, #NFDB
498:I never make mistakes,” I replied. “I’m either right or I’m learning. Jaku niku kyo shoku.” I recited one of the many Japanese sayings he’d spouted over the course of my life. The weak are meat, the strong eat. ~ Penelope Douglas, #NFDB
499:The causes of the China Incident were the exclusion and insult of Japan throughout China, the exclusion of Japanese goods, the persecution of Japanese residents in China, and the illegal violation of Japanese rights ~ Hideki Tojo, #NFDB
500:The dwarfed trees of the Chinese and Japanese have been noticed by every author who has written upon these countries, and all have attempted to give some description of the method by which the effect is produced. ~ Robert Fortune, #NFDB
501:They wanted revenge for the Bataan Death March of 1942, during which Japanese troops killed or brutalized thousands of captured Filipino and American soldiers along a forced hundred-mile march to a prison camp. ~ Mitchell Zuckoff, #NFDB
502:When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan. ~ Tadao Ando, #NFDB
503:A movie of mine is going to be released in Japan next year. I play a waitress who's a really regular girl in this movie. The English title isn't decided yet, but in Japanese it's I'll Get on the A Train Sometime. ~ Chiaki Kuriyama, #NFDB
504:At Tsushima on May 27–28, 1905, the Japanese fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō sent two-thirds of the Russian fleet – 147,000 tons of naval hardware and nearly 50,000 sailors – to the bottom of the Korea Strait. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
505:Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
506:The ditties blend Japanese popular culture themes of saccharine, childlike goodness and viciously detached sadism, which Aum drew upon as it tapped the barely suppressed rage of the young against their society. ~ Robert Jay Lifton, #NFDB
507:If I spoke no English, my world would be limited to the Japanese-speaking community, and no matter how talented I was, I could never do business, seek employment or take part in public affairs outside that community. ~ S I Hayakawa, #NFDB
508:But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age. ~ Sam Donaldson, #NFDB
509:If liberals had been in charge of the Arizona memorial, it would probably have featured an exhaustive exhibit about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and little about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. ~ Mona Charen, #NFDB
510:Japanese women have always loved my films, even when no one else did. Ever since I made 'Maurice' in the 1980s, I've been getting hundreds of letter from Japanese girls. They definitely have a special place in my heart. ~ Hugh Grant, #NFDB
511:One of the things I've discovered, thanks to the Japanese, is that you should enjoy yourself. In the old days, I used to think: 'Oh, never be satisfied, never admit to being happy.' But there's no curse in being happy. ~ Jane Birkin, #NFDB
512:The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
513:English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese. ~ Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
514:I don’t worry about the future,” Lou said. “The Japanese have the word ‘karma.’ It means—if it’s going to happen, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I know my time is limited. And so what? I’ve had a good shot at it. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
515:The second half of the twentieth century in Japan saw the birth of scores of new religions – a phenomenon to which the Japanese have applied the appealing label kamigami no rasshu-awa, “the rush hour of the gods. ~ John Michael Greer, #NFDB
516:When a population saves a lot, the funds are invested outside the country as well as inside. If the Japanese invest in the United States, it pushes their exchange rate down and makes their manufacturing more competitive. ~ Evan Davis, #NFDB
517:You’re not a true fan if you only like the Marvel movies; you can’t be in the anime community unless you speak fluent Japanese; you’re not allowed to dress up as Ms. Marvel unless you’ve read every Ms. Marvel comic, ever. ~ Sam Maggs, #NFDB
518:If there is anything that makes my blood boil it is to see our allies in Indochina and Java deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little people we promised to liberate. It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal. ~ Douglas MacArthur, #NFDB
519:On paper, the Siemens-Mitsubishi offer values Alstom's energy assets almost 15% higher than GE's bid. But Alstom would only get €7 billion ($9.5 billion) in cash from the German-Japanese duo, versus €12.35 billion from GE. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
520:Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It's produced by humans who can't stand looking at other humans. And that's why the industry is full of otaku! ~ Hayao Miyazaki, #NFDB
521:Here we would notice that what we would call Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression. The ~ Donald Richie, #NFDB
522:I'd had a relationship with a French girl, a Japanese girl, an American girl, a Filippina and she was there all the time - a Lancashire girl. I thought: 'It's a Lancashire girl I was looking for. Why didn't I realize it? ~ David Thewlis, #NFDB
523:If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it. ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
524:It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
525:Two hundred years ago life expectancy for females in the record-holding country (Sweden) was roughly thirty-five years, very brief compared to the longest life expectancy today—almost eighty-five years, for Japanese women. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
526:When I venture out to eat, I like to go to places with food that I don't know how to make. So my favorites are Japanese and Indian. Indian food has so much layering of flavor, and the dishes go together so harmoniously. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow, #NFDB
527:Why is our (US) government the only one in the civilized world with a stupid, short-term energy policy? Why do our elected officials consider a European or Japanese-type energy tax not only unpassable but undiscussable? ~ Donella Meadows, #NFDB
528:Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that theres a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life. ~ Suzanne Vega, #NFDB
529:And on nearby islands, the Japanese army was eating raw fish. We felt sorry for them. We didn't know that in America after the war, you wouldn't be able to get into a sushi joint without a reservation. And we thought they lost. ~ Bob Hope, #NFDB
530:I'm getting more and more into Chinese art and Japanese, some of those scroll paintings are amazing. You follow the change of the seasons. It's really something. These guys were great masters and of course the use of space. ~ Robert Barry, #NFDB
531:Because," I said, "the japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups - after we'd done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
532:English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
533:Growing up in a family that listened to almost nothing but classical music had its effects, as well. "California Über Alles," the first Dead Kennedys single, was inspired musically more by Japanese Kabuki than anything else. ~ Jello Biafra, #NFDB
534:Maybe I would get the chance to be financed for a small romantic comedy, but a war movie by a 28-year-old woman about Japanese soldiers? No one was going to go for that. It's easy to just steal an idea because it's very safe. ~ Julie Delpy, #NFDB
535:Often motivated by a desire to maintain the existing status quo, sloth almost cost the U.S. its auto industry, as it refused for decades to build fuel-efficient cars to compete with Japanese, Korean and European imports. ~ Simon Mainwaring, #NFDB
536:schools while their dads are on company assignments, and then have to catch up with their Japanese grade level when their dads get transferred back. Only my dad wasn’t on a company assignment, and he wasn’t getting transferred ~ Ruth Ozeki, #NFDB
537:That the Japanese believe broken things are more beautiful for the history they tell. They even go a step further, repairing pottery with gold and silver, turning the damage into something precious. Kintsukuroi, they call it. ~ P Dangelico, #NFDB
538:The Japanese believed that gods resided not only in natural phenomena such as the sea and the land but also in the cooking stove and even in each individual grain of rice, and therefore they treated all of them with reverence. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
539:The mindfulness he spoke of was called nen in Japanese—an acknowledgment, an appreciation, of the importance of small things. The things that make living more worthwhile. And that, in my work, make it more probable, as well. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
540:Years later, a Japanese visitor tried to apologize to Mao for his country’s invasion of China. Mao interrupted, “Should I not thank you instead?” Without a worthy opponent, he explained, a man or group cannot grow stronger. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
541:Mr Abe went on to criticise China's annual double-digit increase in military spending, saying it was a major source of instability in the region. In response, Xinhua referred to Mr Abe as the "disgraced Japanese prime minister". ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
542:Extremism and Islam are completely different things, we strongly demand the immediate release of the Japanese citizens unharmed ... The international community needs to respond firmly and cooperate without caving into terrorism. ~ Shinzo Abe, #NFDB
543:It's all about being comfortable, being easy and having you be able to wear something and not having it wear you. It's classic. Every time I've tried to be bold and crazy, I feel like a Japanese animated cartoon character. ~ Jennifer Aniston, #NFDB
544:The Japanese say we have three faces. The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends and family. The third face, you never show anyone. It is the truest reflection of who you are.—Unknown ~ Mary Burton, #NFDB
545:don’t be pushy. Don’t come on like the typical asshole American, the typical gaijin—rude, loud, aggressive, not taking no for an answer. The Japanese do not react well to the hard sell. Negotiations here tend to be soft, sinewy. ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
546:I think I can work with different crews; I've worked with Bulgarian, Norwegian, Japanese, and Chinese crews. For me, the most important thing is the storytelling, and I'm really comfortable working with all kinds of languages. ~ Isabel Coixet, #NFDB
547:Mixed martial arts was invented by Brazilians, whose families had been trained by the Japanese. Those Brazilians came to the U.S., where their invention was bought out, gussied up and presented to the world, which found it good. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
548:The Japanese say we have three faces. The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends and family. The third face, you never show anyone. It is the truest reflection of who you are. —Unknown ~ Mary Burton, #NFDB
549:There are no secrets anymore. The governments, the Chinese, the Americans, the Japanese, the Russians, just the governments alone can move right into anybody's mind, any computer, anything, and pick out the information. ~ Drunvalo Melchizedek, #NFDB
550:The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
551:Which was a pretty narrow niche. Charles Gottesman definitely knew how to handle ghosts, as did his wife Ellen, but Brian didn’t know if either of them spoke Japanese. Brian picked up his cellphone and sent a quick text to Jenny. ~ Ron Ripley, #NFDB
552:How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
553:Japanese goldfish,
With your gossamer tail,
You are the loveliest creature
I have ever seen."
"Japanese kitten,
Put your tongue back in where it belongs
And go away.
I know exactly what you are thinking. ~ Paul Gallico,#NFDB
554:Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don't have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
555:Speaking Spanish and Japanese has opened doors in my career and helped me bridge cultural differences, both in my personal and business life. During my football career I realised quickly what difference language skills can make ~ Gary Lineker, #NFDB
556:Tomatoes SIDEKICKS: red watermelon, pink grapefruit, Japanese persimmons, red-fleshed papaya, strawberry guava TRY TO EAT: one serving of processed tomatoes or sidekicks per day and multiple servings per week of fresh tomatoes ~ Steven G Pratt, #NFDB
557:Sometimes the person wouldn’t be in the photo at all. I asked what they would post instead. “A lot of Japanese use their cats,” she said. “They’re not in the photo with the cat?” I asked. “Nope. Just the cat. Or their rice cooker. ~ Aziz Ansari, #NFDB
558:Another curious example of the influence of Shinto on the Japanese way of being is that things that belong to you partake of your spirit. When you give a present, you are giving part of your spirit to the other person. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
559:Build high-speed, electrified trains over the most-traveled corridors. It'sreally hard to power carbon-free airplanes, but electrified trains are much easier. We'll be a half century behind the Japanese, but better late than never. ~ Denis Hayes, #NFDB
560:Dr. Margaret Oda, a true trailblazer in education, served as Honolulu school district superintendent and was the driving force behind the middle-school concept and the first chairwoman of the Japanese American National Museum. ~ Colleen Hanabusa, #NFDB
561:I knew I could now move markets any time I opened my mouth; I stashed a New York Times headline about minimalism in Japanese design in my office drawer when I was a young civil servant to remind myself never to say too much. ~ Timothy F Geithner, #NFDB
562:Years later, a Japanese visitor tried to apologize to Mao for his country’s invasion of China. Mao interrupted, “Should I not thank you instead?” Without a worthy opponent, he explained, a man or group cannot grow stronger. Mao’s ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
563:The mystery school continued throughout the greater Egyptian civilization, which was the second age of humankind and later on into the third age of humankind when the Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan high cultures flourished ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
564:I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic. ~ Deborah Levy, #NFDB
565:The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
566:The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta. Four months later, the first shipload of returnees left the Japanese port of Niigata. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
567:The Japanese tend to be far more co-operative and docile and group-oriented. It would be easier to get the entire population of Tokyo to wear matching outfits than to get any two randomly selected Americans to agree on pizza toppings. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
568:As I reflected on the nature of these relationships, it occurred to me that Japanese people have treated material things with special care since ancient times. The concept of yaoyorozu no kami, literally, “800,000 gods,” is an example. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
569:I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries. ~ Howard Shore, #NFDB
570:I've mastered many things in my life. Navigating the strets of London, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms... ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
571:When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
572:I'd have a few on and off, but the commitment was always more on the girls' part than on mine, to be perfectly honest. So, I met a girl in Tokyo, on my Japanese tour, with whom I've been living ever since, very happily. Her name is Suchi. ~ Iggy Pop, #NFDB
573:I have a tattoo on my foot that says 'it's a whale' in Japanese, because Japanese people kill whales. My stuffed whale was like most children's teddy bear. I took it with me everywhere. I slept with it. I couldn't live without my whale. ~ Skylar Grey, #NFDB
574:You cannot dance physically certain things. But look at tango dancers or flamenco or Japanese classical theater. You can, if you're smart enough and you collaborate with the right choreographers, you could really dance your age. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov, #NFDB
575:I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro, #NFDB
576:Japan's beautiful seas and its territory are under threat, and young people are having trouble finding hope in the future amid economic slump. I promise to protect Japan's land and sea, and the lives of the Japanese people no matter what. ~ Shinzo Abe, #NFDB
577:I think it's good to have different styles, though. I think it's good to have a lucha on a show, some Japanese flavor, I think MMA is a good thing, a little bit of the hardcore and the blood and guts is good. That is what makes a show for me. ~ CM Punk, #NFDB
578:Purists who praised the owner’s defense of day baseball would have been disappointed to know that Wrigley had bought tons of steel to build light towers in 1941. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he donated the steel to the war effort. ~ Kevin Cook, #NFDB
579:The incident does not mean that most Japanese were not appalled by Aum. It does suggest that many young adults viewed their society as so corrupt and hypocritical that any degree of mockery, if not violence against it, was justified. ~ Robert Jay Lifton, #NFDB
580:The Japanese scientists just found a 25,000-year-old mammoth in the ice in Siberia, and they're about to clone it... You think the Japanese of all people would want nothing to do with prehistoric animals after what happened with Godzilla. ~ Greg Giraldo, #NFDB
581:At some point the Japanese, Chinese and Saudi buyers of US and European Government bonds will see just what miserable value they offer. Then governments may have to stop all the runaway spending and bailouts and even put up interest rates. ~ Luke Johnson, #NFDB
582:It is intriguing how market observers from both the West and the East have come up with this same pattern. Market psychology is the same around the world, or, as a Japanese proverb expresses, “The tone of a bird’s song is the same everywhere. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
583:Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center. ~ Newt Gingrich, #NFDB
584:The Mask Of Evil
On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.
~ Bertolt Brecht,#NFDB
585:The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn't preparation for work and never was. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
586:Manga uses Japanese traditional structures in how to teach the student and to transmit a very direct message. You learn from the teacher by watching from behind his back. The whole teacher-master thing is part of Asian culture, I think. ~ Takashi Murakami, #NFDB
587:Maybe she'd seen too many Japanese horror movies, and maybe it was just a tingle of warning from generations of superstitious ancestors, but suddenly she knew that what Alyssa wanted was not to be saved, but for Shane to join her. In death. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
588:On average, the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese are more similar to each other and are different from Australians, Israelis and the Swedes, who in turn are similar to each other and are different from Nigerians, Kenyans, and Jamaicans. ~ J Philippe Rushton, #NFDB
589:And, of course, in the Philippines there were so many thousands of Americans that were captured by the Japanese and held and who were rescued by Filipino Americans, or Filipinos I should say, and by U.S. troops near the close of the war. ~ Dana Rohrabacher, #NFDB
590:Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama. ~ John Roberts, #NFDB
591:Well, Japanese fans braced me since 1991 that was my first time I have been to Japan. So I know that Japanese fans has supported me over the years. So it just a lot of love and Wayne Wonder will release more music, more music and more music! ~ Wayne Wonder, #NFDB
592:Cleaning is considered a vital part of the training process in all traditional Japanese disciplines and is a required practice for any novice. It is accorded spiritual significance. Purifying an unclean place is believed to purify the mind. ~ Mineko Iwasaki, #NFDB
593:If these assets were set up as a revolving fund with which Japan could import raw materials for its industries, Japanese exports could again enter the channels of world trade-and Japanese workers would have employment and something to eat. ~ James Forrestal, #NFDB
594:As the lower parts of the Japanese houses and shops are open both before and behind, I had peeps of these pretty little gardens as I passed along the streets; and wherever I observed one better than the rest I did not fail to pay it a visit. ~ Robert Fortune, #NFDB
595:For every advance that the Japanese have made since they started their frenzied career of conquest, they have had to pay a very heavy toll in warships, in transports, in planes, and in men. They are feeling the effects of those losses. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
596: He was so fascinated by the long single strand of black hair that he did not overflow his mind with fantasies about it, turning it into a hundred varieties of his imagination.
He just sat there staring at it.
Japanese hair. ~ Richard Brautigan,#NFDB
597:I love Chinese food, like steamed dim sum, and I can have noodles morning, noon and night, hot or cold. I like food that's very simple on the digestive system - I tend to keep it light. I love Japanese food too - sushi, sashimi and miso soup. ~ Shilpa Shetty, #NFDB
598:I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
599:New York City vagrant:
"What sort of 'nese are you people? Are you Chinese, or Japanese, or Javanese?"
Kakuzo Okakura responds:
"We are Japanese gentleman. But what sort of 'key are you? Are you a Yankee, or a donkey, or a monkey? ~ Kakuz Okakura,#NFDB
600:What the Japanese are, are the Americans of the 21st century. Essentially what is objectionable about them is what was objectionable about Americans when we had the ball. However, they are committed in a way that American technology is not. ~ Howard Rheingold, #NFDB
601:Nobody has to care anymore, we can even leave the whole scene to itself with Japanese fornicating machines fornicating chemical dolls on and on, with Robot Hospitals and Calculator Machine Crematories and just go off and be free in the Universe! ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
602:Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II. ~ Eisaku Sato, #NFDB
603:As the train pushed off for Yokohama, the POWs’ last sight of Naoetsu was a broken line of Japanese, the few civilian guards and camp staffers who had been kind to them, standing along the side of the track. Their hands were raised in salute. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
604:Oddly enough, I never heard him complain about or blame the political system of North Korea. I finally realized that he’d never experienced true freedom. He’d been born under Japanese colonial rule and then shipped off to a life of slave labor. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
605:Toonami was a tremendous vehicle, delivering the art of Japanese animation to a massive audience that may have otherwise never experienced it. I feel an immense debt of gratitude to everyone involved with the show and to every fan who supported it. ~ Steven Blum, #NFDB
606:I do enjoy wearing Japanese and Italian clothing. I also enjoy my blue jeans or tennis shorts and running shoes. I like driving a Porsche because it is an elegant machine and it is a very beautiful experience to drive it. It's magnificently made. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
607:I married my Japanese wife Mayumi who I'm so happy with, she's been so supportive. I live part time in Japan at her house, so I've been always very influenced by Japan. Since I guess the 70's or so. I've come to appreciate so much of their culture. ~ Terry Bozzio, #NFDB
608:I've always been passionate about these different (film) genres. Kung fu movies, samurai movies, Japanese movies, all this kind of stuff, and my love for it, and just trying to present it in a way that other people can love it as much as I do. ~ Quentin Tarantino, #NFDB
609:Feeling they were being treated as inferiors by the West, and suffering from American and European racism, the Japanese concluded that they had to make their own place in the world, using force to pursue the manifest destiny of the `imperial way'. ~ Jonathan Fenby, #NFDB
610:The main American naval forces were shifted to the Pacific region and an American admiral made a strong declaration to the effect that if war were to break out between Japan and the United States, the Japanese navy could be sunk in a matter of weeks. ~ Hideki Tojo, #NFDB
611:The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
612:This approach has enabled Japanese firms to achieve such production efficiency and quality that now many non-Japanese companies are imitating them. By not assuming the worst about their workers, the Japanese companies have got the best out of them. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
613:I’m proud to be Japanese and I wanted my country to succeed. I believed my system was a way that could help us become a modern industrial nation. That is why I had no problem with sharing it with other Japanese companies, even my biggest competitors. ~ Taiichi Ohno, #NFDB
614:I travel a lot. Japanese culture is very ancient and very strong. That's why most people who commission work from Japanese architects expect them to create works that have an element of exoticism, the kind typical of Japanese culture. I don't do that. ~ Shigeru Ban, #NFDB
615:One thing that really interests me is-and it comes out of Chinese and Japanese painting-where you have a number of different kinds of space in the same painting. You have a kind of deep space, and then you have something like right up on the surface. ~ Mary Heilmann, #NFDB
616:The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
617:When I was 12 years old, I was obsessed with codes, conspiracies, and secret messages. I would record TV commercials with SoundRecorder.exe on Windows 95 and reverse them to see if I was being subliminally influenced to watch Pokémon by Japanese spies. ~ Alex Hirsch, #NFDB
618:When I was first writing about Japan, it was at the peak of the Bubble. Bubble popped, but they kept on going. Japanese street style feeds American iconics back into America in somewhat the way English rock once fed American blues back into America. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
619:The best night of my life was watching the Japanese Noh theater. I've only seen it once, but even saying it now, I think, 'How can I ever have this experience again?' It was so mesmerizing, so complicated and so primordial; I could not believe it. ~ Vivienne Westwood, #NFDB
620:We must work with the Australians, the South Koreans, the Japanese and the Filipinos to contain China. And then we must ask for their support and their help with North Korea. Because believe it or not, China is as concerned about Kim Jong-Un as we are. ~ Carly Fiorina, #NFDB
621:No one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy. ~ Fred Korematsu, #NFDB
622:They walk down Westheimer, a long, long street that always smells of burnt rubber and carbon monoxide, occasionally interrupted by the aromas of foods from all over the world: Mexican, Japanese, Indian, Brazilian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Guatemalan, etc. ~ Gwendolyn Zepeda, #NFDB
623:As far as I have been able to understand, the Japanese seem to keep things close to the vest. Friendly but remote and polite to the point of being invisible. It is in the music, literature, film and art that the Japanese really seem to express themselves. ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
624:Carrie lay on the bed and gazed at the ceiling. She was back in business. It was a day to remember. December 7, the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The next day America declared war on Japan.
America declared war. And she was a whore again. ~ Jackie Collins,#NFDB
625:gaté gaté, para gaté, parasam gaté, boji sowa ka . . . These words are actually in some ancient Indian language71 and not even Japanese, but Jiko told me they means something like this: gone gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray . . . I ~ Ruth Ozeki, #NFDB
626:Jobs are a part of life. Maybe you've heard of the concept. It's called work? See, what happens is that you suffer through doing annoying and humiliating things until you get paid not enough money. Like those Japanese game shows, only without all the glory. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
627:Jobs are a part of life. Maybe you’ve heard of the concept. It’s called work? See, what happens is that you suffer through doing annoying and humiliating things until you get paid not enough money. Like those Japanese game shows, only without all the glory. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
628:All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness. ~ Gretel Ehrlich, #NFDB
629:Good craftsmanship implies socialism. The workings of a modern Japanese auto plant or a Linux chat room might have expanded their sympathy for collaboration of other sorts, but still, all three disputed the pursuit of quality simply as a means to profit. ~ Richard Sennett, #NFDB
630:Part of [Japanese companies] growing and expanding around the world is ... going to help the Japanese keep their lifestyles [despite Japan's] demographics, as a declining population, and [to] make it more conducive to women to go to work, I think, is a plus. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
631:...one day the world will notice that while E=mc2 ultimately gives you 177,000 dead Japanese civilians, F=ma lets you skate across a frozen lake on a winter's night, the wind caressing your face as you glide toward the hot-chocolate stand on the far shore. ~ James K Morrow, #NFDB
632:War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that.” He ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
633:Galleries in the West have probably been looking for exoticism. That's the reason my paintings initially sold well, I think. And then once they started selling, people said my works were very detailed. They may have represented something Japanese to them. ~ Takashi Murakami, #NFDB
634:This is humor: A Japanese woman experiences discomfort in her eye, so she goes to see a qualified ophthalmologist. After a thorough examination, the doctor tells the Japanese woman that she has a cataract. She says, ‘No, I don’t. I have a Lincoln Continental. ~ Lee Goldberg, #NFDB
635:When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States struck back. She didn't go and bomb - she bombed any part of Japan. She dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Those people in Hiroshima probably hadn't even, some of them; most of them hadn't even killed anybody. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
636:But it may be one of our best markets in the long term because when the Japanese society embraces a brand it is a very deep connection, so we're willing to make that investment knowing that it's not the quick route to success that might be in other countries. ~ Reed Hastings, #NFDB
637:IK.” When they didn’t respond, she expanded. “On my profile? IK. Impact kink.” She looked at them like they were naive. “Slapping, scratching, biting, hitting with a crop. Tamakeri if the guy asks. You know—the Japanese fetish? For getting kicked in the balls? ~ Meg Gardiner, #NFDB
638:Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tibetan, or other historical traditions, are all different streams in the same river, different currents in the same ocean. With the long view, we can trust that the seeds that we're planting are transforming the world. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
639:What she tells the Japanese is this lost opportunity which has made her what she is.
The story she tells of this lost opportunity literally transports her outside herself and carries her toward this new man.
To give oneself, body and soul, that's it. ~ Marguerite Duras,#NFDB
640:I don't speak Japanese, I don't know anything about Japanese business or Japanese culture. Apart from sushi. But I can't exactly go up to him and say "Sushi!" out of the blue. It would be like going up to a top American businessman and saying, "T-bone steak! ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
641:In the court of global public opinion, and in the annals of environmental history, Captain Watson will be a champion long after the last Japanese factory ship finds its resting place in the museum of selfish disregard for the living Earth upon which we all depend. ~ Bob Brown, #NFDB
642:I was pretty blown away by how vast and aggressive the terrain is in the Japanese Alps. You're looking up at peaks, and it's like Alaska seeing all kinds of amazing stuff that looks ridable, but it's 70 percent death defying; only a small percentage really goes. ~ Travis Rice, #NFDB
643:It’ll be hard to invent something the Japanese haven’t thought of.” He considers for a moment. “Like those little mops babies can wear on their hands and feet?” “Yes. Have you seen those pillows shaped like a husband’s shoulder for lonely women to sleep on?” His ~ Sally Thorne, #NFDB
644:The aikido term ma ai, which means "space harmony" ("ai" is Chinese for "love," and it translates into Japanese as harmonious connection) refers to the optimal distance point, where you're close enough to connect well and far enough to enjoy your own space. ~ Stephen Gilligan, #NFDB
645:The English language only had one way of apology.
Japanese had over twenty.
I’d use all of them if it meant the heaviness in my chest would ease.
I would murmur them forever if I could somehow find redemption.
But for now, all I could offer was one. ~ Pepper Winters,#NFDB
646:At times, I do Tabata, a high-intensity Japanese training regimen, in which I must do 20 seconds of a specific body part with 10 seconds of rest. This must be done eight times within four minutes. Your heart rate shoots through the roof, but you burn a lot of fat. ~ Arjun Rampal, #NFDB
647:Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there's an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It's the travel experience that has moved me the most. ~ Roman Coppola, #NFDB
648:The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling. ~ Jack Gilbert, #NFDB
649:Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
650:From time to time, a hygiene outfit carried out a lice check at school. If you were dirty, you got told off for poor hygiene. But if you admitted you bathed frequently, you were equally told off, in this case for “Japanese decadence.” As usual, you couldn’t win. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
651:The concept of Multiculturalism was actually first propounded by Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austrian eugenics-philosopher, who was the principle founding father of the European Union and diplomat of mixed Japanese and Austrian parentage and ~ Citizen One, #NFDB
652:With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology, rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese, Danish, and Germans. ~ Jay Inslee, #NFDB
653:Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don’t need much. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
654:On the other hand, those who are willing to wait for an extra season other two for full results (against an Japanese beetle) will turn to milky disease; they will be rewarded with lasting control that become more, rather than less effective with the passage of time. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
655:Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that's when she turns into a 'Christmas Cake'. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf. ~ Andrew Davidson, #NFDB
656:It's a lesser-known story, but the Japanese government (after the Russian-Nazi pact, which split Poland) did allow Polish Jews to come to Japan, with the expectation that they would then be sent to the United States. But they weren't accepted, so they stayed in Japan. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
657:I love food, all types of food. I love Korean food, Japanese, Italian, French. In Australia, we don't have a distinctive Australian food, so we have food from everywhere all around the world. We're very multicultural, so we grew up with lots of different types of food. ~ Hugh Jackman, #NFDB
658:Moonset
LEAVES of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.
The moon's good-by ends pictures.
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
Only dark listening to dark.
~ Carl Sandburg,#NFDB
659:Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
660:I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true." He's not saying, "I'm trying to lie to you." But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is. ~ Paul Beatty, #NFDB
661:But for all we’ve lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe. ~ Ry Murakami, #NFDB
662:I fill one container with hearty vegetable soup, and another with a Japanese-style broth, bok choy, scallions, and udon noodles. I pack up a roasted chicken breast, and some plain steamed brown rice. Some orange slices in honey vinegar with mint. A couple of corn muffins. ~ Stacey Ballis, #NFDB
663:The Russian people have had literary spokesmen who for more than a generation have fascinated the European audience. The Japanese, on the other hand, have possessed no such national and universally recognized figures as Turgenieff or Tolstoy. They need an interpreter. It ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
664:The term “spirit projection” sprang to mind. Are you familiar with it? Japanese folk tales are full of this sort of thing, where the soul temporarily leaves the body and goes off a great distance to take care of some vital task and then returns to reunite with the body. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
665:But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children’s history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame. ~ Ruth Ozeki, #NFDB
666:If the question is ‘How do we stop enormous evils in the world?’ the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently ‘War.’ Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed ‘war is not the answer. ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
667:Japan." Not about the Japanese, but about moments of perfection. Commit it to memory and make good use of it. Because if I come home and you're still pining over this little girl without having given her a chance, I will call you a chicken shit for the rest of your life. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB
668:the Japanese ministry of Education acted with inappropriate haste and unforgivable cavalierness, implementing drastic change before anyone realized what was happening. . . . In English it would be almost ad bad as enforcing a new spelling of philosophy as filosofee. ~ Minae Mizumura, #NFDB
669:When I was on The View, Barbara Walters was asking me about the blood and stuff, and I said, 'Well, you know, that's a staple of Japanese cinema.' And then she came back, 'But this is America.' And I go, 'I don't make movies for America. I make movies for planet Earth.' ~ Quentin Tarantino, #NFDB
670:If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. ~ Michele Bachmann, #NFDB
671:I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
672:The successful British air attack on the Italian Fleet at Taranto, throwing modern first-class battleships out of action for many months, profoundly impressed the Japanese Navy with the power and possibilities of the new air arm, especially when combined with surprise. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
673:Back in the car she said, “I think I die this year, maybe this month.” “I die first,” Jiichan replied. “Japanese women live to nineties.” “I die first! You eat many mandarin orange as child. They make you live longer. Vitamin C.” “You drink more green tea. You live longer. ~ Cynthia Kadohata, #NFDB
674:IMITATED FROM THE JAPANESE A MOST astonishing thing — Seventy years have I lived; (Hurrah for the flowers of Spring, For Spring is here again.) Seventy years have I lived No ragged beggar-man, Seventy years have I lived, Seventy years man and boy, And never have I danced for joy. ~ W B Yeats, #NFDB
675:There is also the issue of personal privacy when it comes the executive power. Throughout our nation's history, whether it was habeas corpus during the Civil War, Alien and Sedition Acts in World War I, or Japanese internment camps in World War II, presidents have gone too far. ~ Dick Durbin, #NFDB
676:The significance of the cherry blossom tree in Japanese culture goes back hundreds of years. In their country, the cherry blossom represents the fragility and the beauty of life. It's a reminder that life is almost overwhelmingly beautiful but that it is also tragically short. ~ Homaro Cantu, #NFDB
677:After a few minutes Jim was forced to admit that he could recognize none of the constellations. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. For all their movements, the Japanese aircraft were its only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
678:For instance, when "Gender trouble " is translated into Japanese, it produces a problem of vocabulary and a way of thinking about a quality for instance that is somewhat controversial in academic circles and also outside of the academy. In other places, "Gender trouble" is old. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
679:My muse can take the form of a landscape, an era, a style of writing, a piece of music, and, perhaps that which I find strangest of all for a muse, a human female. Of course, she's also adept at taking the form of toothless old Japanese men or young English lads with tattoos. ~ Quentin S Crisp, #NFDB
680:The big fun in Battleship is that there are no current battleships in the Navy today. The battleships are about 1,000 feet long and they have huge guns. They were what you saw in WWII. The last battleship that was used was the Missouri, which is what the Japanese surrendered to... ~ Peter Berg, #NFDB
681:According to the Japanese government, people like me who’d moved to North Korea but not changed their nationality were still Japanese citizens. But the North Korean government had other ideas. According to them, all Japanese people who’d immigrated to North Korea were now, ips ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
682:The remarkable reversal of public attitudes toward the Japanese over the years -- especially in Australia, Peru and the United States -- suggests that behavior and performance are more effective ways of changing other people's minds than moral crusades or emotional denunciations. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
683:I've been making movies for a long time. The Japanese way of making movies has become second nature to me. To get away from that, I really try to surround myself with younger staff and approach making movies not like a veteran of the industry but always as a beginner and a rookie. ~ Takashi Miike, #NFDB
684:There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
685:Japan has the oldest population in the world, and the Japanese go to the doctor more than anybody—about fourteen office visits per year, compared with five for the average American. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person on health care each year; we burn through $7,400 per person. ~ T R Reid, #NFDB
686:Sometimes when the Japanese maids, in crisp white uniforms, had withdrawn, a Roosevelt appointee would ask timorously, “These Japanese, can they be trusted?” And The Fort invariably replied, “We’ve had Sumiko for eighteen years, and we’ve never known a better or more loyal maid. ~ James A Michener, #NFDB
687:the Japanese had won by being more European than the Russians; their ships were more modern, their troops better disciplined, their artillery more effective. To Leo Tolstoy, the titan of Russian letters, Japan’s victory looked like a straightforward triumph of Western materialism. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
688:There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them . Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
689:There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will. I ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
690:Yesterday you spoke of power as if it were a good thing. You said you wished we had some kind of magic that could rid us of the Japanese soldiers. I have never seen it used for good. Think of the Japanese soldiers with all their power. It has eroded their hearts and their souls. ~ Tess Uriza Holthe, #NFDB
691:Last year, for example, Etsy acquired Grand St., an online seller of new electronics products. The Grommet, which is majority owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, is another site dedicated to introducing shoppers to the latest inventions from small shops or individuals. Amazon has ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
692:The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways. ~ Ruth Benedict, #NFDB
693:What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.
'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment. ~ Natasha Pulley,#NFDB
694:When the regime changed in Japan, the Japanese changed; Russians too can change, as long as the conditions for it are present once again. Today, we are on the verge of a very uncertain situation when either everything will end in catastrophe, or better people will come to power. ~ Vladimir Voinovich, #NFDB
695:In the Japanese movie's they're throwing everything they have at him, every missile, but he keeps coming, he can't be stopped and that represents death. There's nothing you can do to stop it, to keep yourself from dying. You can try every trick in the book and it still won't prevent it. ~ Brad Warner, #NFDB
696:One of the reasons they [the Japanese] have bad eyesight is probably these microscopic characters [furigana] which have many lines and strokes to them.& We wonder why they went mad and bombed Pearl Harbor when they knew they couldn't win. That [the Japanese language] would be a reason. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
697:The first time I started listening to Irish music, I had a very strong connection. Strangely enough, there's a great many Japanese melodies and vocal styles that sound very much like Hungarian music. You start seeing all these cross-references and comparative, independent musical cultures. ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
698:Hollywood industry people are very spoiled. I don't think they can adjust to the insane, no-money, super-hard working tradition of Japanese filmmaking. I don't think any American can go through that. They don't want to work more than twelve hours and they want Saturday and Sunday off. ~ Ryuhei Kitamura, #NFDB
699:So the story of Wild Fox Kang’s attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot. ~ Jung Chang, #NFDB
700:The social problem is that we haven't come up with any alternative models. Our culture hasn't developed an ars erotica. Think, for example, of conditions in India or in Japanese culture and of how the erotic has been cultivated there. They're not as clinical and rabbit-like as we are. ~ Volkmar Sigusch, #NFDB
701:Einstein was attending a music salon in Germany before the second world war, with the violinist S. Suzuki. Two Japanese women played a German piece of music and a woman in the audience exclaimed: "How wonderful! It sounds so German!" Einstein responded: "Madam, people are all the same." ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
702:History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. ~ Frank Gaffney, #NFDB
703:I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me. ~ Arthur Golden, #NFDB
704:Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a ”women’s culture” with its own customs, values and even language. ~ Kittredge Cherry, #NFDB
705:When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
706:I cannot imagine what an influence a five-week trip to the Orient had on me. I mean, the culture, the absorption of the Japanese way of life, the Japanese way of thinking, the discipline. The entire thing was an extraordinary experience. So these were more than memorable things to me. ~ Polly Allen Mellen, #NFDB
707:I don't care whether they're men or women, that's bullshit. A good writer can get into any gender, can get into any mouth. When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck. You have to be a chameleon when you're writing. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
708:in 1954 it looked as if a deep schism had been driven down the middle of our community, pitting Japanese against haole, but the Sakagawa boys had the courage to back away from that tempting, perilous course. They reconciled haole and Japanese, and it is to their credit that they did so. ~ James A Michener, #NFDB
709:Tea from the Japanese colony?' I said as she opened the airlock.
'Oh no, from my homeward. I think it's obvious that we've been here before: we check on developing civilisations, and sometimes quietly help them along. If we drop in on any young societies, we usually introduce them to tea. ~ Kylie Chan,#NFDB
710:Both men survived, and as terrible as their experience had been, they were lucky. All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
711:I have no idea what to say next. I don't speak Japanese, I don't know anything about Japanese business or Japanese culture. Apart from sushi. But I can't exactly go up to him and say "Sushi!" out of the blue. It would be like going up to a top American businessman and saying "T-bone steak! ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
712:I like a much more Japanese style of blood, where it's red and it almost has a paint kind of quality to it. You can put it on metal, and it has this vividness. Because, normally, what they use in Hollywood is this stuff that looks like strawberry pancake syrup or raspberry pancake syrup. ~ Quentin Tarantino, #NFDB
713:I loved the Limey [movie]! It's so violent! And yet it's so exquisitely romanticized in a sort of Japanese way, it's a samurai film. Coming out of that, I was really deeply conflicted, because a friend who had seen it said, it's beautiful, but it's not about anything. it's one micron thick. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
714:There was one rumor that “Susie Bright” and sex theorist “Pat Califia” were one and the same, and that this individual was not actually a woman at all but a pimp hired by an entity composed of the Mitchell Brothers and a Japanese porn syndicate, which was selling women as sex slaves overseas. ~ Susie Bright, #NFDB
715:and they were deeply moved not so much by the poetry as by their sensitivity to poetry; not so much by the genius of the poem as by their wisdom in understanding the poem; not in knowing the poem but in knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and of the Japanese spirit— ~ Richard Flanagan, #NFDB
716:I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll. ~ John Fowles, #NFDB
717:successfully. ‘Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide’ (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had not unsuccessfully developed a gallium arsenide chip, but also unnecessary. Delete successfully. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
718:47 Ronin is a very special movie for me. Not only a Samurai thing. Not only a Hollywood fantasy. It has a very special mixture between Japanese traditional culture and Western culture for the costume, set, story. Everything. I believe it will be a very special film that no one has ever seen. ~ Hiroyuki Sanada, #NFDB
719:The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes. ~ Robert Olen Butler, #NFDB
720:When a chainsaw rips into a 2,000 year old redwood tree, it's ripping into my guts. When a bulldozer plows through the Amazon rainforest, it's ripping through my side. And when a Japanese whaling ship fires an exploding harpoon into a great whale it's my heart that's being blown to smithereens. ~ David Foreman, #NFDB
721:Even when Kim Il-sung did something particularly brutal or horrific, no one raised an eyebrow. “Remember the time of Japanese colonial rule!” “Never forget the cruelty of American imperialism!” Without any other information at their disposal, young North Koreans simply fell for the propaganda. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
722:It’s strange, but when I have to speak in front of an audience, I find it more comfortable to use my far-from-perfect English than Japanese. I think this is because when I have to speak seriously about something in Japanese I’m overcome with the feeling of being swallowed up in a sea of words. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
723:the same time. There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
724:Two things stand out: The zen-like demeanor of the Japanese amidst such a huge disaster, and the realization that if there is a place on earth that I want to be with my family and friends (current and extended), when (God forbid) such a disaster ever struck again, then it's this country, Japan. ~ Jake Adelstein, #NFDB
725:At a Japanese POW camp, this dead American was found near war’s end, still standing, at a sink at which he was trying to drink. American soldiers and guerrillas went behind enemy lines to rescue the men at this camp, but they were too late. They found the bodies of 150 POWs, starved to death. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
726:Eightfold rising clouds
build an eightfold fence
an eightfold Izumo fence
wherein to keep my bride
oh! splendid eightfold fence.
Attributed to the god Susanoo. This is the first poem to be found in the kojiki the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry.
~ Anonymous, Eightfold Fence.
,#NFDB
727:I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanese chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain's home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched by unmarried sisters, the smell of whale oil burning in the evenings, the stillness of growing old. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
728:The native Korean Communist movement emerged in the early 1920s, and Marxism was much in vogue among the Korean intellectuals of the colonial era. Nonetheless, due to the harshness of the Japanese colonial regime, a majority of the prominent Korean Communists in 1945 operated outside the country. ~ Andrei Lankov, #NFDB
729:Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnepeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
730:People don't put as much of an emphasis in expanding their choices, so that, you know, one of the things that I learned when I was in Japan way back in the 1990's and there were all these quarrels happening between the U.S. and Japan about allowing more American products into the Japanese market. ~ Sheena Iyengar, #NFDB
731:Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
732:Whaling should stop because it brings needless suffering to social, intelligent animals capable of enjoying their own lives. But against the Japanese charge of cultural bias, Western nations will have little defense until they do much more about the needless animal suffering in their own countries. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
733:Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokemon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree. ~ Richard Louv, #NFDB
734:His system is a combination of ferocious blows, holds and throws, adapted from Japanese bayonet tactics, ju-jitsu, Chinese boxing, Sikh wrestling, French wrestling and Cornish collar-and-elbow wrestling, plus expert knowledge of hip-shooting, knife fighting and use of the Tommy gun and hand grenade. ~ Giles Milton, #NFDB
735:Japan. So successful was the Japanese ‘welfare superpower’ that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced the world’s oldest society, with more than 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 65. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
736:There's a beauty to imperfection. This is the essence of the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi values character and uniqueness over a shiny facade. It teaches that cracks and scratches in things should be embraced. It's also about simplicity. You strip things down and then use what you have. ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
737:When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto, #NFDB
738:In Japanese organizations, before you have a meeting and you've got an idea that you want to get across, you go talk to everyone and list them. And then the meeting, you don't do it American style where everyone gets up and advocates and conflicts and decides, you get up and formalize agreements. ~ Howard Rheingold, #NFDB
739:Just as there are many more Californians now to be found in the temples of Kyoto or the villages of Bali or the mountains of the Himalayas than ever before, what is also exciting is that one can just go downtown Santa Barbara and find ayurvedic medicine, Thai restaurants, and Japanese cars in abundance. ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
740:I do not believe there is the slightest chance of war with Japan in our lifetime. The Japanese are our allies.... Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot menace our vital security in any way.... War with Japan is not a possibility which any reasonable government need take into account. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
741:I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,' Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities? ~ James K Morrow, #NFDB
742:Imagine what I could have done in ten years. I could have learned to speak Japanese. I could have played every RPG video game ever created, and if I spoke Japanese I could have played the foreign ones too! Man, I could have built a spaceship in my backyard and flew it to the moon and back, if I wanted. ~ Kevin James, #NFDB
743:The Japanese people were rapidly succumbing to what would later be called shoribyo, or “victory disease”—a faith that Japan was invincible, and could afford to treat its enemies with contempt. Its symptoms were overconfidence, a failure to weigh risks properly, and a basic misunderstanding of the enemy. ~ Ian W Toll, #NFDB
744:A Christian mother's first duty is to soil her child's mind, and she does not neglect it. Her lad grows up to be a missionary, and goes to the innocent savage and to the civilized Japanese, and soils their minds. Whereupon they adopt immodesty, they conceal their bodies, they stop bathing naked together. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
745:We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies-in the minds of those closest to the work. It's been there in front of our noses all along while we've been running around chasing robots and reading books on how to become Japanese-or at least manage like them. ~ Jack Welch, #NFDB
746:Back in 1956, we signed a treaty and surprisingly it was ratified both by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and the Japanese Parliament. But then Japan refused to implement it and after that the Soviet Union also, so to say, nullified all the agreements reached within the framework of the treaty. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
747:Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today? ~ Tom Hanks, #NFDB
748:I think the important thing to remember about the Japanese internment is the situation. We had been attacked. Maybe Roosevelt expected it - I rather think he did. I don't think he expected an attack on Pearl Harbor. I think he expected an attack on Southeast Asia. But we were attacked at Pearl Harbor ~ William A Rusher, #NFDB
749:Shin [Biyajima] rides down with this big ol' Japanese grin and giggle and I'm like what? Two years later, when I started planning the trip, I knew Shin was from the Hakuba area, and I didn't want to come film in Japan without a Japanese rider. Shin had the time and availability, and it worked out perfect. ~ Travis Rice, #NFDB
750:In our victory over Japan, airpower was unquestionably decisive. That the planned invasion of the Japanese Home islands was unnecessary is clear evidence that airpower has evolved into a force in war co-equal with land and sea power, decisive in its own right and worthy of the faith of its prophets. ~ Carl Andrew Spaatz, #NFDB
751:There was something different about Nintendo,” Uemura found. “Here were these very serious men thinking about the content of play. Other companies were importing ideas from America and adapting them to the Japanese market, only making them cheaper and smaller. But Nintendo was interested in original ideas. ~ David Sheff, #NFDB
752:It is no longer taboo to say that President Roosevelt required Pearl Harbor to drag a war-weary American public into supporting another World War. Discussion of FDRʼs foreknowledge of the Japanese attack is not only the subject of books by respected historians, but of documentaries on cable television. ~ Smedley D Butler, #NFDB
753:We can't attribute a long history of democratic traditions to Japan, either, but today Japan boasts a fully-fledged democracy in which governments change according to democratic procedures. It's no coincidence that the Taiwanese, Japanese, and South Korean economies are among the most innovative in Asia. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
754:A Japanese scholar, Raicho Hiratsuka, said that. In order not to fail in the end, you have to be dependent on yourself, and know that you can handle things, and most importantly, bring a little humor into the despair. Lightness, imagination, flexibility—these are the things that go into making a new start. ~ Joan Anderson, #NFDB
755:All of the Kobe beef sold in this country, by chefs famous and anonymous, in ten-dollar sliders or three-hundred-dollar steaks, was fake, all of it, end of story. Every single restaurant and store purporting to sell Kobe beef—or any Japanese beef—was lying, including some of the country’s best-known chefs. ~ Larry Olmsted, #NFDB
756:Isn't it funny that what the Japanese authors consider their first page is our happily-ever-after last one? When you think about it, it's not a bad way to approach life. What appears to be an ending--heartbreaking wounds that you can and cannot see--may just be a beginning, a start of a brand-new adventure. ~ Justina Chen, #NFDB
757:It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... In being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. ~ William D Leahy, #NFDB
758:The girl trembled reflexively. North Korean terrorism, suspicions of abductions of Japanese citizens, and the nuclear program were burdens the girl wearing the chima geogori was made to bear on her slender shoulders. Once she'd been punched in the shoulder by a fiftyish salaryman. On this very platform. ~ Kazuki Kaneshiro, #NFDB
759:We were like, ‘Hey, what are you doing!?’ but soon twigged they were trying to give us a proper Japanese welcome by carrying our bags for us. Great. This was the life. Then we looked round and saw Gillian still struggling with hers. Turns out that in this culture they don’t help a woman. We got her a trolley. ~ Peter Hook, #NFDB
760:When I went to Japan I sang in Japanese; when I went to Greece I sang in Greek. When I went to Spain, I sang in Spanish. I couldn't speak it very well, but I sang, I was beautiful in singing it. These things just constantly attracted people to the uniqueness of who I was and the way in which I performed. ~ Harry Belafonte, #NFDB
761:Beautiful and minimalist, the traditional Japanese art of ikebana - arranging bouquets of cut flowers and leaves using very few elements - ideally corresponded to a form of expression I could transpose in a perfume. The smell of a rose early in the morning, damp, sprinkled with dew, delicate and light. ~ Jean Claude Ellena, #NFDB
762:From where he lay on his tatami mat, he could see her in profile. Her dark hair was down, spilling around her tiny shoulders, and she was dressed only in one of the snow white yukatas or kimonos that the ryokan (a Japanese inn) supplied its guests. She was beautiful, he decided, yet she was a contradiction. ~ David Hagberg, #NFDB
763:I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s. ~ Bruce Feiler, #NFDB
764:Imagine what I could have done in ten years. I could have learned to speak Japanese. I could have played every RPG video game ever created, and if I spoke Japanese I could have played the foreign ones too! Man, I could have built a spaceship in my backyard and flew it to the moon and back, if I wanted. ~ Kevin James Breaux, #NFDB
765:I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
766:koi is popular among young men, but some women have started getting it. It’s the symbol of a person’s journey. A sign of growth, courage, and strength. There’s an old fairy tale that I don’t remember, but apparently the final evolution of the koi is a dragon, the most important of all the Japanese symbols. ~ Jocelynn Drake, #NFDB
767:Our Navy was very largely sunk. And we were at war in no time at all. I share, in retrospect, the distress we all share at the internment of the Japanese American citizens of the United States. It was not our finest hour. But the Supreme Court had it before it at the time, and justified it and upheld it. ~ William A Rusher, #NFDB
768:The Japanese eat, sleep, and breathe golf; the only thing they don't do is actually play it, because to get on a course, you have to make a reservation roughly 137 years in advance, which means that by the time you actually get to the first tee you are deceased. Of course, in golf this is not really a handicap. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
769:I saw the same joy, the same uncontrollable smile in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-lipped Scottish granny and a pale correct Japanese businessman as they wheeled their trolleys in and recognised a figure in the expectant crowd. Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
770:In fact, Japanese Koreans, who were known as kitachosenjin, after the Japanese term for North Korea, Kita Chosen, lived in a world apart. They had distinctive accents and tended to marry one another. Although they were far from rich by Japanese standards, they were wealthy compared with ordinary North Koreans. ~ Barbara Demick, #NFDB
771:It is surely not unreasonable to think that this extraordinary immunity [to foreign invasions after the tenth century], of which we have shared the privilege with scarcely any people but the Japanese, was one of the fundamental factors of European civilization, in the deepest sense, in the exact sense of the word. ~ Marc Bloch, #NFDB
772:We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds and clawed the air with both his hands. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
773:Asians love schoolgirls in uniforms. They say the Japanese can buy used schoolgirl panties from vending machines. And from shops hidden away in apartment buildings. Burusera shops, they call them. The smell is very important; it adds value to the commodity. I wonder how Marx would have dealt with that? ~ David Cronenberg, #NFDB
774:It may be that Japanese culture is not ego-based like Western culture: argument has often a strong ego base. The most likely explanation is that Japanese culture was not influenced by those Greek thinking idioms which were refined and developed by medieval monks as a means of proving heretics to be wrong. (p36) ~ Edward de Bono, #NFDB
775:The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return. ~ Douglas MacArthur, #NFDB
776:In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
777:I started to speak to him in his native tongue, "why would you want to sit with me?" He pressed his lips together, and his eyebrows screwed up. He ran a hand through his spiky black hair. "I don' speak Japanese," He said in English. "But My parents do." "Strange," I said. "A Japanese boy who only speaks English? ~ Rebecca Maizel, #NFDB
778:It is sobering to recall that though the Japanese relocation program, carried through at such incalculable cost in misery and tragedy, was justified on the ground that the Japanese were potentially disloyal, the record does not disclose a single case of Japanese disloyalty or sabotage during the whole war. ~ Henry Steele Commager, #NFDB
779:Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation. And ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen, #NFDB
780:182. To mingle the right action with the action that is not akin to it is called the confused practice. The man that erreth therein hath not attained unto the single heart. He knoweth not thankfulness for the grace of the Enlightened One. ~ Shinran, Wisdom of the East Buddhist Psalms translated from the Japanese of Shinran Shonin, #NFDB
781:Charles had perished in Italy, like hundreds of other Japanese-Americans in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which became known as the Purple Heart Battalion due to the extraordinary number of medals for valor it had been awarded. That regiment, made up entirely of nisei, was the most decorated in US military history, ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
782:God was fair to the Japanese. He gave them no oil, no coal, no diamonds, no gold, no natural resources — nothing! Nothing comes from the island that you can sustain a civilization on. What God gave the Japanese was a sense of style—maintained through the centuries through hard work and the disciplines of ambition. ~ Diana Vreeland, #NFDB
783:The Imperial Household, as represented by the Emperor, has been praying for the welfare of the people while nurturing harmonious relationship with them. Based on the people's respect and adoration for the Emperor, the Japanese people have stayed united. That is the essence of Japan's national heritage, I believe. ~ Yoshiko Sakurai, #NFDB
784:Being hapa, or more specifically, half-Japanese half-Euro mutt (English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, French, Welsh, German. . .in case you were wondering), has definitely helped shape who I am. It's very cool to get to identify and learn about all these unique cultures and I think it's helped put the world in perspective. ~ Kina Grannis, #NFDB
785:Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide. This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
786:My favorite thing is landscaping. I love landscaping. And so what I'll do is, mostly I put language into search engines, and if I want to look, like, at tulip gardens, or, like, Georgian gardens, i love English gardens, how they're laid out. Japanese gardens, Asian gardens. So, I'm kind of a frustrated landscaper. ~ Michele Bachmann, #NFDB
787:When Japanese went to Hawaii they would go straight and buy the same thing that they would buy in Japan. They just got it cheaper, which they liked. And so they would still eat the red bean ice cream or the green tea ice cream, but they didn't really take advantage of the variety and it wasn't clear that they cared. ~ Sheena Iyengar, #NFDB
788:No kitchen is complete without veal stock."
"Do you have veal stock in this kitchen? Does your neighbor?"
"It is the foundation of all sauces. It adds a complexity. Deliciousness. Has Escoffier not told you of this theory of five tastes? A Japanese chemist proved it, and called it 'umami,' which means deliciousness. ~ N M Kelby,#NFDB
789:Perhaps more than an American high school, Japan is like an English public school. You are supposed to learn, excel, and win athletic distinctions—not for yourself, but for the house and for the country, for being Japanese. First on the field, all for the sake of your school. And then, the emptiness when you graduate. ~ Donald Richie, #NFDB
790:Everything is going killer. It's loud and dirty and everything that people expect from DOPE . This situation is nothing new for any of us and so far it's been pretty effortless. We are all crazy excited to get back to Japan and party our asses off, not to mention that we can't wait to kick some Japanese ass on Halloween. ~ Brian Ebejer, #NFDB
791:In japanese culture, there's a belief that only imperfect objects, like a cracked teacup, can truly be beautiful. This is called wabi sabi.
Try to let go of the quest for perfection, and instead accept the beauty that lies in all of life's imperfections. The result will be extra energy, less stress and a longer life. ~ Blinkist,#NFDB
792:It’s charity.” Baba reluctantly lifted his eyes from the jumble of scrolls piled on a shadowed shelf. “What is?” “The liquor. The men meet their fates half giddy. They barely know what is happening. Didn’t the Japanese do the same?” “They didn’t have firing squads.” My father couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice. ~ Shawna Yang Ryan, #NFDB
793:But wars—or the threat of war—at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy—Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban—that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war. ~ Victor Davis Hanson, #NFDB
794:Europe is staring into the face of the kind of deflationary cycle that has paralyzed the Japanese economy for the better part of two decades. Prices are rising far more slowly than its central bank wants, against a backdrop of astronomical unemployment on much of the Continent. Mario Draghi’s response: Give us another month. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
795:Japanese food is very pretty and undoubtedly a suitable cuisine in Japan, which is largely populated by people of below average size. Hostesses hell-bent on serving such food to occidentals would be well advised to supplement it with something more substantial and to keep in mind that almost everybody likes french fries. ~ Fran Lebowitz, #NFDB
796:Not a single one was shipped to the field. Why? Because the National Defense Research Committee had been working on a far more lasting and penetrative weapon for use against the Japanese. Seventeen days before the second and final Final Report on Who, Me? was released, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. O ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
797:Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances. ~ John Berger, #NFDB
798:If you hit a hole in one when playing golf in Japan, you should know that it is customary to throw a lavish celebration for your friends. Don’t worry if the cost of this is worrying you though, as you could join the four million Japanese citizens who have taken out ‘hole-in-one insurance’, covering them for half a million Yen. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
799:I've always disliked kamikazes, that is, people who commit suicide in order to kill others. Starting with the Japanese ones from World War II. I never considered them Pietro Miccas who torch the powder and go up with the citadel in order to block the arrival of the enemy troops at Torino. I never considered them soldiers. ~ Oriana Fallaci, #NFDB
800:When he served in China during World War II, [Ho Chi Minh] learned about Mao Zedong's tactics of guerrilla war against the Japanese (and later against Chiang Kai-shek's forces), and he translated some of Mao's works into Vietnamese. But it is clear that his own ideas on how to counter the enemy ran along the same lines. ~ William J Duiker, #NFDB
801:Japanese soldiers split open the stomachs of pregnant women and bayoneted the fetuses; they tied up local farmers and used them for target practice; they tortured thousands of innocent people in ways that rival the Gestapo at its worst; and they were pursuing deadly medical experiments long before Dr. Mengele and Auschwitz. ~ Laurence Rees, #NFDB
802:A lot of my books have been that way. My World War II thriller about Sarin gas [Black Cross] was published two months before the Sarin attack in the Japanese subway. There are very weird coincidences out there. And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write, because of my fear someone will carry it out. ~ Greg Iles, #NFDB
803:I grew up having to piss in a bucket ’cos there was no indoor shitter, and now I have these computerised Japanese super-loo things that have heated seats and wash and blow-dry your arse at the touch of a button. Give it a couple of years and I’ll have a bog with a robot arm that pulls out my turds, so I don’t have to strain. ~ Ozzy Osbourne, #NFDB
804:You have to find a group that really desperately cares about what it is you have to say. Talk to them. They have something I call otaku. It's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who's obsessed to, say, drive across Tokyo to try a new Ramen noodle place 'cause that's what they do, they get obsessed with it. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
805:herbivore man.” This is a term that has become ubiquitous in Japan over the past few years to describe Japanese men who are very shy and passive and show no interest in sex and romantic relationships. Surveys suggest that about 60 percent of male singles in their twenties and thirties in Japan identify themselves as herbivores. ~ Aziz Ansari, #NFDB
806:Marine Captain Bankson T. Holcomb, Jr., a Japanese-language officer detached from Pearl Harbor’s codebreaking unit, picked up a transmission by a Japanese patrol pilot (probably the same one that had been picked up by the carrier’s radar). The aircraft had reached the end of its patrol route and the pilot had “nothing to report. ~ Ian W Toll, #NFDB
807:The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience. ~ Stanley Milgram, #NFDB
808:Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention? The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story? ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
809:Maitake mushrooms are known in Japan as “the dancing mushroom.” According to a Japanese legend, a group of Buddhist nuns and woodcutters met on a mountain trail, where they discovered a fruiting of maitake mushrooms emerging from the forest floor. Rejoicing at their discovery of this delicious mushroom, they danced to celebrate. ~ Paul Stamets, #NFDB
810:The wicked people of the world are not supposed to be calm and composed. They are supposed to have hysterics and take poison like Hitler and Göring, or fall on their swords like the Japanese soldiers when they had to surrender. They are not supposed to cross one leg over the other and show off their white stockings and nice ankles. ~ Amy Bloom, #NFDB
811:In a way, 'Sin City''s designed to be paced somewhere between an American comic book and Japanese manga. Working in black and white, I realized that the eye is less patient, and you have to make your point, and sometimes repeat it. Slowing things down is harder in black and white, because there isn't as much for the eye to enjoy. ~ Frank Miller, #NFDB
812:In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
813:A MOST astonishing thing
Seventy years have I lived;
(Hurrah for the flowers of Spring,
For Spring is here again.)
Seventy years have I lived
No ragged beggar-man,
Seventy years have I lived,
Seventy years man and boy,
And never have I danced for joy.
~ William Butler Yeats, Imitated From The Japanese
,#NFDB
814:I really love a lot of Japanese music, like Ryuichi Sakamoto and this guy I got really into, Tatsuro Yamashita. When I was a little younger, I thought synthesizers meant Kraftwerk, cold, robotic, weird, Autobahn. But these guys are having a lot of fun on these things. Sometimes. Sometimes it's very somber. They could go either way. ~ Mac DeMarco, #NFDB
815:I remember I was really into this British band, The Vapors, with that song "Turning Japanese." I thought that they were really next level genius cryptic weirdos. And then I realized when I got older they are just using a lot of British words, and I didn't know what they meant. But I thought, Oh, they are making up their own language. ~ Craig Finn, #NFDB
816:There is a Japanese art called kintsukuroi. Each time a piece of pottery cracks, it is lacquered back together with gold. All those golden threads make the piece what it is, extraordinary. I like to think of my heart like that. That each time it breaks, it gets more valuable and beautiful with the mending. It is a collage of gold. ~ Hannah Howard, #NFDB
817:You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion [Islam] too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness? ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
818:Therefore, to teach them [women] at least an outline of economics and law is the first requirement after giving them a general education. Figuratively speaking, it will be like providing the women of civilized society with a pocket dagger for self-protection. ~ Fukuzawa Yukichi From Fukuzawa Yukichi on Japanese Women (1988), trans. Kiyooka Eiichi., #NFDB
819:If there is one point on which all authorities on Japan are in agreement, it is that Japanese institutions, whether business or government agencies, make decisions by consensus. The Japanese, we are told, debate a proposed decision throughout the organization until there is agreement on it. And only then do they make the decision. ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
820:It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness? —ADOLF HITLER ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
821:The man who draws first sparks an unconscious response from a trained opponent, who tends to draw more smoothly and with greater speed. It is counter-intuitive, but as Japanese kendo fighters will affirm, the instinctive reaction after thousands of hours of training is often faster than a blow resulting from a controlled decision. On ~ Conn Iggulden, #NFDB
822:The weapons attacking her were a diverse mix: antiques such as American carbines, Czech-style machine guns, Japanese Type-38 rifles; newer weapons such as standard-issue People's Liberation Army rifles and submachine guns, stolen from the PLA after the publication of the "August Editorial"; and even a few Chinese dadao swords and spears. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
823:To serve as prime minister while being too mindful of the approval rating is like serving as a prime minister on a roller coaster. What is important, I believe, is that I really act on promises that I make and leave results. Leave a track record and show that to the Japanese public, who will, at the end of the day, I hope, appreciate it. ~ Shinzo Abe, #NFDB
824:We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen, #NFDB
825:According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews’ aim, Nilus insisted, ‘to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan’. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
826:Hello Kitty is an icon that doesn't stand for anything at all. Hello Kitty never has been, and never will be, anything. She's pure license; you can even get a Hello Kitty car! The branding thing is completely out of control, but it started as nothing and maintains its nothingness. It's not about the ego, and in that way it's very Japanese. ~ Tom Sachs, #NFDB
827:We have an army for fighting as well as an army for labour. For fighting, we have the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies but even they do a dual job, warfare and production. With these two kinds of armies, and with a fighting army skilled in these two tasks and in mass work, we can overcome our difficulties and defeat Japanese imperialism. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
828:As an example, there is a Japanese composer / singer whose name is Tanimura [Shinji]: he has composed a song entitled entitled "Kazeno Komoriuta" and I have recorded my piano adaptation of this song and honestly I couldn't expect that it would be so difficult and challenging for me to perform my piano version of this beautiful song. ~ Richard Clayderman, #NFDB
829:The seventh type of guerrilla organization is that formed from bands of bandits and brigands. This, although difficult, must be carried out with utmost vigor lest the enemy use such bands to his own advantage. Many bandit groups pose as anti-Japanese guerrillas, and it is only necessary to correct their political beliefs to convert them. In ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
830:I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable. ~ Binyavanga Wainaina, #NFDB
831:Within a few generations, the Chinese allowed their naval and merchant fleets to wither; in 1500, an imperial edict made the construction of vessels with more than two masts a capital offense. In 1525, another decree forbade the building of any oceangoing vessel. Where navies are absent, pirates pillage. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Japanese , #NFDB
832:After a trip to Japan Mitchell famously predicted that the next war would be fought in the Pacific after a Japanese sneak attack on a Sunday morning in Hawaii. Eddie Rickenbacker, who had served as Mitchell’s driver before becoming an ace combat pilot, wryly quipped that “the only people who paid any attention to him were the Japanese.” Most ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
833:George Martin makes a paternal appearance. (I don’t have the cheek to ask him if he’d seen himself described in a magazine article recently as ‘the Michael Palin of rock’!) He says the studio conversion cost about £15 million. ‘Half the money was Japanese, so I feel I’d done my bit to pay them back for the Burma Railway,’ he says, elegantly. ~ Michael Palin, #NFDB
834:New York allows you to go deeper into the person you want to be. You're able to explore whatever your specific interests might be. You can eat good Japanese food if you want to eat good Japanese food. You can go and see your favorite author reading, and you can still listen to Radio Ulster on the internet as you have your breakfast. I love that. ~ Nick Laird, #NFDB
835:At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. ~ John Hersey, #NFDB
836:The Japanese have five different ways to say ‘thank you’—and every one of them translates literally as resentment, in various degrees. Would that English had the same built-in honesty on this point! Instead, English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing. ‘Gratitude,’ for example. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
837:When the secretary of treasury, the head of the central bank, the head of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.), and the head of the New York Fed say, "We want you to do this because we think it's in the best interest of the United States of America," you know, we're like the Japanese. We're a little patriotic that way. We said, "Yes, sir!" ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
838:professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
839:Two-thirds of those evacuated at that time had been born in the United States and were American citizens. Standing in long lines, the Japanese had to wait for hours in front of the desks of the officials, who took down their names and handed out labels for them to wear around their necks with their identity number, the same as for their luggage. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
840:Her seven-year-old self had decided that stealing books was morally bankrupt, but since the books hadn’t actually left the library—they’d merely been relocated—it wasn’t technically stealing. Echo looked around at her sea of tomes, and a single word came to mind: Tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all. ~ Melissa Grey, #NFDB
841:Passing one tableau of blood and guts and moving on to the next, I caught myself glancing over my shoulder to make sure some Viking wasn’t following me with a battle-ax. The effect was so disorienting that when I reached the end and found a Japanese woman immobile and reading on a bench, I had to poke her on the shoulder to make sure she was real. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
842:Chinese dragons are considered benevolent, much like ruler to subject, as long as the people were loyal to them. This is a Confucius principle. Japanese dragons, however, were believed to kill innocent people to force villages to give their maidens to them as food. - Kailin Gow On the Dragon King in Amazon Lee Adventures in China (Discussion Question) ~ Kailin Gow, #NFDB
843:If you expect the present day school system to give history to you, you are dreaming. This, we have to do ourselves. The Chinese didn't go out in the world and beg people to teach Chinese studies or let them teach Chinese studies. The Japanese didn't do that either. People don't beg other people to restore their history; they do it themselves. ~ John Henrik Clarke, #NFDB
844:Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
845:Of course you have memories, and these memories are convincing. But it's really at the moment when I write them down - when I write about my relationship with that Japanese boy in Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam - that they reach a degree of reality which is incandescent, that I've really conquered a story, understood it and feel that it is really part of me. ~ Amelie Nothomb, #NFDB
846:Disorder in your mind shows in your feet. It has long been said that you can tell a lot about a household by looking at its entrance hall, especially in Japanese homes, where we remove our shoes upon entering. If the footwear is perfectly lined up, or if it is all ajumble—you can know the state of mind of those who live there by just this one detail. ~ Shunmy Masuno, #NFDB
847:In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak.Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores. ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
848:I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record -- Le Sacre du Printemps -- caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame. ~ T Coraghessan Boyle, #NFDB
849:Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler’s reported persecution of the Jews. ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
850:Peru has had a Japanese president (Alberto Fujimori). Britain had a Jewish prime minister, all of whose grandparents were born in Italy (Benjamin Disraeli). No one calls these countries “nations of immigrants.” America has never had a president who wasn’t, at least in part, of British ancestry, but people still babble that we’re a nation of immigrants. ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
851:After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts. ~ Alexander Chee, #NFDB
852:Off they go on this sort of camping trip to Iwo Jima, where they're taken around and shown where all the battles took place. It's very moving. Disgusting little island, though. Still an active volcano. Stinks of sulfur. There are dead Japanese everywhere under that island. It's icky. But I knew I would never have another chance to go, so I took the job. ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
853:The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
854:The U.N.-backed International Labor Organization had carried out a study funded by the Japanese government, on the state of human trafficking in Japan. The report was scathing: Japan had failed to punish human traffickers or to take care of the victims. The Japanese government ordered the ILO to keep the report under wraps; it would never be published. ~ Jake Adelstein, #NFDB
855:The Midway battle was crucial. In exchange for 307 lives, the Yorktown and a destroyer, and 147 airplanes, the American fleet had destroyed four Japanese carriers, more than three hundred planes, a cruiser and a destroyer, and nearly five thousand Japanese sailors and airmen. It has been called, with justification, “the turning point” in the Pacific war. ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
856:Overhead, the Amerikano planes buzz by, great birds swooping down with a vengeance. But who is winning? I cannot imagine the Amerikanos will win. How can they? They have lost once before, and how will they resupply themselves when their country is so far away? The Japanese need only jump north and they will be home. How I wish they would both go home. ~ Tess Uriza Holthe, #NFDB
857:I brought in two genius guys from Korea. Guys who did my favorite movies like Oldboy and The Man from Nowhere. It was fun working with them. Even though they don't speak Japanese and I don't speak Korean, I knew from day one we were speaking the same language because they love my work and I love theirs. We instantly connected. There was zero frustration. ~ Ryuhei Kitamura, #NFDB
858:The British had built railways across their Empire with the labour of Asian ‘coolies’. Now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of world history, the Japanese forced 60,000 British and Australian PoWs – as well as Dutch prisoners and conscripted Indian labour – to construct 250 miles of railway through the mountainous jungle on the Thai-Burmese border. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
859:He started skipping, but then caught himself and returned to deliberately pacing out his steps with his sheathed sword. People might ignore a tiny Japanese man in an orange porkpie hat and socks, with a sword, but if you went around expressing unrestrained joy, they would have you in a straightjacket before you could belt out a verse of "Zippity Do-Dah. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
860:May I join you?” she asked. Her English was lightly accented with something warm, maybe Spanish or Portuguese. “Please,” I said, standing and pulling back a chair for her. “Is English all right?” “Of course,” she said, looking at me closely. “You… you’re American?” I nodded. “My parents are Japanese, but I grew up in America. I’m more comfortable in English. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
861:Some Western readers commonly use the Japanese word manga to mean serious comic-book literature. According to one of my Japanese friends, this usage is wrong. The word manga means “idle picture” and is used in Japan to describe collections of trivial comic-book stories. The correct word for serious comic-book literature is gekiga, meaning “dramatic picture. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
862:The Flyboy who got away became president of the United States. What might have been for Warren Earl, Dick, Marve, Glenn, Floyd, Jimmy, the unidentified airman, and all the Others who had lost their lives?...And what might have been for those millions of doomed Japanese boys, abused and abandoned by their leaders? War is the tragedy of what might have been. ~ James D Bradley, #NFDB
863:Then there was the Japanese police officer who had dutifully asked one of the other cops the protocol for greeting instructors one holds in high regard. So every time I saw him in the hallway, he would smile, bow respectfully, and greet me with, "Fuck you, Mr. Douglas."
Rather than getting all complicated, I'd bow back, smile, and say, "Fuck you, too. ~ John Edward Douglas,#NFDB
864:Could we just settle down and have some compassion and respect for ourselves? Could we stop trying to escape from being alone with ourselves? What about practicing not jumping and grabbing when we begin to panic? Relaxing with loneliness is a worthy occupation. As the Japanese poet Ryokan says, “If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
865:They admit their lack of discipline and prosecute it even when it’s not there. We could learn a thing or two from them about how to address the legacy of slavery, or the treatment of Native Americans, or the Japanese internment camps, or Jim Crow, or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or any number of atrocious episodes that leave a stain on the soul of America. ~ Matthew Thomas, #NFDB
866:In the bath the attitude toward sex is representative. No people have it more firmly in place. They are a bit puritanical sometimes, and a number of prudes exist, but there is no people less prurient. What they are prurient about is money. Some Japanese treat money as we treat sex. But, as for sex—well, there are no young bloods trying to peak over the partition. ~ Donald Richie, #NFDB
867:The most dangerous moment of the War, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm, was when the Japanese Fleet was heading for Ceylon and the naval base there. The capture of Ceylon, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring and the future would have been black. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
868:He won all those medals in the Second World War, which was staged by robots so that Dwayne Hoover could give a free-will reaction to such a holocaust. The war was such an extravaganza that there was scarcely a robots anywhere who didn't have a part to play. Harold Newcomb Wilbur got his medals for killing Japanese, who were yellow robots. They were fueled by rice. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
869:In 2000 the then Prime Minister of Japan [Yoshirō Mori] asked me to return to this process, this conversation, these talks, and to do so, incidentally, on the basis of the 1956 declaration. I agreed. Since then we have conducted dialogue in this regard but I cannot say that our Japanese partners and friends have remained within the limits of the 1956 declaration. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
870:The Japanese don't write in alphabetic writing; they write in pictographs. So they never became visual, they stayed in the oral world, which is, everything is part of reality. Which means that they can accept any new technology - it's not threatening to them, and they can still continue to maintain their traditional culture, even in the face of high technology. ~ Owsley Stanley, #NFDB
871:We've teamed up with some Japanese companies to, basically by 2010, make all our clothing out of recycled and recyclable fibers. And we're going to accept ownership of our products from birth to birth. So if you buy a jacket from us, or a shirt ,or a pair of pants, when you're done with it, you can give it back to us and we'll make more shirts and pants out of it. ~ Yvon Chouinard, #NFDB
872:Japanese industrialist and founder of Toyota Industries Sakichi Toyoda understood that problems often have nested causes. He wanted people to get past their preconceptions and “with a blank mind” get to the heart of the issue.7 He didn’t ask Why? once, or even twice. Repeat ‘why’ five times to every matter, he instructed, until you arrive at something with real context. ~ Jim Benson, #NFDB
873:Paris Syndrome” affects roughly a dozen Japanese tourists every year, who arrive in Paris bearing romantic expectations of the French capital, but end up hospitalized “when they discover that Parisians can be rude, or the city does not meet their expectations,” adding, “The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown. ~ Martin Lindstrom, #NFDB
874:Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures—such was our course and the surroundings of it. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
875:Managers have traditionally developed the skills in finance, planning, marketing and production techniques. Too often the relations with their people have been assigned a secondary role. This is too important a subject not to receive first-line attention. In this regard we could learn much from the Japanese. We must reinvest in the human side of management. ~ William Redington Hewlett, #NFDB
876:The US economy, because it's so energy wasteful, is much less efficient than either the European or Japanese economies. It takes us twice as much energy to produce a unit of GDP as it does in Europe and Japan. So, we're fundamentally less efficient and therefore less competitive, and the sooner we begin to tighten up, the better it will be for our economy and society. ~ Hazel Henderson, #NFDB
877:You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
878:She wanted to find out about the gods of this country, but she couldn’t find any books on the subject in Spanish, and she doesn’t read English, so she asked a lot of her customers, but apparently none of the Japanese knew anything, which made her wonder if people here never came up against the kind of suffering where you can’t do anything but turn to your god for help. . . ~ Ry Murakami, #NFDB
879:Some years ago our Japanese counterparts asked us to resume the discussions of the issue and so we did meeting them halfway. Over the passed couple of years the contacts were practically frozen on the initiative of the Japanese side, not ours. At the same time, presently our partners have expressed their eagerness to resume discussions on this issue [the Kuril Islands]. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
880:When the poet's sentiments are overly visible, the audience may become uncomfortable. Japanese ritual is the opposite. By writing simply and only about what is there, the audience is drawn into the poet's world. Their imagination is stimulated, and a silent connection is established. I believe this is where the most important aspect of the Japanese sense of beauty lies. ~ Naoto Fukasawa, #NFDB
881:Now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
882:It’s a natural law (or supernatural, if you’re so inclined) that weird things appear where people tend to disappear. African jungles, Pacific islands, Himalayan wastelands—wherever expeditionary parties go missing, that’s where lost species, Stonehengey stone idols, the flitting shadows of yetis, and ancient, unsurrendering Japanese soldiers are sure to pop up. The ~ Christopher McDougall, #NFDB
883:Object in/ and space - the first impulse may be to give the object - a position - to place the object. (The object had a position to begin with.) Next - to change the position of the object. - Rauschenberg's early sculptures - A board with some rocks on it. The rocks can be anywhere on the board. - Cage's Japanese rock garden - The rocks can be anywhere (within the garden). ~ Jasper Johns, #NFDB
884:And father said "I never wanted this. I'm sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw -- all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let's talk self-sufficiency! ~ Paul Theroux, #NFDB
885:How can these stories from all over the world be so similar? I thought suddenly. I mean, when they were originally told all over those thousands of years ago, it wasn't like the Greeks could send an email to the Aboriginal people, or the Mayans in Mexico could talk on the phone to the Japanese. Could there actually be a bigger link between heaven and earth than I'd thought? ~ Lucinda Riley, #NFDB
886:I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. To try to think of what makes for entertainment is a very Japanese thing. The people who think like this are old-fashioned. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist ~ Takashi Miike, #NFDB
887:One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change. ~ Hirokazu Koreeda, #NFDB
888:Meaning can be usually be approximated, but often by sacrificing style. When I review my translations into Spanish, that's what I'm most concerned with, reading the sentences aloud in Spanish to make sure they sound the way I want them to. To be honest, I much prefer being translated into Greek or Japanese; in those cases, you have no way of being involved, and no pressure. ~ Daniel Alarcon, #NFDB
889:Playing Japanese characters and being in environments that are Japanese, like a character's apartment or whatever, if you have directors or art directors who just don't know what' s what with Japanese culture, then pretty soon something's just passed through. I've been through many times where I've pointed out the incorrectness of so much of what's been done to a set. ~ Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, #NFDB
890:After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there. ~ Ry Murakami, #NFDB
891:China remains not only the cultural but also the territorial and racial centre of the yellow world. Four-fifths of the yellow race is concentrated in China, there being nearly 400,000,000 Chinese as against 60,000,000 Japanese, 16,000,000 Koreans, 26,000,000 Indo-Chinese, and perhaps 10,000,000 people of non-Chinese stocks included within China’s political frontiers. The ~ T Lothrop Stoddard, #NFDB
892:How could he call me a “Japanese bastard” to my face? Looking back on it, I don’t think people even realized it was an offensive term. To them, calling Japanese people bastards was just a statement of fact. North Koreans had been indoctrinated to think that all Japanese were cruel. And to be fair, I tended to call North Koreans “natives.” Most of the returnees did the same. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
893:Regarding R. H. Blyth: The first book in English based on the saijiki is R. H. Blyth's Haiku, published in four volumes from 1949 to 1952. After the first, background volume, the remaining three consist of a collection of Japanese haiku with translations, all organized by season, and within the seasons by traditional categories and about three hundred seasonal topics. ~ Reginald Horace Blyth, #NFDB
894:Japanese addresses typically involve three numbers separated by dashes (e.g., 3-35-31). The first of these is the sub-area where the house or building is located, the second is the block it is on, and the third is the building number. And when these numbers are added together, the sum equals the percentage chance that you are never going to find the building you're looking for. ~ Tim Anderson, #NFDB
895:Aboriginal Okinawan Karate was traditionally taught in modest home Dojos, in small informal groups (sole purpose of teachings revolved around life preservation), in A closely tied supportive environment; unlike main island modern Japanese version with rivalry and competition, instructed in large groups belonging to even larger organizations with pseudo-militaristic hierarchy ~ Soke Behzad Ahmadi, #NFDB
896:But, you see, the water-going dinosaur likes to eat people. It’s envisioned that it might swim through the newly acquired waterways, due to the ice melting and find its way to warmer waters and make its way to our civilization. Then, much like an old Japanese monster movie, start tearing down cities and eating fleeing citizens, stomping pedestrians, and receiving an air strike. ~ Jonathan Maberry, #NFDB
897:One day I knew the war would be over, but I wondered how long the remains of war would last in me and in them even after the bombs had stopped falling and the guns were silent. What I feared most was that my generation would teach the hatred and resentment I was learning at the hands of the Japanese to our own children and the cycle of disaffection and violence would never stop. ~ Louis Zamperini, #NFDB
898:The hands of Hitler were filthy, but those of the United States were not clean. Our government had accepted, was still accepting, the subordination of black people in what we claimed was a democratic society. Our government threw Japanese families into concentration camps on the racist supposition that anyone Japanese—even if born in this country—could not be allowed to remain free. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
899:For some people who hope to fly in space, language can be a challenge. We all have to be able to speak at least one second language (I’ve been studying Russian for years, and my cosmonaut crewmates speak my language much better than I speak theirs), but the European and Japanese astronauts have the added burden of learning two languages if they don’t already speak English or Russian. ~ Scott Kelly, #NFDB
900:Marriage isn't a contest to see who is most often right. Marriage requires being what the Japanese call 'the wise bamboo,' which means you bend so you don't break. Treat your spouse with the flexibility and respect you would give to a top client. Think how we treat clients; We smile, we are polite, we listen to their ideas. Never forget that your spouse is your most important client. ~ Joan Rivers, #NFDB
901:The D-Day fortieth-anniversary project awakened my earliest memories. Between the ages of three and five I lived on an Army base in western South Dakota and spent a good deal of my time outdoors in a tiny helmet, shooting stick guns at imaginary German and Japanese soldiers. My father, Red Brokaw, then in his early thirties, was an all-purpose Mr. Fix-It and operator of snow-plows and ~ Tom Brokaw, #NFDB
902:In my opinion, everybody has the same soul from God and we are united by that. Outside, our bodies are different, our faces are different, but inside we are all the same, we share the same feelings of sadness, love, pain My music comes out of these feelings. Whether it is Japanese music, African, Qawalli, or any other form of music, if it touches your heart it becomes important for me. ~ A R Rahman, #NFDB
903:In the talcum on the floor around him he could see the imprints of his mother's feet. She had moved from side to side, propelled by an over-eager partner, perhaps one of the Japanese officers to whom she was teaching to tango. Jim tried out the dance steps himself, which seemed far more violent than any tango he had ever seen, and managed to fall and cut his hand on the broken mirror. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
904:These people looked Japanese, were originally Japanese, were numerous. We had no way of knowing to what extent they had been infiltrated. To their great credit, it seems not to have been very much at all. But I can understand why. And I rather respect Eleanor for standing out against the tide at that point. But it certainly was a tide. And I'm not going to say it was unjustified. ~ William A Rusher, #NFDB
905:Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by a high rate of population increase. The Ainu are more nearly the descendants of Japan’s ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
906:You could say that my aim is ‘to recover the place’. The place is a result of nature and time; this is the most important aspect. I think my architecture is some kind of frame of nature. With it, we can experience nature more deeply and more intimately. Transparency is a characteristic of Japanese architecture; I try to use light and natural materials to get a new kind of transparency. ~ Kengo Kuma, #NFDB
907:We made our debut in Japan about few years ago and when we went on a morning show there to promote our album, I did a brief interview in Japanese using simple expressions such as "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu." But one of the members of our group said, "Stay quiet if you can't speak Japanese! It's embarrassing!" So that's when I told myself that I'd show how good I am by studying Japanese hard. ~ Seungri, #NFDB
908:I will not offer my thoughts on what Japan could and should have done, this is none of my business, it is the business of the Japanese leadership. But we should understand how practicable all our agreements are as a whole given the allied obligations Japan has assumed, how much independence there is in making those decision, and what we can hope for, what we can ultimately arrive at. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
909:Just then, a little hopped-up Japanese car zips up next to us. It’s bright yellow with loud, high-pitched exhaust pipes and a big air spoiler on the back. I look over at the driver to see who’s making all the racket. I’m surprised to see a teenage girl there. After a moment, she gooses it and whinnies on past. On her back window, there’s a sticker: NO FEAR.
I think, good girl. ~ Michael Zadoorian,#NFDB
910:suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would drop as nervous investors sold off their holdings. Buyers would only be found at a price low enough to compensate them for the increased risk of a Japanese default or currency depreciation. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
911:Kaizen" is a Japanese term that captures the concept of continuously making many small improvements. It was considered to be one of the main reasons for the dramatic gains in productivity and quality in Japanese manufacturing and was widely copied throughout the world. Kaizen applies to individuals, too. Every day, work to refine the skills you have and to add new tools to your repertoire. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
912:More than seven years after the Japanese disaster, the United States still had a hundred licensed and operational power reactors—including one at Three Mile Island. France continued to generate 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, and China had recently embarked on a reactor building spree, with twenty new units under construction and thirty-nine already in operation. ~ Adam Higginbotham, #NFDB
913:People scooped up these tabloids, devoured their gossip.. But now, for some reason, I found myself thinking about Morrie whenever I read anything silly or mindless.
I kept picturing him there, in the house with the Japanese maple.. counting his breath, squeezing out every moment with his loved ones, while I spent so many hours on things that meant absolutely nothing to me personally. ~ Mitch Albom,#NFDB
914:The distinction between East and West is that the Western novel is very organized, it's very logical, there's a logical progression, there's a chronological progression, and there's a safety in that. Whereas if you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life. ~ Donald Richie, #NFDB
915:We're so screwed up with our principles. We used to mock Japanese game shows where they ate bugs. Now we're doing the same, if not worse. It's terrifying... It seems the better the quality, the more you're penalised... There are some very good people in television, but a lot of fools running it. They put fame ahead of talent and think someone from 'EastEnders' will put bums on seats. ~ Philip Glenister, #NFDB
916:Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans -- or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity -- they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth -- the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given -- far behind them in the past. ~ Savitri Devi, #NFDB
917:He was righteous. He had a sense of duty, of what was right and wrong in the world, and I don't mean that in some evangelical sense of the word. And I don't mean that his world was just black and white. He just had a code, you know? He used to talk about that, about how few people had CODES anymore. It was his thing. He was always reading books about the samurai, about Japanese culture. ~ Nickolas Butler, #NFDB
918:The previous day, December 6, Sprague had upbraided his crew for their sloppy performance during an intensive series of drills. He broke with his nature and let them have it. Gathering his officers in the Tangier's wardroom, Sprague said, “We're not prepared. We can't trust the Japanese. How do you know the Japanese won't attack tomorrow?” The next morning the Combined Fleet struck. ~ James D Hornfischer, #NFDB
919:used around women and children. Then there was the Japanese police officer who had dutifully asked one of the other cops the protocol for greeting instructors one holds in high regard. So every time I saw him in the hallway, he would smile, bow respectfully, and greet me with, “Fuck you, Mr. Douglas.” Rather than getting all complicated, I’d bow back, smile, and say, “Fuck you, too. ~ John Edward Douglas, #NFDB
920:Executives consistently report that their hardest experiences, the stretches that most challenged them, were the most helpful. A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, was in charge of the company’s Asian operations during a major Japanese earthquake and the Asian economic collapse. He says that’s when he discovered that “you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times.” His ~ Geoff Colvin, #NFDB
921:It’s amazing what can be done by people who learn to relax, pay attention, and focus, appreciating the present hour and all the opportunity it contains. It is said that in America we try to cultivate an appreciation of art, while the Japanese cultivate the art of appreciation. You, too, can cultivate the art of appreciation. Appreciate this hour. This hour, right now, is pure opportunity. ~ Steve Chandler, #NFDB
922:Contrary to a tenacious myth, France is not owned by California pension funds or the Bank of China, any more than the United States belongs to Japanese and German investors. The fear of getting into such a predicament is so strong today that fantasy often outstrips reality. The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
923:The Japanese cameras that used to proliferate in these places have almost all been replaced by camcorders. Like a magic lamp, the camcorder swallows the palace and sucks in the pond in front. In these tourists' minds, the Belvedere is reduced into an unfocused square image, cast with a bluish tint. The present is re-created to immortalize memories. It's pathetic, but that's human tendency now. ~ Young Ha Kim, #NFDB
924:One night in Tokyo we watched two Japanese businessmen saying good-night to each other after what had clearly been a long night of drinking, a major participant sport in Japan. These men were totally snockered, having reached the stage of inebriation wherein every air molecule that struck caused them to wobble slightly, but they still managed to behave more formally than Americans do at funerals. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
925:We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns and I followed your white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. Rising off the water, lights flickered an invitation far enough away to be interpreted as we liked; to shimmer glamourously behind the silhouette of retrospective good times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald, #NFDB
926:A very enjoyable meditation on the curious thing called 'Zen' -not the Japanese religious tradition but rather the Western clich of Zen that is embraced in advertising, self-help books, and much more. . . . Yamada, who is both a scholar of Buddhism and a student of archery, offers refreshing insight into Western stereotypes of Japan and Japanese culture, and how these are received in Japan. ~ Alexander Gardner, #NFDB
927:There are few gardens that can be left alone. A few years of neglect and only the skeleton of a garden can be traced. . . . Japanese artists working with a few stones and sand four hundred years ago achieved strangely lasting compositions. However there, too, but for the hands that have piously raked the white sand into patterns and controlled the spread of moss and lichens, little would remain. ~ Russell Page, #NFDB
928:You know, or three kinds of ice cream bars and you'd see this and like this... okay they could clearly benefit from some more choices and I remember having these discussions with the Japanese because they you know they often like to go to Hawaii for vacation because it was definitely much cheaper for them and I would ask them, "So when you go to Hawaii, you know do eat all these other things?" ~ Sheena Iyengar, #NFDB
929:Aomori Water is a sound collage piece made in 1998, in Aomori Japan. I was in a residency with other artists. A Japanese sculptor was making a round house and wanted a sound piece to play in it. I recorded some very gentle waves lapping the beach, for the first part. And a very small mountain stream, flowing, for the second part. I layered 8 tracks. This was the first work that I did in ProTools. ~ Phill Niblock, #NFDB
930:I don't believe in making movies to cater to a foreign audience. You never know what the reaction is going to be anyhow. At the time I made Maborosi, the Japanese movies getting any foreign attention were all period dramas and seemed to be about some representative element of Japanese life, and my movie was contemporary movie about one specific woman trying to understand her husband's suicide. ~ Hirokazu Koreeda, #NFDB
931:Now the Japanese companies are more focused on that. To have two independent directors - I think it's good to have outside people look at you and think of what you could be doing better. Those are voluntary, but most of the companies told me they're going to do it. And I think it's good for them to say our returns on equity, for example, should be higher. Also, I think some could be more ambitious. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
932:American, Swiss, and Japanese taxpayers are pretty honest. So are most of the other Western European democracies. Greece, Spain, and Italy are not. In fact, the level of tax evasion in Greece is such that the country’s deficit—which is so large that Greece has teetered on the brink of outright bankruptcy for years—would all but disappear if Greek citizens obeyed the law and paid what they owed. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
933:Having survived her 10th London winter (she got through January by assigning it "international month," and amusing Moses and his big sister, Apple, 9, with a visiting Italian chef, Japanese anime screenings, and hand-rolled-sushi lessons, no less), Paltrow admits that her dreams of relocating the family to their recently acquired residence in Brentwood, California, are becoming ever more urgent. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow, #NFDB
934:In fact, the poor are generally too busy making ends meet to be the vanguard of any revolution. History shows that terrorism is a largely bourgeois endeavor, from the Russian anarchists of the late nineteenth century to the German Marxists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang of the 1970s, to the apocalyptic Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo of the 1990s. Islamist terrorists, it turns out, are no different. ~ Peter L Bergen, #NFDB
935:The Japanese were order people and knew it.. Americans and English were chaos people who thought they were order people. The French were the worst thing to be; order people who thought they were chaos people. But Afghans, like Africans and Russians and the Irish, were chaos people who knew they were chaos people, and while this lent them a good amount of charm, it made their countries berserk, insane. ~ Tom Bissell, #NFDB
936:LIBERATION IS PERHAPS not the right word to describe the end of the war in colonial societies. Most Asians were more than happy to be rid of the Japanese, whose “Asian liberation” had turned out to be worse than the Western imperialism it temporarily replaced. But liberation is not quite what the Dutch had in mind for the Dutch East Indies in 1945, or the French for Indochina, or the British for Malaya. ~ Ian Buruma, #NFDB
937:South Korea from a country that had relatively little primary education became close to universal literacy in the course of 25, 30 years, in a way trying to replicate what Japan had done earlier. They were learning to some extent from the Japanese experience too. So I think, in a sense, the East Asians were following a path, which all other countries including South Asia could follow but chose not too. ~ Amartya Sen, #NFDB
938:we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. It was to spare— ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
939:Drying her eyes, Mother said to Totto-chan very slowly, "You're Japanese and Masao-chan comes from a country called Korea. But he's a child, just like you. So, Totto-chan, dear, don't ever think of people as different. Don't think, 'That person's a Japanese, or this person's a Korean.' Be nice to Masao-chan. It's so sad that some people think other people aren't nice just because they're Koreans. ~ Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, #NFDB
940:Ever since I was a child, I always had insecurity or suspicions about my own personal identity. That's why I started going to a lot of movie theaters, because I felt more comfortable there than at school. Now, the search for a personal identity is becoming a common topic for young Japanese people, and it's a big theme in their own lives. But it's been a theme in my life, as well, ever since I was young. ~ Mamoru Oshii, #NFDB
941:I went round the side of the house, and stared at the garden in horror. The ivy had almost taken over. There were still flowers in the borders, but weeds rioted everywhere, choking all the blooms. The stream still trickled in spite of vast tangles of waterweed. I followed it to the end of the garden. The little Japanese house was lurid green with moss. I sat on the cold seat and shut my eyes tight. ~ Jacqueline Wilson, #NFDB
942:The Japanese have an expression for human relations that are sticky with the mutual obligations and dependencies of the collective life. They use the English word “wet.” Traditional Japanese family relations are “wet.” Yakuza gangs are “wet.” Behavior that is more detached, more individualistic, often associated with a Western way of life, is “dry.” Terayama Shuji was “dry.” Kara was most definitely “wet. ~ Ian Buruma, #NFDB
943:All his men were crack shots, but Fairbairn himself favoured close-range physical combat over the bullet. ‘His system is a combination of ferocious blows, holds and throws, adapted from Japanese bayonet tactics, ju-jitsu, Chinese boxing, Sikh wrestling, French wrestling and Cornish collar-and-elbow wrestling, plus expert knowledge of hip-shooting, knife fighting and use of the Tommy gun and hand grenade. ~ Giles Milton, #NFDB
944:As well as Japanese animation, technology has a huge influence on Japanese society, and also Japanese novels. It's because before, people tended to think that ideology or religion were the things that actually changed people, but it's been proven that that's not the case. Technology has been proven to be the thing that's actually changing people. So in that sense, it's become a theme in Japanese culture. ~ Mamoru Oshii, #NFDB
945:I think it would be more correct to say that mass movements are powerful, and therefore have the potential to do great damage or good. The United States mobilized in a way that could be called a mass movement to fight the Second World War–and so did the Japanese. Were those mass movements good or bad? Both nations felt justified in what they did, and the rights and wrongs depend on which side you are on. ~ Jared Taylor, #NFDB
946:J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
947:We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called 'isolationism.' ~ Pat Buchanan, #NFDB
948:But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan - which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn't find it interesting at all. ~ Hirokazu Koreeda, #NFDB
949:I have mastered many things in my life. Navigating the streets of London, speaking French without an accent, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms..." Tessa stared. "Alas," he went on, "no one has ever actually referred to me as 'the master,' or 'the magister,' either. More's the pity. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
950:The problem with a foreign policy driven foremost by Never Again! is that it ignores limits and the availability of resources. World War II had the secondary, moral effect of saving what was left of European Jewry. Its primary goal and effect was to restore the European and Asian balance of power in a manner tolerable to the United States—something that the Nazis and the Japanese fascists had overturned. ~ Robert D Kaplan, #NFDB
951:Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. ~ Paul Nitze, #NFDB
952:She stands behind the reception desk, dwarfed and age speckled as a winter starling, perhaps ninety years old, and chattering, chattering away, as if a cure for his inability to speak Japanese were the application of more Japanese (a hair-of-the-dog sensibility). And yet some how, from his months of travel and pantomime, his pathetic journey into empathic and telepathic, he feels he does understand. ~ Andrew Sean Greer, #NFDB
953:Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Lucia Berlin’s short stories for John Cheever’s, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado for Dany Laferrière’s I Am a Japanese Writer, Dubravka Ugrešić’s Lend Me Your Character for Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarreled and Other Stories, Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder for Capote’s In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle’s The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB
954:I was really delighted when in June that year the U.S State Department put Japan on a watch list of countries doing a piss-poor job of addressing human trafficking problems. In terms of willingness to act, Japan was ranked only slightly above North Korea. For the Japanese, that was like pushing a button. Never underestimate the power of national humiliation to make the Japanese government get off its lazy ass. ~ Jake Adelstein, #NFDB
955:Oddly enough, I never heard him complain about or blame the political system of North Korea. I finally realized that he’d never experienced true freedom. He’d been born under Japanese colonial rule and then shipped off to a life of slave labor. So he’d never known anything else. That might explain why he seemed to grow milder and more accepting over time. My mother, however, became more frightened by the day. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
956:A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: “I know exactly what that bomb was.” It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city. I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened. ~ Daniel Ellsberg, #NFDB
957:Seems to be catching."
"What is?" asked Neku.
"Wanting Kit dead."
Neku shrugged. "He was fucking the wife of a gang boss and bikers used his bar to deal drugs, plus lots of uyoku felt Yoshi Tanaka should be married to someone Japanese. Then there's chippu he owed to the local police and unpaid bills from a Brazilian transvestite who mends his motorcycle. It could have been anyone. ~ Jon Courtenay Grimwood,#NFDB
958:The Japanese are virtuosos. They make just the little accent that makes all the difference. So much there is so beautiful - just a shop window display is a work of art. Just the way they make all kinds of things out of bamboo that are so ingenious. Just the way this little bamboo drain or latch is so beautiful. The masonry around the streams to hold the bank are beautiful - and not all one kind and not just cement. ~ Jane Jacobs, #NFDB
959:What the art historians had forgotten is that in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Indian art, they never painted shadows. Why did they paint shadows in European art? Shadows are because of optics. Optics need shadows and strong light. Strong light makes the deepest shadows. It took me a few years to realize fully that the art historians didn't grasp that. There are a lot of interesting new things, ideas, pictures. ~ David Hockney, #NFDB
960:A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout— I can’t waste my time with the likes of you!” His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your impertinence.”“That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
961:As regards humanitarian issues and how to handle them, that was the Prime Minister's [Shinzō Abe] initiative. He brought the matter up at our last meeting in Lima and asked me straightforwardly whether we would agree to let Japanese citizens travel on a visa-free basis, resolve the issue in such a way as to enable them to visit the South Kurils, visit their native areas. I said at once that it was quite possible. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
962:If you write about the Asian culture, be accurate between what is the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Thai, Taiwanese, Indonesian, and many individual Asian countries' cultures. While there are many similarities, the differences in cultures will set your novel apart from what is an authentic portrayal to what is a westernized version. - Kailin Gow on Asian Portrayals through Literature and Media ~ Kailin Gow, #NFDB
963:In Japanese culture, the significance of the cherry blossom tree dates back hundreds of years. The cherry blossom represents the fragility and magnificence of life. It’s a reminder of how beautiful life is, almost overwhelmingly so, but that it is also heartbreakingly short.
As are relationships.
Be wise. Let your heart lead the way. And when you find someone who’s worth it—never let them go. ~ L J Shen,#NFDB
964:People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly. ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
965:Those wolves were crueler even than the Japanese devils. They knew that all they had to do was rip open the bellies and let the horses die under their own hooves. I've never seen anything more sinister, more savage in my life. Those wolves embody the spirit of the Japanese samurai. Suicidal attacks don't faze them, and that makes Mongol wolves more fearful than any others. I won't rest till I kill every last one of them! ~ Jiang Rong, #NFDB
966:America has no now. We're reluctant to acknowledge the present. It's too embarrassing.
Instead, we reach into the past. Our culture is composed of sequels, reruns, remakes, revivals, reissues, re-releases, recreations, reenactments, adaptations, anniversaries, memorabilia, oldies radio, and nostalgia record collections. World War II has been refought so many times, the Germans and Japanese are now drawing residuals. ~ George Carlin,#NFDB
967:A shelf farther back contains general humanities—collections of Japanese literature, world literature, and individual writers, classics, philosophy, drama, art history, sociology, history, biography, geography. . . . When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages—a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
968:During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
969:I have mastered many things in my life. Navigating the streets of London, speaking French without an accent, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms..."
Tessa stared.
"Alas," he went on, "no one has ever actually referred to me as 'the master,' or 'the magister,' either. More's the pity... ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
970:Or, if I have to work, I find it preferable (and less painful) to work intensely for very short hours, then do nothing for the rest of the time (assuming doing nothing is really doing nothing), until I recover completely and look forward to a repetition, rather than being subjected to the tedium of Japanese style low-intensity interminable office hours with sleep deprivation. Main course and dessert are separate. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
971:There was a sentence, buried somewhere in the paperwork, that stated, “Once you have settled in North Korea, you will not be allowed to return to Japan without official Japanese authorization.” I tried to convince myself that since I was Japanese by birth, it wouldn’t be a problem for me to come back someday. But as we went through the various bureaucratic steps, I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of dread. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
972:within three years of its founding, OverDrive had loaned one million books, and in 2012, it had reached a hundred million checkouts. By the end of 2017, it had reached the milestone of having loaned one billion books. On an average day, seven hundred thousand books are checked out through OverDrive. The company has been so successful that, a few years ago, the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten paid $410 million to acquire it. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB
973:I've mastered many thing's in my life. Navigating the streets of London, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms..."
Tessa stared.
"Alas," he went on, "no one has ever actually referred to me as 'the master' or 'the magister', either. More's the pity..."
"Are you highly intoxicated at the moment? ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
974:Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
975:He flicked off the light switch, setting the alarm system. Overhead he could hear
Reno—music that could only be Japanese hip-hop, for God’s sake, and thumps and
bumps. Either he had half a dozen girls up there on the floor and he was doing them one by one, or he was doing some sort of exercise. Or dancing. The thought of Reno dancing was enough to send cold shivers down Peter’s spine. He preferred the notion of an orgy. ~ Anne Stuart,#NFDB
976:Shamefully, all of us have wanted revenge on someone at some point for something. I've lived since before man and buffalo roamed this small planet. I have survived the beginning, bloom, and death of countless enemies, civilizations, and people. And the one truth I have learned most during all of these centuries is the old Japanese proverb. If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
977:You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
978:What kind of music do you listen to?” she asked. “All different kinds. But I guess I don’t listen to a lot of Japanese music.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. I never really thought about it. What kind of music do you listen to?” “I listen to all different kinds. But I guess I don’t listen to a lot of Japanese music.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. I never really thought about it.” “I guess that makes us the same.” “I guess it does. ~ Kazuki Kaneshiro, #NFDB
979:Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service. The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow. ~ W Edwards Deming, #NFDB
980:Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
981:Miyamoto Musashi’s actual burial ground was in close range. According to legend he had been buried in full samurai regalia clutching his faithful sword. The last line of the translation: He died lonely. The Japanese liked loneliness. It had a different quality than our dreaded isolation. More like one with the void, alone with the Alone, no longer separate from anything. It was the final compliment to describe him this way. ~ Natalie Goldberg, #NFDB
982:I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words—I was just about to leave when I met a man who seemed to know quite a lot about Schoenberg. ~ Helen DeWitt, #NFDB
983:most Americans have never recognized as “terrorist” in precisely the same sense the firestorms caused deliberately by U.S. firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden or Hamburg or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. These deliberate massacres of civilians, though not prosecuted after World War II like the Japanese slaughter in China at Nanking, were by any prior or reasonable criteria war crimes, wartime terrorism, crimes against humanity. ~ Daniel Ellsberg, #NFDB
984:The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta. Four months later, the first shipload of returnees left the Japanese port of Niigata. Shortly after that, people affiliated with the League of Koreans in Japan started showing up on our doorstep, eager to persuade us to make the journey. They were all in favor of the mass repatriation. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
985:he’d wondered aloud if the Scottish-Japanese technophile wanted to be Batman. “You already have the lair, the finances and the right equipment,” he’d said. “Why do you ask? Do you have a fetish for rich men in masks?” Ken asked, smiling that angelic smile. “I don’t have fetishes,” Brady responded quickly. “But he isn’t my type. He’s got a cave full of baggage and relies on toys instead of natural talent. Give me Superman any day. ~ R G Alexander, #NFDB
986:The [articles of the Genva Convention] adopted by The International Committee drew upon...the codes of a warrior's honour...these codes vary from culture to culture and their common features are the oldest artifacts of human morality: from Christian chivalry... to the Japanese Bushido or way of the warrior... The codes acknowledged the moral paradox of battle: that those who fight ...bravely are bound [by]...mutual respect... ~ Michael Ignatieff, #NFDB
987:There are actual communication systems being built to enable eye surgeons to get inside the eye, and vascular surgeons to get inside the arteries. You could see a social reaction in which people would want to regulate this technology because they are threatened by it, and thereby cause a lot of harm. There are several scenarios that are happening at once. The other scenario is that the Japanese are going for this in a big way. ~ Howard Rheingold, #NFDB
988:What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television. ~ Richard Rodriguez, #NFDB
989:In the distance, the bomber swung around and began flying at the rafts again. Louie hoped that the crew had realized the mistake and was returning to help them. Flying about two hundred feet over the water, the bomber raced at them, following a path slightly parallel to the rafts, so that its side passed into view. All three men saw it at once. Behind the wing, painted over the waist, was a red circle. The bomber was Japanese. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
990:In the potential of absurdity, hiding in the disparate combination of the various different subjects which in themselves are nothing but daily items equally in the exclusive representation of a normal item taken out of their usual context, is by far the most radical - in its effect comparable to a Japanese Zen koan - paradox to be witnessed, which modern art has produced, one of the most forceful impulses that generated from it. ~ Antoni Tapies, #NFDB
991:I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren’t doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say? “Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!” “Excuse me. I’m Japanese.” “Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
992:Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue. She still loved Trahearne, still maintained her secret fidelity as if it were a miniature Japanese pine, as tiny and perfect as a porcelain cup, lost in the dark and tangled corner of a once-formal garden gone finally to seed. ~ James Crumley, #NFDB
993:Fashion is made up of paradoxes. There was a key moment in fashion. When the Japanese first arrived - Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and all - I have to humbly admit that I didn't understand the importance of it at all. It was Jean-Jacques Picart who explained it to me. They had a huge influence in that they showed that aestheticism could be different from prettiness, that there was beauty and that beauty was beyond pretty. ~ Ines de La Fressange, #NFDB
994:IN THOSE DAYS, your village might change hands every few weeks, one day to the Communists, the next to the Nationalists, the next to the Japanese. How easy it was to mistake your brother for a traitor or your beloved for an enemy, to fear that you yourself were born in the wrong moment of history. But in the teahouses, anyone could share a few songs, anyone could lift their wine cup and toast the validity and the continuity of love. ~ Madeleine Thien, #NFDB
995:It's as if Japanese men, all to aware that deep inside they'd like to stomp Tokyo flat, breathe fire, and do truly terrible and disgusting things to women, have built themselves the most beautiful of prisons for their rampaging ids. Instead of indulging their fantasies, they focus on food, or landscaping, or the perfect cup of tea -- or a single slab of o-toro tuna -- letting themselves go only at baseball games and office parties. ~ Anthony Bourdain, #NFDB
996:Japanese often use the expression shikata-ga-nai (there is nothing you can do) as a fatalistic response to a given circumstance. They assume that circumstance is all there is; they face that shikata-ga-nai with stoic resignation. But the Christian God offers a reality far greater, a possibility of the infinite breaking through, even though the fallen world is cursed and operates within the limitations of a natural, closed mechanism. ~ Makoto Fujimura, #NFDB
997:But the Viet-Minh had had about ten months in which to establish their administration, train their forces with Japanese and American weapons (and Japanese and Chinese instructors), and kill or terrorize into submission the genuine Vietnamese nationalists who wanted a Viet-Nam independent from France but equally free of Communist rule. The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun. ~ Bernard B Fall, #NFDB
998:No matter how much I scream at them to make my toast as crispy as possible, I have never once gotten it the way I want it. I can't imagine why. What with Japanese industriousness and high-tech culture and the market principles that the Denny's chain is always pursuing, it shouldn't be that hard to get crispy toast, don't you think? So, why can't they do it? Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered? ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
999:Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke.112 I don’t know how to translate it, but basically it means that we’re spaced out and careless because we don’t understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that. ~ Ruth Ozeki, #NFDB
1000:He saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls of the factories, and the simpering, boisterous girls from the south of Market. There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. These, in turn, were crowded out by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs; by Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped with degeneracy; by full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned and brown-skinned. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1001:One cold night in December 1941 I won a dance contest jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction” at the Denver Dance Hall. The next thing I knew I was on a troop train at four in the morning heading for the West Coast to defend California. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I just turned twenty-one and I was 6′2″. Four years later when the war ended I got my discharge one day before I turned twenty-five; I was 6′ 4″. I had grown two inches. ~ Charles Brandt, #NFDB
1002:Although we can get to know ourselves better by sitting down and analyzing our characteristics or by listening to others’ perspectives on us, I believe that tidying is the best way. After all, our possessions very accurately relate the history of the decisions we have made in life. Tidying is a way of taking stock that shows us what we really like.” -
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing ~ Marie Kond,#NFDB
1003:Judo has been part of Japanese culture for a long time. It makes sense to me that this sport, which is both athletic and philosophical, was created in Japan. It is based on respect for the partner and for our elders as our teachers, which is very important and makes a strong, positive contribution to human relationships, and not only in sports. I am happy that life brought me to this wonderful sport as a child. It is like my first love. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
1004:They were martyred. But what a martyrdom! I had long read about martyrdom in the lives of the saints--how the souls of the martyrs had gone home to Heaven, how they had been filled with glory in Paradise, how the angels had blown trumpets. This was the splendid martyrdom I had often seen in my dreams. But the martyrdom of the Japanese Christians I now describe to you was no such glorious thing. What a miserable and painful business it was! ~ Sh saku End, #NFDB
1005:The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
1006:Activist Supreme Courts are not new. The Dred Scott decision in 1856, imposing slavery in free territories; the Plessy decision in 1896, imposing segregation on a private railroad company; the Korematsu decision in 1944, upholding Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens, mostly Japanese Americans; and the Roe decision in 1973, imposing abortion on the entire nation; are examples of the consequences of activist Courts and justices. ~ Mark Levin, #NFDB
1007:John Adams came closest to Trump (and Nixon) with the four Alien and Sedition Acts that restricted immigration and gave him a path to prosecute political enemies—as Trump says he wants to do. One of those four laws remained on the books long enough to give legal cover to the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942. Still, the Adams administration was free of scandal, managed government finances prudently, and launched the modern Navy. ~ David Cay Johnston, #NFDB
1008:Now I keep searching for happiness so I don't end up like he did. I learn about this town called Happy in Texas and think about how that must be the greatest place to live. I teach myself how to say and read and write happy in Spanish, German, Italian and even Japanese but I would have to draw the last one out. I discover the happiest animal in the world, the quokka. He's a cheeky little bastard that's always smiling.
But it's not enough. ~ Adam Silvera,#NFDB
1009:Ronald Wilson Reagan: America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.” But then he added, “Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. ~ John McCain, #NFDB
1010:Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed. ~ Barbara W Tuchman, #NFDB
1011:Good afternoon, class," he said.
I said a soft good afternoon, but no one else in the class joined me.
Dr. Green laughed. "I think my class is missing. Did no one show up today? I'll have to mark everyone as absent. I believe I said good afternoon."
The room chorused a low murmuring of 'good afternoon' in reply.
"This won't do," Dr. Green said. "I'm here to teach you Japanese. I can't very well teach you English, too. ~ C L Stone,#NFDB
1012:Japan was a closed book. Western ignorance of Japan was not the fault of the westerners but the design of the Japanese. For two hundred years, Japan had been shut tight. By national law, a Japanese could not leave Japan and no outsider was allowed in. Death sentences were meted out to any who gave foreigners information about the land of the gods. Almost no maps and no books existed in the English-speaking world describing the closed land. ~ James D Bradley, #NFDB
1013:Before any modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist (I insist with violence) that he shall always be very much pleased when his barber tries to talk to him. His barber is humanity: let him love that. If he is not pleased at this, I will not accept any substitute in the way of interest in the Congo or the future of Japan. If a man cannot love his barber whom he has seen, how shall he love the Japanese whom he has not seen? It ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1014:My advice? Get out the Norton I left you, and you better bloody still have it because if you lost it like you did my Slade Alive! LP, I will hunt you down, son. Page 1902. “Japan.” Not about the Japanese, but about moments of perfection. Commit it to memory and make good use of it. Because if I come home and you’re still pining over this little girl without having given her a chance, I will call you a chicken shit for the rest of your life. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB
1015:Of all of them, I’d choose the Walther PPK 7.65 mm. It only came fourth after the Japanese M-14, the Russian Tokarev and the Sauer M-38. But I like its light trigger pull and the extension spur of the magazine gives a grip that should suit 007. It’s a real stopping gun. Of course it’s about a .32 calibre as compared with the Beretta’s .25, but I wouldn’t recommend anything lighter. And you can get ammunition for the Walther anywhere in the world. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
1016:Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish. ~ Adam Rex, #NFDB
1017:Still holding my breath, I worked the dull point inside and slowly, slowly drew back the stopper, plunged it back in, and exhaled. At last, my grateful spirit eased out of the fetid bag of humanity crumpled in that Japanese car, eased out and drifted overhead, until it floated high over the San Fernando Valley, far away from all these people who just didn't understand, far away and high above the awful circumstance of what now passed for my life. ~ Jerry Stahl, #NFDB
1018:We had lead underwear, we wore it over our pants. Write that. We had good jokes, too. Here's one: An American robot is on the roof for five minutes, and then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five minutes, , and then -- breaks down. The Russian robot is up there two hours! Then a command comes in over the loudspeaker: "Private Ivanov! In two hours you're welcome to come down and have a cigarette break." Ha-Ha! [laughs.] ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
1019:Sejal had not often thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish. ~ Adam Rex, #NFDB
1020:Now every girl is expected to have: Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes. ~ Tina Fey, #NFDB
1021:The idea of the book ["The Japanese Lover"] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
1022:Do you like my working persona?" Saiman asked softly. "An aesthetically pleasing combination of intelligence and elegance, wouldn't you say?"
Aren't we pleased with ourselves. "Are you Chinese, Japanese, half-white? I can't tell, your features are neither here nor there."
"I'm inscrutable, mysterious and intellectual."
He forgot conceited. "Did you have any trouble getting that ego through the door?"
Saiman didn't even blink. "Not in the least. ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
1023:I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page looks like "aware," which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there, what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our relations. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
1024:The local Red Cross chapter volunteered to publish his book. It came out in a deluxe, gold-embossed, Japanese-paper edition to remind the reader of human artistry, which can be a refuge from evil and a source of new, platonic stirrings. One copy was reserved for His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II. (The Tsar fairly devoured mystical works, believing that hell could be avoided by a combination of education and deceit.)
"The Book of Kings and Fools," p. 136. ~ Danilo Ki,#NFDB
1025:film crew up there, enraptured by the charming rodents. The crew had come to shoot a documentary about the massacre; they had expected teen angst and American social Darwinism. They were seduced by the tranquillity—less than a hundred yards from the school. They shot hours of footage of the twelve-inch prairie dogs. The Japanese crew saw this place somewhat differently than Americans did. Their depiction was by turns tumultuous, brutal, explosive, and serene. ~ Dave Cullen, #NFDB
1026:Then he read the words of the scroll slowly, first in Japanese and then carefully translated into English: 'There is really nothing you must be. And there is nothing you must do. There is really nothing you must have. And there is nothing you must know. There is really nothing you must become. However. It helps to understand that fire burns, and when it rains, the earth gets wet. . . .' 'Whatever, there are consequences. Nobody is exempt,' said the master. ~ Robert Fulghum, #NFDB
1027:Christ said "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" and when asked "who is thy neighbour? went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you wish to understand this parable as it was understood by his hearers, you should substitute "Germans and Japanese" for Samaritan. I fear my modern day Christians would resent such a substitution, because it would compel them to realize how far they have departed from the teachings of the founder of their religion. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1028:Gore said foreigners are not worried about 'what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do.' Good. They should be worried. They hate us? We hate them. Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell anger. Japanese Kamikazes pilots hated us once, too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons got their attention. Now they are gentle little lambs. ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
1029:It's pretentious to say, but my art is like a little Zen story, a story with a question mark at the end. People can take from it what they need. If somebody says, "Your art is very funny," I say, "You are totally right." If somebody says, "Your art is very sad," I say, "You are totally right." In Japan they say, "Your art is very Japanese, you even look Japanese.Your great-grandfather was most surely a Japanese man." And I say, "You are totally right." ~ Christian Boltanski, #NFDB
1030:It was Bormann who advocated imposing even stricter limits on the Church’s authority, in alignment with the views of Hitler who lamented Christianity’s weakness: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness! ~ Tania Crasnianski, #NFDB
1031:Within Young Leaves Wrapped within young leaves: the sound of water. —SOSEKI This delicate observation by this Japanese poet is filled with the quiet hope that embedded in our nature, even as we begin, is our gift already unfolded. Embedded in the seed is the blossom. Embedded in the womb is the child fully grown. Embedded in the impulse to care is the peace of love realized. Embedded in the edge of risk and fear is the authenticity that makes life worth living. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
1032:Also intriguing was all the bowing. The association of height and status did not, of course, faze him. If anything, it made the Japanese seem noble. But where were the ones who made themselves big? That was the question. With so many people bowing down, it seemed to Majnoun like a competition amongst the low to see who could be lowest. In which case, discretion was strength, a paradox that Majnoun found almost as compelling as the film's relative absence of dogs. ~ Andr Alexis, #NFDB
1033:In October 1944, we were cruising near Samar, getting ready to help lead the invasion of the Philippines. We had thirteen ships in our group, which sounds like a lot, but aside from the carrier, it was mainly destroyers and escorts, so we didn’t have much firepower. And then, on the horizon, we saw what seemed like the entire Japanese fleet coming toward us. Four battleships, eight cruisers, eleven destroyers, hell-bent on sending us to the bottom of the sea. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1034:Alana – still dressed as a pirate- chambers over the counter like that evil Japanese ghost in the Ring, knocking over the child-size popcorn of some little kid, who starts to cry. The pink-pigtailed girl knows something crazy is going on, but she doesn’t yet understand it has anything to do with her. Not until Alana has grabbed Tyler by his black button-down shirt and pushed him hard into the Icee machine, which begins to stream cherry-red Icee onto the counter. ~ Tommy Wallach, #NFDB
1035:Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1036:I believe there are a lot of questions today that require expert analysis by various agencies: political agencies, foreign ministries, economic agencies and security agencies. We need to assess everything and understand what we can agree on and what the implications will be both for Japan and for Russia so that both the Russian people and the Japanese people come to the conclusion that these compromise solutions are acceptable and are in our countries' interests. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
1037:In tropical climes, there are certain times of day,When the citiens retire to tear their clothes off and perspire.--It s one of those rules that the greatest fools obey,--because the sun is much too sultry, and one must avoid it s ultra-violet-ray.--Mad dogs and englishmen go out in the mid-day sun.--The Japanese don t care to, The Chinese wouldn t dare to. Hindoos and Argentines sleep firmly from twelwe to one.--But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun. ~ No l Coward, #NFDB
1038:when you arrive in Japan, you realize that sake means “alcoholic drink” in general. Thus, if you drink a beer, you are drinking sake; if you drink whiskey, you are drinking sake; and if you drink rum, you are drinking sake. So, when we order sake in a Japanese restaurant outside Japan, what is the specific name for the drink they serve us? It will probably be nihonshu, which is the Japanese word used to refer to the alcoholic beverage obtained from rice. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
1039:If you study Japanese art you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
1040:The school year started in September, with a long vacation in the winter, not the summer, due to the difficulty of keeping the schools warm in North Korea’s harsh winters. My kindergarten had a large wood-burning stove in the middle of the classroom and walls painted with colourful scenes of children performing gymnastics, children in uniform, and of a North Korean soldier simultaneously impaling a Yankee, a Japanese and a South Korean soldier with his rifle bayonet. ~ Hyeonseo Lee, #NFDB
1041:Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the New York Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C. In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1042:For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn’t want to learn Japanese, why I didn’t already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here? ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen, #NFDB
1043:Here again the Japanese method of interior decoration differs from that of the Occident, where we see objects arrayed symmetrically on mantelpieces and elsewhere. In Western houses we are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be fraud. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1044:He’s only half Japanese. And he’s not usually like that, but I guess seeing the Antichrist in his house pushed him over the edge.” He laughs and rubs the back of his neck. “Well, I’m just going by Satan these days, but if you want to be all formal about it…” “Can I call you Lucy?” “Huh?” “Short for Lucifer.” “Oh, sure, but only when we’re alone. I can’t have you calling me that in front of my evil minions. They might laugh and … well … that would just hurt my feelings. ~ Leisa Rayven, #NFDB
1045:On a larger cultural level, where we live also determines our timeliness. For example, in Australia, you can be assured that your guests will show up thirty minutes late, often with friends in tow that they haven’t told you about. In Switzerland, guests are always on time, and if they plan on being five minutes late, they will let you know. Japanese guests will show up a half hour before they are supposed to, and in Israel, they will be forty-five minutes late. Our ~ Martin Lindstrom, #NFDB
1046:One added benefit of making the opponent come to you, as the Japanese discovered with the Russians, is that it forces him to operate in your territory. Being on hostile ground will make him nervous and often he will rush his actions and make mistakes.
For negotiations or meetings, it is always wise to lure others into your territory, or the territory of your choice. You have your bearings, while they see nothing familiar and are subtly placed on the defensive. ~ Robert Greene,#NFDB
1047:You can’t run, you can’t hide, and the idea that you have no control at all just gets into your head and it sticks there. In my time in the Navy, I was never so scared in my life. Bombs and smoke everywhere, fires on the deck. Meanwhile, the guns are booming and the noise is like nothing you’ve ever heard. Thunder times ten, maybe, but that doesn’t describe it. In the big battles, Japanese Zeros strafed the deck continually, the shots ricocheting all over the place. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1048:Behind the incongruity between actual and perceived reality, there always lies an element of intellectual arrogance, of intellectual rigour and dogmatism. ‘It is I, not they, who know what poor people can afford’, the Japanese industrialist in effect asserted. ‘People behave according to economic rationality, as every good Marxist knows,’ as Khrushchev implied. This explains why the incongruity is so easily exploited by innovators: they are left alone and undisturbed. ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
1049:However, there is a fundamental difference between the issue related to Japan's history and our negotiations with China. What is it all about? The Japanese issue resulted from World War II and is stipulated in the international instruments on the outcomes of World War II, while our discussions on border issues with our Chinese counterparts have nothing to do with World War II or any other military conflicts. This is the first, or rather, I should say, the second point. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
1050:She delivered a vicious blow, penetrating his rib cage, and withdrew her hand — with the ninja's still-beating heart in it. As all but Lady Catherine turned away in disgust, Elizabeth took a bite, letting the blood run down her chin and onto her sparring gown. "Curious," said Elizabeth, still chewing. "I have tasted many a heart, but I dare say, I find the Japanese ones a bit tender."
Her ladyship left the dojo without giving compliment to Elizabeth's skills. ~ Seth Grahame Smith,#NFDB
1051:Some former POWs became almost feral with rage. For many men, seeing an Asian person or overhearing a snippet of Japanese left them shaking, weeping, enraged, or lost in flashbacks. One former POW, normally gentle and quiet, spat at every Asian person he saw. At Letterman General Hospital just after the war, four former POWs tried to attack a staffer who was of Japanese ancestry, not knowing that he was an American veteran. Troubled former POWs found nowhere to turn. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1052:In 1984, Fred Korematsu went back to federal court, seeking to have his conviction voided retroactively on the theory that the government had withheld crucial facts from the judiciary. The court agreed with him. The Department of Justice and the Army, it found, had distorted the record to make it appear that there was a legitimate security concern.113 A few years later, Congress granted reparations of twenty thousand dollars to each Japanese-American who had been interned. ~ Noah Feldman, #NFDB
1053:Indeed, there were those who maintained that Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese was itself the result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews’ aim, Nilus insisted, ‘to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan’. The ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1054:Not specifically. "Demons have been on Earth as long as we have. They're all over the world, in their different forms – Greek daemons, Persian daevas, Hindu asuras, Japanese oni. Most belief systems have some method of incorporating both their existence and the fight against them. Shadowhunters cleave to no single religion, and in turn all religions assist us in our battle. I could as easily have gone for help to a Jewish synagogue or a Shinto temple, or – Ah. Here it is. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1055:Any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you feel you cannot ever write anything worth anything is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is for you an occasion of sin. In you the talent is there and you are expected to use it. Whether the work itself is completely successful, or whether you ever get any worldly success out of it, is a matter of no concern to you. It is like the Japanese swordsmen who are indifferent to getting slain in the duel. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
1056:I can manage in a restaurant, take a cab, and even make small talk with the driver. “Do you have children?” I ask. “Will you take a vacation this year?” “Where to?” When he turns it around, as Japanese cabdrivers are inclined to do, I tell him that I have three children, a big boy and two little girls. If Pimsleur included “I am a middle-aged homosexual and thus make do with a niece I never see and a very small godson,” I’d say that. In the meantime, I work with what I have. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1057:In the sunny flats, kudzu from last year had climbed to wrap trees and telephone poles in dry, brown leaves. Whole buildings looked as if they had been bagged. Introduced from Japan in the thirties to help control erosion that had damaged eighty-five percent of the tillable land, kudzu has consumed entire fields, and no one has found a good way to stop it. Kudzu and water hyacinth, another Japanese import, have run through Dixie showing less restraint than Sherman. ~ William Least Heat Moon, #NFDB
1058:I was angry that, although human trafficking was rampant in the country at the time, the Japanese police and the Japanese government didn't care and didn't want to deal with it. I can't really blame the police that much. The laws are the laws, and without any real anti-human trafficking ordinances on the books, what were they supposed to do? The problem didn't start with the cops; it started way above them.
I decided to bust the Japanese government as far as I could. ~ Jake Adelstein,#NFDB
1059:Just before she died, Emilie was given a rude jolt by Pranab Mukherjee. He asked her to sign a paper so that the ashes kept in the Japanese temple could be taken to India as Bose’s ashes. According to a less charitable and probably bloated account, octogenarian Emilie was offered “a blank cheque”. “She was told that she could earn any amount in any currency for such a favour. She took the blank cheque and tore it to pieces, asking the emissary never to approach her in the future. ~ Anuj Dhar, #NFDB
1060:Professor Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University isolated umami as glutamic acid while studying kombu, giant Japanese sea kelp. He commercialized this finding as monosodium glutamate (MSG), but you need not eat headache powder to taste the wonder (and healthfulness, when organic) of umami. Tomatoes, parmesan, and chicken broth all have high glutamate content. There are also mimics: shiitake mushrooms have umami-like nucleotides that allow them to impart a similar taste. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1061:So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention? ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
1062:The Japanese garden is a very important tool in Japanese architectural design because, not only is a garden traditionally included in any house design, the garden itself also reflects a deeper set of cultural meanings and traditions. Whereas the English garden seeks to make only an aesthetic impression, the Japanese garden is both aesthetic and reflective. The most basic element of any Japanese garden design comes from the realization that every detail has a significant value. ~ E J W Barber, #NFDB
1063:Fear? That’s it, Francis. The little slum boy still fears loss of job. Fears he’ll be cast into the outer darkness and deafened by the weeping, the wailing, the gnashing. Brave, imaginative teacher encourages teenagers to sing recipes but wonders when the axe will fall, when Japanese visitors will shake their heads and report him to Washington. Japanese visitors will instantly detect in my classroom signs of America’s degeneracy and wonder how they could have lost the war. And ~ Frank McCourt, #NFDB
1064:Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion. ~ Geraldine Brooks, #NFDB
1065:Does everything have a father? Apparently so. A web search on “the father of” turned up fathers for vasectomy reversal, hillbilly jazz, lichenology, snowmobiling, modern librarianship, Japanese whiskey, hypnosis, Pakistan, natural hair care products, the lobotomy, women’s boxing, Modern Option Pricing Theory, the swamp buggy, Pennsylvania ornithology, Wisconsin bluegrass, tornado research, Fen-Phen, modern dairying, Canada’s permissive society, black power, and the yellow schoolbus. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
1066:I'm not sure about this Live 8 thing. Correct me if I am wrong, but are they hoping that one of these guys from the G8 is on a quick 15-minute break at Gleneagles and sees Annie Lennox singing "Sweet Dreams" and thinks: "F... me, she might have a point there, you know." It's not going to f... happen, is it? Keane doing "Somewhere Only We Know" and some Japanese businessman going: "Aw, look at him...we should really f... drop that debt, you know." It's not going to happen, is it? ~ Noel Gallagher, #NFDB
1067:In a 1986 Time magazine cover story on Reagan, reporter Lance Morrow droned on about the sainted FDR, saying he “explored the upper limits of what government could do for the individual”—evidently by putting Japanese in internment camps and fighting a war against a race-supremacist regime with a segregated military. Reagan, by contrast, Morrow said, “is testing the lower limits”5—one assumes by ending Soviet totalitarianism and bequeathing America two decades of peace and prosperity. ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
1068:I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see--even the election, as stupid as it is. I've come to loathe most sports, which I used to love--a loss I attribute to having seen the same thing over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) will keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I've said, has novels and biographies I've read thirty pages into but can't tell you much about. ~ Richard Ford, #NFDB
1069:I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm. ~ Rick Steves, #NFDB
1070:There are elements of intrinsic beauty in the simplification of a house built on the log cabin idea. First, there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament, but are clearly revealed, a charm felt in Japanese architecture....The quiet rhythmic monotone of the wall of logs fills one with the rustic peace of a secluded nook in the woods. ~ Gustav Stickley, #NFDB
1071:There are succulent loins of fatty pork fried in scales of thin bread crumbs and served with bowls of thickened Worcestershire and dabs of fiery mustard. Giant pots of curry, dark and brooding as a sudden summer storm, where apples and onions and huge hunks of meat are simmered into submission over hours. Or days. There is okonomiyaki, the great geologic mass of carbs and cabbage and pork fat that would feel more at home on a stoner's coffee table than a Japanese tatami mat. ~ Matt Goulding, #NFDB
1072:It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today. Newt ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1073:Consider it this way: what would you say if a blond homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now I believe you should consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner–ah!–you find it beautiful. ~ David Henry Hwang, #NFDB
1074:Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettoes and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning, and ambition. ... I suggest that the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettoes and barrios would be the second wand. ~ Richard Lamm, #NFDB
1075:What the Roman enjoys in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the faggot and stake, or of the bull-fight, the present-day Japanese who presses his way to the tragedy, the workman of the Parisian suburbs who has a homesickness for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who, with unhinged will, "undergoes" the performance of "Tristan and Isolde"--what all these enjoy, and strive with mysterious ardour to drink in, is the philtre of the great Circe ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1076:Management guru Stephen Covey tells this old Japanese tale about a samurai warrior and his three sons: The samurai wanted to teach his sons about the power of teamwork. So he gave each of them an arrow and asked them to break it. No problem. Each son did it easily. Then the samurai gave them a bundle of three arrows bound together and asked them to repeat the process. But none of them could. “That’s your lesson,” the samurai said. “If you three stick together, you will never be defeated. ~ Phil Jackson, #NFDB
1077:In retrospect, the reason for her decision seems evident. Our Noriko, for so many years troubled by the demands of society on one hand and the needs of the self on the other, finally decided. She would do what she wanted. And she did. All attempts to lure her out over the years have been rebuffed. When a documentary was made on Ozu, she refused to appear, just as, when he died, she did not attend his funeral. Setsuko Hara was her own person at last.
On Japanese actress Setsuko Hara ~ Donald Richie,#NFDB
1078:No matter how much I wanted to sing Western songs, they were all very difficult. Had I, born in Japan, no choice but to sing Japanese songs? Was there a Japanese song that expressed my present sentiment - a traveler who had immersed himself in love and the arts in France but was now going back to the extreme end of the Orient where only death would follow monotonous life? ... I felt totally forsaken. I belonged to a nation that had no music to express swelling emotions and agonized feelings. ~ Kafu Nagai, #NFDB
1079:If I had been born in America, I'd be called Korean-American and would have all the rights accorded to an American citizen. I'd be treated like I was human. But this country is different. If I become a model person, more so than any Japanese, I still wouldn't be treated like a proper human as long as I have Korean citizenship. The way a sumo wrestler can't become a stable master while he still has foreign citizenship. Assimilation or exclusion. There are only two choices in this country. ~ Kazuki Kaneshiro, #NFDB
1080:with “voluntary sterility among married men and women of good life . . . If the best classes do not reproduce themselves the nation will of course go down.” Roosevelt’s distinctions were rooted in the readily expressed racism of his time and in animosity toward Japanese and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, whose comparative fecundity seemed to threaten the whiteness of the nation. But they were also an expression of judgment against the women exercising new forms of public autonomy. ~ Rebecca Traister, #NFDB
1081:Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese. ~ Dorothy Day, #NFDB
1082:The imperial heir in 1954, Bao Dai, was a nationalist who had abdicated after the Japanese occupation ended in 1945, giving his benediction to Ho Chi Minh. This conferred a legitimacy on Ho that proved troublesome when Bao Dai briefly returned to head the French-backed government of South Vietnam. From 1949 until 1955, the faux emperor failed to shake his image as an interloper. Ho had been designated the national leader, and Bao Dai was now seen simply (and correctly) as an agent of the French. ~ Mark Bowden, #NFDB
1083:Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity — or does the very word “Balkanization” remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times? Has Europe become a safer place after importing vast numbers of people from the Middle East, with cultures hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization? ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
1084:Japanese gaman is not a philosophical concept. The conventional translations fail to convey the passivity and abnegation that the idea contains, the extent to which gaman often seems indistinguishable from a collective lack of self-esteem. Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after the disaster; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted the Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over and no responsibility for their national plight. ~ Richard Lloyd Parry, #NFDB
1085:The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn't use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we'd broken the Japanese code. He thought he'' broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office. ~ Lawrence Wilkerson, #NFDB
1086:American parents, teachers, and children were far more likely than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts to believe that mathematical ability is innate; if you have it, you don’t have to work hard, and if you don’t have it, there’s no point in trying. In contrast, most Asians regard math success, like achievement in any other domain, as a matter of persistence and plain hard work. Of course you will make mistakes as you go along; that’s how you learn and improve. It doesn’t mean you are stupid. ~ Carol Tavris, #NFDB
1087:Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
1088:A famous Japanese Zen master, Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, said that unless you can explain Zen in words that a fisherman will comprehend, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Some fifty years ago a UCLA professor told me the same thing about applied mathematics. We like to hide from the truth behind foreign-sounding words or mathematical lingo. There’s a saying: The truth is always encountered but rarely perceived. If we don’t perceive it, we can’t help ourselves and we can’t much help anyone else. ~ Jeff Bridges, #NFDB
1089:It was still hard for a Korean to become a Japanese citizen, and there were many who considered such a thing shameful—for a Korean to try to become a citizen of its former oppressor. When she told her friends in New York about this curious historical anomaly and the pervasive ethnic bias, they were incredulous at the thought that the friendly, well-mannered Japanese they knew could ever think she was somehow criminal, lazy, filthy, or aggressive—the negative stereotypical traits of Koreans in Japan. ~ Min Jin Lee, #NFDB
1090:Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
1091:The difference between the Japanese and the American is summed up in their opposite reactions to the proverb (popular in both nations), "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Epidemiologist S. Leonard Syme observes that to the Japanese, moss is exquisite and valued; a stone is enhanced by moss; hence a person who keeps moving and changing never acquires the beauty and benefits of stability. To Americans, the proverb is an admonition to keep rolling, to keep from being covered with clinging attachments. ~ Carol Tavris, #NFDB
1092:Then he read the words of the scroll slowly, first in Japanese and then carefully translated into English:
'There is really nothing you must be.
And there is nothing you must do.
There is really nothing you must have.
And there is nothing you must know.
There is really nothing you must become.
However. It helps to understand
that fire burns, and when it rains,
the earth gets wet. . . .'
'Whatever, there are consequences. Nobody is exempt,' said the master. ~ Robert Fulghum,#NFDB
1093:For over two weeks, the defenders of Wake Island held off a vastly superior force of Japanese ships and troops, inspiring the whole nation with their plucky spirit and sacrifice. Unfortunately, Navy leaders at Pearl Harbor, struggling to protect what was left of the shattered Pacific Fleet, canceled a relief mission, allowing the island and its defenders to fall without support. Wake damaged the long-standing trust between the Corps and the Navy, a memory that still rankles Marines and shames sailors. ~ Tom Clancy, #NFDB
1094:The Japanese army is now prepared to use every means within its power to subdue its opponents. The objectives of the Japanese Expeditionary Forces are, as clearly set forth in statements issued by the Japanese Government, not only to protect the vested interests of Japan and the lives and property of the Japanese residents in the affected area, but also to scourge the Chinese Government and army who have een pursuing anti-foreign and anti-Japanese policies in collaboration with Communist influences. ~ Iwane Matsui, #NFDB
1095:Chia decided to change the subject. “What’s your brother like? How old is he?” “Masahiko is seventeen,” Mitsuko said. “He is a ‘pathological - techno - fetishist - with - social - deficit,” ’ this last all strung together like one word, indicating a concept that taxed the lexicon of the ear-clips. Chia wondered briefly if it would be worth running it through her Sandbenders, whose translation functions updated automatically whenever she ported. “A what?” “Otaku,” Mitsuko said carefully in Japanese. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
1096:In the early days of the so-called repatriation, some seventy thousand people left Japan and crossed the sea to North Korea. With the exception of a brief three-and-a-half-year hiatus, the process continued until 1984. During this period, some one hundred thousand Koreans and two thousand Japanese wives crossed over to North Korea. That’s one hell of a mass migration. In fact, it was the first (and only) time in history that so many people from a capitalist country had moved to a socialist country. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
1097:People came to our house from far and wide. Party and military bigwigs, some guy known as the “combat commander,” the village headman, and various hangers-on all made an appearance. Though our house was in the depths of the mountains, they somehow all managed to get there. They were no fools. They knew we had delicious food and drink to share. They knew that our crummy Japanese house was—shock and horror—clean. And, perhaps most important, they knew that there was an abundance of alcohol to be had. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
1098:it seemed, everyone had some defining experience with outsiders. Two of the couples were multinational — Japanese natives with partners who were American and Chinese. Other hosts were Japanese by birth but had lived in other countries or traveled a lot. This appeared to give them a certain renegade perspective, a degree of global cross-pollination and comfort with strangers that seemed to put them at odds with many of the people around them, but also made them more like other Airbnb users internationally. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1099:Not all of them, but certainly there's some really, really dramatic differences among apples. And what you learn if you have that number of varieties is you learn which Apple is good for which purpose. So I have a favorite apple for apple pie. It's called Bramley Seedling. It's a old British Apple. I blend a lot of these apples together that make apple cider every year. It's a great hobby, but it's, you know, it takes some time. And it can be frustrating when the Japanese beetles or the gypsy moths come. ~ Cary Fowler, #NFDB
1100:When I assumed command of the Pacific Fleet in 31 December, 1941; our submarines were already operating against the enemy, the only units of the Fleet that could come to grips with the Japanese for months to come. It was to the Submarine Force that I looked to carry the load until our great industrial activity could produce the weapons we so sorely needed to carry the war to the enemy. It is to the everlasting honor and glory of our submarine personnel that they never failed us in our days of peril. ~ Chester W Nimitz, #NFDB
1101:If you pour a cup of tea, you are aware of extending your arm and touching your hand to the teapot, lifting it and pouring the water. Finally the water touches your teacup and fills it, and you stop pouring and put the teapot down precisely, as in the Japanese tea ceremony. You become aware that each precise movement has dignity. We have long forgotten that activities can be simple and precise. Every act of our lives can contain simplicity and precision and can thus have tremendous beauty and dignity. ~ Ch gyam Trungpa, #NFDB
1102:Perhaps the flowers appreciate the full significance of it. They are not cowards, like men. Some flowers glory in death--certainly the Japanese cherry blossoms do, as they freely surrender themselves to the winds. Anyone who has stood before the fragrant avalanche at Yoshino or Arashiyama must have realized this. For a moment they hover like bejewelled clouds and dance above the crystal streams; then, as they sail away on the laughing waters, they seem to say: "Farewell, O Spring! We are on to eternity. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1103:So you want another story?"
Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened."
Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?"
Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English."
Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention? ~ Yann Martel,#NFDB
1104:I think the strangest thing probably is when I went to Japan, and I don't know what the hell I was eating, but there was this one thing that seemed to be in a lot of soups and things there - I always called it pond scum. It looked exactly like the green stuff that floats on top of a pond. I would say, "Oh my God, this has pond scum in it!" I would eat it, to be polite, because we were usually with Japanese people and I didn't want to gag or spit it out or anything. And I still don't know what it was. ~ Cassandra Peterson, #NFDB
1105:Bond frowned. ‘It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you’re prepared to kill people,’ he said. ‘That’s all the meaning it has. It’s nothing to be particularly proud of. I’ve got the corpses of a Japanese cipher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm to thank for being a Double O. Probably quite decent people. They just got caught up in the gale of the world like that Yugoslav that Tito bumped off. It’s a confusing business but if it’s one’s profession, one does what one’s told. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
1106:Then there is another area of activity - economic interaction between Russia and the United States. Right now, for example, it has already been made public that we signed a large deal to privatise one of our biggest oil and gas companies, Rosneft. We know for sure that US companies, as well as Japanese ones, by the way, are keenly interested in cooperation in Russia's oil and gas sector, in joint work. This has immense significance for world energy markets and will directly affect the whole world economy. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
1107:Meditate but one hour upon the self’s nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man,” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world’s unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything. ~ Emil M Cioran,#NFDB
1108:The moment you begin moving furniture around and getting rid of garbage, your room changes. It’s very simple. If you put your house in order in one fell swoop, you will have tidied up in one fell swoop. (In Japanese, the term is ikki ni, or “in one go.”) Rebound occurs because people mistakenly believe they have tidied thoroughly, when in fact they have only sorted and stored things halfway. If you put your house in order properly, you’ll be able to keep your room tidy, even if you are lazy or sloppy by nature. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1109:The Winter Woman is as wild as a blizzard, as fresh as new snow. While some see her as cold, she has a fiery heart under that ice-queen exterior. She likes the stark simplicity of Japanese art and the daring complexity of Russian literature. She prefers sharp to flowing lines, brooding to pouting, and rock and roll to country and western. Her drink is vodka, her car is German, her analgesic is Advil. The Winter Woman likes her men weak and her coffee strong. She is prone to anemia, hysteria, and suicide. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
1110:would be hard to think of a more monocultural, insular and self-complacent nation than Japan—and vet the Japanese are among the leading participants in the international economy, in international scientific and technological developments, as well as in international travel and tourism. This is not a defense of insularity or of the Japanese, It is simply a piece of empirical evidence to highlight the non sequitur of the claim that international participation requires the multicultural ideology or agenda. Another ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
1111:A firm may achieve differentiation, yet this differentiation will usually sustain only so much of a price differential. Thus if a differentiated firm gets too far behind in cost due to technological change or simply inattention, the low cost firm may be in a position to make major inroads. For example, Kawasaki and other Japanese motorcycle producers have been able to successfully attack differentiated producers such as Harley-Davidson and Triumph in large motorcycles by offering major cost savings to buyers. ~ Michael E Porter, #NFDB
1112:A Japanese woman we’d met in Paris came to the apartment yesterday and spent several hours explaining our appliances. The microwave, the water kettle, the electric bathtub: everything blinks and bleeps and calls out in the middle of the night. I’d wondered what the rice maker was carrying on about, and Reiko told us that it was on a timer and simply wanted us to know that it was present and ready for duty. That was the kettle’s story as well, while the tub was just being an asshole and waking us up for no reason. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1113:Some cultures, for instance, are collectivist; others are individualistic. Collectivist cultures, like Japan and other Confucian nations, value social harmony more than any one person’s happiness. Individualistic cultures, like the United States, value personal satisfaction more than communal harmony. That’s why the Japanese have a well-known expression: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In America, the nail that sticks out gets a promotion or a shot at American Idol. We are a nation of protruding nails. ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
1114:The folks who want to build this mosque, who are really radical Islamists, who want to triumphfully prove they can build a mosque next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists. Those folks don't have any interest in reaching out to the community. They're trying to make a case about supremacy... This happens all the time in America. Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. ~ Newt Gingrich, #NFDB
1115:The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1116:My job the same as carpenter. What kind of house you want to build? What kind of food you want to make? You think your ingredients, your structure. Simple. [Other] Japanese restaurants … mix in some other style of food and call it influence, right? I don't like that. … In Japanese sushi restaurants, a lot of sushi chefs talk too much. 'This fish from there,' 'This very expensive.' Same thing, start singing. And a lot have that fish case in front of them, cannot see what chef do. I'm not going to hide anything, right? ~ Masa Takayama, #NFDB
1117:Branson ate his salad, and left the rest of his fish untouched, while Grace tucked into his steak and kidney pudding with relish. 'I read a while ago,' he told Branson, 'that the French drink more red wine than the English but live longer. The Japanese eat more fish than the English but drink less wine and live longer. The Germans eat more red meat than the English, and drink more beer and they live longer too. You know the moral of this story? 'No' 'It's not what you eat or drink - it's speaking English that kills you. ~ Peter James, #NFDB
1118:The point of the pilgrimage,” as a Buddhist priest told the traveling author Oliver Statler on his journey around the Japanese island of Shikoku, “is to improve yourself by enduring and overcoming difficulties.” In other words, if the journey you have chosen is indeed a pilgrimage, a soulful journey, it will be rigorous. Ancient wisdom suggests if you aren't trembling as you approach the sacred, it isn't the real thing. The sacred, in its various guises as holy ground, art, or knowledge, evokes emotion and commotion. ~ Phil Cousineau, #NFDB
1119:The audience had run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear; and not content with the ravages produced in its over-excitable nervous system by the remorseless workings of its critical intelligence, it had sat through a film of Japanese life called 'Yes,' made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained twelve close-ups of water-lilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four suicides, all done extremely slowly. ~ Stella Gibbons, #NFDB
1120:Japanese train signs, station signs, are really representative of the Japanese mind to me, because it always has the station where you are, the station you were previously at, and the station that is the next station. When I came to New York, I was very confused. It just doesn't say where I was and where I was going. But I realized after a while probably most people don't need to know what station you were previously at. But I think it's just some weird Japanese mentality that we need to know, we need to connect the plot. ~ Miho Hatori, #NFDB
1121:Keanu Reeves learned a lot, respecting the culture. I was surprised when I first met him. He knew a lot already and he learned a lot. And also he learned Japanese. It's incredible. On the set, switching between the Japanese and English, even for us, is very hard. It's complicated. But the first time Keanu spoke in Japanese it was a very important scene between us, and more than the dialogue's meaning, I was moved. His energy for the film, completely perfect Japanese pronunciation. It was moving, surprising, respecting. ~ Hiroyuki Sanada, #NFDB
1122:My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue ~ Alexander Chee, #NFDB
1123:There was a lot of nervous tension at that time on all levels of society over the alarming developments in Europe and Asia. Magazines speculated grimly on whether war with Japan was inevitable. Then our attention was diverted from Japanese aggression in China to the Nazi conquests in Europe. On December 7, 1941, we were thrown into war by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and I was thrown out of the Multimixer business. Supplies of copper, used in winding the motors for Multimixer, were restricted by the war effort. A ~ Ray Kroc, #NFDB
1124:Soon some of the plants were as big as fruit trees. There were fans of long emerald-green leaves, flowers resembling peacock tails with rainbow-colored eyes, pagodas consisting of sumperimposed unbrellas of violet silk. Thick stems were interwoven like braids. Since they were transparent, they looked like pink glass lit up from within. Some of the blooms looked like clusters of blue and yellow Japanese lanterns. And little by little, as the luminous night growths grew denser, they intertwined to form a tissue of soft light. ~ Michael Ende, #NFDB
1125:The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
1126:For the 1,300 years prior to the Japanese occupation, Korea had been a unified country governed by the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies in world history. Before the Chosun dynasty, there were three kingdoms vying for power on the peninsula. Political schisms tended to run north to south, the east gravitating naturally toward Japan and the west to China. The bifurcation between north and south was an entirely foreign creation, cooked up in Washington and stamped on the Koreans without any input from them. ~ Barbara Demick, #NFDB
1127:It is from these cold, hard facts that Truman’s advisers estimated that between 250,000 and 1 million American lives would be lost in an invasion of Japan.59 General Douglas MacArthur estimated that there could be a 22:1 ratio of Japanese to American deaths, which translates to a minimum death toll of 5.5 million Japanese.60 By comparison (cold though it may sound), the body count from both atomic bombs—about 200,000 to 300,000 total (Hiroshima: 90,000 to 166,000 deaths, Nagasaki: 60,000 to 80,000 deaths61)—was a bargain. ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
1128:Branson ate his salad, and left the rest of his fish untouched, while Grace tucked into his steak and kidney pudding with relish. 'I read a while ago,' he told Branson, 'that the French drink more red wine than the English but live longer. The Japanese eat more fish than the English but drink less wine and live longer. The Germans eat more red meat than the English, and drink more beer and they live longer too. You know the moral of this story?
'No'
'It's not what you eat or drink - it's speaking English that kills you. ~ Peter James,#NFDB
1129:The practice of treating prisoners as ‘human cattle’ had not come about from a collapse of discipline. It was usually directed by officers. Apart from local people, victims of cannibalism included Papuan soldiers, Australians, Americans and Indian prisoners of war who had refused to join the Indian National Army. At the end of the war, their Japanese captors had kept the Indians alive so that they could butcher them to eat one at a time. Even the inhumanity of the Nazis’ Hunger Plan in the east never descended to such levels. ~ Antony Beevor, #NFDB
1130:America's new tea lovers are the people who have forced the tea trade to wake up. Elsewhere, tea has meant a certain way, a certain tradition, for centuries, but this is America! The American tea lover is heir to all the world's tea drinking traditions, from Japanese tea ceremonies to Russian samovars to English scones in the afternoon. India chai, China green, you name it and we can claim it and make it ours. And that's just what we are doing. In this respect, ours is the most innovative and exciting tea scene anywhere. ~ James Norwood Pratt, #NFDB
1131:When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1132:In Japanese language, kata (though written as 方) is a frequently-used suffix meaning way of doing, with emphasis on the form and order of the process. Other meanings are training method and formal exercise. The goal of a painter's practicing, for example, is to merge his consciousness with his brush; the potter's with his clay; the garden designer's with the materials of the garden. Once such mastery is achieved, the theory goes, the doing of a thing perfectly is as easy as thinking it
~ Boye De Mente, Japan's Secret Weapon - The Kata Factor,#NFDB
1133:My current way of teaching mindfulness is, in part, informed by this early Shingon training. I have people observe self in terms of inner mental images, mental talk, and emotional body sensation, the three sensory elements used in the Vajrayana deity yoga practice. I’ve created a hybrid approach. What I have people observe is derived from the Japanese Vajrayana paradigm: self = mental image + mental talk + body. But how I have people observe is derived from mindfulness, which has its origin in Southeast Asian Theravada practice. ~ Shinzen Young, #NFDB
1134:Norm elbowed him and nodded toward Esme. “She’s a looker, huh? Especially for a broad from Yale. You ever see what that school matriculates? No wonder they’re known as the Bulldogs.” “You’re so progressive, Norm.” “Ah, screw progressive. I’m an old man, Myron. I’m allowed to be insensitive. On an old man, insensitive is cute. A cute curmudgeon, that’s what they call it. By the way, I think Esme is only half.” “Half?” “Chinese,” Norm said. “Or Japanese. Or whatever. I think she’s half white too. What do you think?” “Good-bye, Norm. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1135:Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair ... I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ [as] crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking's wheelchair. ... The crowds had streamed after Einstein [on Einstein's visit to Japan in 1922] as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later. ... They showed exquisite choice in their heroes. ... Somehow they understood that Einstein and Hawking were not just great scientists, but great human beings. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
1136:but fear and prejudice were amplified by local politics, and a push-button issue was constructed out of little more than worked-up imaginings of the ‘Yellow Peril’. ‘My neighbor is a Jap’, one farmer told a journalist: He has an eighty acre place next to mine and he is a smart fellow. He has a white woman living in his house and upon that white woman’s knee is a baby. Now what is that baby? It isn’t white. It isn’t Japanese. I’ll tell you what it is. It is the beginning of a problem – the biggest race problem the world has ever known. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1137:Did the International Committee of the Red Cross know anything about this? Did the United States? The UN? Yes, yes, and yes. And what did they do about it? Nothing. In the early days of the so-called repatriation, some seventy thousand people left Japan and crossed the sea to North Korea. With the exception of a brief three-and-a-half-year hiatus, the process continued until 1984. During this period, some one hundred thousand Koreans and two thousand Japanese wives crossed over to North Korea. That’s one hell of a mass migration ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
1138:Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1139:In that sense, “otaku” referred to a sudden, spontaneous, and, to most Japanese, inexplicable eruption of extreme obsessiveness among the country’s youth. One day, Japanese in their teens and twenties were normal, well-adjusted young people. The next day, or so it seemed, they were hopeless geeks who had forsaken all social skills in favor of a deep dive into—whatever. Manga (comics). Anime. Super-hard-core deviant anime porn in which tender young schoolgirls are violated by multi-tentacled octopi. Trains. It could be anything really. ~ Frank Rose, #NFDB
1140:Consider the death of Princess Diana. This accident involved an English citizen, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before. ~ Mark Riebling, #NFDB
1141:The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many-fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production, and even more powerful forms are in development. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1142:Arosteguy poured more sake for both of them. "I love warm sake. How brilliant to create a drink at body temperature." He shook his head. "The Japanese. Feared by the West for so long, and now fading into their beloved sunrise. Or sunset. First militarily, then economically, and now, only gastronomically. And I need to become Japanese at a time when everyone wants to become Chinese. The Chinese call the Japanese 'the little people,' I've been told. That could have to do with the miniaturization of island species. I must do a study. ~ David Cronenberg, #NFDB
1143:Not only does Japan have an economic need and the technological know-how for robots, but it also has a cultural predisposition. The ancient Shinto religion, practiced by 80 percent of Japanese, includes a belief in animism, which holds that both objects and human beings have spirits. As a result, Japanese culture tends to be more accepting of robot companions as actual companions than is Western culture, which views robots as soulless machines. In a culture where the inanimate can be considered to be just as alive as the animate, robots ~ Alec J Ross, #NFDB
1144:The Daily Telegraph reported on April 9, 1937: 'Since M. Litvinoff ousted Chicherin, no Russian has ever held a high post in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.' It seems that the Daily Telegraph was unaware that Chicherin's mother was a Jewess. The Russian Molotov, who became Foreign Minister later, has a Jewish wife, and one of his two assistants is the Jew, Lozovsky. It was the last-named who renewed the treaty with Japan in 1942, by which the Kamchatka fisheries provided the Japanese with an essential part of their food supplies. ~ Arnold Leese, #NFDB
1145:I was also motivated by a strong sense of fear that we had still not begun to deal with, let alone solve, any of the fundamental issues arising from the gas attack. Specifically, for people who are outside the main system of Japanese society (the young in particular), there remains no effective alternative or safety net. As long as this crucial gap exists in our society, like a kind of black hole, even if Aum is suppressed, other magnetic force fields—"Aum-like" groups—will rise up again, and similar incidents are bound to take place. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1146:But that is not the only effect of folding. The real benefit is that you must handle each piece of clothing. As you run your hands over the cloth, you pour your energy into it. The Japanese word for healing is te-ate, which literally means “to apply hands.” The term originated prior to the development of modern medicine when people believed that placing one’s hand on an injury promoted healing. We know that gentle physical contact from a parent, such as holding hands, patting a child on the head, and hugging, has a calming effect on children. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1147:The first rule of tinkering is, of course, ‘save all the parts.’ But in dismantling the social fabric, the parts cannot all be saved, for one of them is time. Time, we were told, is a river flowing endlessly through the universe and one cannot step into the same river twice. Not only can we not undo actions taken in haste and in fear (the Japanese Internment), but those taken from the best reasons, but that have proved destructive (affirmative action); the essential mechanism of societal preservation is not inspiration, but restraint. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
1148:There were shoppers everywhere. Counter after counter. Salesgirls, mostly white, with a sprinkling of Japanese as department managers. The din was terrific.
After some confusion Mr. Baynes located the men's clothing department. He stopped at the racks of men's trousers and began to inspect them. Presently a clerk, a young white, came over, greeting him.
Mr. Baynes said, 'I have returned for a pair of dark brown wool slacks which I was looking at yesterday.' Meeting the clerk's gaze he said, 'You're not the man I spoke to. ... ~ Philip K Dick,#NFDB
1149:When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1150:See, this is the other reason for my depression, how before this whole thing came down I’d shot two Jap boys in the back. And it’s funny how it won’t sit with me, considering that’s what we came over here to do. It was the first time I’d ever actually killed somebody. And it wasn’t supposed to matter because it was them, but I kept thinking, Don’t Japanese mommas cry if their boys don’t come home? It’s one of those things you figure will be okay, and then it happens. Nobody really prepares you for when it happens. How can they? I guess. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde, #NFDB
1151:Throughout our history, there has been a long list of those we've been conditioned to hate. The British, French, Spanish, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Communists, Northern Koreans, Vietnamese, Iranians, Taliban, and both northerners and southerners in America are some of the people we've been encouraged at various times to call enemies and to hate. The list is long, and as time passes, those we were assigned to hate we later were told should be removed from our hate list. The enemy is obviously hatred itself. Have empathy for your assigned enemy. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
1152:the Japanese were aware of three powers: the power of the sword, the jewel, and the mirror. The sword symbolizes the power of weapons. America has spent trillions of dollars on weapons and, because of this, is a powerful military presence in the world. The jewel symbolizes the power of money. There is some degree of truth to the saying, “Remember the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.” The mirror symbolizes the power of self-knowledge. This self-knowledge, according to Japanese legend, was the most treasured of the three. All ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
1153:Beneath the surface level of conditioned thinking in every one of us there is a single living spirit. The still small voice whispering to me in the depths of my consciousness is saying exactly the same thing as the voice whispering to you in your consciousness. 'I want an earth that is healthy, a world at peace, and a heart filled with love.' It doesn't matter if your skin is brown or white or black, or whether you speak English, Japanese, or Malayalam - the voice, says the Gita, is the same in every creature, and it comes from your true self. ~ Eknath Easwaran, #NFDB
1154:There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other people or without wasting a large amount of Earth property. You can drown in water right here, or jump into a volcano like the Japanese in the old books. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair. ~ Cordwainer Smith, #NFDB
1155:To a Japanese, accustomed to simplicity of ornamentation and frequent change of decorative method, a Western interior permanently filled with a vast array of pictures, statuary, and bric-a-brac gives the impression of mere vulgar display of riches. It calls for a mighty wealth of appreciation to enjoy the constant sight of even a masterpiece, and limitless indeed must be the capacity for artistic feeling in those who can exist day after day in the midst of such confusion of color and form as is to be often seen in the homes of Europe and America. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1156:forces. What utter treachery!” Hitler then makes misleading statements about how he and Mussolini had agreed to defend Sicily. The Fuehrer also offers a backhanded apology to the Japanese for allowing a large amount of the Italian Navy to fall into Allied hands. However, it is Hitler’s current plan for the defense of Italy that interests Washington. Oshima quotes him on this as saying: “[The Allies] have two courses: either they will go north in Italy or they will try to land in the Balkans. I am inclined to believe they will take the latter course. I ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
1157:God’s side is determined not by geography, but by those who do His will. If Germans, English, Japanese, and Americans prayed right, they would all be praying for the same intention: Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. And what is that Will? The reign of Justice and Charity in the hearts of men. Through a prayerful contemplation of war we will see not soldiers of different nations in combat, but one great family, quarreling, fighting, wounding, and all in need of the peace and charity of Christ which we hope to obtain by our supplications. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
1158:The Game of Go was one of the 4 Arts of China. It spread to all over Asia and was even mentioned in the Japanese novel, Tales of Genji. More than an ancient board game, the Game of Go is an analogy of life and emphasize balance, challenge, and fun. Not only does my name Kailin Gow has the word "Go" in it, but my philosophy on life of balance, challenge, and fun is similar to the Game. Thus, Kailin Gow's Go Girl TV Series, books, and overall brand reflects this philosophy as well. - Kailin Gow in interview about Kailin Gow's Go Girl Books and TV Series. ~ Kailin Gow, #NFDB
1159:The government forbade the broadcast of this “decadent bourgeois music,” and Li Guyi, the first mainland singer to imitate Teresa Teng’s style, was subjected to a parade of official criticism sessions. Nevertheless, where privacy could be found, people huddled around “bricks”—our nickname for the little square Japanese-made radio-recorders on which popular songs could be heard. We listened and listened, until we could sing the songs ourselves, everywhere—in the halls, in the cafeterias, in bed. Anyone who owned a “brick” always had plenty of friends. It ~ Xiaobo Liu, #NFDB
1160:Within two or three years of World War II's end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depend on it. Why? To create a more abundant life? If so, where was the abundance? Where were the luxurious living spaces? Eyesores dominated the scenery wherever you went, and people still crammed themselves into packed commuter trains each morning, submitting to conditions that would be fatal for any other mammal. Apparently what the Japanese wanted wasn't a better life, but more things. ~ Ry Murakami, #NFDB
1161:Meanwhile in Iran and Israel the violence is an open wound on TV, so predictable and it’s bloodiness of the mutilated children and howling women become a spectacle you shatter it briefly before zapping over to some Japanese game show. The well-meaning optimism of those Entertainement programs, with their perky nerdiness and banana-skin tomfoolery, provides a counterpoint to the real world grief. Their crude hilarities flit through my head while I swim my laps, like my Spanish Kahlo mantra or fragments of some absurd erotic fantasy, poignantly irrelevant. ~ Liz Jensen, #NFDB
1162:Lieutenant (jg) Ralph Hanks, an Iowa pig farmer before the war, became an “ace in a day” by shooting down five Zeros in a single skirmish. In a fifteen-minute air engagement, his throttle never left the firewall and his Hellcat surpassed 400 knots in a diving attack. Hanks had to stand on his rudder pedals and use his entire upper-body strength to keep his stick under control. Intense g-forces caused him to black out several times. This first massed encounter of Zeros and Hellcats did not bode well for the future of the now-obsolete Japanese fighter plane. ~ Ian W Toll, #NFDB
1163:Perhaps the most shocking element in the whole story of Unit 731 was MacArthur’s agreement, after the Japanese surrender, to provide immunity from prosecution to all involved, including General Ishii. This deal allowed the Americans to obtain all the data they had accumulated from their experiments. Even after MacArthur had learned that Allied prisoners of war had also been killed in the tests, he ordered that all criminal investigations should cease. Soviet requests to prosecute Ishii and his staff at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal were firmly rejected. ~ Antony Beevor, #NFDB
1164:Sumire and I were a lot alike. Devouring books came as naturally to us as breathing. Every spare moment we’d settle down in some quiet corner, endlessly turning page after page. Japanese novels, foreign novels, new works, classics, avant-garde to best-seller—as long as there was something intellectually stimulating in a book, we’d read it. We’d hang out in libraries, spend whole days browsing in Kanda, the used-book-store mecca in Tokyo. I’d never run across anyone else who read so avidly—so deeply, so widely—as Sumire, and I’m sure she felt the same. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1165:The Ministry interfered with Ienaga’s attempts to document the Nanking massacre for schoolchildren. For example, in his textbook manuscript Ienaga wrote: “Immediately after the occupation of Nanking, the Japanese Army killed numerous Chinese soldiers and citizens. This incident came to be known as the Nanking Massacre.” The examiner commented: “Readers might interpret this description as meaning that the Japanese Army unilaterally massacred Chinese immediately after the occupation. This passage should be revised so that it is not interpreted in such a way. ~ Iris Chang, #NFDB
1166:Look at all the Eastern writers who've written great Western literature. Kazuo Ishiguro. You'd never guess that The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go were written by a Japanese guy. But I can't think of anyone who's ever done the reverse-- any Westerner who's written great Eastern literature. Well, maybe if we count Lawrence Durrell - does the Alexandria Quartet qualify as Eastern literature?"
"There is a very simple test," said Vikram. "Is it about bored, tired people having sex?"
"Yes," said the convert, surprised.
"Then it's western. ~ G Willow Wilson,#NFDB
1167:I give you five minutes to spare your blushes. here is the little bronze key that opens the ebony caskets on the mantle piece in the Louise-Phillipe room. In one of the caskets you will find a scorpion, in the other, a grasshopper, both very cleverly imitated in Japanese bronze: they will say yes or no for you. If you turn the scorpion round, that will mean to me, when I return that you have said yes. The grasshopper will mean no... The grasshopper, be careful of the grass hopper! A grasshopper does not only turn: it hops! It hops! And it hops jolly high! ~ Gaston Leroux, #NFDB
1168:When the Japanese invaded, informers said mother was an important member of the resistance. She was taken in, badly tortured and never confessed. Her life was spared because the Japanese interrogators could not believe a woman could have held such a key role.
When her children were grown-up, mother would tell us, ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds. The first time, you’re scared you’ll give away your friends. But there comes a point when you pass out. Once that happens, you cannot feel pain anymore. Once you have learnt that, you can beat your torturers. ~ Ang Swee Chai,#NFDB
1169:More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between Governments. The once powerful malignant Nazi state is crumbling; the Japanese warlords are receiving in their homelands the retribution for which they asked when they attacked Pearl Harbor. But the mere conquest of our enemies is not enough; we must go on to do all in our power to conquer the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed, which made this horror possible. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
1170:This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees—partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings; partly because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the estate’s exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves. ~ John Hersey, #NFDB
1171:Why? If I’d run into her in the street, the first thing she would have said would have been, “What are you doing back in Tokyo?” If I had used a different name, surely she would have commented on that. And if she heard me speaking in unaccented, native Japanese, of course she would have said, “I thought you said you were more comfortable with English?” So her reticence was situation-specific. I thought of the fear I had detected when her eyes had first alighted on Murakami. It was him. She was afraid of saying or doing something that would draw his attention. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1172:I walked for hours, marveling at the extent of the destruction. Cars drove through Daitokuji Temple. Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism, had been turned into a parking lot, with an entertainment emporium on its summit. Streets that had once been lined with ancient wooden houses accented with bamboo trellises were now tawdry with plastic and aluminum and neon, the wooden houses dismantled and gone. Everywhere were metastasizing telephone lines, riots of electric wires, laundry hanging from prefabricated apartment windows like tears from idiot eyes. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1173:Ten days before the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, a plan circulated briefly, never to be executed, providing for the creation of a “surface attack group” under Fletcher’s cruiser boss, Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright, drawing the battleship North Carolina, the heavy cruisers Minneapolis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, and Salt Lake City, the Atlanta, and four destroyers into a single fighting force should the Japanese fleet come within gun range. Those ships were finally reckoned too valuable to spare in missions other than antiaircraft defense. ~ James D Hornfischer, #NFDB
1174:When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our nervous organisation! ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1175:Do you like manga?" she asked after a minute. "Anime?" "Anime's cool. I'm not really into it, but 1 like Japanese movies, animated or not." "Well, I'm into it. I watch the shows, read the books, chat on the boards, and all that. But this girl I know, she's completely into it. She spends most of her allowance on the books and DVDs. She can recite dialogue from them." She caught my gaze. "So would you say she belongs here?" "No. Most kids are that way about something, right? With me, it's movies. Like knowing who directed a sci-fi movie made before I was born. ~ Kelley Armstrong, #NFDB
1176:ONE OF THE STURDIEST PRECEPTS of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World’s Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark of the aetataureate delusion. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
1177:Pride in one's own race-and that does not imply contempt for other races-is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilisations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilisation to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1178:Sumire and I were very alike. Devouring books came as naturally to us as breathing. Every spare moment we’d settle down in some quiet corner, endlessly turning page after page. Japanese novels, foreign novels, new works, classics, avant-garde to bestseller – as long as there was something intellectually stimulating in a book, we’d read it. We’d hang out in libraries, spend whole days browsing in Kanda, the second-hand bookshop Mecca in Tokyo. I’d never come across anyone else who read so avidly – so deeply, so widely, as Sumire, and I’m sure she felt the same. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1179:[Admiral Nelson's counsel] guided me time and again. On the eve of the critical battle of Santa Cruz, in which the Japanese ships outnumbered ours more than two to one, I sent my task force commanders this dispatch: ATTACK REPEAT ATTACK. They did attack, heroically, and when the battle was done, the enemy turned away. All problems, personal, national, or combat, become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly, and its spines crumble. Carry the battle to the enemy! Lay your ship alongside his! ~ William Halsey, #NFDB
1180:Until we can insert a USB into our ear and download our thoughts, drawing remains the best way of getting visual information on to the page. I draw as a collagist, juxtaposing images and styles of mark-making from many sources. The world I draw is the interior landscape of my own personal obsessions and of cultures I have absorbed and adapted, from Latvian folk art to Japanese screens. I lasso thoughts with a pen. I draw a stave church or someone from Hello! magazine not because I want to replicate how they look, but because of the meaning they bring to the work. ~ Grayson Perry, #NFDB
1181:Pride in one's own race - and that does not imply contempt for other races - is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilization to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1182:I absolutely am a big Call of Duty fan. Every time a new Call of Duty comes out – I never play the games online, but I play the solo version super fast. My family knows not to interrupt me the day they come out, they know it's a sacred date for me. I think my favorite visually, of all of the Call of Duty games -- even if it's not as sassy and high tech -- is World at War because. That game has some really incredible episodes in Berlin and the Japanese fields. It's really quite arresting for me, visually, and it was very immersive. But I love Modern Warfare, too. ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
1183:Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1184:The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. ~ William D Leahy, #NFDB
1185:What did you get?” “I didn’t know what you like, so I got a mix of random things from this Japanese fusion place on Seamless.” My brows flew up after entering the living room. He’d done more than order random things. His industrial kingdom had been tidied so there was nothing but dark leather furniture, a rich burgundy rug, and wood that gleamed under golden lamplight. His coffee table—which had once been a massive brushed metal steamer trunk—was laden with containers of sushi, rice, teriyaki dishes, and various sides. He’d also laid out plates and a bottle of sake. ~ Santino Hassell, #NFDB
1186:When you give a present, you are giving part of your spirit to the other person. That’s why presents in Japan are so very important, even if they’re small presents of no real value. This belief also has significance when you buy something secondhand. The Japanese are reluctant to purchase things that have belonged to someone else, maybe because the previous owner’s spirit still lingers inside them. One of the advantages of this belief is that thefts in Japan are almost nonexistent: stealing something from someone would be like stealing part of their spirit. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
1187:Revolutionary war is an antitoxin that not only eliminates the enemy's poison but also purges us of our own filth. Every just, revolutionary war is endowed with tremendous power and can transform many things or clear the way for their transformation. The Sino-Japanese war will transform both China and Japan; provided China perseveres in the War of Resistance and in the united front, the old Japan will surely be transformed into a new Japan and the old China into a new China, and people and everything else in both China and Japan will be transformed during and after the war. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
1188:Within the month it became apparent that the volunteer evacuation was not working, so further orders were given by the Justice Department to physically relocate the West Coast Japanese. These orders stated: “No military guards will be used except when absolutely necessary for the protection of the evacuees. You will, to the maximum, provide assistance. For those who do not relocate themselves comfortable transportation will be provided to temporary assembly centers. Families will not be separated, medical care, nutrition for children and food for adults will be provided. ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
1189:Navajo infants get so attached to cradleboard that they cry to be tied into it. Kikuyu infants in Kenya get handed around several"mothers," all wives to one man. . . . Mothers in rural Guatemala keep their infants quiet, in dark huts. Middle-class American mothers talk a blue streak at them. Israeli kibbutz mothers give them over to a communal caretaker . . . Japanese mothers sleep with them. . . . All these tactics are compatible with normal health--physical and mental--and development in infancy. So one lesson for parents so far seems to be: Let a hundred flowers bloom. ~ Melvin Konner, #NFDB
1190:In the communist revolution in North Korea, when they threw out the Japanese occupiers, they claimed the power in the dynamic of this volcano for their revolution, saying that this is at the center of the dynamics of our revolution. Everything that you encounter - you don't have, for example, any advertisements, you don't have anything like that anywhere in the country - if you see anything it would be propaganda, and propaganda always inevitably comes back to the volcano. It's always including the volcano. You see the new leader and standing behind him you see the volcano. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
1191:A key-in-lock noise jarred him. He walked into the living room. Mariko had 11:00 a.m. booze breath. He said, “Hello, Mother.” She spoke slurred Japanese back. He bowed and tried to take her hand. She pulled away and flashed a magazine. A “picture bride” rag. Choose a photograph and send for a young woman. She’ll be shipped from Japan. Include the five-hundred-dollar steamship fare. All brides guaranteed to be fertile and subservient. “I’ve told you, Mother. I’m not going to marry a fifteen-year-old girl out of a brothel.” “You too old to be bachelor. Neighbors get suspicious. ~ James Ellroy, #NFDB
1192:In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire’s ‘finest hour’. Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins? ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1193:There was a Japanese TV set in front of us. There were Japanese TV sets all over the prison. They were like portholes on an ocean liner. The passengers were in a state of suspended animation until the big ship got where it was going. But anytime they wanted, the passengers could look through a porthole and see the real world out there.
Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them.
Look at it go! ~ Kurt Vonnegut,#NFDB
1194:The Japanese defeat in World War II left 2.4 million Koreans stranded in Japan. They belonged to neither the winning nor the losing side, and they had no place to go. Once freed, they were simply thrown onto the streets. Desperate and impoverished, with no way to make a living, they attacked the trucks containing food intended for members of the imperial Japanese armed forces and sold the booty on the black market. Even those who’d never been violent before had little choice but to turn into outlaws. In a strange sort of way, all this illegality actually set these people free. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
1195:Do you like manga?" she asked after a minute. "Anime?"
"Anime's cool. I'm not really into it, but 1 like Japanese movies,
animated or not."
"Well, I'm into it. I watch the shows, read the books, chat on the boards, and all that. But this girl I know, she's
completely into it. She spends most of her allowance on the books and DVDs. She can recite dialogue from
them." She caught my gaze. "So would you say she belongs here?"
"No. Most kids are that way about something, right? With me, it's
movies. Like knowing who directed a sci-fi movie made before I was born. ~ Kelley Armstrong,#NFDB
1196:Even if the initial home-base advantage is hard to sustain, a global strategy can contribute to supplementing and upgrading it. A good example is in consumer electronics, where Matsushita, Sanyo, Sharp, and other Japanese firms initially competed on cost in selling simply designed, portable televisions. As they began penetrating foreign markets, they gained economies of scale and further reduced cost by moving down the learning curve. Worldwide volume then helped to support aggressive investments in marketing, new production equipment, and R&D and to achieve proprietary technology. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1197:Maybe fear and want never went away. We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear. They feel painted hunger, as the Japanese call it. Painted fear, painted suffering. The rage of the servile will. Will is a matter of free choice, but servitude is lack of freedom. So the servile will feels defiled, feels guilt, expresses that as an assault on something external. And so something evil happens.” Another shrug. “However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1198:Very often people who live in a ghetto accept some of the stigmatisation against them. I mention the case of a Japanese minority the Burakumin, which was pure Japanese in descent, but which was concerned with dirty work: leather work, cadavers, and some other things.There was a famous story of an old man who asked: 'Do you yourself believe you are the same as the Japanese?' And the outsider said: 'I do not know, we are dirty.' This kind of conscience was never there in the surroundings in which I lived. One always felt as someone whom could be proud of, being both German and Jewish. ~ Norbert Elias, #NFDB
1199:At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: - Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of 'barbarian' in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1200:What to eat? You've crossed a dozen time zones to get here and you want to make every meal count. Do you start at an izakaya, a Japanese pub, and eat raw fish and grilled chicken parts and fried tofu, all washed down with a river of cold sake? Do you seek out the familiar nourishment of noodles- ramen, udon, soba- and let the warmth and beauty of this cuisine slip gloriously past your lips? Or maybe you wade into the vast unknown, throw yourself entirely into the world of unfamiliar flavors: a bowl of salt-roasted eel, a mound of sticky fermented soybeans, a nine-course kaiseki feast. ~ Matt Goulding, #NFDB
1201:As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as the well. And I see them at the same time, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing. ~ Sally Mann, #NFDB
1202:How many scenes of blasted terrain, or medics rushing headlong with a stretcher on which lay a figure beneath a sheet, too small, too anonymous, and too deathly still? How long would they mean? Ellie thought of the Japanese photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographed movies inside the cinema. He left the shutter of the camera open in the dark auditorium and the film exposed for the entire length of the screening. The result was not a wildly complicated superimposition of images, but simple white-out, pure light, a flare of nothing. Too many images, layered together, left only a blank. ~ Gail Jones, #NFDB
1203:In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1204:People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. ~ David Mitchell, #NFDB
1205:During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more. From the North Korean government’s point of view, their country desperately needed rebuilding after the Korean War. What could be more convenient than an influx of workers? ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
1206:Note, however, the sharp correction in the Italian real estate market in 1994–1995 and the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000–2001, which caused a particularly sharp drop in the capital/income ratio in the United States and Britain (though not as sharp as the drop in Japan ten years earlier). Note, too, that the subsequent US real estate and stock market boom continued until 2007, followed by a deep drop in the recession of 2008–2009. In two years, US private fortunes shrank from five to four years of national income, a drop of roughly the same size as the Japanese correction of 1991 ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1207:The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line. Japanese companies that implemented Deming’s ideas made it easy for workers to do so: They installed a cord that anyone could pull in order to bring production to a halt. Before long, Japanese companies were enjoying unheard-of levels of quality, productivity, and market share. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
1208:On a cloudless afternoon in the peaceful Shikoku city of Tokushima, twelve-year-old Chizuru Akitani, Japanese-American daughter of acclaimed violinist and Living National Treasure Hiro Akitani, walked into the staff room at Motomachi Elementary, covered with blood and clutching a letter opener. Panic swept the room, as people assumed the sixth grader, known for her introspective nature, had seriously hurt herself. The English teacher, Ms. Daniela Townshend, was the first to approach Chi-zuru. As she neared, the girl raised her palm and stilled the room with five words:
"This is not my blood. ~ Kelly Luce,#NFDB
1209:a team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1210:I hate to admit it," she said, "but for all we hear about the States, Canada's capacity for racism seems even worse." "Worse?" "The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn't liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren't allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We've never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government's whole idea—to make sure we'd never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada. ~ Joy Kogawa, #NFDB
1211:At the table next to me was a Japanese man surrounded by three fawning hostesses. He looked superficially youthful, with radiant, white teeth and black hair swept back from a tanned face free of fissures. But I looked more closely and saw the appearance was ersatz. The hair was dyed; the tan courtesy of a sun lamp; the unseamed face likely the product of botox and surgery; the teeth porcelain caps. The chemicals and the knife, even the retinue of attractive young women with paid-for adoring smiles, all flimsy tools to prop up a shaky wall of denial about the inevitable indignities of aging and death. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1212:COLACHEL, TAMIL NADU This is the coastal town where Martanda Varma, ruler of the tiny kingdom of Venad (later Travancore) decisively defeated the Dutch East India Company in 1741. This was a major feat as the Dutch were then the world’s leading maritime power and controlled what is now South Africa, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The Dutch never recovered and went into decline. No Asian would again defeat a European power decisively till the Japanese navy defeated the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. A commemorative column still stands at the spot where Martanda Varma accepted Dutch surrender. ~ Sanjeev Sanyal, #NFDB
1213:Listen--God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't. ~ Haruki Murakamipages 286-287 ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1214:a team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned.175 ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1215:People pontificate, Suicide is selfishness. Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.
~ David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas,#NFDB
1216:Before entering our room we had to remove our shoes. Here Ken and myself made what I expected to be the first of many faux pas. After taking our shoes off, we noticed some oriental style slippers nearby and presumed that we ought to put these on in true Japanese style. Grumbling that they were all too small, we eventually selected two pairs and were tottering to our room when one of the Japanese ‘attendants’ – it wouldn’t be quite right to call them ‘waitresses’ – stopped us excitedly and told us to take off the shoes. Then we realised the awful truth – that they belonged to people already eating there. ~ Michael Palin, #NFDB
1217:Do the gods of different nations talk to each other? Do the gods of Chinese cities speak to the ancestors of the Japanese? To the lords of Xibalba? To Allah? Yahweh? Vishnu? Is there some annual get-together where they compare each other’s worshippers? Mine will bow their faces to the floor and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one. Mine will sacrifice animals, says another. Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third. Here is the question I think of most often: Are there any who can honestly boast, My worshippers obey my good laws, and treat each other kindly, and live simple generous lives? ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
1218:In geological terms, Japan is in an appalling situation, on top of not one, but two so-called triple junctions—points at which three of the Earth’s tectonic plates collide and grate against one another. Fire, wind, flood, landslide, earthquake, and tsunami: it is a country of intense, elemental violence. Harsh natural environments often breed qualities that take on the status of national characteristics—the dark fatalism of Russians, the pioneer toughness of frontier Americans. Japanese identify in themselves the virtue of nintai or gaman, variously rendered as endurance, patience, or perseverance ~ Richard Lloyd Parry, #NFDB
1219:NO ONE COULD say exactly when the great celebration erupted. There were those who claimed it kicked off as soon as the war was over, straight after the Japanese surrender on 14 August 1945, when everyone danced in the streets and a Jewish refugee, Alfred Eisenstaedt of Life magazine, took the photograph of his life on Times Square: a sailor, delirious with joy, kissing a nurse on the lips. These were the months when GIs returned from all corners of the globe, the years when people suddenly had money in their pockets. Even in America, luxuries had been scarce and rationed for years; now you could buy washing ~ Geert Mak, #NFDB
1220:The Japanese have a proverb: "The gods only laugh when men pray to them for wealth." The boon bestowed on the worshiper is always scaled to his stature and to the nature of his dominant desire: the boon is simply a symbol of life energy stepped down to the requirements of a certain specific case. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, whereas the hero who has won the favor of the god may beg for the boon of perfect illumination, what he generally seeks are longer years to live, weapons with which to slay his neighbor, or the health of his child. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon, #NFDB
1221:One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
1222:You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of 'missing' something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some 'sensation'. It is no longer desire, or even 'taste', or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease - it is the 'fun morality' or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full one's potential for thrills pleasure or gratification. ~ Jean Baudrillard, #NFDB
1223:The guy was shrewder than he looked. I realized I had given too much credence to the scrawny body and the obvious age, and had underestimated him. Watching him set up what would be our makeshift classroom, I wondered whether there would be some value to that. Getting people to underestimate you. Not letting them see what was under the hood. Preventing them from seeing it coming. I thought of the Japanese expression Nō aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu. The hawk with talent hides its talons. It had always been just that for me, an expression. But for the first time, I felt an inkling of what it might really imply. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1224:Not only does Japan have an economic need and the technological know-how for robots, but it also has a cultural predisposition. The ancient Shinto religion, practiced by 80 percent of Japanese, includes a belief in animism, which holds that both objects and human beings have spirits. As a result, Japanese culture tends to be more accepting of robot companions as actual companions than is Western culture, which views robots as soulless machines. In a culture where the inanimate can be considered to be just as alive as the animate, robots can be seen as members of society rather than as mere tools or as threats. ~ Alec J Ross, #NFDB
1225:Acres of spice-covered almonds, blackberry and lavender honey, chocolate-covered cherries, their young saleswoman reaching forward with samples, her low-cut shirt selling more than fruit. The seafood shop, crabs lined up like a medieval armory, fish swimming through a sea of ice. Her ultimate goal was at the end of the aisle- a produce stand staffed by an elderly man who, some people joked, had been at the market since its beginning a hundred years before. George's offerings were the definition of freshness, corn kernels pillowing out of their husks, Japanese eggplant arranged like deep purple parentheses. ~ Erica Bauermeister, #NFDB
1226:Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima 70,000 were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 totally. “It is no exaggeration to say,” reports the Japanese study, “that the whole city was ruined instantaneously.”2679 Material losses alone equaled the annual incomes of more than 1.1 million people. “In Hiroshima many major facilities—prefectural office, city hall, fire departments, police stations, national railroad stations, post offices, telegram and telephone offices, broadcasting station, and schools—were totally demolished or burned. Streetcars, roads, and electricity, gas, water, and sewage facilities were ruined beyond use. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
1227:Connections? I will tell you about connections . . . An amateur German physicist works in a patent office in Bern in Switzerland. He comes up with a theory that, half a century later, will lead to whole Japanese cities being destroyed, along with much of their population. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters. He does not want that connection to form, but that does not stop it forming.’
‘You’re talking about something very different.’
‘No. No, I am not. This is a planet where a daydream can end in death, and where mathematicians can cause an apocalypse. That is my view of the humans. Is it any different from yours? ~ Matt Haig,#NFDB
1228:this small effort will encourage you to read further. All of the major wars had their fighter ace heroes: Canadian George Beurling, Americans Richard Bong, “Gabby” Gabreski, and Gregory Boyington. The Japanese who owned the skies over Asia and the Pacific in the first years of the war had more than their share of fighter aces. The Russians had multiple aces as did the French and the Finns who fought against the USSR from 1940-44. Each of these men helped develop aerial warfare as we know it today, and many of their aerial feats are still taught in fighter pilot programs the world over. ~ Ryan Jenkins, #NFDB
1229:I like the relaxed way in which the Japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reborn as an ox.'
This makes as much sense to me as anything I ever heard from, for example, the Reverend Pat Robertson. ~ Dave Barry,#NFDB
1230:Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen, #NFDB
1231:Taryn Grant wore cotton pajamas at night, and had just gotten into them, in a dressing room off the hallway in her bedroom suite, a few minutes before midnight, when she heard—or maybe felt—footsteps on the wooden floor coming down to the bedroom. The security people were the only others in the house, and weren’t welcome in her bedroom wing. Something had happened, or was happening. She took down the Japanese kimono that she used as a robe, pulled it over her shoulders, and headed toward the door, just as the doorbell burped discreetly. She pressed an intercom button: “Yes?” “It’s me, Doug. I need to talk with you. ~ John Sandford, #NFDB
1232:The thought arrested her and she pulled away from him just to stand there a moment and take in the strangeness of it all. Music drifted down to her then, an odd tinkling sort of music with a rippling rhythmic undercurrent that seemed to tug the melody in another direction altogether, into the depths of a deep churning sea, but beautiful for all that, and so perfect and unexpected. She felt languid and free--all eyes were on her, every man turning to stare--and it came to her that she loved this place, this moment, these people. She could stay here forever, right here, in the gentle sway of the Japanese night. ~ T Coraghessan Boyle, #NFDB
1233:Selflessness involves giving up your self. You become a martyr. Like the Hindu kamikaze warriors. These Japanese Hindus chose to give up their lives, and they were killed if they didn't. Imagine what their families felt. One day you have a father, and next, you're watching him fly a plane into a ship on Pearl Harbor on television. Those kids didn't do anything wrong. They just lived in an evil country. The axis of evil. That sort of evil is beyond anything you or I will experience in our lifetimes. So be glad. Be glad we live in the US of A. Be glad we get to choose, with our freedoms. Now get out there and fight! ~ Bill Konigsberg, #NFDB
1234:Of one thing, though, she was sure: "I want to travel," she confessed.
Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her, the pages going by so fast, her heart in her chest - she couldn't stop... And pictures of the chocolaty Amazon, of stark Patagonia in the National Geographics, a transparent butterfly snail in the sea, even of an old Japanese house slumbering in the snow... - She found they affected her so much she could often hardly read the accompanying words - the feeling they created was so exquisite, the desire so painful. ~ Kiran Desai,#NFDB
1235:The most powerful reason given for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they saved the lives of those who would have died in an invasion of Japan. But the official report of the Strategic Bombing Survey, which interrogated seven hundred Japanese officials right after the war, concluded that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender and would “certainly” have ended the war by December of 1945 even if the bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even without an invasion of Japan. Furthermore, the United States, having broken the Japanese code, knew the Japanese were on the verge of surrender. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
1236:Historically, and notably in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo “control group” changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as “the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.” The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands. Before ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
1237:We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are silent, because we understand that by ourselves alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind, while the 'hakujin' believes his aloneness is everything, his separateness is the foundation of his existence. He seeks and grasps, seeks and grasps for his separateness, while we seek union with the Greater Life--you must see that these are distinct paths we are travelling, Hatsue, the 'hakujin' and we Japanese" (p. 176). ~ David Guterson, #NFDB
1238:If fear hinders us even in grade school, no wonder it takes such discipline—some people even call it a practice—to turn off that inner critic in adulthood and return to a place of openness. In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, “not know mind.” To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
1239:Most American view World War II nostalgically as the "good war," in which the United States and its allies triumphed over German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism. The rest of the world remembers it as the bloodiest war in human history. By the time it was over, more than 60 million people lay dead, including 27 million Russians, between 10 million and 20 million Chinese, 6 million Jews, 5.5 million Germans, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 2.5 million Japanese, and 1.5 million Yugoslavs. Austria, Great Britain, France, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and the United States each counted between 250,000 and 333,000 dead. ~ Oliver Stone, #NFDB
1240:Don’t you know?” he asked with a great show of incredulity. “This is the latest scientific method. It can produce more.” I hadn’t planted rice seedlings before, but I knew what every Japanese kid learned in elementary school. If you plant rice seedlings too close together, they crowd one another out and can’t produce a decent crop. Rice Growing 101, if you like. But then I thought, This guy can’t be an amateur. He must know something I don’t. Maybe they’ve discovered something new. So I carried on. Needless to say, the crop was a miserable failure. I often wonder how many people starved as a result of that idiotic policy. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
1241:Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
1242:The battle of Iwo Jima would quickly turn into a primitive contest of gladiators: Japanese gladiators fighting from caves and tunnels like the catacombs of the Colosseum, and American gladiators aboveground, exposed on all sides, using liquid gasoline to burn their opponents out of their lethal hiding places.
All of this on an island five and a half miles long and two miles wide. An area smaller than Doc Bradley's hometown of Antigo, but bearing ten times the humanity. A car driving sixty miles an hour could cover its length in five and a half minutes. For the slogging, dying Marines, it would take more than a month. ~ James D Bradley,#NFDB
1243:Noa stared at her. She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn't himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn't care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn't care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn't possible. It would never be possible with her. ~ Min Jin Lee, #NFDB
1244:The art forms of the Western world arise from spiritual and philosophical traditions in which spirit is divided from nature, and comes down from heaven to work upon it as an intelligent energy upon an inert and recalcitrant stuff. Thus Malraux speaks always of the artist “conquering” his medium as our explorers and scientists also speak of conquering mountains or conquering space. To Chinese and Japanese ears these are grotesque expressions. For when you climb it is the mountain as much as your own legs which lifts you upwards, and when you paint it is the brush, ink, and paper which determine the result as much as your own hand. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1245:What do I want to be when I grow up? An attractive role would be that of the bunjin. He is the Japanese scholar who wrote and painted in the Chinese style, a literatus, something of a poetaster - a pose popular in the 18th century. I, however, would be a later version, someone out of the end of the Meiji, who would pen elegant prose and work up flower arrangements from dried grasses and then encourage spiders to make webs and render it all natural. For him, art is a moral force and he cannot imagine life without it. He is also the kind of casual artist who, after a day's work is done, descends into his pleasure park and dallies. ~ Donald Richie, #NFDB
1246:Legume or bean intake is an important variable in the promotion of long life. An important longitudinal study showed that a higher legume intake is the most protective dietary factor affecting survival among the elderly, regardless of their ethnicity. The study found that legumes were associated with long-lived people in various food cultures, including the Japanese (soy, tofu, natto), the Swedes (brown beans, peas), and Mediterranean peoples (lentils, chickpeas, white beans).2 Beans and greens are the foods most closely linked in the scientific literature with protection against cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and dementia. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
1247:The Japanese government actively promoted the repatriation, supposedly on humanitarian grounds. But in my opinion, what they were actually pursuing was opportunism of the most vile and cynical kind. Look at the facts. During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
1248:Inquisition as such, that is, apart from methods and severity of results, has remained a live institution. The many dictatorships of the 20C have relied on it and in free countries it thrives ad hoc - Hunting down German sympathizers during the First World War, interning Japanese-Americans during the second, and pursuing Communist fellow-travelers during the Cold War. In the United States at the present time the workings of "political correctness" in universities and the speech police that punishes persons and corporations for words on certain topics quaintly called "sensitive" are manifestations of the permanent spirit of inquisition. ~ Jacques Barzun, #NFDB
1249:A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It's phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency. ~ Daniel Yergin, #NFDB
1250:There was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground. Tiny flares glowed and disappeared. Shrapnel burst with bluish white puffs. Jets of flamethrowers flickered and here and there new explosions stirred up the rubble.
While I watched, an American observation plane droned over the Japanese lines, spotting targets for the U.S. warships lying offshore. Suddenly the little plane was hit by flak and disintegrated. The carnage below continued without pause.
Here I was safe, but tomorrow I would be there. In that instant I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me. ~ William Manchester,#NFDB
1251:A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout— I can’t waste my time with the likes of you!” His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your impertinence.”“That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell.” Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword , and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight. “And that,” said the monk, “is heaven. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
1252:Horchow's daughter, Sally, told me a story of how she once took her father to a new Japanese restaurant where a friend of hers was a chef. Horchow liked the food, and so when he went home he turned on his computer, pulled up the names of acquaintances who lived nearby, and faxed them notes telling them of a wonderful new restaurant he had discovered and that they should try it. This is, in a nutshell, what word of mouth is. It's not me telling you about a new restaurant with great food, and you telling a friend and that friend telling a friend. Word of mouth begins when somewhere along that chain, someone tells a person like Roger Horchow. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
1253:I, however, had not been too late. It has been my great good fortune to see India when that once fabulously beautiful land was as lovely, and to a great extent as peaceful and unspoiled, as Eden before the Fall. To live for two years in Peking in an old Chinese house, once the property of a Manch Prince, at a time when the citizens of that country still wore their national costumes instead of dressing up - or down! - in dull Russian-style "uniforms. To have visited Japan before war, the Bomb and the American occupation altered it beyond recognition, when the sight of a Japanese woman in European dress was unusual enough to make you turn and stare... ~ M M Kaye, #NFDB
1254:Lupe was upset that the Japanese honeymooners were wearing surgical masks over their mouths and noses; she imagined the young Japanese couples were dying of some dread disease—she thought they’d come to Of the Roses to beg Our Lady of Guadalupe to save them. “But aren’t they contagious?” Lupe asked. “How many people have they infected between here and Japan?” How much of Juan Diego’s translation and Edward Bonshaw’s explanation to Lupe was lost in the crowd noise? The proclivity of the Japanese to be “precautionary,” to wear surgical masks to protect themselves from bad air or disease—well, it was unclear if Lupe ever understood what that was about. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1255:The conduct of war will always challenge a nation founded on a commitment to justice. It will call back the nation’s history, its earlier struggles, its triumphs and failures. There were shades, during the war on terror, of the Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798 during the Quasi-War with France, of the Espionage Act of the First World War, and of FDR’s Japanese internment order during the Second World War. But with Bush’s November 2001 military order, the war on terror became, itself, like another airplane, attacking the edifice of American law, down to its very footings, the ancient, medieval foundations of trial by jury and the battle for truth. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
1256:The person who returns from living abroad isn't the same person who left originally... Your outlook changes. You don't take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver... and I realized this was because Americans assume that the other person intended to do what he did, so they want to teach the person a lesson. But you know, in Japan, people almost never get upset in those situations. Japanese look at other people's mistakes more as something arbitrary, like the weather, I think, not so much as something to get angry about. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1257:Japanese gardeners, over many centuries, have learned to do things to trees, to clip their roots or trim their branches, to limit their supply of water, air, or sun, so that they live, and for a long time, but only in tiny, shrunken, twisted shapes. Such trees may please us, or they may not. But what could they tell us about the nature of trees? If a tree can be deformed and shrunk, is this, then, its nature? The nature of these trees, given enough of the sun, air, water, soil, and food they need, is to grow like trees, tall and straight. People can be more easily deformed, and worse deformed, even than trees—and more than trees, they feel it, it hurts. But ~ John Holt, #NFDB
1258:There’s a cure for aging that no one talks about. It’s called learning. In my mind, as long as you learn something new each day, stretch your personal frontiers and improve the way you think, you cannot grow old. Aging only happens to people who lose their lust for getting better and disconnect from their natural base of curiosity. “Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. So for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time,” said Peter Drucker, the father of modern management who lived ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
1259:while Koreans also are relatively group-oriented, they also have a strong individualistic streak like most Westerners. Koreans frequently joke that an individual Korean can beat an individual Japanese, but that a group of Koreans are certain to be beaten by a group of Japanese.”36 The rate of employee turnover, raiding of other companies’ skilled labor, and the like are all higher in Korea than in Japan.37 Anecdotally, there would seem to be a lower level of informal work-oriented socializing in Korea than in Japan, with employees heading home to their families at the end of the day rather than staying on to drink in the evenings with their workmates.38 ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
1260:Christians believe that God speaks through history; and only by knowing that history can we hope to interpret momentous events like the Japanese persecutions and the fall of the Asian churches. Yet Christians have systematically forgotten or ignored so very much of their history that it is scarcely surprising that they encounter only a deafening silence. Losing the ancient churches is one thing, but losing their memory and experience so utterly is a disaster scarcely less damaging. To break the silence, we need to recover those memories, to restore that history. To borrow the title of one of Charles Olson’s great poems: the chain of memory is resurrection. ~ Philip Jenkins, #NFDB
1261:Neethan is a tall dude, six-eight, and watching him come out of a limo is like watching a cleverly designed Japanese toy robot arachnid emerge from a box, propelling a torso on which nods his head, across which is splashed a smile of idealized teeth, teeth so gleaming you could brush your own teeth looking into them, teeth that still look fantastic blown up two stories tall on the side of a building, a sexual promise to nameless fans encoded in bicuspid, molar, incisor, and canine. The arm rises, a wave, a hello, an acknowledgement that the assembled journalists exist and through the conduits of their cameras exist the public. Neethan F. Jordan has arrived! ~ Ryan Boudinot, #NFDB
1262:Back then, when the culture was still building, people were loyal to stores, brands, and the cause. The style was retro-nineties, loud colors, vector or photographic driven, skinny jeans, selvage denim, lots of Japanese brands, and hip-hop/street culture content. There was also a political aspect to streetwear. Speaking for myself, I was sick of rocking logos for people. What people started printing their own shirts on AAA or American Apparel blanks, we got to rep the culture through the clothing. In the post-9/11 era, a lot of the more powerful messages about individuality, free speech, and what it was to be American manifested themselves in streetwear. (215) ~ Eddie Huang, #NFDB
1263:Then for about four minutes I did some diaphragmatic breathing. To do this one opens the lungs to their fullest extent, placing the hands on the lower ribs and slowly expanding the diaphragm; one holds the breath while counting eight at moderate speed and then releases it quietly through the mouth with a low hissing sound. It is unwise to do this for too long as it may induce unconsciousness. I was taught diaphragmatic breathing by a Japanese who claimed that it had transformed his life, and although I cannot say that it has transformed mine, I can recommend it as being harmless and conceivably beneficial, particularly for someone who is as suggestible as I am. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1264:Almost every woman had a primary role in the “female-dominated” family structure; only a small percentage of men had a primary role in the “male-dominated” governmental and religious structures. Many mothers were, in a sense, the chair of the board of a small company—their family. Even in Japan, women are in charge of the family finances—a fact that was revealed to the average American only after the Japanese stock market crashed in 1992 and thousands of women lost billions of dollars that their husbands never knew they had invested.23 Conversely, most men were on their company’s assembly line—either its physical assembly line or its psychological assembly line. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
1265:I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story I was interested to see the words 'swamp' and 'orchids' and 'Seminoles' and 'cloning' and 'criminal' together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB
1266:Louie found himself thinking of the moment at which he had woken in the sinking hull of Green Hornet, the wires that had trapped him a moment earlier now, inexplicably, gone. And he remembered the Japanese bomber swooping over the rafts, riddling them with bullets, and yet not a single bullet had struck him, Phil, or Mac. He had fallen into unbearably cruel worlds, and yet he had borne them. When he turned these memories in his mind, the only explanation he could find was one in which the impossible was possible.
What God asks of men, said Graham, is faith. His invisibility is the truest test of that faith. To know who sees him, God makes himself unseen. ~ Laura Hillenbrand,#NFDB
1267:longevity, a woman who was about to turn 100 years old sang the following song for us in a mixture of Japanese and the local dialect: To keep healthy and have a long life, eat just a little of everything with relish, go to bed early, get up early, and then go out for a walk. We live each day with serenity and we enjoy the journey. To keep healthy and have a long life, we get on well with all of our friends. Spring, summer, fall, winter, we happily enjoy all the seasons. The secret is to not get distracted by how old the fingers are; from the fingers to the head and back once again. If you keep moving with your fingers working, 100 years will come to you.* ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
1268:This conference on religious education seems to your humble servant the last word in absurdity. We are told by a delightful 'expert' that we ought not really teach our children about God lest we rob them of the opportunity of making their own discovery of God, and lest we corrupt their young minds by our own superstitions. If we continue along these lines the day will come when some expert will advise us not to teach our children the English language, since we rob them thereby of the possibility of choosing the German, French or Japanese languages as possible alternatives. Don't these good people realize that they are reducing the principle of freedom to an absurdity? ~ Reinhold Niebuhr, #NFDB
1269:(While interviewing The University Student:)
'Oh, poor Xinran. You haven't even got the various categories of women straight. How can you possibly hope to understand men? Let me tell you. When men have been drinking, they come out with a set of definitions for women. Lovers are "swordfish", tasty but with sharp bones. "Personal secretaries" are "carp", the longer you "stew" them, the more flavour they have. Other men's wives are "Japanese puffer fish", trying a mouthful could be the end of you, but risking death is a source of pride.'
'And what about their own wives?'
'Salt cod, because it keeps for a long time. When there is no other food, salt cod is cheap and convenient. ~ Xinran,#NFDB
1270:Marshall also called upon the left-leaning Florida senator Claude Pepper to exert his influence in the case. Invoking patriotism, Marshall reminded the senator that the War Department had recently confirmed stories of American servicemen who had been tortured by the Japanese in Philippine prison camps and argued that the lynching of a fifteen-year-old boy would taint America’s international reputation: “the type of material that radio Tokio [sic] is constantly on the alert for and will use effectively in attempting to offset our very legitimate protest in respect to the handling of American citizens who unfortunately are prisoners of war.” Claude Pepper refused to get involved. ~ Gilbert King, #NFDB
1271:The ‘tail’ of a comet, by the way, is a train of dust, but it is not streaming out behind the head of the comet as we might think. Instead, it is ‘blown’ by a stream of particles coming from the sun, which we call the solar wind. So the tail of the comet always points away from the sun, no matter which way the comet is travelling. There’s an exciting proposal, once confined to science fiction stories but now being implemented by Japanese space engineers, to use the solar wind to propel spacecraft equipped with gigantic ‘sails’. Like sailing yachts on the sea using real wind, solar wind space-yachts would theoretically provide a very economical way to travel to distant worlds. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1272:We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends - but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compare with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word "cosmopolitan" we use it too lightly - it's flippant, it means we're galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don't comprehend. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1273:We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends - but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compared with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word "cosmopolitan" we use it too lightly - it's flippant, it means we're galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don't comprehend. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1274:The whites, you see, are tempted by their egos and have no means to resist. We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are silent, because we understand that by ourselves, alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind, while the hakujin believes his aloneness is everything, his separateness is the foundation of his existence. He seeks and grasps, seeks and grasps for his separateness, while we seek union with the Greater Life—you must see that these are distinct paths we are traveling, Hatsue, the hakujin and we Japanese. ~ David Guterson, #NFDB
1275:Until the last day of the war, MacArthur and his staff continued to
plan for Olympic [the invasion of the Japanese home islands]. Yet nobody, with the possible exception of the general, wanted to launch the operation. A British infantryman, gazing at bloated corpses on a
Burman battlefield, vented the anger and frustration common to almost
every Allied soldier in those days, about the enemy's rejection of
reason: "Ye stupid sods! Ye stupid Japanni sods! Look at the fookin' state of ye! Ye wadn't listen--and yer all fookin' dead! Tojo's way! Ye dumb bastards! Ye coulda bin suppin' chah an' screwin' geeshas in yer fookin' lal paper 'ooses--an' look at ye! Ah doan't knaw! ~ Max Hastings,#NFDB
1276:There was a flap in Fremont, California, about how to celebrate the Fourth. The city put up American flags, to be sure, but vice mayor Steven Cho thought this was not inclusive enough, so the American flag shared honors with flags from 25 other countries, including Qatar and Mongolia.
San Francisco celebrates diversity with cash. In 1999, the Cinco de Mayo Carnival and Parade got $162,500, the Japanese Cherry Blossom Parade got $40,000, the American Indian Festival got $27,000, Martin Luther King Day got $21,000, Juneteenth got $13,000, Samoan Flag Day got $12,000, and the Min Sok Korean Festival got $7,500. Veterans were angry to be fobbed off with only $1,000 for Veterans Day. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
1277:She is sad. She does not speak Japanese. Her husband went to the desert months and months ago. Every day she goes to the market and brings back chocolate, a peach, and a salmon rice-ball for her dinner. She sits and eats and stares at the wall. Sometimes she watches television. Sometimes she walks three miles to Blue Street to look at necklaces in the window that she wishes someone would buy for her. Sometimes she walks along the pier to see the sunken bicycles, pinged into ruin by invisible arrows of battleship-sonar, crusted over with rust and coral. She likes to pet people’s dogs as they walk them. That is her whole life. What should she dream of?”
“Something better. ~ Catherynne M Valente,#NFDB
1278:On Jan. 30, a Japanese-American college student named George Miller, posted a three-and-a-half minute compilation of comedy on YouTube. Miller has been posting videos since 2008 and had developed an absurd comic style and an audience of tens of thousands. Miller’s movie began with 19 seconds of “Pink Guy,” (a character where he plays a mime in a pink body suit who dances and pratfalls) and three friends dancing in Miller’s bedroom to an obscure piece of electronic dance music: “Harlem Shake” by a little-known DJ called Harry Rodrigues, or “Baauer.” Miller’s audience loved the dance. Within hours, one fan had posted a video that looped the 19-second sequence for three and a half minutes. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1279:Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages. The language called C is all harsh imperatives, almost raw computer-speak. The language called Lisp is like one long, looping sentence, full of subclauses, so long in fact that you usually forget what it was even about in the first place. The language called Erlang is just like it sounds: eccentric and Scandinavia. I cannot program in any of these languages because they're all too hard.
But Ruby, my language of choice, was invented by a cheerful Japanese programmer, and it reads like friendly, accessible poetry. Billy Collins by way of Bill Gates. ~ Anonymous,#NFDB
1280:This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors, described the state of mind that his captivity created: "I was literally becoming a lesser human being. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1281:I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates it's as if they've leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1282:In the Judeo-Christian view--and thus, the dominant Western view--to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. ("Sin" does not qualify for the DSM-5.)
The cultural meaning of suicide in Japan is different. It's viewed as a selfless, even honorable act...
Outsiders say that the Japanese romanticize suicide, and that Japan has a "suicide culture." But the reality is more complicated. The Japanese view of self-inflicted death as altruistic is more about wanting not to be a burden, rather than fascination with mortality itself. ~ Caitlin Doughty,#NFDB
1283:I felt like Schrödinger’s cat. She would come, or not come. She would take me in, or throw me out. She would forgive me, or tell me to fuck off. And in that narrow, purgatorial space, a feeling crept in, a kind of mourning for my younger self and all his terrible choices, and a wish that I could somehow tell him what I knew now and help him for both our sakes to get it right, and a grief that such a thing was impossible, the young man’s blindness irreparable, his mistakes immutable, the consequences irreversible. And then I smiled, thinking of mono no aware, the sadness of being human, aware of the irony of having traveled all the way to Paris to feel something so quintessentially Japanese. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1284:One especially prominent time loop lashes together two of the city’s most celebrated high-rises -- the Park Hotel and the Jin Mao Tower -- binding the Puxi of Old Shanghai with the Pudong New Area. Each was the tallest Shanghai building of its age (judged by highest occupied floor), the Park Hotel for five decades, the Jin Mao Tower for just nine years. This discrepancy masks a deeper time-symmetry in the completion dates of the two buildings: the Park Hotel seven years prior to the closing of the city (with the Japanese occupation of the International Settlement in 1941), the Jin Mao Tower seven years after the city’s formal re-opening (as the culmination of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, in 1992). ~ Nick Land, #NFDB
1285:What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn’t tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right. Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century painting. Rugs worn to threads, painted Japanese fans and antique valentines flickering in candlelight, Pierrots and doves and flower-garlanded hearts. Pippa’s face pale in the dark. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
1286:In Japan’s militaristic society, all citizens, from earliest childhood, were relentlessly indoctrinated with the lesson that to be captured in war was intolerably shameful. The 1941 Japanese Military Field Code made clear what was expected of those facing capture: “Have regard for your family first. Rather than live and bear the shame of imprisonment, the soldier must die and avoid leaving a dishonorable name.” As a result, in many hopeless battles, virtually every Japanese soldier fought to the death. For every Allied soldier killed, four were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed, one was captured. In some losing battles, Japanese soldiers committed suicide en masse to avoid capture. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1287:Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, "When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile. ~ James D Bradley, #NFDB
1288:Few would argue against safe-guarding the nation. But in the judgment of at least one of the country's most distinguished presidential scholars, the legal steps taken by the Bush Administration in its war against terrorism were a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's history and traditions: more significant than John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, than Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, than the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Collectively, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, the Bush Administration's extralegal counter-terrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history. ~ Jane Mayer, #NFDB
1289:Later, we deepen our investigation into the drinking-while-standing phenomenon at Mashika, an Italian izakaya in a hip pocket of Nishi-ku. The Italian-Japanese coalition is hardly new territory in this pasta-loving country, but Mishika is a different kind of mash-up. To start with, the space isn't really a restaurant at all. During the day, grandma sells cigarettes out of the small space. When the sun goes down, grandson fires up the burners as a crowd of thirtysomething Osakans drink Spritz and fill up on charcuterie, sashimi, and funky hybrids like spaghetti sauced with grated daikon and crowned with a wedge of ocean-sweet saury tataki. The menu follows no particular rules at all. Nobody seems to notice. ~ Matt Goulding, #NFDB
1290:The other half, Lost Tokyo-1, has not been located yet, although presumably it exists out there somewhere in the universe, a mega-demi-city of eighty-five million people, a city fractured, cracker in half, torn, ripped not cleanly, but shredded, ragged, ripped along living rome, plans, meetings, dates, conjugal beds in prisons, family dinner tables, secrets being whispered into ears, couples holding hands, separated in an instant without warning or explanation, leaving two halves, bewildered, speaking Japanese to instant neighbours from the other side of the world, unable to understand what has happened, or if things will ever go back to the way they were, hoping its other half might someday find its way back. ~ Charles Yu, #NFDB
1291:Lao Tzu saw this twenty-six centuries ago: ‘The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.’ Montesquieu’s phrase for the calming effect of trade on human violence, intolerance and enmity was ‘doux commerce’ – sweet commerce. And he has been amply vindicated in the centuries since. The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved. Think of the Dutch after 1600, the Swedes after 1800, the Japanese after 1945, the Germans likewise, the Chinese after 1978. The long peace of the nineteenth century coincided with the growth of free trade. The paroxysm of violence that convulsed the world in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with protectionism. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
1292:Two Lakes
Lakes do not happen
Only in geography.
I know one with a Japanese garden
And a limited zoo; it is surrounded
By a red road and is completely
Artificial. Among its reflections
Are isolated trucks, fragrant locomotives, and a giant
Steel works.
The second lake lies
At the foot of a hill and is clean
To the point of invisibility. On one side
Is the club where dead Englishmen sit
Down on tigers and play bridge; little
Balls of air drift through their moustached faces.
In the billiard-room the table is still
Intact, while the stained kitchen-knife
Has appeared in the region's
Folklore.
[From: Distance in Statute Miles]
~ Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,#NFDB
1293:I was convinced that they understood my condition, that at the sight of me one of them exclaimed, “Oh! It’s that castaway with the pussy cat Bamphoo was telling me about. Poor boy. Hope he has enough plankton. I must tell Mumphoo and Tomphoo and Stimphoo about him. I wonder if there isn’t a ship around I could alert. His mother would be very happy to see him again. Goodbye, my boy. I’ll try to help. My name’s Pimphoo.” And so, through the grapevine, every whale of the Pacific knew of me, and I would have been saved long ago if Pimphoo hadn’t sought help from a Japanese ship whose dastardly crew harpooned her, the same fate as befell Lamphoo at the hands of a Norwegian ship. The hunting of whales is a heinous crime. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
1294:The meal was an epicurean extravaganza, the Michelin chef outdoing himself with his nine courses, each richer than the last. Maya nibbled at the fare as first-growth Bordeaux flowed like water, ten cases of Chateau Petrus from a stellar year purchased at auction in New York and shipped to Nahir’s temperature-controlled, eight-thousand-bottle wine cellar for the party. After salad, lobster bisque, and curried shrimp, a small piece of seared pork belly was followed by ostrich in a truffle reduction, which in turn was trumped by poached Chilean sea bass, bluefin tuna, fugu prepared by a master Japanese chef skilled in the art of preparation of the poisonous pufferfish, and the final entrée course of Kobe beef filet. ~ Russell Blake, #NFDB
1295:A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... The Sprawl was a long, strange way home now over the Pacific, and he was no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
1296:Civilians!” they read in Japanese. “Evacuate at once! “These leaflets are being dropped to notify you that your city has been listed for destruction by our powerful air force. “This advance notice will give your military authorities ample time to take necessary defensive measures to protect you from our inevitable attack. Watch and see how powerless they are to protect you. Systematic destruction of city after city will continue as long as you blindly follow your military leaders whose blunders have placed you on the very brink of oblivion. It is your responsibility to overthrow the military government now and save what is left of your beautiful country. “In the meanwhile, we encourage all civilians to evacuate at once. ~ Bill O Reilly, #NFDB
1297:According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state. “The Japanese want their kids to struggle,” said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who cowrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. “Sometimes the [Japanese] teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding. ~ Daniel Coyle, #NFDB
1298:Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. ~ Jun ichir Tanizaki, #NFDB
1299:If Nintendo had been an American company playing by the rules such companies follow, it would have given up long before there was any indication of success—that is, after Arakawa’s original market surveys, when the AVS failed, or when there was resistance at the first trade shows. Many American companies are so wedded to market research that the devastating results of focus groups have signaled death knells. Had Nintendo been American, the company would probably have retreated when retailers in New York declined to place orders, or when it took more than a year for big sales numbers to appear. But commitment to an idea and pure tenacity are inherent in Japanese business philosophy—and certainly to Japanese business successes. ~ David Sheff, #NFDB
1300:One study of America’s Fortune 500 companies found that the one quarter with the most female executives had a return on equity 35 percent higher than the quarter with the fewest female executives. On the Japanese stock exchange, the companies with the highest proportion of female employees performed nearly 50 percent better than those with the lowest. In each case, the most likely reason isn’t that female executives are geniuses. Rather, it is that companies that are innovative enough to promote women are also ahead of the curve in reacting to business opportunities. That is the essence of a sustainable economic model. Moving women into more productive roles helps curb population growth and nurtures a sustainable society. ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
1301:Dr. Y. Hiraiwa, professor of Hiroshima University of Literature and Science, and one of my church members, was buried by the bomb under the two storied house with his son, a student of Tokyo University. Both of them could not move an inch under tremendously heavy pressure. And the house already caught fire. His son said, ‘Father, we can do nothing except make our mind up to consecrate our lives for the country. Let us give Banzai to our Emperor.’ Then the father followed after his son, ‘Tenno-heika, Banzai, Banzai, Banzai!’ . . . In thinking of their experience of that time Dr. Hiraiwa repeated, ‘What a fortunate that we are Japanese! It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor. ~ John Hersey, #NFDB
1302:humankind, though “apt to forget it, is a creature of the earth. ‘Dust thou art’ and ‘All flesh is grass’ were not said by scientists, but they are sound biology.” When lower creatures exhaust their resources, Vogt argued, bad things happen. Exactly the same is true for Homo sapiens. The article tallied example after example of overreaching, most drawn from Vogt’s travels in Latin America. But then, provocatively, he switched to the United States’ current enemy, Japan: “Many explanations have been offered for Japanese aggression,” he argued. But, he asked, “can anyone deny that population pressures set off the explosion?” Unless humankind controlled its appetites for procreation and consumption, Vogt said, “there can be no peace. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
1303:A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. ~ William Gibson, Neuromancer, #NFDB
1304:Much has been said of the aesthetic values of chanoyu- the love of the subdued and austere- most commonly characterized by the term, wabi. Wabi originally suggested an atmosphere of desolation, both in the sense of solitariness and in the sense of the poverty of things. In the long history of various Japanese arts, the sense of wabi gradually came to take on a positive meaning to be recognized for its profound religious sense. ...the related term, sabi,... It was mid-winter, and the water's surface was covered with the withered leaves of the of the lotuses. Suddenly I realized that the flowers had not simply dried up, but that they embodied, in their decomposition, the fullness of life that would emerge again in their natural beauty. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1305:These Taoists' ideas have greatly influenced all our theories of action, even to those of fencing and wrestling. Jiu-jitsu, the Japanese art of self-defence, owes its name to a passage in the Tao-teking. In jiu-jitsu one seeks to draw out and exhaust the enemy's strength by non-resistance, vacuum, while conserving one's own strength for victory in the final struggle.
In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the full measure of your aesthetic emotion. ~ Kakuz Okakura,#NFDB
1306:Our definition of neglect has stretched to prevent parents from determining when their children are ready for even a modest amount of autonomy, and sacrifices developmentally appropriate skill building to fears of the unknown. While we might write off the Japanese as crazy, our American insistence on children being observed and accompanied at all times makes us look like the crazy ones. Ironically—and quite cruelly (if you pause a moment to think about it)—the unexamined harm these days is that our kids grow up believing that an evil stranger, a fellow shopper in the grocery store, or worse, a neighbor offering candy at Halloween wants to do them harm or that their own parent is putting them in harm’s way. FENDING OFF THE FEARS ~ Julie Lythcott Haims, #NFDB
1307:I mutter and mutter and no one to listen. I speak my words in Japanese and my daughter will not hear them. The words that come from our ears, our mouths, they collide in the space between us.
"Obachan, please! I wish you would stop that. Is it too much to ask for some peace and quiet? You do this on purpose, don’t you? Don’t you! I just want some peace. Just stop! Please, just stop."
"Gomennasai. Waruine, Obachan wa. Solly. Solly."
Ha! Keiko, there is method in my madness. I could stand on my head and quote Shakespeare until I had a nosebleed, but to no avail, no one hears my language. So I sit and say the words and will, until the wind or I shall die. Someone, something must stand against this wind and I will. I am. ~ Hiromi Goto,#NFDB
1308:Physically, too, he is funny—never more so than when indulging his passion for eccentric exercise. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge has been heard yelling irritably at a portly object swaying in the sky, “Theodore! if you knew how ridiculous you look on top of that tree, you would come down at once.”53 On winter evenings in Rock Creek Park, strollers may observe the President of the United States wading pale and naked into the ice-clogged stream, followed by shivering members of his Cabinet.54 Thumping noises in the White House library indicate that Roosevelt is being thrown around the room by a Japanese wrestler; a particularly seismic crash, which makes the entire mansion tremble, signifies that Secretary Taft has been forced to join in the fun. ~ Edmund Morris, #NFDB
1309:What strange hesitancy, fear, or apathy stops us from looking within ourselves, from trying to grasp the true essence of joy and sadness, desire and hatred? Fear of the unknown prevails, and the courage to explore that inner world fails at the frontier of our mind. A Japanese astronomer once confided to me: “It takes a lot of daring to look within.” This remark—made by a scientist at the height of his powers, a steady and open-minded man—intrigued me. Recently I also met a Californian teenager who told me: “I don’t want to look inside myself. I’m afraid of what I’d find there.” Why should he falter before what promised to be an absolutely fascinating research project? As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Look within; within is the fountain of all good. ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
1310:war, instead of finishing in 1945, would have ended in 1948 had the Government Code and Cypher School not been able to read the Enigma cyphers and produce the Ultra intelligence.” During this period of delay, additional lives would have been lost in Europe, and Hitler would have been able to make greater use of his V-weapons, inflicting damage throughout southern England. The historian David Kahn summarizes the impact of breaking Enigma: “It saved lives. Not only Allied and Russian lives but, by shortening the war, German, Italian, and Japanese lives as well. Some people alive after World War II might not have been but for these solutions. That is the debt that the world owes to the codebreakers; that is the crowning human value of their triumphs. ~ Simon Singh, #NFDB
1311:We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
1312:The actor Richard Burton once wrote an article for the New York Times about his experience playing the role of Winston Churchill in a television drama:
"In the course of preparing myself...I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history.... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, 'We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth? Such simple--minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single--minded and merciless ferocity."-- ~ Richard Francis Burton,#NFDB
1313:This wasn’t a POW camp. It was a secret interrogation center called Ofuna, where “high-value” captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented, and tortured to divulge military secrets. Because Ofuna was kept secret from the outside world, the Japanese operated with an absolutely free hand. The men in Ofuna, said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs. In fact, they had no rights at all. If captives “confessed their crimes against Japan,” they’d be treated “as well as regulations permit.” Over the course of the war, some one thousand Allied captives would be hauled into Ofuna, and many would be held there for years. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1314:Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait. ~ Pamela Paul, #NFDB
1315:The Philippines campaign was a mistake,” says the present-day Japanese historian Kazutoshi Hando, who lived through the war. “MacArthur did it for his own reasons. Japan had lost the war once the Marianas were gone.” The Filipino people whom MacArthur professed to love paid the price for his egomania in lost lives—perhaps half a million, including those who perished from famine and disease—and wrecked homes. It was as great a misfortune for them as for the Allied war effort that neither President Roosevelt nor the U.S. chiefs of staff could contain MacArthur’s ambitions within a smaller compass of folly. In 1944, America’s advance to victory over Japan was inexorable, but the misjudgements of the Southwest Pacific supreme commander disfigured its achievement. ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
1316:When our citizens are determined to openly wear pistols on their belts to go shopping at Walmart, that signifies to me a failure on the part of the macho ideal. Ostensibly, the handgun is displayed to let evildoers know, in no uncertain terms, that this is not a person with whom to trifle. It then follows that the wearing of the pistol presumes a situation in which the bearer will need to shoot someone, rendering the brandishing of the weapon a badge of fear, does it not? It occurs to me that if we keep on turning to such “masculine” methodology to solve our conflicts, the only inevitable ending is a bunch of somebody’s family lying in a bloody schoolhouse, movie theater, or smoking Japanese city. I guess we just hope it’s not our family? I don’t like the odds. ~ Nick Offerman, #NFDB
1317:From the time she opened her doors to the modern world in 1867, Japan has been consistently underrated by westerners, despite her successful defeats of China and then Russia in 1894 and 1905, respectively; despite Pearl Harbor; and despite her sudden emergence as an economic superpower and the toughest competitor in the world market of the 1970s and 1980s. A major reason, perhaps the major one, is the prevailing belief that innovation has to do with things and is based on science or technology. And the Japanese, so the common belief has held (in Japan as well as in the West, by the way), are not innovators but imitators. For the Japanese have not, by and large, produced outstanding technical or scientific innovations. Their success is based on social innovation. ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
1318:So much was lost - names, faces, ages, ethnic identities - that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together, knowing that some pieces will never be recovered. This is not quite as harrowing or hopeless as it might sound I liken it to the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken vessels using gold. The scars of the object are not concealed, but highlighted and embraced, thus giving them their own dignity and power. The brokenness and its subsequent repair are a recognized part of the story of the journey of the vessel, not to be obscured, and change, transition, and transformation are seen as important as honoring the original structure and its traditional meaning and beauty. ~ Michael W Twitty, #NFDB
1319:the audience, unaccustomed to any of this, went wild: America! The high point of this whirring, pale-blue era was 1960. The average American earned more than 5,000 dollars a year; a newly built house cost 12,500 dollars, a car 2,600, a pair of shoes 13, a litre of gasoline 6.7 cents. The tail fins on the new Cadillac Eldorado were the largest and sharpest ever seen. In April, the world’s first weather satellite was launched. In the Philippines, the Japanese government tried in vain to coax the last two Japanese soldiers out of the jungle – they refused to believe the war was over. Xerox put the first commercial photocopier on the market. Chubby Checker started a new dance craze, the twist. Frank Sinatra, cigarette in hand, stood and sang in a short film called Music for ~ Geert Mak, #NFDB
1320:We must learn to live with danger, " he now said to Kino.
"Do you mean the ocean and the volcano cannot hurt us if we are not afraid?" Kino asked.
"No," his father replied. "I did not say that. Ocean is there and volcano is there. It is true that on any day ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame. We must accept this fact, but without fear. We must say, 'Someday I shall die, and does it matter whether it is by ocean or volcano, or whether I grow old and weak?' "
"I don't want to think about such things," Kino said.
"it is right for you not to think about them," his father said. "Then do not be afraid. When you are afraid, you are thinking about them all the time. Enjoy life and don not fear death - that is the way of a good Japanese. ~ Pearl S Buck,#NFDB
1321:Captain Copeland picked up the intercom mike and addressed the Roberts’s crew. That he was speaking for himself struck Ens. Jack Moore as unusual and urgent. Normally seaman Jack Roberts was the public address voice of his namesake warship. His southern drawl was all but unintelligible to anyone not acquainted with Dixie’s rhythms and diphthongs. But the skipper’s diction was as crisp as a litigator’s. He was talking fast and sounding more than a little nervous. “A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers. “This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can. ~ James D Hornfischer, #NFDB
1322:recognize. In the 1980s, with rivals operating far from the productivity frontier, it seemed possible to win on both cost and quality indefinitely. Japanese companies were all able to grow in an expanding domestic economy and by penetrating global markets. They appeared unstoppable. But as the gap in operational effectiveness narrows, Japanese companies are increasingly caught in a trap of their own making. If they are to escape the mutually destructive battles now ravaging their performance, Japanese companies will have to learn strategy. To do so, they may have to overcome strong cultural barriers. Japan is notoriously consensus oriented, and companies have a strong tendency to mediate differences among individuals rather than accentuate them. Strategy, on the other ~ Michael E Porter, #NFDB
1323:I didn’t realize until I was an adult that most of my poor childhood friends were Asian American or Pacific Islanders. My idea of Asian Americans very much fit in with the popular stereotype of hard-working, financially and academically successful, quiet, serious people of predominantly East Asian (Chinese, Korean, or Japanese) descent. But most of my friends’ parents were from Guam, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and India. Most of my friends’ parents had fled war, conflict, and economic disaster. They were all poor, they were all struggling, and they were all discriminated against for their brown skin and their strong accents. But even though they were my friends, their racial and ethnic identity was invisible to me and continued to be so well into my adulthood. ~ Ijeoma Oluo, #NFDB
1324:If there is one indelible image from the Battle of Tarawa, it is a photo of dozens of dead Marines bobbing in the shallows just off what was called Red Beach II. I often launched my windsurfer from Red Beach II. Just twenty yards from the beach lies a rusting amtrac. At reef’s edge are the brown ribs of a ship long ago grounded, where Japanese snipers once picked off Marines wading and swimming and floating toward a beach that offered nothing better. A little farther I directed my board over the wings and fuselage of a B- 29 Liberator. Clearing the harbor entrance, I confronted the rusting carcasses of several landing vehicles. Near the beach was a Sherman tank, with children playing on the turret. The Battle of Tarawa is an inescapable part of daily life on the island. ~ J Maarten Troost, #NFDB
1325:The market is growing, and widening. Translation in continental Europe was once dominated by the “FIGS” (French, Italian, German and Spanish); Japanese, Chinese and Korean were the only Asian languages to speak of. Roughly 90% of online spending is accounted for by speakers of 13 languages, says Don DePalma of CSA. But others are becoming more important, for reasons of both politics and commerce. The European Union’s bureaucrats now have to communicate in 24 tongues. In Asia once-neglected languages such as Vietnamese and Indonesian matter more as those countries grow. Companies active in Africa regard that continent’s languages as increasingly important. Big software firms like Microsoft find it profitable to localise their wares in small languages like Maya or Luxembourgish. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1326:It was a garden, a walled garden. Overgrown but with beautiful bones visible still. Someone had cared for this garden once. The remains of two paths snaked back and forth, intertwined like the lacing on an Irish dancing shoe. Fruit trees had been espaliered around the sides, and wires zigzagged from the top of one wall to the top of another. Hungry, wisteria branches had woven themselves around to form a sort of canopy.
Against the southern wall, an ancient and knobbled tree was growing. Cassandra went closer. It was the apple tree, she realized, the one whose bough had reached over the wall. She lifted her hand to touch one of the golden fruit. The tree was about sixteen feet high and shaped like the Japanese bonsai plant Nell had given Cassandra for her twelfth birthday. ~ Kate Morton,#NFDB
1327:But in 1947, an American working in Japan turned that thinking on its head. His name was W. Edwards Deming, and he was a statistician who was known for his expertise in quality control. At the request of the U.S. Army, he had traveled to Asia to assist with planning the 1951 Japanese census. Once he arrived, he became deeply involved with the country’s reconstruction effort and ended up teaching hundreds of Japanese engineers, managers, and scholars his theories about improving productivity. Among those who came to hear his ideas was Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corp.—one of many Japanese companies that would apply his ideas and reap their rewards. Around this time, Toyota also instituted radical new ways of thinking about production that jibed with Deming’s philosophies. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
1328:According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted.
Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians. ~ Oliver Stone,#NFDB
1329:There is really only one way to restore a world that is dying and in disrepair: to make beauty where ugliness has set in. By beauty, I don’t mean a superficial attractiveness, though the word is commonly used in this way. Beauty is a loveliness admired in its entirety, not just at face value. The beauty I’m referring to is metabolized grief. It includes brokenness and fallibility, and in so doing, conveys for us something deliciously real. Like kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, what is normally seen as a fatal flaw is distinguished with value. When we come into contact with this kind of beauty, it serves as a medicine for the brokenness in ourselves, which then gives us the courage to live in greater intimacy with the world’s wounds. ~ Toko pa Turner, #NFDB
1330:Three days after the earthquake in Louisiana there was another geological catastrophe announced, this time in China. The coast of the province of Kiangsu, north of Nanking, about half way between the mouth of the Yangtse and the old bed of the Hwangho, was ripped apart in a powerful, thunderous earthquake; the sea gushed into this fissure and joined up with the great lakes of Pan Yoon and Hungtsu between the cities of Hwaingan and Fugyang. Apparently as a result of the earthquake, the Yangtse left its course below Nanking and flowed down towards Lake Tai and on to Hang-Cho. Loss of human life cannot, so far, even be estimated. Hundred of thousands of refugees are fleeing into the provinces to the north and south. Japanese warships have been given orders to sail to the affected area. ~ Karel apek, #NFDB
1331:To live in the midst of danger is to know how good life is," his father replied.
"But if we are lost in the danger?" Kino asked anxiously.
"To live in the presence of death makes us brave and strong," Kino's father replied. "That is why our people never fear death. We see it too often and we do not fear it. To die a little later or a little sooner does not matter. But to live bravely, to lobe life, to see how beautiful the trees are and the mountains, yes, even the sea, to enjoy work because it produces food for life - in these things we Japanese are a fortunate people. We love life because we live in danger. We do not fear death because we understand that life and death are necessary to each other."
"What is death?" Kino asked.
"Death is the great gateway," Kino's father said. ~ Pearl S Buck,#NFDB
1332:Fukushima, Japan. The disaster involving the three General Electric–built reactors on the northeastern coast of Honshu followed a now familiar course, this time played out live on television: a loss of coolant led to reactor meltdown, a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas, and several catastrophic explosions. No one was killed or injured by the immediate release of radiation, but three hundred thousand people were evacuated from the surrounding area, which will remain contaminated for decades to come. During the early stages of the emergency cleanup, it became clear that robots were incapable of operating in the highly radioactive environment inside the containment buildings of the plant. Japanese soldiers were sent in to do the work, in another Pyrrhic victory of bio-robots over technology. ~ Adam Higginbotham, #NFDB
1333:There are a dozen factors that make Japanese food so special- ingredient obsession, technical precision, thousands of years of meticulous refinement- but chief among them is one simple concept: specialization. In the Western world, where miso-braised short ribs share menu space with white truffle ceviche, restaurants cast massive nets to try to catch as many fish as possible, but in Japan, the secret to success is choosing one thing and doing it fucking well. Forever. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to grilling beef intestines, slicing blowfish, kneading buckwheat into tangles of chewy noodles- microdisciplines with infinite room for improvement.
The concept of shokunin, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1334:Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time. ~ Wallace Stegner, #NFDB
1335:We have almost all had the experience of gazing at the full moon. But those of us who are neither astronomers nor astronauts are unlikely to have scheduled moongazing appointments. For Zen Buddhists in Japan, however, every year, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, followers gather at nightfall around specially constructed cone-shaped viewing platforms, where for several hours prayers are read aloud which use the moon as a springboard for reflections on Zen ideas of impermanence, a ritual known as tsukimi. Candles are lit and white rice dumplings (tsukimi dango) are prepared and shared out among strangers in an atmosphere at once companionable and serene, a feeling thereby supported by a ceremony, by architecture, by good company and by food. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1336:Worse to come were Japanese accusations of racism by the United States. The Japanese had been immigrating to America—many of them illegally—in increasing numbers until by the early 1900s they were arriving at the rate of a thousand per month in California alone. West coast newspapers began shouting warnings about the “yellow peril.” This prompted the San Francisco Board of Education in 1906 to issue an order segregating all Japanese schoolchildren from the white student population. Moreover, the California legislature had passed a resolution that branded Japanese immigrants as “immoral, intemperate [and] quarrelsome.”6 Not only that but workers in California began rioting and beating immigrant Japanese who, they claimed, were willing to work for “coolie” wages, thus putting them out of their jobs. ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
1337:London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others.
Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city - New York or Paris or Sydney - but he felt instinctively that London was .... at the extreme. The darker side of that history, as opposed to the parks, palaces and pearly kings' side that made busloads of Japanese and American tourists gawk and jabber. The hidden history of a city where the lonely, the dispossessed, the homeless, wandered the streets, brushing shoulders with the shadows of those that had come before them. A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night.
A city where the dead could stay lost a long time ~ Mark Billingham,#NFDB
1338:As the economy collapses prices remain high. This is, I guess, very Japanese. In some other countries there would be at least a few merchants who would lower their expectations. Not here, however. There are new alternatives (the hundred-yen malls), but nothing established lowers anything. Perhaps it is because quality is judged by price. If you lower the price you lessen the quality. There is thus really no such thing as a bargain. Indeed, some raise their prices as though to tempt through exceptional quality—this is the way Wako Department Store works. The goods are in no way exceptional, but the prices are. Consequently anything merely wrapped in Wako paper is first-rate. I remember tales that in the far hinterlands people used to paper their walls with Tokyo department store paper, simply to give tone. ~ Donald Richie, #NFDB
1339:Shadows in the Jungle, by Larry Alexander; Bataan Death March, by Lt. Col. William E. Dyess; American Guerrilla: The Forgotten Heroics of Russell W. Volckmann, by Mike Guardia; Lapham’s Raiders, by Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling; Some Survived, by Manny Lawton; Escape from Davao, by John D. Lukacs; Lieutenant Ramsey’s War, by Edwin Price Ramsey and Stephen J. Rivele; My Hitch in Hell, by Lester I. Tenney; Escape from Corregidor, by Edgar D. Whitcomb. Tears in the Darkness, by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman, is a thorough and engaging history of the Bataan Death March as seen from both American and Japanese perspectives. The Doomed Horse Soldiers of Bataan, by Raymond G. Woolfe, Jr., is a compelling account of the famous Twenty-Sixth Cavalry and its final charge. I highly recommend both books. What’s next on ~ John Grisham, #NFDB
1340:But nobody lives in a universal thing called culture. They live only in specific cultures, each of which differ from one another. Plays written and produced in Germany are three times as likely to have tragic or unhappy endings than plays written and produced in the United States. Half of all people in India and Pakistan say they would marry without love, but only 2 percent of people in Japan would do so. Nearly a quarter of Americans say they are often afraid of saying the wrong things in social situations, whereas 65 percent of all Japanese say they are often afraid. In their book Drunken Comportment, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
1341:Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?"
"Sounds like a Japanese game show."
Kat straightens her shoulders. "Okay, we're going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you're a science fiction writer."
Okay: "World government... no cancer... hover-boards."
"Go further. What's the good future after that?"
"Spaceships. Party on Mars."
"Further."
"Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere."
"Further."
"I pause a moment, then realize: "I can't."
Kat shakes her head. "It's really hard. And that's, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century. ~ Robin Sloan,#NFDB
1342:To be a ramen writer of Kamimura's stature, you need to live in a ramen town, and there is unquestionably no town in Japan more dedicated to ramen than Fukuoka. This city of 1.5 million along the northern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, is home to two thousand ramen shops, representing Japan's densest concentration of noodle-soup emporiums. While bowls of ramen are like snowflakes in Japan, Fukuoka is known as the cradle of tonkotsu, a pork-bone broth made milky white by the deposits of fat and collagen extracted during days of aggressive boiling. It is not simply a specialty of the city, it is the city, a distillation of all its qualities and calluses.
Indeed, tell any Japanese that you've been to Fukuoka and invariably the first question will be: "How was the tonkotsu? ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1343:it was probably more dangerous to remain aboard the fuel- and explosive-laden jeep carrier than to take off and glide-bomb a Japanese capital ship. As Leonard Moser, a plane captain on the Fanshaw Bay, was changing a carburetor on a VC-68 aircraft, half a dozen pilots hovered nearby, coveting a chance to climb into that cockpit and get their tails off the ship. The aviation machinist’s mate finished the job, then climbed up into the cockpit. “What are you doing?” one of the pilots asked. “I’m going to check this damn engine out,” Moser said, “and then go find a hole to hide in.” The pilot said that he would do his own engine check this time, thank you very much. Moser stepped aside. “He got in, started it up, and took off with a cold motor. My helper didn’t even have all of the cowling on. That pilot was glad to leave. ~ James D Hornfischer, #NFDB
1344:I didn't know. All I know was that the sex was terrific. And that the hippie was cute. She loved sweet pickles. She liked the name Willie. She even liked Apocalypse Now. She was not a vegeterian. These were all on the plus side. But, once I introduced her to my friends, at the time, and they were all stuck-up asshole Lit majors and they made fun of her and she understoond what was going on and her eyes, usually blue, too blue, vacant, were sad. And I protected her. I took her away from them. ('Spell Pynchon,' they asked her, cracking up.) And she introduced me to her friends. And we ended up sitting on some Japanese pillows in her room and we all smoked some pot and this little hippie girl with a wreath on her head, looked at me as I held her and said, "The world blows my mind'. And you know what?
I fucked her anyway. ~ Bret Easton Ellis,#NFDB
1345:Because around a crisis point, even the tiniest action can assume importance all out of proportion to its size. Consequences multiply and cascade, and anything—a missed telephone call, a match struck during a blackout, a dropped piece of paper, a single moment—can have empire-tottering effects. The Archduke Ferdinand’s chauffeur makes a wrong turn onto Franz-Josef Street and starts a world war. Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard steps outside for a smoke and destroys a peace. Hitler leaves orders not to be disturbed because he has a migraine and finds out about the D-Day invasion eighteen hours too late. A lieutenant fails to mark a telegram “urgent” and Admiral Kimmel isn’t warned of the impending Japanese attack. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. ~ Connie Willis, #NFDB
1346:But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight
years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident that not
even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western
student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap-
ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or
esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive
the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial
scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will
smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth
of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on
Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard; ~ Will Durant,#NFDB
1347:Geoff Wade, pointed out that China is ‘openly utilising its financial clout globally to facilitate expanded strategic leverage. Chinese capital is, without doubt, being employed as a strategic tool.’19 British, American and Japanese investors do not hail from one-party states that habitually use overseas trade and investment to pressure and coerce other countries into policy positions sympathetic to their strategic interests. For them the guiding principle is not ‘economic ties serve political goals’. Nor do they bring modes of operating that are secretive, deceptive and frequently corrupt, and whose important decisions are often made by political cadres embedded in companies and answerable to a totalitarian party at home. Only when the Chinese state no longer operates in these ways should we treat Chinese investment like any other. ~ Clive Hamilton, #NFDB
1348:destiny by the throat and wring its neck. My Japanese name is Masaji Ishikawa, and my Korean name is Do Chan-sun. I was born (for the first time) in the neighborhood of Mizonokuchi in the city of Kawasaki, just south of Tokyo. It was my misfortune to be born between two worlds—to a Korean father and a Japanese mother. Mizonokuchi is an area of gently sloping hills that now grows crowded on the weekends with visitors from Tokyo and Yokohama seeking an escape from the city and some fresh air. But sixty years ago, when I was a child, it consisted of little more than a few farms, with irrigation canals that led from the Tama River running between them. Back then, the irrigation canals were used not just for farming but also for household tasks like laundry and washing dishes. As a boy, I spent long summer days playing in the canals. I’d ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
1349:The north-east has, to a certain extent, been a victim of geography. Unlike the east and south of China, which straddle major international trading lanes, the north-eastern provinces’ two foreign neighbours are North Korea and the sparsely populated far east of Russia and it is not far from the equally desolate expanse of Mongolia. Their dominant commercial relations have been with Japan, but heightened tensions between China and Japan in the past couple of years have got in the way. Japanese investment in Liaoning was 33.5% lower year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2014. South Korean investment, about a third of Japan’s, fell even more sharply. Demography has also started to hurt. China as a whole is struggling to adapt as the working-age population peaks. The birth rate in the north-east, however, is less than one child per woman: ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1350:By the time Herman appears at six thirty, I've done a double batch of my version of an upgraded pinwheel, making a homemade honey oat graham cookie base, a piped swirl of soft vanilla honey marshmallow cream, and a covering of dark chocolate mixed with tiny, crunchy Japanese rice pearls. I've made a test batch of a riff on a Nutter Butter, two thin, crisp peanut butter cookies with a layer of peanut butter cream sandwiched between them. My dad always loved Nutter Butters; he could sit in his office for hours working on briefs, eating them one after another. I figured he would be my best taster, so might as well try them and bring some with me later today. And I've just pulled a new brownie out of the oven: a deep, dark chocolate base with a praline pecan topping, sort of a marriage of brownie and that crispy top layer of a good pecan pie. ~ Stacey Ballis, #NFDB
1351:Every day leaflets fall from the sky, Japanese planes whirring overhead and letting loose propaganda, all over the colony, telling the Chinese and the Indians not to fight, to join with the Japanese in a “Greater Far Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere.” They’ve been collecting them as they fall on the ground, stacking them in piles, and Trudy wakes up on Christmas Day and declares a project, to make wallpaper out of them. In their dressing gowns, they put on Christmas carols, make hot toddies, and—in a fit of wild, Yuletide indulgence—use all the flour for pancakes, and paste the leaflets on the living room wall—a grimly ironic decoration. One has a drawing of a Chinese woman sitting on the lap of a fat Englishman, and says the English have been raping your women for years, stop it now, or something to that effect, in Chinese, or so Trudy says. ~ Janice Y K Lee, #NFDB
1352:Our researches have thus yielded us twenty societies, most of them related as parent or offspring to one or more of the others: namely the Western, the Orthodox, the Iranic, the Arabic (these last two being now united in the Islamic), the Hindu, the Far Eastern, the Hellenic, the Syriac, the Indic, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Indus Culture, the Sumeric, the Hittite, the Babylonic, the Egyptiac, the Andean, the Mexic, the Yucatec and the Mayan.......Indeed it is probably desirable to divide the Orthodox Christian Society into an Orthodox-Byzantine and an Orthodox-Russian society, and the Far Eastern into a Chinese and a Korean-Japanese Society. This would raise our numbers to twenty-two; and since this book was written, a twenty third has come to light: the Shang culture that preceded the Sinic civilization, in the Yellow River Valley. ~ Arnold Joseph Toynbee, #NFDB
1353:Zen wishes to storm this citadel of topsy-turvydom and to show that we live psychologically or biologically and not logically. ~ D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen BuddhismZen Words for the Heart: Hakuin's Commentary on the Heart Sutra by Hakuin and Norman Waddell ★★★★ 1/2 "Hakuin Zenji (1689-1769) was one of the most important of all Japanese Zen masters" ad amzn.to/2ZexAsyZen: Zen For Beginners a Beginners Guide to Mindfulness and Meditation by Daniel D'apollonio ★★★★ 1/2 "easy-to-follow steps guaranteed to help you bring the essence of Zen into your everyday life" ad amzn.to/2SLOQRB@Zer0Books Glad to hear it sold out. Here's to it happening again with this run. 🍻@Zer0Books Reminds me of Belters from the Expanse. They developed physical gestures in their language after being in space suits for generations. Guess we're kind of virtual space suits these days, #NFDB
1354:Until the early twentieth century, Australians and Americans would go to Japan and say the Japanese were lazy. Until the mid nineteenth century, the British would go to Germany and say that the Germans were too stupid, too individualistic and too emotional to develop their economies (Germany was not unified then) – the exact opposite of the stereotypical image that they have of the Germans today and exactly the sort of things that people now say about Africans. The Japanese and German cultures were transformed with economic development, as the demands of a highly organized industrial society made people behave in more disciplined, calculating and cooperative ways. In that sense, culture is more of an outcome, rather than a cause, of economic development. It is wrong to blame Africa’s (or any region’s or any country’s) underdevelopment on its culture. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1355:wife’s death. “I know what you are thinking, my prince, but I do not see how Rapp could have left America and put this together so quickly. Who would he find to be a suicide bomber?” “Maybe he blew himself up?” Rashid asked in a hopeful tone. Tayyib thought about that for a moment and then announced, “I have studied Rapp. The man would never commit suicide unless he had to. He would have simply shot Saeed.” “Then tell me why a fellow Muslim would want to kill Saeed?” “Maybe it wasn’t a Muslim.” Rashid frowned. “There is no such thing as a non-Muslim suicide bomber. Do you see any Jewish suicide bombers? Even the Irish during their war with the British never resorted to suicide bombings. The Japanese are the only other culture to employ the tactic in modern history, and I doubt the Japanese killed Saeed.” “I’ll grant that the timing looks bad, but I ~ Vince Flynn, #NFDB
1356:It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. ~ Trevanian, #NFDB
1357:To his mind there were four kinds of beautiful skin. The first he likened to porcelain: finely grained and flawless in sheen, but marked by a hardness and chill. The second he compared to snow: duller and more coarsely grained, with a deep whiteness and an inner warmth and softness that belied its cold surface. Next was what he called the textile look, what others called silken; this was the complexion most prized by Japanese women, yet it had no virtue in Mikamé’s eyes beyond a flat, smooth prettiness. To be supremely beautiful, he thought, a woman’s skin had to glow with the internal life-force of spring’s earliest buds unfolding naturally in the sun. But city women, too clever with makeup, lost that perishable, flowerlike beauty at a surprisingly early age—and rare indeed was the woman past twenty-five whose skin had kept the freshness of youth. ~ Fumiko Enchi, #NFDB
1358:For thousands of years, scarcely anyone left. Korea was the hermit kingdom, with its spiritual basis in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shamanism, until 1910, when it was annexed by Japan and colonized for thirty-five years thereafter, followed by the Korean War in 1950. Having been born and raised under these brutal colonizers, my paternal grandfather spoke fluent Japanese. Shortly before his death, in the mid-1980s, he came to stay with my family in Queens, where he befriended a young Japanese woman, a missionary from the Unification Church. When my father confronted him about his sudden interest in the cult, my grandfather answered that he didn’t care about the Moonies, he only enjoyed the chance to speak Japanese with his new friend. Like others from his generation, he suffered from a sort of Stockholm syndrome and missed the language of his oppressors. ~ Suki Kim, #NFDB
1359:This matter of the “love” of pets is of immense import because many, many people are capable of “loving” only pets and incapable of genuinely loving other human beings. Large numbers of American soldiers had idyllic marriages to German, Italian or Japanese “war brides” with whom they could not verbally communicate. But when their brides learned English, the marriages began to fall apart. The servicemen could then no longer project upon their wives their own thoughts, feelings, desires and goals and feel the same sense of closeness one feels with a pet. Instead, as their wives learned English, the men began to realize that these women had ideas, opinions and aims different from their own. As this happened, love began to grow for some; for most, perhaps, it ceased. The liberated woman is right to beware of the man who affectionately calls her his “pet. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
1360:A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
1361:Nothing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity, but words cannot voice his delight, for the eye has no tongue. Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind. It is this which makes a masterpiece something sacred. In the old days the veneration in which the Japanese held the work of the great artist was intense. The tea-masters guarded their treasures with religious secrecy, and it was often necessary to open a whole series of boxes, one within another, before reaching the shrine itself--the silken wrapping within whose soft folds lay the holy of holies. Rarely was the object exposed to view, and then only to the initiated. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1362:Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous. ~ Robert Higgs,#NFDB
1363:Anti-Conception
Could I unthink you,
little heart,
what would I do?
throw you out
with last night's garbage,
undo my own decisions,
my own flesh
& commit you to the void
again?
Fortunately,
it is not my problem.
You hold on, beating
like a little clock,
Swiss in your precision,
Japanese in your tenacity,
& already having
your own karma,
while I, with my halfhearted maternal urges,
my uncertainty that any creature
ever really creates
another (unless it be
herself) know you
as God's poem
& myself merely as publisher,
as midwife,
as impresario,
oh, even, if you will,
as loathèd producer
of your Grand Spectacle:
you are the star,
& like your humblest fan,
I wonder
(gazing at your image
on the screen)
who you really are.
10
~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
1364:So we have to make sure we stop it here," he said.
"Exactly. Well,you asked me to get you as close to the water as possible.I presume you have a plan?"
"My love,I always have a plan."
They heard footsteps rattling behind them and turned as Prometheus and Niten came hurrying up. They were both carrying fishing rods over their shoulders.The slender Japanese man grinned. "Do not ask him how much it cost to hire these," he said.
"How much?" Nicholas asked.
"Too much," Prometheus answered furiously. "I could have bought an entire fishing boat,or at least a very good fish dinner,for what it cost to rent them for a couple of hours," he grumbled. "Plus a deposit in case we don't bring them back."
"What's the plan?" Niten asked. He held out an empty bucket. "We can'nt really go fishing. We don't have bait."
"Oh,but we do." Nicholas smiled. "You are our bait. ~ Michael Scott,#NFDB
1365:By late 1940 the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo was sending secret messages to its U.S. embassy and various consulates requesting “utilization of our ‘Second Generations’ and resident nationals” to commit acts of espionage and to stir up antiwar feelings among “Negroes, communists, anti-Semites and labor union members.” The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reported that “a number of second-generation Japanese have been placed in airplane plants for intelligence purposes” and “will observe closely all shipments of airplanes and other war materials [from the West Coast] and report the amounts and destinations of such shipments.” The Japanese consulates were soon sending a series of detailed responses to the Tokyo authorities outlining almost every aspect of U.S. warplane production on the Pacific coast, as well as which warships were in harbor and which ones had sailed. ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
1366:Can o'Beans was to remark that a comparison between the American Cowpoke and, say, the Japanese samurai, left the cowboy looking rather shoddy. 'Before a samurai went into battle,' Can o' Beans was to say, 'he would burn incense in his helmet so that if his enemy took his head, he would find it pleasant to his nose. Cowboys, on the other hand, hardly ever bathed or changed their crusty clothing. If a samurai's enemy lost his sword, the samurai gave him his extra one so that the fight might continue in a manner honorable and fair. The cowboy's specialty was to shoot enemies in the back from behind a bush. Do you begin to see the difference?' Spoon and Dirty Sock would wonder how Can o' Beans knew so much about samurai. 'Oh, I sat on the shelf next to a box of imported rice crackers for over a month,' Can o' Beans would explain. 'One can learn a lot conversing with foreigners. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1367:Fumio to dinner. We look at old photos. I turn up one of [Nakano] Yuji at work—part-time laborer, standing there for forty years now.
I wondered why I still think so much about him, now that I have not seen him for decades, now that he is an old man, if even alive. Fumio said, “Because, he was the last Japanese.”
It’s true. Yuji had all of the old virtues—he saw a connection between himself and nature, the way things are. He believed in authority, though he was sly about evading it; was polite, decent, honest to the extent that he did not get caught; willing to do his best and allow himself to be much imposed on; fond of pleasure, and probably drank himself to death. And, more, he embodied an attitude now extinct—he accepted without bitterness, and made the most of what was left. I don’t know if this defines old-fashioned Japanese-ness, but it defines Yuji. ~ Donald Richie,#NFDB
1368:At birth, your baby can distinguish between the sounds of every language that has ever been invented. Professor Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, discovered this phenomenon.
She calls kids at this age “citizens of the world”. Chomsky puts it this way: We are not born with the capacity to speak a specific language. We are born with the capacity to speak any language.
Unfortunately, things don’t stay that way. By their first birthday, Kuhl found, babies can no longer distinguish between the sounds of every language on the planet. They can distinguish only between those to which they have been exposed in the past six months.
A Japanese baby not exposed to “rake” and “lake” during her second six months of life cannot distinguish between those two sounds by the time she is 1 year old. ~ John Medina,#NFDB
1369:From the 1950s onward, popular thinking on the link between Western lifestyles and cancer focused on industrialization and carcinogens in the environment—something Higginson himself argued against in the 1980s, noting that “only a very small part of the total cancer burden” could be laid on industrial chemicals. When cancer epidemiologists did systematic reviews of the data, they continued to conclude, as Higginson had, that some significant percentage of cancers had to be lifestyle- or diet-induced. Breast cancer may be the best example. Though it has never been the scourge among Japanese women living in Japan that it is among women in America, it takes only two generations in the United States before Japanese-Americans experience the same breast-cancer rates as any other ethnic group. This implies that something about the American lifestyle or diet is a cause of breast cancer, ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
1370:The world headquarters of Fukai Semiconductor was housed in a mammoth, sprawling building of glass, polished aluminum and native rock that seemed to be a hybrid design between traditfonal Japanese architecture and something off the drawing board of Frank Lloyd Wright, though there was almost nothing Western about the place. Situated along the shore of the bay, the massive structure rose in some places five stories above the water, each level cantilevered at a different angle thirty and sometimes fifty or sixty yards without apparent support. In other places the building was low, and followed the sinuously twisting shoreline as if it had grown out of the rock. About a half-mile north, still along the bay, the end of the main runway was marked by a cluster of hangars, a 747 jetliner with Fukai's stylized seagull emblem painted in blue on the tail, parked in front of one of them. ~ David Hagberg, #NFDB
1371:Japanese Lullaby
Sleep, little pigeon, and fold your wings,-Little blue pigeon with velvet eyes;
Sleep to the singing of mother-bird swinging-Swinging the nest where her little one lies.
Away out yonder I see a star,-Silvery star with a tinkling song;
To the soft dew falling I hear it calling-Calling and tinkling the night along.
In through the window a moonbeam comes,-Little gold moonbeam with misty wings;
All silently creeping, it asks, "Is he sleeping-Sleeping and dreaming while mother sings?"
Up from the sea there floats the sob
Of the waves that are breaking upon the shore,
As though they were groaning in anguish, and moaning-Bemoaning the ship that shall come no more.
But sleep, little pigeon, and fold your wings,-Little blue pigeon with mournful eyes;
Am I not singing?--see, I am swinging-Swinging the nest where my darling lies.
~ Eugene Field,#NFDB
1372:I sat down on the bench in front of the print and made some notes. “Katsushika Hokusai. 1760–1849. Japanese printmaker. Leading Japanese expert on Chinese painting. Master of the Ukiyo-e form. Nichiren Buddhist.” Later, at home, I Googled Hokusai. He died at eighty-nine, and sure enough, on his deathbed—still looking to penetrate deeper into his art—he had exclaimed, “If only heaven will give me just another ten years!… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.” Hokusai was a man who saw his work as a means to “penetrate to the essential nature” of things. And he appears to have succeeded. His work, a hundred and fifty years after his death, could reach right off a gallery wall and grab me in the gut. More than anything, I was intrigued by the quality of Hokusai’s passion for his work. He helped me see that a life devoted to dharma can be a deeply ardent life. ~ Stephen Cope, #NFDB
1373:By probing questions such as these, the Swiss watch company Swatch, for example, was able to arrive at a cost structure some 30 percent lower than any other watch company in the world. At the start, Nicolas Hayek, chairman of Swatch, set up a project team to determine the strategic price for the Swatch. At the time, cheap (about $75), high-precision quartz watches from Japan and Hong Kong were capturing the mass market. Swatch set the price at $40, a price at which people could buy multiple Swatches as fashion accessories. The low price left no profit margin for Japanese or Hong Kong–based companies to copy Swatch and undercut its price. Directed to sell the Swatch for that price and not a penny more, the Swatch project team worked backwards to arrive at the target cost, a process that involved determining the margin Swatch needed to support marketing and services and earn a profit. Given ~ W Chan Kim, #NFDB
1374:The road climbed higher into the mountains of Nikko National Park, the terraced farm fields giving way grudgingly to forests of tiny trees that seemed to be trimmed, the growth around them carefully cultivated. From a narrow defile the car was passed through a massive wooden gate that swung on a huge arch ornately carved with the figures of fierce dragons. From there a perfectly maintained road of crushed white gravel led up the valley to a broad forested ledge through which a narrow stream bubbled and plunged over the sheer edge. The view from the top was breathtaking. Perched on the far
edge was a traditionally styled Japanese house, low to the ground and rambling in every direction. Tiled roofs, rice-paper screens and walls, carved beams, courtyards, broad verandas, gardens, ponds, and ancient statues and figures gave the spot an unreal air, as if it were a setting in a fairy tale ~ David Hagberg,#NFDB
1375:He pulled the knitting away from her, throwing it in the grass, then sank down on his knees in front of her, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his head in her lap. He was shaking, she realized, and the tears were pouring down her face, onto him, as she stroked his long, silken hair and cried.
She didn't care what it sounded like—the hiccupping noises, the choking sobs.
Her own body was shaking, racked by the final release, and he sat back on his heels and pulled her out of the chair, into his arms, holding her so tightly that a weaker woman might break, whispering to her in Japanese, sweet, loving words, letting her cry.
She was a strong woman, and her tears, so long denied, only made her stronger.
His heart was pounding against hers, his hands firm and tender, pushing the hair away from her tear-drenched face. When he kissed her she couldn't breathe, and she didn't care. ~ Anne Stuart,#NFDB
1376:Dr. Ransome marked the exercises in the algebra textbook and gave him two strips of rice-paper bandage on which to solve the simultaneous equations. As he stood up, Dr. Ransome removed the three tomatoes from Jim's pocket. He laid them on the table by the wax tray.
'Did they come from the hospital garden?'
'Yes.' Jim gazed back frankly at Dr. Ransome. Recently he had begun to see him with a more adult eye. The long years of imprisonment, the constant disputes with the Japanese had made this young physician seem middle-aged. Dr. Ransome was often unsure of himself, as he was of Jim's theft.
'I have to give Basie something whenever I see him.'
'I know. It's a good thing that you're friends with Basie. He's a survivor, though survivors can be dangerous. Wars exist for people like Basie.' Dr. Ransome placed the tomatoes in Jim's hand. 'I want you to eat them, Jim. I'll get you something for Basie. ~ J G Ballard,#NFDB
1377:P R E S I D E N T Y O S H I D A’S T E N S P A R T A N R UlE S Hideo Yoshida’s quest for management excellence was no doubt driven by his visions for Japanese marketing and media, but also by an overall worry about Japan’s economic prospects after World War II. As a result, he developed a set of business and work principles, or rules, which he called the “Ten Spartan Rules”: difficult work.5. Once you begin a task, complete it. Never give up.6. Lead and set an example for your fellow workers.7. Set goals for yourself to ensure a constant sense of purpose.8. Move with confidence. It gives your work force and substance.9. At all times, challenge yourself to think creatively and find new solutions.10. When confrontation is necessary, don’t shy away from it. Confrontation is often necessary to achieve progress. These traditional work rules still guide Dentsu’s employees, and are carried around in their notebooks ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1378:Stalin’s position in east Asia was now rather good. If the Japanese meant to fight the United States for control of the Pacific, it was all but inconceivable that they would confront the Soviets in Siberia. Stalin no longer had to fear a two-front war. What was more, the Japanese attack was bound to bring the United States into the war—as an ally of the Soviet Union. By early 1942 the Americans had already engaged the Japanese in the Pacific. Soon American supply ships would reach Soviet Pacific ports, unhindered by Japanese submarines—since the Japanese were neutral in the Soviet-German war. A Red Army taking American supplies from the east was an entirely different foe than a Red Army concerned about a Japanese attack from the east. Stalin just had to exploit American aid, and encourage the Americans to open a second front in Europe. Then the Germans would be encircled, and the Soviet victory certain. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
1379:[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation.
Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to. ~ Alain de Botton,#NFDB
1380:However, one intriguing shift that suggests there are limits to automation was the recent decision by Toyota to systematically put working humans back into the manufacturing process. In quality and manufacturing on a mass scale, Toyota has been a global leader in automation technologies based on the corporate philosophy of kaizen (Japanese for “good change”) or continuous improvement. After pushing its automation processes toward lights-out manufacturing, the company realized that automated factories do not improve themselves. Once Toyota had extraordinary craftsmen that were known as Kami-sama, or “gods” who had the ability to make anything, according to Toyota president Akio Toyoda.49 The craftsmen also had the human ability to act creatively and thus improve the manufacturing process. Now, to add flexibility and creativity back into their factories, Toyota chose to restore a hundred “manual-intensive” workspaces. ~ John Markoff, #NFDB
1381:The prize item of the house is Jane’s small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whispers, which is something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex conversations, covering the full range of human emotions—surprise, enthusiasm, hearty endorsement, bitter disagreement—in a tone that sounds awfully like someone trying to have an orgasm quietly. I followed them from room to room, enthralled by their conversation, until I realized that I was becoming part of it, and that they were casting glances at me with something like unease, so I bowed apologetically and left them to admire an old fireplace with low moans of expressive rapture. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1382:On Hayao Miyazaki
I told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.
"We have a word for that in Japanese," he said, "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."
Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry?
"I don't think it's like the "pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb. ~ Roger Ebert,#NFDB
1383:Extended Family
Yet like grandfather
I bathe before the village crow
the dry chlorine water
my only Ganges
the naked Chicago bulb
a cousin of the Vedic sun
slap soap on my back
like father
and think
in proverbs
like me
I wipe myself dry
with an unwashed
Sears turkish towel
like mother
I hear faint morning song
(though here it sounds
Japanese)
and three clear strings
nextdoor
through kitchen
clatter
like my little daughter
I play shy
hand over crotch
my body not yet full
12
of thoughts novels
and children
I hold my peepee
like my little son
play garden hose
in and out
the bathtub
like my grandson
I look up
unborn
at myself
like my great
great-grandson
I am not yet
may never be
my future
dependent
on several
people
yet
to come
~ A. K. Ramanujan,#NFDB
1384:One famous Japanese haiku illustrates the state that Sid managed to discover in himself. It is one that Joseph Goldstein has long used to describe the unique attentional posture of bare attention: The old pond. A frog jumps in. Plop!2 Like so much else in Japanese art, the poem expresses the Buddhist emphasis on naked attention to the often overlooked details of everyday life. Yet, there is another level at which the poem may be read. Just as in the parable of the raft, the waters of the pond can represent the mind and the emotions. The frog jumping in becomes a thought or feeling arising in the mind or body, while “Plop!” represents the reverberations of that thought or feeling, unelaborated by the forces of reactivity. The entire poem comes to evoke the state of bare attention in its utter simplicity. ~ Mark Epstein, #NFDB
1385:One widespread stereotype about people in Japan is that they're exceptionally dedicated and hardworking, even though some Japanese people say they look like they're working harder than they really are. There is no doubt, though, about their ability to be completely absorbed in a task, or about their perseverance when there is a problem to be solved. One of the first words one learns when starting Japanese lessons is ganbaru, which means "to persevere" or "to stay firm by doing one's best." Japanese people often apply themselves to even the most basic tasks with an intensity that borders on obsession. We see this in all kinds of contexts, from the "retirees" taking meticulous care of their rice fields in the mountains on Nagano to the college students working the weekend shift in convenience stores known as kobinis. If you go to Japan, you'll experience this attention to detail firsthand in almost every transaction. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
1386:You cut me,” he said. His voice was pleasant. British. Very ordinary. He looked at his hand with critical interest. “It might be fatal.”
Tessa looked at him with wide eyes. “Are you the Magister?”
He tilted his hand to the side. Blood ran down it, spattering the floor. “Dear me, massive blood loss. Death could be imminent.”
“Are you the Magister?”
“Magister?” He looked mildly surprised by her vehemence. “That means ‘master’ in Latin, doesn’t it?”
“I…” Tessa was feeling increasingly as if she were trapped in a strange dream. “I suppose it does.”
“I’ve mastered many things in life. Navigating the streets of London, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms…”
Tessa stared.
“Alas,” he went on, “no one has ever actually referred to me as ‘the master’, or ‘the magister’, either. More’s the pity… ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
1387:Café Flore is packed, shimmering, every table filled. Bentley notices this with a grim satisfaction but Bentley feels lost. He’s still haunted by the movie Grease and obsessed with legs that he always felt were too skinny though no one else did and it never hampered his modeling career and he’s still not over a boy he met at a Styx concert in 1979 in a stadium somewhere in the Midwest, outside a town he has not been back to since he left it at eighteen, and that boy’s name was Cal, who pretended to be straight even though he initially fell for Bentley’s looks but Cal knew Bentley was emotionally crippled and the fact that Bentley didn’t believe in heaven didn’t make him more endearing so Cal drifted off and inevitably became head of programming at HBO for a year or two. Bentley sits down, already miked, and lights a cigarette. Next to them Japanese tourists study maps, occasionally snap photos. This is the establishing shot. ~ Bret Easton Ellis, #NFDB
1388:Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was laid waste to its very foundations.”2698 Lifton’s history professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
1389:As you run your hands over the cloth, you pour your energy into it. The Japanese word for healing is te-ate, which literally means “to apply hands.” The term originated prior to the development of modern medicine when people believed that placing one’s hand on an injury promoted healing. We know that gentle physical contact from a parent, such as holding hands, patting a child on the head, and hugging, has a calming effect on children. Likewise, a firm but gentle massage by human hands does much more to loosen knotted muscles than being pummeled by a massage machine. The energy that flows from the person’s hands into our skin seems to heal both body and soul. The same is true for clothing. When we take our clothes in our hands and fold them neatly, we are, I believe, transmitting energy, which has a positive effect on our clothes. Folding properly pulls the cloth taut and erases wrinkles, and makes the material stronger and more vibrant. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1390:This may sound like a terrible generalization but the Japanese language has taught me that a person's understanding of the world need not be so well articulated -- so rationally articulated -- the way it tends to be in Western languages. The Japanese language has the full potential to be logical and analytical, but it seems to me that it isn't its real business to be that way. At least, not the Japanese language we still use today. You can mix the present and the past tense. You don't have to specify whether something is singular or plural. You aren't always looking for a cogent progression of sentences; conjunctions such as "but," "and," and "so" are hence not all that important. Many Japanese people used to criticize their language for inhibiting rational thought. It was quite liberating to me when I realized that we can understand the world in different ways depending on the language we use. There isn't a right way or a wrong way. ~ Minae Mizumura, #NFDB
1391:He invited the Indian scholar Paramartha to come and set up a Translation Bureau for Buddhist texts, and the scholar stayed for twenty-three years. He invited the great Bodhidharma, the twenty-eighth patriarch after the Shakyamuni Buddha, to come from Kanchipuram in India, near the Temple of the Golden Lizard, but their meeting was disappointing. The Emperor asked Bodhidharma what merit he had accumulated by building monasteries and stupas in his kingdom. “No merit” was the reply. He asked what was the supreme meaning of sacred truth. “The expanse of emptiness. Nothing sacred.” Finally, the Emperor pointed at Bodhidharma and said, “Who is that before Us?” “Don’t know,” said Bodhidharma. The Emperor didn’t understand. So Bodhidharma left Ch’ien-k’ang and wandered until he came to the Shao-lin Monastery, where he sat motionless for nine years facing a wall, and then transmitted his teachings, the origin of Ch’an in China and Japanese Zen. ~ Eliot Weinberger, #NFDB
1392:I was utterly terrified—petrified—but I knew there had to be a Japanese sniper in a small fishing shack near the shore. He was firing in the other direction at Marines in another battalion, but I knew as soon as he picked off the people there—there was a window on our side—that he would start picking us off. And there was nobody else to go…and so I ran towards the shack and broke in and found myself in an empty room. There was a door which meant there was another room and the sniper was in that—and I just broke that down. I was just absolutely gripped by the fear that this man would expect me and would shoot me. But as it turned out he was in a sniper harness and he couldn’t turn around fast enough. He was entangled in the harness so I shot him with a .45 and I felt remorse and shame. I can remember whispering foolishly, “I’m sorry” and then just throwing up…I threw up all over myself. It was a betrayal of what I’d been taught since a child. ~ Dave Grossman, #NFDB
1393:Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I’m waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She’s probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer—equally sheer, skintight, and micro-short—and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There’s a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
1394:At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, "To Rachel, from Daddy." The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me - both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father's dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, "The only paradise is paradise lost. ~ Mira Bartok, #NFDB
1395:[Hmmm…Do you know who I was named after?]
I’d say Eva Perón.
—Eva’s from Puerto Rico, Vincent, not Argentina.
[I was named after a robot.]
—That is interesting.
—Oh yeah. You have his attention now.
[I was born on the day of the parade when the EDC was created. My parents were the biggest geeks ever, huge science-fiction fans. Themis was the greatest thing they’d ever seen. They wanted to name me after her, but they somehow thought everyone would start naming their kid Themis, so they named me after another big robot.]
A robot?
[Yes. Eva’s a common name in Spanish, but apparently, it’s also the name of a giant robot, from a Japanese anime they really liked. It’s old. I never saw it.]
—Eva is for Evangelion? That is so cool!
—Of course, Vincent knows all about it.
—Yeah! It’s awesome! But ours is bigger.
—Eva, I think you have a fan now.
—I…We have it on DVD, you know. ~ Sylvain Neuvel,#NFDB
1396:The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did—and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices. ~ Victor Davis Hanson, #NFDB
1397:A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout—I can’t waste my time with the likes of you!” His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your impertinence.” “That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell.” Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight. “And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.” The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agitated state illustrates the crucial difference between being caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. Socrates’s injunction “Know thyself” speaks to this keystone of emotional intelligence: awareness of one’s own feelings as they occur. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
1398:The main trend on the job market isn’t that we’re moving into entirely new professions. Rather, we’re crowding into those pieces of terrain in figure 2.2 that haven’t yet been submerged by the rising tide of technology! Figure 3.6 shows that this forms not a single island but a complex archipelago, with islets and atolls corresponding to all the valuable things that machines still can’t do as cheaply as humans can. This includes not only high-tech professions such as software development, but also a panoply of low-tech jobs leveraging our superior dexterity and social skills, ranging from massage therapy to acting. Might AI eclipse us at intellectual tasks so rapidly that the last remaining jobs will be in that low-tech category? A friend of mine recently joked with me that perhaps the very last profession will be the very first profession: prostitution. But then he mentioned this to a Japanese roboticist, who protested: “No, robots are very good at those things! ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
1399:While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.
Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably exemplified, the article said, in the collection of Mme. de Guermantes. Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. ~ Marcel Proust,#NFDB
1400:Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day. ~ Ray Bradbury,#NFDB
1401:facts matter a great deal. What a patient does for a living, what his background is, what level of education he has achieved…all of these issues must be addressed in great detail in order to put his complaints and his disease in the proper context. If I ask a man to take the square root of 100 and he cannot, I might take this as proof of a left-hemispheric brain tumor, unless I know that he has worked on a farm since childhood and never attended school. Likewise, I might find it normal that a patient could not tell me the current exchange rate of the pound in Japanese yen. But if I knew that person was a merchant banker, on the other hand, ignorance of this fact would indicate a grave illness indeed! Americans have grown so dependent upon their scanning toys that they fail to view the patient as a multidimensional person. To have the audacity to cut into a person’s brain without the slightest clue of his life, his occupation…I find that most simply appalling.” These ~ Frank T Vertosick Jr, #NFDB
1402:A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. The monk replied with scorn, "You're nothing but a lout - I can't waste my time with the likes of you!"
His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled "I could kill you for your impertinence."
"That," the monk calmly replied, "is hell."
Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.
"And that,"said the monk "is heaven."
The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agitated state illustrates the crucial difference between being caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. Socrates's injunction "Know thyself" speaks to the keystone of emotional intelligence: awareness of one's own feelings as they occur. ~ Daniel Goleman,#NFDB
1403:Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968, committed suicide in 1971. Two years earlier, in 1969, another great Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, ended his life in the same way. Since 1895 ,thirteen Japanese novelists and writers have committed suicide, including the author of the Rashomon, Ryunosuko Akutagawa, in 1927. That "continuous tragedy" of Japanese culture during 70 years coincides with the penetration of Western civilization and materialistic ideas into the traditional culture of Japan. Whatever it be, for the poets and the writers of tragedies, civilization will always have an inhuman face and be a threat to humanity. A year before his death, Kawabata wrote "men are separated from each other by a concrete wall that obstructs any circulation of love. Nature is smothered in the name of progress." In the novel The Snow Country, published in 1937 , Kawabata places man's loneliness and alienation in the modern world at the very focus of his reflections. ~ Alija Izetbegovi, #NFDB
1404:Once, in the supermarket, I bought a little can that had a Japanese woman painted on the side. Later, at home, I opened the can and saw inside it a piece of tuna fish. The woman seemed to have changed into a piece of fish during her long voyage. This surprise came on a Sunday: I had decided not to read any writing on Sundays. Instead I observed the people I saw on the street as though they were isolated letters. Sometimes two people sat down next to each other in a café, and thus, briefly, formed a word. Then they separated, in order to go off and form other words. There must have been a moment in which the combinations of these words formed, quite by chance, several sentenced in which I might have read this foreign city like a text. But I never discovered a single sentence in this city, only letters and sometimes a few words that had no direct connection to any "cultural content". These words now and then led me to open the wrapping paper on the outside, only to find different wrapping paper below. ~ Y ko Tawada, #NFDB
1405:The twentieth century’s first major discovery about vision came about, once again, because of war. Russia had long coveted a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean, so in 1904 the czar sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Manchuria and Korea to bully one away from the Japanese. These soldiers were armed with high-speed rifles whose tiny, quarter-inch bullets rocketed from the muzzle at fourteen hundred miles per hour. Fast enough to penetrate the skull but small enough to avoid messy shattering, these bullets made clean, precise wounds like worm tracks through an apple. Japanese soldiers who were shot through the back of the brain—through the vision centers, in the occipital lobe—often woke up to find themselves with tiny blind spots, as if they were wearing glasses spattered with black paint. Tatsuji Inouye, a Japanese ophthalmologist, had the uncomfortable job of calculating how much of a pension these speckled-blind soldiers should receive, based on the percentage of vision lost. Inouye could have gotten away ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1406:One of our favorite examples of the value of Nothing is an incident in the life of the Japanese emperor Hirohito. Now, being emperor in one of the most frantically Confucianist countries in the world is not necessarily all that relaxing. From early morning until late at night, practically every minute of the emperor's time is filled in with meetings, audiences, tours, inspections, and who-knows-what. And through a day so tightly scheduled that it would make a stone wall seem open by comparison, the emperor must glide, like a great ship sailing in a steady breeze.
In the middle of a particularly busy day, the emperor was driven to a meeting hall for an appointment of some kind. But when he arrived, there was no one there. The emperor walked into the middle of the great hall, stood silently for a moment, then bowed to the empty space. He turned to his assistants, a large smile on his face. "We must schedule more appointments like this," he told them. "I haven't enjoyed myself so much in a long time. ~ Benjamin Hoff,#NFDB
1407:When someone makes a spectacular ass of himself, it's always in a French restaurant, never a Japanese or Italian one. The French are the people who slap one another with gloves and wear scarves to cover their engorged hickies. My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that's confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we've done. Things like movies that stereotype the people of France as boors and petty snobs, and little remarks such as "We saved your ass in World War II." Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos were born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are "We're number two! ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1408:In this cosmic arena, Luo Ji faced not the fancy moves of Chinese sword fighting, resembling dance more than war; nor the flourishes of Western sword fighting, designed to show off the wielder’s skill; but the fatal blows of Japanese kenjutsu. Real Japanese sword fights often ended after a very brief struggle lasting no more than half a second to two seconds. By the time the swords had clashed but once, one side had already fallen in a pool of blood. But before this moment, the opponents stared at each other like statues, sometimes for as long as ten minutes. During this contest, the swordsman’s weapon wasn’t held by the hands, but by his heart. The heart-sword, transformed through the eyes into the gaze, stabbed into the depths of the enemy’s soul. The real winner was determined during this process: In the silence suspended between the two swordsmen, the blades of their spirits parried and stabbed as soundless claps of thunder. Before a single blow was struck, victory, defeat, life, and death had already been decided. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
1409:And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital "T," which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small "t," which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it's not because Japanese people now had a live in two temporalities. It's rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world—the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular. ~ Minae Mizumura, #NFDB
1410:For more than forty years frontal attacks had been abandoned on account of the severity of modern fire. In the Franco-German War the great German victories had been won by wide turning movements executed on one flank or the other by considerable forces. In the Russo-Japanese War this method was invariably pursued by the victors. Thus at Liao-yang it was General Kuroki’s army which turned the Russian left; and at Mukden General Nogi’s army brought specially from Port Arthur turned the Russian right. It was certain that frontal attacks unaccompanied by turning movements on the flank would be extremely costly and would probably fail. But now, in France and Flanders for the first time in recorded experience there were no flanks to turn. The turning movement, the oldest manœuvre in war, became impossible. Neutral territory or salt water barred all further extension of the Front, and the great armies lay glaring at each other at close quarters without any true idea of what to do next. It was in these circumstances that ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
1411:Out comes a gorgeous, fleshy wheel of foie gras, perched on its side like a monument grander than its actual two-inch height. Around it are its minions, smears of savory-sweet onion confit paste and garlic tendrils puffed like Rice Krispies. You slide your knife down, slowly at first. The wheel is murky, muddy, and before you know it, the knife is being sucked to the bottom of the plate as you watch the wheel unpeel from itself.
Out spills a green liquid, as mesmerizing as lava. Go on, take a forkful. Drag the finest, smoothest foie into the absolute essence of pea. Pick up a few pieces from the pool of accents. And taste. Put your fork down and wonder: how could this dish seem so pure and elemental, and yet have a flavor so electric, so challenging?
Bakushan, from the Japanese word bakku-shan. A girl who looks pretty from behind, but is ugly in the front.
This dish is not ugly by any means, but it offers that bit of shock, that moment of fear and excitement when the girl turns around and shows you the truth. ~ Jessica Tom,#NFDB
1412:Soap is a waste of time too. What good is soap in a zombie situation? Soap sometimes imagines himself trapped in his mother’s soap boutique. Zombies are coming out of the surf, dripping wet, hellishly hungry, always so fucking slow, shuffling hopelessly up through the sand of Manhattan Beach. Soap has barricaded himself in Float with his mother and some blond Japanese tourists with surfboards. “Do something, sweetheart!” his mother implores. So Sweetheart throws water all over the floor. There’s the surfboards, a baseball bat under the counter, some rolls of quarters, and a swordfish mounted up on the wall, but Sweetheart decides the cash register is best for bashing. He tells the Japanese tourists to get down on their hands and knees and rub soap all over the floor. When the zombies finally find a way into Float, his mother and the tourists can hide behind the counter. The zombies will slip all over the floor and Sweetheart will bash them in the head with the cash register. It will be just like a Busby Berkeley zombie musical. ~ Kelly Link, #NFDB
1413:Based on telescope observations of the solar system, astronomers now estimate that there are at least one hundred thousand Earth orbit–crossing asteroids comparable in size to the one that finished off the ancient dinosaurs. If any one of these hit our planet this afternoon, that would be the end of everything we know. We as a society have an opportunity. We could direct a small fraction of our intellect and treasure to identify the dangerous objects and then build a spacecraft capable of nudging one of these things safely off of a collision course. I’m talking about giving certain line items priority in, say, the NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Roscosmos, China National Space Agency, and JAXA (Japanese Exploration Agency) budgets. Detecting every single seriously dangerous object out there is perhaps a billion-dollar project. Put another way, it would cost the amount of money that the United States government spends every two hours. A two-hour investment could save all of humankind from the most unpleasant form of global change. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
1414:Bond closed his eyes and waited for the pain. He knew that the beginning of torture is the worst. There is a parabola of agony. A crescendo leading up to a peak and then the nerves are blunted and react progressively less until unconsciousness and death. All he could do was to pray for the peak, pray that his spirit would hold out so long and then accept the long free-wheel down to the final blackout. He had been told by colleagues who had survived torture by the Germans and the Japanese that towards the end there came a wonderful period of warmth and languor leading into a sort of sexual twilight where pain turned to pleasure and where hatred and fear of the torturers turned to a masochistic infatuation. It was the supreme test of will, he had learnt, to avoid showing this form of punch-drunkenness. Directly it was suspected they would either kill you at once and save themselves further useless effort, or let you recover sufficiently so that your nerves had crept back to the other side of the parabola. Then they would start again. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
1415:A woman was bargaining with the gardener for a piece of vine, half as big as her finger, for her miniature Japanese garden. It was just what she wanted to climb up the stone in her dish. I looked with wonder on the Japanese appreciation of all small things in nature. Is it because their country, beautifully and theatrically mountainous, hardly ever allows a long vista, letting them always see things at close range? Or have her strange and lovely mists some part in teaching them to see, falling often like a backdrop behind a single pine, separating it from the rest of the world? Or have the Japanese, from generations spent in one-story paper houses, learned a language, an alphabet of beauty in nature, that we, in our houses of brick and stone, have shut out? Or is it, again, only because they are always artists and see more than we do?
If only I could stay here long enough, I would learn to see too. And after minutely watching the surface of things I would learn to see below the surface. I would see the essence of a thing. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh,#NFDB
1416:I must tell you something about necks in Japan, if you don't know it; namely, that Japanese men, as a rule, feel about a woman's neck and throat the same way that men in the West might feel about a woman's legs. This is why geisha wear the collars of their kimono so low in the back that the first few bumps of the spine are visible; I suppose it's like a woman in Paris wearing a short skirt. Auntie painted onto the back of Hatsumomo's neck a design called sanbon-ashi-"three legs." It makes a very dramatic picture, for you feel as if you're
looking at the bare skin of the neck through little tapering points of a white fence. It was years before I understood the erotic effect it has on men; but in a way, it's like a woman peering out from between her fingers. In fact, a geisha leaves a tiny margin of skin bare all around the hairline, causing her makeup to look even more artificial, something like a mask worn in Noh drama. When a man sits beside her and sees her makeup like a mask, he becomes that much more aware of the bare skin beneath. ~ Arthur Golden,#NFDB
1417:At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower's instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually assured destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness.
Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world's military budget, a lot of others aren't pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn't it feel like that?
Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you're obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? The geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he's lost all sense of national interest. ~ Mark Steyn,#NFDB
1418:Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
1419:Ga’n git ‘em, marras! Remember Arroyo!”
“Booger Arroyo!” roared Grandarse, and the corporal pulled himself up into a sitting position, and as we swung past he was trying to sing, in a harsh unmusical croak.
Aye, Ah ken John Peel an’ Ruby too,
Ranter an’ Ringwood, Bellman an’ True
From a find to a check, from a check to a view
From a view to a death in the morning!
He was a romantic, that one, but whoever he was I’m grateful to him, for I can say I have heard the regimental march sung, and the regimental war cry shouted, as we went in under Japanese fire. I don’t know how many casualties we took at that point – seven dead and thirty-three wounded was the count at the end of the day – but I do know that the companies never stopped or even broke stride; they “kept ga’n”, and I must be a bit of a romantic, too, I suppose, for whenever I think back on those few minutes when the whizz-bangs caught us, and see again those unfaltering green lines swinging steadily on, one word comes into my Scottish head: Englishmen. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,#NFDB
1420:For Japanese people before 1868, Europeans were little more than curious beasts, strange and incomprehensible. Then, after the Meiji Restoration, everything changed. Along with European science and technology, European art flooded into Japan, all forms of it representing themselves as the universal—and most advanced—model. The same was true of novels. The Japanese, with characteristic diligence, began to read masterpieces of European literature, first in the original and then in translation. And such is the power of literature that through the act of reading, little by little the Japanese came to live the lives of Europeans as if they were their own. They began to live the ambitions of Julien Sorel, the happiness of Jane Eyre, the sufferings of young Werther, and the despair of Anna Karenina as if they were their own. They thus began living a new temporality—that which flows in the West, dictated by the Gregorian calendar, marked by major historical events in the West. And by so doing, they eventually joined what the Europeans called "humanity. ~ Minae Mizumura, #NFDB
1421:He's on to sashimi now, fanning and curling slices of snapper and fugu into white roses on his cutting board. Before Toshio can plate the slices, Shunichi reaches over and calmly replaces the serving plate his son has chosen with an Edo-era ceramic rectangle more to his liking.
Three pieces of tempura- shrimp, eggplant, new onion- emerge hissing and golden from the black iron pot in the corner, and Toshio arranges them on small plates with wedges of Japanese lime. Before the tempura goes out, Shunichi sneaks in a few extra granules of salt while Toshio's not looking.
By now Dad is shadowing his son's every move. As Toshio waves a thin plank of sea cucumber eggs over the charcoal fire, his dad leans gently over his shoulder. "Be careful. You don't want to cook it. You just want to release its aroma."
Toshio places a fried silverfish spine on a craggy ceramic plate, tucks grated yuzu and sansho flowers into its ribs, then lays a sliver of the dried eggs over the top. The bones shatter like a potato chip, and the sea cucumber detonates in my mouth. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1422:The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1423:Late, going home, I pass a group of squatting high schoolers. One of the boys, obviously seeking to impress the girls, says that foreigners are funny (okashii no yo). The sight of me has prompted the remark and he is, like everyone else, unaware that some foreigners speak Japanese. It is thus not a provocative remark, but an observation he might have made of a passing dog, in reference to dogs in general.
I am not offended by the remark (it is scarcely personal), but I am interested that the remark was made at all. He made it because he wanted to assert their feeling of being in a group. By defining those outside this group as funny, he strengthened their group feeling of not being funny. This made everyone feel good. And for so long as a feel-good grouping is necessary, we will have xenophobia, racism, and all the rest. The only solution is to dissolve the pleasures of groupery.
Had I become angry, felt slighted, outraged, etc., I would have become as culpable as they, for I would have brought my own feelings of group (as a foreigner) to strive against theirs. ~ Donald Richie,#NFDB
1424:They walked in silence through the little streets of Chinatown. Women from all over the world smiled at them from open windows, stood on the doorsteps inviting them in. Some of the rooms were exposed to the street. Only a curtain concealed the beds. One could see couples embracing. There were Syrian women wearing their native costume, Arabian women with jewelry covering their half-naked bodies, Japanese and Chinese women beckoning slyly, big African women squatting in circles, chatting together. One house was filled with French whores wearing short pink chemises and knitting and sewing as if they were at home. They always hailed the passers-by with promises of specialities. The houses were small, dimly lit, dusty, foggy with smoke, filled with dusky voices, the murmurs of drunkards, of lovemaking. The Chinese adorned the setting and made it more confused with screens and curtains, lanterns, burning incense, Buddhas of gold. It was a maze of jewels, paper flowers, silk hangings, and rugs, with women as varied as the designs and colors, inviting men who passed by to sleep with them. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
1425:HAPPENING APART FROM WHAT’S HAPPENING AROUND IT There is a vividness to eleven years of love because it is over. A clarity of Greece now because I live in Manhattan or New England. If what is happening is part of what’s going on around what’s occurring, it is impossible to know what is truly happening. If love is part of the passion, part of the fine food or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not clear what the love is. When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, “What is the sound of the waterfall?” “Silence,” he finally told me. The stillness I did not notice until the sound of water falling made apparent the silence I had been hearing long before. I ask myself what is the sound of women? What is the word for that still thing I have hunted inside them for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy, the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper down where a woman’s heart is holding its breath, where something very far away in that body is becoming something we don’t have a name for. ~ Jack Gilbert, #NFDB
1426:Consistency
Should painter attach to a fair human head
The thick, turgid neck of a stallion,
Or depict a spruce lass with the tail of a bass,
I am sure you would guy the rapscallion.
Believe me, dear Pisos, that just such a freak
Is the crude and preposterous poem
Which merely abounds in a torrent of sounds,
With no depth of reason below 'em.
'T is all very well to give license to art,-The wisdom of license defend I;
But the line should be drawn at the fripperish spawn
Of a mere _cacoethes scribendi_.
It is too much the fashion to strain at effects,-Yes, that's what's the matter with Hannah!
Our popular taste, by the tyros debased,
Paints each barnyard a grove of Diana!
Should a patron require you to paint a marine,
Would you work in some trees with their barks on?
When his strict orders are for a Japanese jar,
Would you give him a pitcher like Clarkson?
Now, this is my moral: Compose what you may,
And Fame will be ever far distant
Unless you combine with a simple design
A treatment in toto consistent.
~ Eugene Field,#NFDB
1427:Sunshine Through A Cobwebbed Window
What charm is yours, you faded old-world tapestries,
Of outworn, childish mysteries,
Vague pageants woven on a web of dream!
And we, pushing and fighting in the turbid stream
Of modern life, find solace in your tarnished broideries.
Old lichened halls, sun-shaded by huge cedar-trees,
The layered branches horizontal stretched, like Japanese
Dark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a sky
Of faintest colour, where the gothic spires fly
And sway like masts, against a shifting breeze.
Worm-eaten pages, clasped in old brown vellum, shrunk
From over-handling, by some anxious monk.
Or Virgin's Hours, bright with gold and graven
With flowers, and rare birds, and all the Saints of Heaven,
And Noah's ark stuck on Ararat, when all the world had sunk.
They soothe us like a song, heard in a garden, sung
By youthful minstrels, on the moonlight flung
In cadences and falls, to ease a queen,
Widowed and childless, cowering in a screen
Of myrtles, whose life hangs with all its threads unstrung.
~ Amy Lowell,#NFDB
1428:And he was introduced to Loki, the family’s hairless cat.
“The kids wanted another pet,” Becky explained as Felix stared in horror at the creature beside him. “But with Polly’s allergies . . .”
“You are lying to me. You borrowed this creature from a zoo to play a prank on me. This isn’t even really a cat, is it? This is some sort of rat and opossum hybrid. This is a lifelike Japanese robot that can dance to disco music.”
“Funny. They’re called sphinx cats. Come on, feel her skin. Like peach fuzz, right? Isn’t she sweet? Give her a good rub. She’s very affectionate.”
“Ah-ha, yes, isn’t that just . . . er, what is coating my hands?”
“It’s . . . it’s like a body wax. I should’ve bathed her before you came. The hairless cats, they ooze this waxy stuff to protect their skin. ’Cause they don’t have hair. To protect them. So the waxy ooze helps. You see.”
Felix stared at her for several seconds, his hands held up like a doctor about to perform surgery.
“I’m going to wash my hands now. And I’m going to try very hard not to run out of this house screaming. ~ Shannon Hale,#NFDB
1429:To understand how seriously the people of Noto take the concept of waste, consider the fugu dilemma. Japanese blowfish, best known for its high toxicity, has been a staple of Noto cuisine for hundreds of years. During the late Meiji and early Edo periods, local cooks in Noto began to address a growing concern with fugu fabrication; namely, how to make use of the fish's deadly ovaries. Pregnant with enough poison to kill up to twenty people, the ovaries- like the toxic liver- had always been disposed of, but the cooks of Noto finally had enough of the waste and set out to crack the code of the toxic reproductive organs. Thus ensued a long, perilous period of experimentation. Locals rubbed ovaries in salt, then in nukamiso, a paste made from rice bran, and left them to ferment. Taste-testing the not-quite-detoxified fugu ovary was a lethal but necessary part of the process, and many years and many lives later, they arrived at a recipe that transformed the ovaries from a deadly disposable into an intensely flavored staple. Today pickled fugu ovaries remain one of Noto's most treasured delicacies. ~ Matt Goulding, #NFDB
1430:In the same way both Lincoln and the Japanese regard people. These are also a kind of currency. A man is worth what he does. Lincoln upon hearing a new name asks, “What does he do?” Almost never, “What has he done?” Much more often, “What does he want to do?” He invests in people—as do the Japanese, and just as freely, just as openly. People are currency. They pay dividends. Both Lincoln and the Japanese pay high dividends too. The resulting relationship is one of nature’s happiest—symbiosis.
Flesh may dazzle, wit may seduce, but not for long. Infatuation over in a matter of minutes, Lincoln wants to know, “Now, what is it that you can do best?” He wants to know because then, to protect his investment, he will put you on the proper road, help you achieve your potential. Often in his own country Lincoln is misunderstood. They do not comprehend that there are rewards for accomplishment but that there is no sympathy for failure.
Japan understands well. This most pragmatic of people do not count hopes or intentions as accomplishments. A man is what he does. After his death, he is what he has done. ~ Donald Richie,#NFDB
1431:In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, “not know mind.” To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it. When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality—a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back upon wistfully.) But when that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don’t want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but I believe it is a part of our nature that should be resisted. By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
1432:Four hours later Liv wakes in a box room with an Arsenal duet cover and a head that thumps so hard she has to reach up a hand to check she isn't being assaulted. She blinks, stares blearily at the little Japanese cartoon creatures on the wall opposite and lets her mind slowly bring together the pieces of information from the previous night.
Stolen bag...she closes her eyes. Oh, no.
Strange bed...she has no keys. Oh, God she has no keys. And no money. She attempts to move, and pain slices through her head so that she almost yelps.
And then she remembers the man. Pete? Paul? She sees herself walking through deserted streets in the early hours. And then she sees herself lurching forward to kiss him, his own polite retreat.
"You are delicious..."
"Oh, no," she says softly, then puts her hands over her eyes.
"Oh, I didn't..."
She sits up and moves to the side of the bed, noticing a small yellow plastic car near his right foot. Then, when she hears the sound of a door opening, the shower starting up next door, Liv grabs her shoes and her jacket and lets herself out of the flat into the cacophonous daylight. ~ Jojo Moyes,#NFDB
1433:I know Dad killed himself because of me. Mom thinks that his recent jail stint tipped him over the edge, that his many chemical imbalances caught up with him. Now I keep searching for happiness so I don’t end up like he did. I learn about this town called Happy in Texas and think about how that must be the greatest place to live. I teach myself how to say and read and write happy in Spanish, German, Italian, and even Japanese but I would have to draw that last one out. I discover the happiest animal in the world, the quokka. He’s a cheeky little bastard that’s always smiling. But it’s not enough. The memories are still rattling around my head, twisting into me like a knife. I don’t want to wait around to see what comes next for me in this tragic story I’m living. I open up one of my father’s unused razors and cut into my wrist like he did, slit in a curve until it smiles so everyone will know I died for happiness. I was expecting relief but instead it’s the saddest pain I’ve ever experienced. I never once stop feeling empty or unworthy of anyone’s rescue, not even when the thin line on my wrist makes everything go red. I ~ Adam Silvera, #NFDB
1434:At the front of Sushi Nozawa is a mean woman. When I asked Mom why the woman is so angry, Mom said it’s because she’s Japanese and that it’s cultural. The woman at school who serves lunch is also mean but she is not Japanese. Maybe it’s just serving food that makes people angry.
I understand why the people who work here are so angry. I guess it’s like working at a gas station, but instead of cars, they have to fill up people. And people eat slowly and talk about their stupid lives at the table and make each other laugh, but when the waiters come by, the people at the table stop laughing and become quiet like they don’t want to let anyone else know about their great jokes. And if the waiters talk about their own lives, they’re not allowed to talk about how bad it is, only how good it is, like, “I’m doing great, how are you?” And if they say something truthful like, “I’m doing terrible, I’m a waiter here,” they will probably get fired and then they will be even worse. So it’s probably always a good idea to talk about things happily. But sometimes that’s impossible. That’s why I’m giving Sushi Nozawa 16 out of 2000 stars. ~ Jesse Eisenberg,#NFDB
1435:During forced exercise one day, Louie fell into step with William Harris, a twenty-five-year-old marine officer, the son of marine general Field Harris. Tall and dignified, with a face cut in hard lines, Harris had been captured in the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942. With another American,* he had escaped and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-hour swim across Manila Bay, kicking through a downpour in darkness as fish bit him. Dragging himself ashore on the Japanese-occupied Bataan Peninsula, he had begun a run for China, hiking through jungles and over mountains, navigating the coast in boats donated by sympathetic Filipinos, hitching rides on burros, and surviving in part by eating ants. He had joined a Filipino guerrilla band, but when he had heard of the American landing at Guadalcanal, the marine in him had called. Making a dash by boat toward Australia in hopes of rejoining his unit, he had gotten as far as the Indonesian island of Morotai before his journey ended. Civilians had turned him in to the Japanese, who had discovered that he was a general’s son and sent him to Ofuna. Even here, he was itching to escape. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1436:But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes. ~ Tina Fey, #NFDB
1437:When God created man,” Chiun had said, “he put a lump of clay in the oven. And when he took it out, he said, ‘It is underdone. This is no good. I have created a white man.’ Then he put another lump of clay in the oven, and to compensate for his error, he left it in longer. When he took it out, he said, ‘Oh, I have failed again. I have left it in too long. This is no good. I have created a black man.’ And then he put another lump of clay in the oven, this time a superior clay, molded with more care and love and integrity, and when he took it out, he said: ‘Oh, I have done it just right. I have created the yellow man.’ “And then to this man in whom he was pleased he gave a mind. To the Chinese, he gave lust and dishonesty. To the Japanese, he gave arrogance and greed. To the Koreans, he gave honesty, courage, integrity, discipline, beauty of thought, heart and wisdom. And because he had given them so much, he said, ‘I shall also give them poverty and conquerors because they have been given more already than any other man on earth. They are truly the perfect people in my sight, and in their wonderfulness, I am well pleased.’” Remo ~ Warren Murphy, #NFDB
1438:Families were bound by the oyaku-shinju (parent-child death pact). The were obligated to take their own lives and those of their kin by any means at hand. Cyanide capsules were given out until there were no more. Soldiers offered to shoot civilians in turn and did not always wait to be invited. In a crowded cave, one grenade might do the work of twenty bullets. Sword-wielding officers beheaded dozens of willing victims. There were reports of children forming into a circle and tossing a live hand-grenade, one to another, until it exploded and killed them all. In cave filled with Japanese soldiers and civilians, Yamauchi recalled, a sergeant ordered mothers to keep their infants quiet, and when they were unable to do so, he told them "Kill them yourself or I'll order my men to do it." Several mothers obeyed. As the Japanese perimeter receded toward the island's northern terminus at Marpi Point, civilians who had thus far resisted the suicide order were forced back to the edge of a cliff that dropped several hundred feet onto a rocky shore. In a harrowing finale, many thousands of Japanese men, women and children took that fateful last step. ~ Ian W Toll, #NFDB
1439:Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you. PSALM 9:10 SEPTEMBER 29 A missionary’s wife in central China during World War II knew the Japanese were approaching her city. She was with her baby girl, two months old, and her son, just over a year old. Her husband had been taken to a hospital, himself ill. He was one hundred and fifteen miles away and would not be back for perhaps a month. The poor woman was filled with fear—she was alone and unprotected, in bitter January weather. When morning came, she realized that she was without food for her children. She pulled off the calendar page. That day’s verse stated simply: “So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children” (Genesis 50:21). There was a rap at the door. “We knew you would be hungry,” said a longtime neighbor, “and you didn’t know how to milk the goats. So I have milked your goats. Here is milk for your children.” Will you try to explain this away, handle it on an intellectual basis as just pure coincidence? When you come right down to it, what is coincidence? It is an act of God in the midst of time. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
1440:The Animals are Leaving
One by one, like guests at a late party
They shake our hands and step into the dark:
Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling.
One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes,
They leap the fence and disappear into the woods:
Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl;
Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.
One by one, like grade school friends,
They move away and fade out of memory:
Portuguese ibex; Blue buck; Auroch; Oregon bison;
Spanish imperial eagle; Japanese wolf; Hawksbill
Sea turtle; Cape lion; Heath hen; Raiatea thrush.
One by one, like children at a fire drill, they march outside,
And keep marching, though teachers cry, "Come back!"
Waved albatross; White-bearded spider monkey;
Pygmy chimpanzee; Australian night parrot;
Turquoise parakeet; Indian cheetah; Korean tiger;
Eastern harbor seal ; Ceylon elephant ; Great Indian rhinoceros.
One by one, like actors in a play that ran for years
And wowed the world, they link their hands and bow
Before the curtain falls.
~ Charles Harper Webb,#NFDB
1441:Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second Language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a lefty nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
1442:Leo Rubinfein over to ask questions for his book. He asked me what I most regretted, having lived half a century here, and witnessed all the change. I said that I most regretted the loss of a kind of symbiosis between people and where they lived, a kind of agreement to respect each other. I again mention the paradigm—the builders make a hole in their wall to accommodate the limb of a tree. No more now. It is more expensive to make a hole than it is to cut down the tree, just as it is cheaper to raze than to restore. And since the environment is now so different, the people are different. This is symbiotic, too, degraded environment makes degraded people who make more degraded environment.
And with it I regret the loss of a kind of curiosity. People used to be curious about each other. Now they have their hands full with their convenient and portable environment—Walkman in the ears, manga for the eyes, and the portable phone (which now contains their lives) in the palm of their hands. Many Japanese no longer look at each other, or those they talk to—those on that select menu of known voices on their phones they cannot see. These robots, I regret. ~ Donald Richie,#NFDB
1443:I did it again, Robert Childan informed himself. Impossible to avoid the topic. Because it's everywhere, in a book I happen to pick up or a record collection, in these bone napkin rings -- loot piled up by the conquerors. Pillage from my people.
Face facts. I'm trying to pretend that the Japanese and I are alike. But observe: even when I burst out as to my gratification that they won the war, that my nation is lost -- there's still no common ground. What words mean to me is a sharp contrast vis-à-vis them. Their brains are different. Souls likewise. Witness them drinking from English bone china cups, eating with U.S. silver, listening to Negro style of music. It's all on the surface. Advantage of wealth and power makes this available to them, but it's ersatz as the day is long.
Even the I Ching, which they've forced down our throats; it's Chinese. Borrowed from way back when. Whom are they fooling? Themselves? Pilfer customs right and left, wear, eat, talk, walk, as for instance consuming with gusto baked potato served with sour cream and chives, old-fashioned American dish added to their haul. But nobody fooled, I can tell you; me least of all. ~ Philip K Dick,#NFDB
1444:Rice is sacred to the Japanese people," he says. "We eat it at every meal, yet we never get tired of it." He points out that the word for rice in Japanese, gohan, is the same as the word for meal.
When he finally lifts the lid of the first rice cooker, releasing a dramatic gasp of starchy steam, the entire restaurant looks ready to wave their white napkins in exuberant applause.
The rice is served with a single anchovy painstakingly smoked over a charcoal fire. Below the rice, a nest of lightly grilled matsutake mushrooms; on top, an orange slice of compressed fish roe. Together, an intense wave of umami to fortify the tender grains of rice.
Next comes okoge, the crispy rice from the bottom of the pan, served with crunchy flakes of sea salt and oil made from the outside kernel of the rice, spiked with spicy sansho pepper. For the finale, an island of crisp rice with wild herbs and broth from the cooked rice, a moving rendition of chazuke, Japanese rice-and-tea soup. It's a husk-to-heart exposé on rice, striking in both its simplicity and its soul-warming deliciousness- the standard by which all rice I ever eat will be judged. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1445:New England farmers did not think of war as a game, or a feudal ritual, or an instrument of state power, or a bloodsport for bored country gentlemen. They did not regard the pursuit of arms as a noble profession. In 1775, many men of Massachusetts had been to war. They knew its horrors from personal experience. With a few exceptions, they thought of fighting as a dirty business that had to be done from time to time if good men were to survive in a world of evil. The New England colonies were among the first states in the world to recognize the right of conscientous objection to military service, and among the few to respect that right even in moments of mortal peril. But most New Englanders were not pacifists themselves. Once committed to what they regarded as a just and necessary war, these sons of Puritans hardened their hearts and became the most implacable of foes. Their many enemies who lived by a warrior-ethic always underestimated them, as a long parade of Indian braves, French aristocrats, British Regulars, Southern planters, German fascists, Japanese militarists, Marxist ideologues, and Arab adventurers have invariably discovered to their heavy cost. ~ David Hackett Fischer, #NFDB
1446:Who cares? If you people want to call me Zainichi, go ahead! You Japanese are scared of me. Can't feel safe unless you categorize and label it, right? But you're wrong. You know what-- I'm a lion. A lion has no idea he's a lion. It's just a random name that you people gave him so you can feel like you know all about him. See what happens when you try to get closer, calling my name. I'll pounce on your carotid artery and tear you to shreds. You understand? As long as you call me Zainichi, you're always going to be my victim. I'm not Zainichi or South Korean or North Korean or Mongoloid. Quit forcing me into those narrow categories. I'm me! Wait, I don't even want to be me anymore. I want to be free from having to be me. I'll go anywhere to find whatever thing will let me forget who I am. And if that thing isn't here. I'll get out of this country, which is what you wanted anyway. You can't do that, can you? No, you'll all die, tied down by your ideas about country, land, titles, customs, traditions, and culture. Well, that's too bad. I never had any of that stuff, so I'm free to go anywhere! Jealous? Say you're jealous! Damn it, what am I saying? Damn it, damn it.... ~ Kazuki Kaneshiro, #NFDB
1447:Then Chameroy spoke. 'You always put the blame on opium, but as I see it the case of Freneuse is much more complicated. Him, an invalid? No - a character from the tales of Hoffmann! Have you never taken the trouble to look at him carefully? That pallor of decay; the twitching of his bony hands, more Japanese than chrysanthemums; the arabesque profile; that vampiric emaciation - has all of that never given you cause to reflect? In spite of his supple body and his callow face Freneuse is a hundred thousand years old. That man has lived before, in ancient times under the reigns of Heliogabalus, Alexander IV and the last of the Valois. What am I saying? That man is Henri III himself. I have in my library an edition of Ronsard - a rare edition, bound in pigskin with metal trimmings - which contains a portrait of Henri engraved on vellum. One of these nights I will bring the volume here to show you, and you may judge for yourselves. Apart from the ruff, the doublet and the earrings, you would believe that you were looking at the Due de Freneuse. As far as I'm concerned, his presence here inevitably makes me ill - and so long as he is present, there is such an oppression, such a heaviness... ~ Jean Lorrain, #NFDB
1448:Even supermotivated people who’re working to exhaustion may not be doing deliberate practice. For instance, when a Japanese rowing team invited Olympic gold medalist Mads Rasmussen to come visit, he was shocked at how many hours of practice their athletes were logging. It’s not hours of brute-force exhaustion you’re after, he told them. It’s high-quality, thoughtful training goals pursued, just as Ericsson’s research has shown, for just a few hours a day, tops. Noa Kageyama, a performance psychologist on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music, says he’s been playing the violin since he was two but didn’t really start practicing deliberately until he was twenty-two. Why not? There was no lack of motivation—at one point, young Noa was taking lessons with four different teachers and, literally, commuting to three different cities to work with them all. Really, the problem was just that Noa didn’t know better. Once he discovered there was an actual science of practice—an approach that would improve his skills more efficiently—both the quality of his practice and his satisfaction with his progress skyrocketed. He’s now devoted himself to sharing that knowledge with other musicians. ~ Angela Duckworth, #NFDB
1449:The couple in the Skyline came to mind. Why did I have this fixation on them? Well, what else did I have to think about? By now, the two of them might be snoozing away in bed, or maybe pushing into commuter trains. They could be flat character sketches for a TV treatment: Japanese woman marries Frenchman while studying abroad; husband has traffic accident and becomes paraplegic. Woman tires of life in Paris, leaves husband, and returns to Tokyo, where she works in Belgian or Swiss embassy. Silver bracelets, a memento from her husband. Cut to beach scene in Nice: woman with the bracelets on left wrist. Woman takes bath, makes love, silver bracelets always on left wrist. Cut: enter Japanese man, veteran of student occupation of Yasuda Hall, wearing tinted glasses like lead in Ashes and Diamonds. A top TV director, he is haunted by dreams of tear gas, by memories of his wife who slit her wrist five years earlier. Cut (for what it's worth, this script has a lot of jump cuts): he sees the bracelets on woman's left wrist, flashes back to wife's bloodied wrist. So he asks woman: could she switch bracelets to her right wrist?
"I refuse," she says. "I wear my bracelets on my left wrist. ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
1450:So, Rachel, what do you want to get?" he asks, even though we still haven't opened the menu.
I throw open the cover and quickly scan my choices. I am hungry for everything. I want to taste their teriyaki sauce and see how they've worked yuzu into a salad dressing and sample their tempura batter. I want to sit up at the sushi bar and chat with the chef about different fillets of raw fish. And I want to be on a date with a guy who wants to hear the chef's answers too. Still, Rob Zuckerman is nice, and he's obviously smart and successful, and he has a full head of brown hair (one cannot discount that full head of hair). So I close my menu and ask him to suggest a few things since he has obviously been here before.
"Why don't we start with a bowl of edamame and an order of tatsuta-age chicken?"
"I made that this week," I exclaim, excited that he'd pick that off the menu since I was eyeing it. "I'm learning how to cook and it's actually really easy. You just marinate the chicken and then coat it in potato starch before you fry it." I notice that Rob is staring at me as if I've just started reciting the recipe in Japanese. "I can't believe I've ordered it all these years when I could make it at home. ~ Melissa Ford,#NFDB
1451:Grinning, she hovered over him. Then, like a fist closing around a doorknob, her grin closed around him. With her lips, she turned the knob first one way and then the other: left, right, open, shut; left, right, open, shut. The knob did not squeak. In fact, Wiggs was unusually quiet.
Now, falling into rhythm, she sucked the knob from its axle, sucked the axle from its door, the door from its hinges. Out onto the lawn, tempo increasing, she sucked up the flagstone walk, the rosebushes, the petunia bed, the sprinkler, the driveway, and the small Japanese car parked in the driveway: oh, what a feeling! Toyota! Wiggs moaned as the neighborhood disappeared.
The towers of the city began to sway, and soon, the planet itself fell victim to the force, swelling at its equator, throbbing at its poles. It wobbled violently on its axis, once, twice, then exploded. The Big Bang theory, proven at last. Continuing to impersonate a black hole, she pulled in every drop and particle – she’d never had a man in such entirety – and it wasn’t until the final spasm had subsided and the cosmos was at peace that she loosened her grip and, lips glistening like the Milky Way, looked up to see – the legs of a third party standing there. ~ Tom Robbins,#NFDB
1452:Laurie piped up again. 'At State, everybody calls diversity dispersity. What happens is, everybody has their own clubs, their own signs, their own sections where they all sit in the dining hall--all the African Americans are over there? . . . and all the Asians sit over't these other tables? -- except for the Koreans? -- because they don't get along with the Japanese so they sit way over there? Everybody's dispersed into their own little groups -- and everybody's told to distrust everybody else? Everybody's told that everybody else is trying to screw them over--oops!' -- Laurie pulled a face and put her fingertips over her lips -- 'I'm sorry!' She rolled eyes and smiled. 'Anyway, the idea is, every other group is like prejudiced against your group, and no matter what they say, they're only out to take advantage of you, and you should have nothing to do with them -- unless your white, in which case all the others are not prejudiced against you, they're like totally right, because you really are a racist and everything, even if you don't know it? Everybody ends up dispersed into their own like turtle shells, suspicious of everybody else and being careful not to fraternize with them. Is it like that at Dupont? ~ Tom Wolfe, #NFDB
1453:In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word “unconditional” was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill’s surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: “Peace can come to the world,” the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, “only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. . . . The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.”1976 Roosevelt later told Harry Hopkins that the surprising and fateful insertion was a consequence of the confusion attending his effort to convince French General Henri Girard to sit down with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle: We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee—and then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it.1977 ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
1454:AWARE
The great sigh of things. To be aware of aware (pronounced ah-WAH-ray) is to be able to name the previously ineffable sigh of impermanence, the whisper of life flitting by, of time itself, the realization of evanescence. Aware is the shortened version of the crucial Japanese phrase mono-no-aware, which suggested sensitivity or sadness during the Heian period, but with a hint of actually relishing the melancholy of it all. Originally, it was an interjection of surprise, as in the English “Oh!” The reference calls up bittersweet poetic feelings around sunset, long train journeys, looking out at the driving rain, birdsong, the falling of autumn leaves. A held-breath word, it points like a finger to the moon to suggest an unutterable moment, too deep for words to reach. If it can be captured at all, it is by haiku poetry, the brushstroke of calligraphy, the burbling water of the tea ceremony, the slow pull of the bow from the oe. The great 16th-century wandering poet Matsuo Basho caught the sense of aware in his haiku: “By the roadside grew / A rose of Sharon. / My horse / Has just eaten it.” A recent Western equivalent would be the soughing lyric of English poet Henry Shukman, who writes, “This is a day that decides by itself to be beautiful. ~ Phil Cousineau,#NFDB
1455:If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep? ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen, #NFDB
1456:I do not believe that God has given us this trial to not purpose. I know that the day will come when we will clearly understand why this persecution with all it's sufferings has been bestowed upon us -- for everything that Our Lord does is for our good. And yet, even as I write these words I feel the oppressive weight in my heart of those last stammering words of Kichijiro in the morning of his departure: "Why has Deus Sama imposed this suffering on us?" and then the resentment in those eyes that he turned upon me. "Father", he had said "what evil have we done?"
I suppose I should simply cast from my mind these meaningless words of the coward; yet why does his plaintive voice pierce my breast with tall the pain of a sharp needle? Why has Our Lord imposed this torture and this persecution on poor Japanese peasants? No, Kichijiro was trying to express something different, something even more sickening. The silence of God. Already twenty years have passed since the persecution broke out; the black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to Him, God has remained silent. ~ Sh saku End,#NFDB
1457:The suspicion that European travellers in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century may from time to time have stumbled across charts and maps containing the remnants of a lost geography (perhaps even the maps of Marinus of Tyre, said to have been superior to those of Ptolemy) is intriguingly enhanced by the first of Alfonso de Albuquerque's two letters. It introduces a 'piece of a map' that Albuquerque has acquired in his travels in the Indian Ocean and that he is sending to King Manuel. The fragment, he explains, is not the original but was 'traced' by Francisco Rodrigues from: 'a large map of a Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove islands [effectively a world map, therefore], the navigation of the Chinese and the Gores [an unidentified people, thought by some to be the Japanese, or the inhabitants of Taiwan and the Ryukyu archipelago] with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and Your Highness will be very pleased to see it; it had the names in Javanese writing, but I had with me a Javanese who could read and write. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1458:There are a number of good books that draw upon fox legends -- foremost among them, Kij Johnson's exquisite novel The Fox Woman. I also recommend Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters (with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano); Larissa Lai's unusual novel, When Fox Is a Thousand; Helen Oyeyemi's recent novel, Mr. Fox; and Ellen Steiber's gorgeous urban fantasy novel, A Rumor of Gems, as well as her heart-breaking novella "The Fox Wife" (published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears). For younger readers, try the "Legend of Little Fur" series by Isobelle Carmody. You can also support a fine mythic writer by subscribing to Sylvia Linsteadt's The Gray Fox Epistles: Wild Tales By Mail.
For the fox in myth, legend, and lore, try: Fox by Martin Wallen; Reynard the Fox, edited by Kenneth Varty; Kitsune: Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance, and Humour by Kiyoshi Nozaki;Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative by Raina Huntington; The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling by Leo Tak-hung Chan; and The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship, by Karen Smythers. ~ Terri Windling,#NFDB
1459:U.S. Textbook Skews History, Prime Minister of Japan Says By MARTIN FACKLER TOKYO — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on Thursday criticized an American textbook that he said inaccurately depicted Japan’s actions during World War II, opening a new front in a battle to sway American views of the country’s wartime history. Speaking in Parliament, Mr. Abe pledged to increase efforts to fight what he called mistaken views abroad concerning Japan’s wartime actions, when the Japanese military conquered much of Asia. He singled out a high school history textbook published by McGraw-Hill Education that he said contained the sort of negative portrayals that Japan must do more to combat. In particular, he objected to a description of women forced to work in Japanese military brothels during the war, a highly fraught issue in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. The textbook is used in some public schools in California. “I just looked at a document, McGraw-Hill’s textbook, and I was shocked,” The Japan Times quoted Mr. Abe as saying during a meeting of a parliamentary budget committee. “This kind of textbook is being used in the United States, as we did not protest the things we should have, or we failed to correct the things we should have.” McGraw-Hill has defended its textbook, saying ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1460:Now, just to understand better what's going on, let's imagine the shoe on the other foot. Let's imagine that hundreds of thousands of badly-educated Americans, white Americans, were pouring across the boarder into Mexico. And let's imagine that they were insisting on instruction in school in English rather than Spanish. Let's imagine they were asking for ballot papers in English rather than Spanish, they were celebrating Fourth of July rather than Sinco de Mayo, buying up newspapers, publishing in English, television stations, radios, all publishing and broadcasting in English ,and that there were so many of them coming in that they threatened to reduce Mexicans to minority. Do you think the Mexicans could possibly be tricked into thinking that this was enrichment, this was diversity, that this was great? No. No. They wouldn’t stand for it for a moment. This would be to them an impossible unacceptable invasion of their country. And you would find the same reaction in any non-white country anywhere in the world. Can you imagine say, the Japanese or the Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Costa Ricans accepting this kind of wholesale demographic change that would change their country, transform their country, and reduce them to a minority? No. These things are impossible to imagine. ~ Jared Taylor, #NFDB
1461:they’ll start.” “What are they going to do about the Elder Council?” “Meritorious was a good man and the most powerful Grand Mage we had seen in a long time. The other Councils in Europe are worried about who will fill the vacuum now that he’s gone. The Americans are offering their support, the Japanese are sending delegates to help us wrest back some control, but…” “It sounds like a lot of people are panicking.” “And they have a right to. Our systems of power, our systems of self-government, are delicate. If we topple, others will follow. We need a strong leader.” “Why don’t you do it?” He laughed. “Because I’m not well liked, and I’m not well trusted, and I already have a job. I’m a detective, remember?” She gave her own little shrug. “Vaguely.” Another snippet of pub music drifted by the window, and Stephanie thought about the world she’d grown up in, and how different it was from the world she’d been introduced to, and yet how similar. There was joy and happiness in both, just as there was heartbreak and horror. There was good and evil and everything in between, and these qualities seemed to be shared equally in the worlds of the magical and the mundane. It was her life now. She couldn’t imagine living without either one. “How are you?” Skulduggery asked, his voice gentle. ~ Derek Landy, #NFDB
1462:I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
“But it’s burnt down?”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Many times.”
“And rebuilt.”
“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
“With completely new materials.”
“But of course. It was burnt down.”
“So how can it be the same building?”
“It is always the same building.”
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself. ~ Douglas Adams,#NFDB
1463:Perhaps the most remarkable elder-care innovation developed in Japan so far is the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)—a powered exoskeleton suit straight out of science fiction. Developed by Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba, the HAL suit is the result of twenty years of research and development. Sensors in the suit are able to detect and interpret signals from the brain. When the person wearing the battery-powered suit thinks about standing up or walking, powerful motors instantly spring into action, providing mechanical assistance. A version is also available for the upper body and could assist caretakers in lifting the elderly. Wheelchair-bound seniors have been able to stand up and walk with the help of HAL. Sankai’s company, Cyberdyne, has also designed a more robust version of the exoskeleton for use by workers cleaning up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the wake of the 2011 disaster. The company says the suit will almost completely offset the burden of over 130 pounds of tungsten radiation shielding worn by workers.* HAL is the first elder-care robotic device to be certified by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The suits lease for just under $2,000 per year and are already in use at over three hundred Japanese hospitals and nursing homes.21 ~ Martin Ford, #NFDB
1464:California City Landscape
On a mountain-side the real estate agents
Put up signs marking the city lots to be sold there.
A man whose father and mother were Irish
Ran a goat farm half-way down the mountain;
He drove a covered wagon years ago,
Understood how to handle a rifle,
Shot grouse, buffalo, Indians, in a single year,
And now was raising goats around a shanty.
Down at the foot of the mountain
Two Japanese families had flower farms.
A man and woman were in rows of sweet peas
Picking the pink and white flowers
To put in baskets and take to the Los Angeles market.
They were clean as what they handled
There in the morning sun, the big people and the baby-faces.
Across the road, high on another mountain,
Stood a house saying, 'I am it,' a commanding house.
There was the home of a motion picture director
Famous for lavish ****-house interiors,
Clothes ransacked from the latest designs for women
In the combats of 'male against female.'
The mountain, the scenery, the layout of the landscape,
And the peace of the morning sun as it happened,
The miles of houses pocketed in the valley beyondIt was all worth looking at, worth wondering about,
How long it might last, how young it might be.
~ Carl Sandburg,#NFDB
1465:Manga represents and extremely unfiltered view of the inner workings of their creator's minds. This is because manga are free of the massive editing and "committee"-style production used in other media like film, magazines and television. Even in American mainstream comics, the norm is to have a stable of artists, letterers, inkers, and scenario writers all under the control of the publisher. In Japan, a single artist might employ many assistants and act as a sort of "director," but he or she is usually at the core of the production process and retains control over the rights to the material created. That artists are not necessarily highly educated and deal frequently in plain subject matter only heightens the sense that manga offer the reader an extremely raw and personal view of the world.
Thus, of the more than 2 billion manga produced each year, the vast majority have a dreamlike quality. They speak to people's hope, and fears. They are where stressed-out modern urbanites daily work out their neuroses and their frustrations. Viewed in their totality, the phenomenal number of stories produced is like the constant chatter of the collective unconscious -- and articulation of the dream world. Reading manga is like peering into the unvarnished, unretouched reality of the Japanese mind. ~ Frederik L Schodt,#NFDB
1466:Apartheid, for all its power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense. Racism is not logical. Consider this: Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa. I don’t mean they were running around acting black. They were still Chinese. But, unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision, didn’t know what to do with them, so the government said, “Eh, we’ll just call ’em black. It’s simpler that way.” Interestingly, at the same time, Japanese people were labeled as white. The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black. I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren’t doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say? “Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!” “Excuse me. I’m Japanese.” “Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
1467:No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war -- the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand's breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutiliated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
1468:The art department proper I thought much inferior to that of the Tokyo Exhibition of 1890. Fine things there were, but few. Evidence, perhaps, of the eagerness with which the nation is turning all its energies and talents in directions where money is to be made; for in those larger departments where art is combined with industry,—such as ceramics, enamels, inlaid work, embroideries,—no finer and costlier work could ever have been shown. Indeed, the high value of certain articles on display suggested a reply to a Japanese friend who observed, thoughtfully, "If China adopts Western industrial methods, she will be able to underbid us in all the markets of the world." "Perhaps in cheap production," I made answer. "But there is no reason why Japan should depend wholly upon cheapness of production. I think she may rely more securely upon her superiority in art and good taste. The art-genius of a people may have a special value against which all competition by cheap labor is vain. Among Western nations, France offers an example. Her wealth is not due to her ability to underbid her neighbors. Her goods are the dearest in the world: she deals in things of luxury and beauty. But they sell in all civilized countries because they are the best of their kind. Why should not Japan become the France of the Further East? ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
1469:Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema. ~ Tom Hanks, #NFDB
1470:Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema. ~ Tom Hanks, #NFDB
1471:Can I sit next to you until we get to Takamatsu? I just can’t relax when I sit by myself. I always feel like some weird person’s going to plop himself down next to me, and then I can’t get to sleep. When I bought my ticket they told me they were all single seats, but when I got on I saw they’re all doubles. I just want to catch a few winks before we arrive, and you seem like a nice guy. Do you mind?” “No problem.” “Thanks,” she says. “‘ In traveling, a companion,’ as the saying goes.” I nod. Nod, nod, nod— that’s all I seem capable of. But what should I say? “How does that end?” she asks. “How does what end?” “After a companion, how does it go? I can’t remember. I never was very good at Japanese.” “‘ In life, compassion,’” I say. “‘ In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,’” she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn’t surprise me if she wrote it down. “So what does that really mean? In simple terms.” I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. “I think it means,” I say, “that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.” She mulls that over for a while, then slowly brings her hands together on top of the table and rests them there lightly. “I think you’re right about that— that chance encounters keep us going.
-Kafka on the Shore ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
1472:She brought the tea into the living room on a lacquered tray. The pot and cups were Japanese with unglazed rims. She poured.
"Thanks," I said.
"Well?"
"Huh?"
"Your family," she reminded.
I sipped the tea. "This is really good. Really delicious."
She raised her eyebrows. "That's what I thought. You're a good listener, Davy, and you can change the subject on a dime. You've hardly talked about yourself at all."
"I talk... too much."
"You talk about books, you talk about plays, you talk about movies, you talk about places, you talk about food, you talk about current events. You don't talk about yourself."
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I hadn't really thought about it. Sure, I didn't talk
about the jumping, but the rest? "Well, there's not much to say. Not like those stories of growing up with four brothers."
She smiled. "It's not going to work. If you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. But I'm not going to be distracted again, nor fooled into talking about those idiots again."
She poured more tea into my cup.
I frowned. "Do I really do that?"
"What? Not talk about yourself? Yes."
"No, try and distract you."
She stared at me. "You are fucking amazing. I've never seen someone so good at changing the subject."
"I don't do it on purpose."
She laughed. ~ Steven Gould,#NFDB
1473:We can very easily see how parents in other cultures simply repeat cultural norms to their children as if those cultural norms were objective truth. Japanese parents teach their children obedience and filial piety; Catholic parents teach their children to drink the blood of their god; Muslim parents teach their children that a man who married a six-year-old girl – and consummated that marriage when she was nine – is the paragon of moral virtue; Western parents teach their children that democracy is the highest ideal; North Korean parents teach their children that the dictator who rules their lives is a sort of secular deity who loves them. The list goes on and on. Virtually every parent in the world believes that she is teaching her child the truth, when she is merely inflicting what may be politely called cultural mythologies on her child. We lie to our children, all the while telling them that lying is wrong. We command our children to think for themselves, all the while repeating the most prejudicial absurdities as if they were objective facts. We tell our children to be good, but we have no idea what goodness really is. We tell our children that conformity is wrong (“If everyone jumped off the Empire State building, would you jump too?”) but at the same time we are complete slaves to the historical inertia of prior prejudices. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
1474:Freed of the burden I had been carrying, I moved on, this time circling east. Under an overpass at Nogizaka, north of Roppongi-dori, I saw a half-dozen chinpira, gaudy in sleek racing leathers, squatting in a tight semicircle, their low-slung metal motorcycles parked on the footpath alongside them. Fragments of their conversation skipped off the concrete wall to my right, the words unintelligible but the notes tuned as tight as the tricked-out exhaust pipes of their machines. They were probably jacked on kakuseizai, the methamphetamine that has been the Japanese drug of choice since the government distributed it to soldiers and workers during World War II, and of which these chinpira were doubtless both purveyors and consumers. They were waiting for the drug-induced hum in their muscles and brains to hit the right pitch, for the hour to grow suitably late and the night more seductively dark, before emerging from their concrete lair and answering the neon call of Roppongi. I watched them take notice of me, a solitary figure approaching from the southern end of what was in effect a narrow tunnel. I considered crossing the street, but a metal divider made that maneuver unfeasible. I might simply have backed up and taken a different route. My failure to do so made it more difficult for me to deny that I was indeed heading toward the cemetery. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1475:Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
1476:The myriad activities that go into creating, producing, selling, and delivering a product or service are the basic units of competitive advantage. Operational effectiveness means performing these activities better—that is, faster, or with fewer inputs and defects—than rivals. Companies can reap enormous advantages from operational effectiveness, as Japanese firms demonstrated in the 1970s and 1980s with such practices as total quality management and continuous improvement. But from a competitive standpoint, the problem with operational effectiveness is that best practices are easily emulated. As all competitors in an industry adopt them, the productivity frontier—the maximum value a company can deliver at a given cost, given the best available technology, skills, and management techniques—shifts outward, lowering costs and improving value at the same time. Such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness, but relative improvement for no one. And the more benchmarking that companies do, the more competitive convergence you have—that is, the more indistinguishable companies are from one another. Strategic positioning attempts to achieve sustainable competitive advantage by preserving what is distinctive about a company. It means performing different activities from rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways. ~ Michael E Porter, #NFDB
1477:They drove about half a mile until they found their site. They were old hats, having been camping together several times. Sylvie opened the cooler and pulled out some chicken breasts to roast on the grill over the fire. She had also brought veggies she had washed and precut at home, then packed in aluminum foil with oil and garlic.
"God that smells good, Sylvie. I'm friggin' starving." Molly settled into the black butterfly chair she always brought along when she camped.
"I know, right? Food tastes so much better out here. I guess it's probably because you have to work so hard for it, huh?" Sylvie poked the chicken to check its progress.
"Yeah, that and the fact that you cook like MacGyver. You could, like, make a feast out of two blades of grass and a mushroom, whereas I can barely manage to open a bottle."
Sylvie looked at her friend sideways, but said nothing to the contrary, they both knew the truth of it. "I haven't eaten yet today and I'm about to faint. I think instinctively my body knows I'll need my strength for tonight."
"Oh yeah? You got plans I don't know about?" Molly said jokingly.
"I plan on dancing my ass off," said Sylvie.
"Tell me please we brought a camera. We did, right?"
"Please. You know I'm half Asian, right? My Japanese ancestors would be horrified if I'd forgotten a camera." Molly exploded into laughter. ~ Amy S Foster,#NFDB
1478:All cultures seem to find a slightly alien local population to carry the Hermes projection. For the Vietnamese it is the Chinese, and for the Chinese it is the Japanese. For the Hindu it is the Moslem; for the North Pacific tribes it was the Chinook; in Latin America and in the American South it is the Yankee. In Uganda it is the East Indians and Pakistanis. In French Quebec it is the English. In Spain the Catalans are "the Jews of Spain". On Crete it is the Turks, and in Turkey it is the Armenians. Lawrence Durrell says that when he lived in Crete he was friends with the Greeks, but that when he wanted to buy some land they sent him to a Turk, saying that a Turk was what you needed for a trade, though of course he couldn't be trusted.
This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out - or murdered - when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Jankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915-16. The outsider is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well. ~ Lewis Hyde,#NFDB
1479:FIVE-AND-TWENTY years have gone
Since old William pollexfen
Laid his strong bones down in death
By his wife Elizabeth
In the grey stone tomb he made.
And after twenty years they laid
In that tomb by him and her
His son George, the astrologer;
And Masons drove from miles away
To scatter the Acacia spray
Upon a melancholy man
Who had ended where his breath began.
Many a son and daughter lies
Far from the customary skies,
The Mall and Eades's grammar school,
In London or in Liverpool;
But where is laid the sailor John
That so many lands had known,
Quiet lands or unquiet seas
Where the Indians trade or Japanese?
He never found his rest ashore,
Moping for one voyage more.
Where have they laid the sailor John?
And yesterday the youngest son,
A humorous, unambitious man,
Was buried near the astrologer,
Yesterday in the tenth year
Since he who had been contented long.
A nobody in a great throng,
Decided he would journey home,
Now that his fiftieth year had come,
And "Mr. Alfred' be again
Upon the lips of common men
Who carried in their memory
His childhood and his family.
At all these death-beds women heard
A visionary white sea-bird
Lamenting that a man should die;
And with that cry I have raised my cry.
~ William Butler Yeats, In Memory Of Alfred Pollexfen
,#NFDB
1480:In Iowa, the American Future Fund began airing an ad created by Larry McCarthy that Geoff Garin, the Democratic pollster, described as perhaps “the most egregious of the year.” The ad accused the then congressman Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat and a lawyer, of supporting a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, which it misleadingly called a “mosque at Ground Zero.” As footage of the destroyed World Trade Center rolled, a narrator said, “For centuries, Muslims built mosques where they won military victories.” Now it said a mosque celebrating 9/11 was to be built on the very spot “where Islamic terrorists killed three thousand Americans”; it was, the narrator suggested, as if the Japanese were to build a triumphal monument at Pearl Harbor. The ad then accused Braley of supporting the mosque. In fact, Braley had taken no position on the issue. No surprise for a congressman from Iowa. But an unidentified video cameraman had ambushed him at the Iowa State Fair and asked him about it. Braley replied that he regarded the matter as a local zoning issue for New Yorkers to decide. Soon afterward, he says, the attack ad “dropped on me like the house in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ” Braley, who won his seat by a margin of 30 percent in 2008, barely held on in 2010. The American Future Fund’s effort against Braley was the most expensive campaign that year by an independent group. ~ Jane Mayer, #NFDB
1481:...you should’ve seen me ready to shiv security for making me take my ring off earlier.”
I frowned as I accidently lost control of my chopsticks, my California roll dropping into the little plastic cup of soy sauce. “See?Sounds like classic Bridezilla behavior to me.”
She almost choked on her wasabi-laced sushi piece. “Bridezilla? I am the least likely person to turn Bridezilla you will ever meet. In fact, I am like the Mothra of the Bridezilla world.”
“Mothra.” I tsked. “Pedestrian. Destoroyah—no, Bridestoroyah—could totally take on Bridezilla.”
“You have the chopstick skill level of a preschooler, and you dare to go around citing Japanese monster movie characters to me?” Laney seethed. “I have my reasons for choosing Mothra.”
“Yeah?” I stabbed my chopsticks straight through the middle of my errant sushi piece. “Let’s hear them.”
“Don’t, it’s bad luck!” she exclaimed.
“What, to talk to a bride about her wedding dress before the big day?” And I thought Sloane was taking the wedding superstitions too far.
“No, to stab your chopstick through the middle of your food.” She reached across the table and readjusted my sticks for me with one hand. I noticed she kept her other hand on the garment bag riding shotgun in the chair next to her. Its midnight blue sheen and fancy silver embroidery looked out of place in the middle of the airport food court. ~ Jessica Topper,#NFDB
1482:To understand Bashō’s place in Japanese poetry, it’s useful to have some sense of the literary culture he entered. The practice of the fine arts had been central to Japanese life from at least the seventh century, and virtually all educated people painted, played musical instruments, and wrote poems. In 17th century Japan, linked-verse writing was as widespread and popular as card games or Scrabble in mid-20th-century America. A certain amount of rice wine was often involved, and so another useful comparison might be made to playing pool or darts at a local bar. The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving. Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho. ~ Jane Hirshfield, #NFDB
1483:Escoffier set the table. He'd found a Japanese kimono, an obvious prop from some theater production, to use as a tablecloth. Paris had secretly fallen in love with all things oriental. It was red silk brocade, covered with a flock of white flying cranes, and made from a single bolt of fabric. The neckline and cuffs were thickly stained with stage makeup but the kimono itself was quite beautiful. It ran the length of the thin table. The arms overhung one end.
Outside the building he'd seen a garden with a sign that read "Please do not pick." But it was, after all, for a beautiful woman. Who would deny him? And so Escoffier cut a bouquet of white flowers: roses, peonies and a spray of lilies, with rosemary stalks to provide the greenery. He placed them in a tall water glass and then opened the basket of food he'd brought. He laid out the china plates so that they rested between the cranes, and then the silver knives, forks and spoons, and a single crystal glass for her champagne. Even though it was early afternoon, he'd brought two dozen candles.
The food had to be served 'à la française'; there were no waiters to bring course after course. So he kept it simple. Tartlets filled with sweet oysters from Arcachon and Persian caviar, chicken roasted with truffles, a warm baguette, 'pâté de foie gras,' and small sweet strawberries served on a bed of sugared rose petals and candied violets. ~ N M Kelby,#NFDB
1484:me through, gentlemen and – er – madam. Your reaction was not unexpected. Let me put it this way: Fort Knox is a bank like any other bank. But it is a much bigger bank and its protective devices are correspondingly stronger and more ingenious. To penetrate them will require corresponding strength and ingenuity. That is the only novelty in my project – that it is a big one. Nothing else. Fort Knox is no more impregnable than other fortresses. No doubt we all thought the Brink organization was unbeatable until half a dozen determined men robbed a Brink armoured car of a million dollars back in 1950. It is impossible to escape from Sing Sing and yet men have found ways of escaping from it. No, no, gentlemen. Fort Knox is a myth like other myths. Shall I proceed to the plan?’ Billy Ring hissed through his teeth, like a Japanese, when he talked. He said harshly, ‘Listen, shamus, mebbe ya didn’t know it, but the Third Armoured is located at Fort Knox. If that’s a myth, why don’t the Russkis come and take the United States the next time they have a team over here playing ice-hockey?’ Goldfinger smiled thinly. ‘If I may correct you without weakening your case, Mr Ring, the following is the order of battle of the military units presently quartered at Fort Knox. Of the Third Armoured Division, there is only the Spearhead, but there are also the 6th Armoured Cavalry Regiment, the 15th Armour Group, the ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
1485:decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.’16 If Pater was the godfather of the Nineties, then undoubtedly its most precocious child and greatest visual genius was Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), and The Yellow Book, the artistic quarterly which he helped to found with his friend Henry Harland, its Scripture. When he took a bundle of drawings to Burne-Jones’s studio in Fulham, the older artist told Beardsley, then aged eighteen, ‘Nature has given you every gift which is necessary to become a great artist. I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.’17 Whistler, whose relations with Beardsley were much edgier, made a generous admission in 1896 when he saw Beardsley’s brilliantly clever illustrations to Pope’s Rape of the Lock – ‘Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake – you are a very great artist’ – a tribute which reduced the consumptive (and not always sober) genius to tears. Art historians can spot the influences on Beardsley’s work – some William Morris here, some Japanese prints there. Beardsley’s drawings, however, do not merely illustrate, they define their age, as with his design for a prospectus of The Yellow Book, showing an expensively dressed, semi-oriental courtesan perusing a brightly lit bookstall late at night while from within the shop the elderly pierrot gazes at her furiously, quizzically. ~ A N Wilson, #NFDB
1486:For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased 130 square feet on which to grow Swedish strawberries. “The land didn’t cost more than four rubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,” wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: “Now it’s war!” And war it certainly was—all the time. In just about every part of the world, and it had been going on for several years. It had broken out about a year before little Allan had got his errand-boy job at Nitroglycerin Ltd. While Allan loaded his boxes with dynamite, he listened to the workers’ comments on events. He wondered how they could know so much, but above all he marveled at how much misery grown men could cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Then, Germany conquered Luxembourg a day before declaring war on France and invading Belgium. Great Britain then declared war on Germany, Austria declared war on Russia, and Serbia declared war on Germany. And on it went. The Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. In the months after the Czar abdicated, the British took Baghdad for some reason, and then Jerusalem. The Greeks and Bulgarians started to fight each other while the Arabs continued their revolt against the Ottomans…. So “Now it’s war!” was right. ~ Jonas Jonasson, #NFDB
1487:KF: Why is type 2 diabetes suddenly so prevalent? NB: Diets are changing, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Diabetes seems to follow the spread of meaty, high-fat, high-calorie diets. In Japan, for example, the traditional rice-based diet kept the population generally healthy and thin for many centuries. Up until 1980, only 1 to 5 percent of Japanese adults over age forty had diabetes. Starting around that time, however, the rapid westernization of the diet meant that meat, milk, cheese, and sodas became fashionable. Waistlines expanded, and, by 1990, diabetes prevalence in Japan had climbed to 11 to 12 percent. The same sort of trend has occurred in the U.S. Over the last century, per capita meat consumption increased from about 125 pounds per year (which was already very high compared with other countries) in the early 1900s to over 200 pounds today. In other words, the average American now eats 75 pounds more meat every year than the average American of a century ago. In the same interval, cheese intake soared from less than 4 pounds per person per year to about 33 pounds today. Sugar intake has gone up, too, by about 30 pounds per person per year. Where are we putting all that extra meat, cheese, and sugar? It contributes to body fat, of course, and diabetes follows. Today, about 13 percent of the U.S. adult population has type 2 diabetes, although many of them are not yet aware they have it. ~ Kathy Freston, #NFDB
1488:The clearest signs of Hakodate's current greatness, though, can be found clustered around its central train station, in the morning market, where blocks and blocks of pristine seafood explode onto the sidewalks like an edible aquarium, showcasing the might of the Japanese fishing industry.
Hokkaido is ground zero for the world's high-end sushi culture. The cold waters off the island have long been home to Japan's A-list of seafood: hairy crab, salmon, scallops, squid, and, of course, uni. The word "Hokkaido" attached to any of these creatures commands a premium at market, one that the finest sushi chefs around the world are all too happy to pay.
Most of the Hokkaido haul is shipped off to the Tsukiji market in Tokyo, where it's auctioned and scattered piece by piece around Japan and the big cities of the world. But the island keeps a small portion of the good stuff for itself, most of which seems to be concentrated in a two-hundred-meter stretch in Hakodate.
Everything here glistens with that sparkly sea essence, and nearly everything is meant to be consumed in the moment. Live sea urchins, piled high in hillocks of purple spikes, are split with scissors and scraped out raw with chopsticks. Scallops are blowtorched in their shells until their edges char and their sweet liquor concentrates. Somewhere, surely, a young fishmonger will spoon salmon roe directly into your mouth for the right price. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1489:Originally the Indians made their tepees of buffalo hides, but since the destruction of the buffalo herds by the white man, domestic cow hides have been used, as well as canvas. New buffalo-hide tepee covers were made every spring. The size of the tepee depended somewhat on the number of horses the tribe or family had, because it required several horses to transport a large tepee. The poles were made of lodgepole pine, cedar, spruce, or any other straight tree. Flexible poles were not used. The poles averaged about 25 feet in length and tapered from 4 to 1 inch in diameter.
In warm weather the lower part of the tepee was raised up on the poles to allow the breeze to blow through. In cold weather the space around the bottom between the stakes and the ground was packed with sod to hold it down tightly and to keep out the snow and drafts.
When the tepee was new it was nearly white. But by spring, the smoke and the weather had darkened it at the top and the skins became quite transparent. At night the campfires made the tepees look like large Japanese lanterns.
On the Great Plains the wind is usually from the west and for that reason the tepees were set up with the smoke hole facing the east. The flaps, or smoke hole ears, as they are called, were used to control the drafts and to keep the wind from blowing down the smoke hole. In case of a storm they could be lapped over to close the smoke hole completely. ~ W Ben Hunt,#NFDB
1490:Momoko’s idea of the life of Mrs. Browning was singular. She had somehow gotten the idea that the poetess had been forced into a position much beneath her, had, in fact, been obliged to give herself to numbers of men, none of whom deserved her, and had consoled herself by penning those immortal lyrics of hers. I mentioned that the only men I know of in Elizabeth’s life were her father and her husband, both of whose intentions, so far as I had heard, had been impeccable. Yes, she nodded, pensive. She had heard of them. Robert—he was her first, her true love. And she remained true to him. While in the very throes of unfortunate transport in anonymous arms she had thought only of Robert. But certainly, I ventured, he had outlived her. He had gone on and become one of England’s greatest poets. “Did he write poetry too?” she asked, struck at the thought. “Yes, a very great deal.” She pondered, finger on cheek, then decided how sweet it was—he, the dear man, had loved her so much he had copied her. And she, forced into this promiscuous life, remained true to him, no matter what. And who forced her into it? Her father of course, crude man, who thought of nothing but money. I tried to discover where she could have uncovered such a fund of misinformation. Japanese schools teach some wild things but nothing, I think, so far from any reality as this. Upon this point, however, Momoko was not to be drawn out. She knew what she knew. ~ Donald Richie, #NFDB
1491:I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what’ll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait. “Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the west coast—what in later days they called the slave coast or the ivory coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times: they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but, Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1492:When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.” Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield. FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third. When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The ~ James D Bradley, #NFDB
1493:I can’t help but feel he’s a little disappointed in me because I don’t bow whenever I see him. When he interviewed me, he wanted to know whether I spoke any Japanese. I explained that I was born in Gardena. He said, Oh, you nisei, as if knowing that one word means he knows something about me. You’ve forgotten your culture, Ms. Mori, even though you’re only second generation. Your issei parents, they hung on to their culture. Don’t you want to learn Japanese? Don’t you want to visit Nippon? For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn’t want to learn Japanese, why I didn’t already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here? Of course I didn’t ask him those questions. I just smiled and said, You’re so right, sir. She sighed. It’s a job. But I’ll tell you something else. Ever since I got it straight in my head that I haven’t forgotten a damn thing, that I damn well know my culture, which is American, and my language, which is English, I’ve felt like a spy in that man’s office. On the surface, I’m just plain old Ms. Mori, poor little thing who’s lost her roots, but underneath, I’m Sofia and you better not fuck with me. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen, #NFDB
1494:Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked out a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. You saw it in the sign at the Peking Express - a cartoon man with a coolie hat, slant eyes, buckteeth, and chopsticks. You saw it in the little boys on the playground, stretching their eyes to slits with their fingers - Chinese - Japanese - look at these - and in the older boys who muttered ching chong ching chong ching as they passed you on the street, just loud enough for you to hear. You saw it when waitresses and policemen and bus drivers spoke slowly to you, in simple words, as if you might not understand. You saw it in photos, yours the only black head of hair in the scene, as if you'd been cut out and pasted in. You thought: Wait, what's she doing there? And then you remembered that she was you. You kept your head down and thought about school, or space, or the future, and tried to forget about it. And you did, until it happened again. ~ Celeste Ng, #NFDB
1495:Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. You saw it in the sign at the Peking Express - a cartoon man with a coolie hat, slant eyes, buckteeth, and chopsticks. You saw it in the little boys on the playground, stretching their eyes to slits with their fingers -- Chinese - Japanese - look at these - and in the older boys who muttered ching chong ching chong ching as they passed you on the street, just loud enough for you to hear. You saw it when waitresses and policemen and bus drivers spoke slowly to you, in simple words, as if you might not understand. You saw it in photos, yours the only black head of hair in the scene, as if you'd been cut out and pasted in. You thought: Wait, what's she doing there? And then you remembered that she was you. You kept your head down and thought about school, or space, or the future, and tried to forget about it. And you did, until it happened again. ~ Celeste Ng, #NFDB
1496:Angeline says that we’re not doing very well. Apparently they expected the Japs from the south, by the sea, but they came from the north instead and just breezed right through the defenses there. And it’s really awful outside.” Her voice hiccups. “I saw a dead baby on a pile of rubbish this morning as I came here. It’s all around, the rubbish and the corpses, I mean, and they’re burning it so it smells like what I imagine hell smells like. And I saw a woman being beaten with bamboo poles and then dragged off by her hair. She was half being dragged, half crawling along, and screaming like the end of the world. Her skin was coming off in ribbons. You’re supposed to wear sanitary pads so that . . . you know . . . if a soldier tries to . . . Well, you know. The locals and the Japanese both are looting anything that’s not locked down, and thieving and generally being impossible. They’re all over the place in Kowloon, running amok. We’re thinking about moving out to one of the hotels, just so we’re more in the middle of things, and we can see people and get more information. The Gloucester is packed to the rafters but my old friend Delia Ho has a room at the Repulse Bay and says we can have it because she’s leaving to go to China. We can share the room with Angeline, don’t you think? And apparently, the American Club has cots out and people are staying there as well. They have a lot of supplies, I suppose. Americans always do. Everyone wants to be around other people. ~ Janice Y K Lee, #NFDB
1497:And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name"
You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone. ~ John Ashbery,#NFDB
1498:When I lived on the Bluff in Yokohama I spend a good deal of my leisure in the company of foreign residents, at their banquets and balls. At close range I was not particularly struck by their whiteness, but from a distance I could distinguish them quite clearly from the Japanese. Among the Japanese were ladies who were dressed in gowns no less splendid than the foreigners’, and whose skin was whiter than theirs. Yet from across the room these ladies, even one alone, would stand out unmistakably from amongst a group of foreigners. For the Japanese complexion, no matter how white, is tinged by a slight cloudiness. These women were in no way reticent about powdering themselves. Every bit of exposed flesh—even their backs and arms—they covered with a thick coat of white. Still they could not efface the darkness that lay below their skin. It was as plainly visible as dirt at the bottom of a pool of pure water. Between the fingers, around the nostrils, on the nape of the neck, along the spine—about these places especially, dark, almost dirty, shadows gathered. But the skin of the Westerners, even those of a darker complexion, had a limpid glow. Nowhere were they tainted by this gray shadow. From the tops of their heads to the tips of their fingers the whiteness was pure and unadulterated. Thus it is that when one of us goes among a group of Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper. The sight offends even our own eyes and leaves none too pleasant a feeling. ~ Jun ichir Tanizaki, #NFDB
1499:You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you, as well as consequential psychological and possibly, depending on your personal belief system, spiritual risks ensuing from your personal reaction to said physical risk. Any movement on your part constitutes an implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk," the first MetaCop says. There is a little speaker on his belt, simultaneously translating all of this into Spanish and Japanese.
"Or as we used to say," the other MetaCop says, "freeze, sucker!"
"Under provisions of The Mews at Windsor Heights Code, we are authorized to enforce law, national security concerns, and societal harmony on said territory also. A treaty between The Mews at Windsor Heights and White Columns authorizes us to place you in temporary custody until your status as an Investigatory Focus has been resolved."
"Your ass is busted," the second MetaCop says.
"As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your cooperation," the first MetaCop says.
"You stay cool and we'll stay cool," the second MetaCop says.
"However, we are equipped with devices, including but not limited to projectile weapons, which, if used, may pose an extreme and immediate threat to your health and well-being."
"Make one funny move and we'll blow your head off," the second MetaCop says. ~ Neal Stephenson,#NFDB
1500:As Jefferson wrote in a letter to Charles Yancey: “The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.” In the age of our Founders, this human impulse to demand the right of co-creating shared wisdom accounted for the ferocity with which the states demanded protection for free access to the printing press, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. General George Washington, in a speech to officers of the army in 1783, said, “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” But the twentieth century brought its own bitter lessons. The new and incredibly powerful electronic media that began to replace the printing press—first radio and film and then television—were used to indoctrinate millions of Germans, Austrians, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, and others with elaborate abstract ideologies that made many of them deaf, blind, and numb to the systematic leading of tens of millions of their fellow human beings “to the slaughter. ~ Al Gore, #NFDB
115 Poetry
74 Integral Yoga
15 Zen
6 Psychology
5 Occultism
3 Mysticism
2 Mythology
1 Thelema
1 Integral Theory
1 Fiction
1 Education
1 Alchemy
42 The Mother
27 Kobayashi Issa
23 Satprem
15 Dogen
13 Nolini Kanta Gupta
13 Ikkyu
12 Yosa Buson
12 Sri Aurobindo
12 Muso Soseki
12 Fukuda Chiyo-ni
12 A B Purani
5 Jakushitsu
5 Hakuin
3 William Butler Yeats
3 Masahide
3 Jordan Peterson
3 James George Frazer
2 Yamei
2 Nukata
2 Nirodbaran
2 Joseph Campbell
2 Aleister Crowley
15 Dogen - Poems
12 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
6 Questions And Answers 1953
5 Agenda Vol 02
4 The Secret Doctrine
4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
4 Agenda Vol 08
4 Agenda Vol 06
3 Yeats - Poems
3 The Golden Bough
3 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
3 Maps of Meaning
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
3 Agenda Vol 05
2 Words Of Long Ago
2 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
2 The Human Cycle
2 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 Some Answers From The Mother
2 Questions And Answers 1954
2 Letters On Yoga IV
2 Letters On Yoga II
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
2 Agenda Vol 09
2 Agenda Vol 04
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Tibetans, Chinese and Japanese. Fire is the Foundation, the
central core, of things; above this forms a crust, tormented
0.03 - III - The Evening Sittings, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
From 1922 to 1926, No. 9, Rue de la Marine, where he and the Mother had shifted, was the place where the sittings were held. There, also upstairs, was a less broad verandah than at the Guest House, a little bigger table in front of the central door out of three, and a broad Japanese chair, the table covered with a better cloth than the one in the Guest House, a small flower vase, an ash-tray, a block calendar indicating the date and an ordinary time-piece, and a number of chairs in front in a line. The evening sittings used to be after meditation at 4 or 4.30 p.m. After 24 November 1926, the sittings began to get later and later, till the limit of 1 o'clock at night was reached. Then the curtain fell. Sri Aurobindo retired completely after December 1926, and the evening sittings came to a close.
On 8 February 1927, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved to No. 28, Rue Franois Martin, a house on the north-east of the same block as No. 9, Rue de la Marine.
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the Japanese cover the walls of their rooms with embroidered curtains.
You are right; nothing is better than to realise our most beautiful
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The paintings are fine, they are like Japanese ones. As for
the "plane" from which they come, it is surely the subtle physical, where the memory of all the conceptions and works of art
0 1956-04-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
A friend of Satprem's who died insane in a Japanese hospital in India
***
0 1961-04-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I have had some cats. I had a cat who was the reincarnation of the mind of a Russian woman. I had a vision of it one day, it was so strangethis woman had been murdered at the time of the Russian Revolution, along with her two little children. And her mind entered a cat here. (How? I dont know.) But this cat, mon petit. I got her when she was very young. She would come and lie down, stretched out like a human being, with her head on my arm! (I used to sleep on a Japanese tatami on the floor.) And she would stay there, so well-behaved, didnt stir all night long! I was really amazed. Then she had kittens, and wanted to give birth to them lying stretched out, not at all like a cat. It was very difficult to make her understand that it couldnt be done that way! And one night after she had had her kittens, I saw her I saw a young woman in furs, with a fur bonnetyou could just see a tiny human face; she had two little ones and she came to me and placed them at my feet. Her whole story was there in her consciousness: how she and the two children had been murdered. And then I realized she was the cat!
The cat wouldnt leave her kittens for a moment! Not for anything. She wouldnt eat, wouldnt go outside to relieve herself, nothing: she stayed put. So I told her, Bring me your kittens. (If you know how to handle them, cats understand very well when theyre spoken to.) Bring me your little ones. She looked at me, went and brought one of her kittens, and placed it between my feet. Then she went to fetch the other one and placed it between my feet (not beside, between my feet). Now you can go out, I told her. And out she went.
0 1961-07-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes. When I read that book (it was very well written), I understood the problem, and my understanding was confirmed when I went to Japan. Many Japanese also have a blunted sensibility (blunted in the sense that to feel anything they need extremely violent stimuli). Perhaps an explanation could be found along these lines.
But behind it all, the original problem remains unresolved: Why has it become like this? Why this deformation? Why has it all been deformed? There are some very beautiful things behind, very intense, infinitely more powerful than we ourselves can even bear, marvelous things. But why has it all become so dreadful here? Thats what comes up immediatelyits why I told you I had no inspiration.
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In fact, this is what legitimizes the ego; because if we had never formed an ego, we would have lived all mixed up (laughing), now this person, now another! Oh, it was so comical, seeing this the other day! At first it was a bit bewildering, but when I looked closely, it became utterly amusing: two little people with no physical resemblance, yet of a similar typesmall and in short, a similarity. Its like the four men I used to see in Japan: there was an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Japanese and one more, each from a different country; well, at night they were all the same, as if viewed one through the other, all intermingledvery amusing!
But individualization is a slow and difficult process. Thats why you have an ego, otherwise you would never become individualized, but always be (Mother laughs) a kind of public place!
0 1961-11-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Once there (this would also make a great novel), Richard continued writing and sending his manuscripts to Sri Aurobindo. Finally, when the Peace Treaty was signed and it was possible to travel, the English said that if we tried to return to India they would throw us in jail! But it all worked out miraculously, almost becoming a diplomatic incident: the Japanese government decided that if we were put in prison they would protest to the British government! (What a story I could write novels!) In short, Richard returned here with me. And thats when the tragi-comedy began.
I will tell you about it one dayfantastic!
0 1961-12-20, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont know, Im putting it poorly, but this experience was concrete to the point of being physical. It happened in a Japanese country-house where we were living, near a lake. There was a whole series of circumstances, events, all kinds of thingsa long, long story, like a novel. But one day I was alone in meditation (I have never had very profound meditations, only concentrations of consciousness Mother makes an abrupt gesture showing a sudden ingathering of the entire being); and I was seeing. You know that I had taken on the conversion of the Lord of Falsehood: I tried to do it through an emanation incarnated in a physical being [Richard]7, and the greatest effort was made during those four years in Japan. The four years were coming to an end with an absolute inner certainty that there was nothing to be done that it was impossible, impossible to do it this way. There was nothing to be done. And I was intensely concentrated, asking the Lord, Well, I made You a vow to do this, I had said, Even if its necessary to descend into hell, I will descend into hell to do it. Now tell me, what must I do?The Power was plainly there: suddenly everything in me became still; the whole external being was completely immobilized and I had a vision of the Supreme more beautiful than that of the Gita. A vision of the Supreme.8 And this vision literally gathered me into its arms; it turned towards the West, towards India, and offered meand there at the other end I saw Sri Aurobindo. It was I felt it physically. I saw, sawmy eyes were closed but I saw (twice I have had this vision of the Supremeonce here, much later but this was the first time) ineffable. It was as if this Immensity had reduced itself to a rather gigantic Being who lifted me up like a wisp of straw and offered me. Not a word, nothing else, only that.
Then everything vanished.
0 1962-05-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There was, in fact, a whole group of Ashram people (they might be called the Ashram "intelligentsia") who, influenced by Subhas Bose, were strongly in favor of the Nazis and the Japanese against the British. (It should be recalled that the British were the invaders of India, and thus many people considered Britain's enemies to be automatically India's friends.) It reached the point where Sri Aurobindo had to intervene forcefully and write: "I affirm again to you most strongly that this is the Mother's war.... The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces: the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.... The Allies at least have stood for human values, though they may often act against their own best ideals (human beings always do that); Hitler stands for diabolical values or for human values exaggerated in the wrong way until they become diabolical.... That does not make the English or Americans nations of spotless angels nor the Germans a wicked and sinful race, but...." (July 29, 1942 and Sept. 3, 1943, Cent. Ed., Vol. XXVI.394 ff.) And on her side also, Mother had to publicly declare: "It has become necessary to state emphatically and clearly that all who by their thoughts and wishes are supporting and calling for the victory of the Nazis are by that very fact collaborating with the Asura against the Divine and helping to bring about the victory of the Asura.... Those, therefore, who wish for the victory of the Nazis and their associates should now understand that it is a wish for the destruction of our work and an act of treachery against Sri Aurobindo." (May 6, 1941, original English.)
See note at the end of this conversation
0 1963-04-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Like a bang on the head I was completely dazed. They called a doctor. There were no medicines left in the citythere werent enough medicines for people, but as we were considered important people (!) the doctor brought two tablets. I told him (laughing), Doctor, I never take any medicines. What! he said. Its so hard to get them!Thats just the point, I replied, theyre very good for others! Then, then suddenly (I was in bed, of course, with a first-rate fever), suddenly I felt seized by trance the real trance, the kind that pushes you out of your body and I knew. I knew: Its the end; if I cant resist it, its the end. So I looked. I looked and I saw it was a being whose head had been half blown off by a bomb and who didnt know he was dead, so he was hooking on to anybody he could to suck life. And each of those beings (I saw one over me, doing his business!) was one of the countless dead. Each had a sort of atmospherea very widespread atmosphereof human decomposition, utterly pestilential, and thats what gave the illness. If it was merely that, you recovered, but if it was one of those beings with half a head or half a body, a being who had been killed so brutally that he didnt know he was dead and was trying to get hold of a body in order to continue his life (the atmosphere made thousands of people catch the illness every day, it was swarming, an infection), well, with such beings, you died. Within three days it was overeven before, within a day, sometimes. So once I saw and knew, I collected all the occult energy, all the occult power, and (Mother bangs down her fist, as if to force her way into her body) I found myself back in my bed, awake, and it was over. Not only was it over, but I stayed very quiet and began to work in the atmosphere. From that moment on, mon petit, there were no new cases! It was so extraordinary that it appeared in the Japanese papers. They didnt know how it happened, but from that day on, from that night on, not a single fresh case. And people recovered little by little.
I told the story to our Japanese friend in whose house we were living, I told him, Well, thats what this illness isa remnant of the war; and heres the way it happens. And that being was repaid for his attempt! Naturally, the fact that I repelled his influence by turning around and fighting [dissolved the formation]. But what power it takes to do that! Extraordinary.
He told the story to some friends, who in turn told it to some friends, so in the end the story became known. There was even a sort of collective thanks from the city for my intervention. But the whole thing stemmed from that: What Is this illness? Youre able to find out, arent you? (Laughter) Go and catch it!
0 1963-08-07, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its giving me the same kind of nights again. But its odd, I dont know what it means, last night there were buildings made of a kind of red granite, and many Japanese. Japanese women sewing and making ladies dresses and fabrics; Japanese youths climbing up and down the buildings with great agility; and everybody was very nice. But it was always the same thing (gesture of a collapse or a fall into a hole): you know, a path opens up, you walk on it, and after a while, plop! it all collapses. And there was a young Japanese man who was climbing up and down the place absolutely like a monkey, with extraordinary ease: Oh, I thought, but thats what I should do! But when I approached the spot, the things he used to climb up and down vanished! Finally, after a while, I made a decision: I will go just the same, and found myself downstairs. There I met some people and all sorts of things took place. But what I found interesting was that all the buildings (there were a great many of them, countless buildings!) were made of a kind of red porphyry. It was very beautiful, Granite or porphyry, there were both. Wide stairs, big halls, large gardenseven in the gardens there were constructions.
But outwardly, difficulties are coming back, in the sense that the Chinese seem to be seized again with a zeal to conquer they are massing troops at the border.
--
The Japanese are receptive people.
Theyve learned so much from the Americansit has warped their taste, but now its beginning to come back. Also, all that theyve learned helps them. And theyve converted America to the sense of Beauty!
Its odd, last night, it was all Japanese.
***
0 1964-02-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But when you have the experience perfectly sincerely, that is, when you dont kid yourself, its necessarily one single point, ONE WAY of putting it, thats all. And it can only be that. There is, besides, the very obvious observation that when you habitually use a certain language, the experience expresses itself in that language: for me, it always comes either in English or in French; it doesnt come in Chinese or Japanese! The words are necessarily English or French, with sometimes a Sanskrit word, but thats because physically I learned Sanskrit. Otherwise, I heard (not physically) Sanskrit uttered by another being, but it doesnt crystallize, it remains hazy, and when I return to a completely material consciousness, I remember a certain vague sound, but not a precise word. Therefore, the minute it is formulated, its ALWAYS an individual angle.
It takes a sort of VERY AUSTERE sincerity. You are carried away by enthusiasm because the experience brings an extraordinary power, the Power is there its there before the words, it diminishes with the words the Power is there, and with that Power you feel very universal, you feel, Its a universal Revelation. True, it is a universal revelation, but once you say it with words, its no longer universal: its only applicable to those brains built to understand that particular way of saying it. The Force is behind, but one has to go beyond the words.
0 1964-08-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(D., a disciple, sent Mother an eighteenth-century account by a Japanese monk of the Zen Buddhist sect describing a method called "Introspection," which enables one to overcome cold and hunger and attain physical immortality. Mother reads a few pages, then gives up.)
[Herms magazine, Spring 1963.]
0 1964-08-08, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are some strange things. When I went to Japan, I met a man there who was a striking reproduction of my father the first moment, I wondered if I was dreaming. I think my father was already dead, but I am not sure, I dont remember exactly (my father died while I was in Japan, thats all I know). But he was the same age as my father, which means they were born together, at the same time. My father was born in Turkey, while this one was born in Japan but anyway, it WAS my father! And this man took to me with a paternal passion, it was extraordinary! He wanted to see me all the time, he showered me with gifts. And we could hardly talk to each other, as he knew very little English. But what a resemblance! As if one were the exact replica of the other: same size, same features, same color (he was exceptionally white for a Japanese, and my father wasnt white as northern people are: he was white as people from the Middle East are, just like me).
It always surprised me. You know, people often say, Oh, they look like each other, but thats not it! He was like an exact replica.
0 1965-06-18 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One is wondering if, really, it wont be necessary to have an American occupation here, which would have the double effect of converting the Americans and making the Indians make some progress. Practical progress is what they would make, as the Japanese did. And the Americans are now the disciples of the Japanese: from the point of view of Beauty they have made wonderful and absolutely unexpected progress. If the Americans came here, they would be converted, they would become oh, they would understand spiritual life. Only, of course, it wouldnt be too pleasant (!) But its the surest methodits always the dominator that learns the lesson from the dominated. The Americans might become the most militant spiritualists in the world if they occupied India. Only, the Indians would have a bad time. But they would become very practical, they would learn to put order in what they dowhich they quite lack (just see, I didnt make you say that for that typewriter).
Its troublesome. Its something in suspense [the American occupation]. In my active consciousness, I dont want it. First, it would take a long timeit always takes a long time. A lot of time wasted, a lot of suffering, a lot of humiliation. But its a very radical method.
0 1965-07-10, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I can tell you (if it helps your physical mind) that in Japan I had a sort of measles (which had its own rather deep reasons) and that the Japanese doctor (who, besides, had studied in Germany, anyway he was a doctor through and through) told me very gravely that I should take care, that I was in the early stages of this wonderful disease, that above all I should never live in a cold climate, and this and that. I was losing weight and so on. That was in Japan. Then I came here and I said that to Sri Aurobindo, who looked at me and smiled; and it was over, we didnt talk about it anymore. We didnt talk about it anymore and it wasnt there anymore! (laughing) It was all over. When I met Dr. S., years later, I asked him. Nothing at all, he said, everything is fine, there is absolutely nothing, not a trace. And I hadnt done anything, I hadnt taken any medicine or any precaution. Only, I had told Sri Aurobindo about it, who had looked at me and smiled.
Well, I am convinced thats how it is, thats all. But the physical mind doesnt believe in that. It believes that thats all very well in the higher realms, but when we are in Matter things follow a law of Matter and are material and mechanical, and there is a mechanism, and when the mechanism and so on and so forth (not with these words, but with this thought). And one has to keep forever working on that, forever saying, Oh, put a stop to all your difficulties, keep quiet!
0 1965-09-18, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Pakistan, there was a firing system of the latest American model, in which they take aim with, I dont know, electrical systems, and they can fire several thousand shots in anyway, its frightening; and shots that reach exactly where they want. Its quite an organization. Theyve become very efficient. It was given to Pakistan by the Americans. And it had to be destroyed. So one of the Indian pilots went and crashed his plane into it. Naturally, the plane crushed everythinghe too was crushed. But the installation was demolished. People here are capable of such things. If they feel what Sri Aurobindo says in this letter I have just given you, that the leader of our march is the Almighty, if they feel that way Thats what made the strength of the Japanese in the past. Thats what makes the strength of people here, once they are convinced. Thats how the Japanese took Port Arthur; there was a sort of ditch around the fortress, as there are in fortified places, and because of that they couldnt get in; well, they let themselves be killed till they were able to walk across on the bodies: the bodies made a bridge by filling up the ditch, and then they walked across.
People who are conscious that death isnt the end, that death is the beginning of something else, it gives them a strength that these Europeans cannot have.
0 1965-11-06, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A disciple who was a friend of Satprem's; he had died insane seven or eight years earlier and Satprem had assisted him in a Japanese mental hospital.
***
0 1967-02-08, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday evening, something amusing happened. I received some soups from Japan. It was all written in Japanese, impossible to read. When the doctor came (he comes every evening), I asked him, Would you like to try a Japanese soup? And I gave him a packet to take with him. Yesterday evening, when he came back, I asked him, Did you taste the Japanese soup? He said, Its shellfish soup, and he added, Its not good for you. I asked him, Why is it not good for me? (I asked him just for information, to know what my illness was(!), why I couldnt eat shellfish?) He answered me, Oh, you would have an allergic reaction. Then I looked at him and, with great force, said to him, I have NO allergic reactions. (Mother laughs) The poor man! He gave a shudder and he is down with fever!
Its true that now, as soon as the nerves (but you know, its an observation of every second), as soon as the nerves start protesting and it happens very often when they are interested in a sensation: they become interested in a sensation, they concentrate and follow it, then suddenly, it exceeds (how should I put it?) the amount they are used to considering as pleasant (it can be put that way), so theres a slight tipping over and they start going wrong, they start protesting. But if there is observation, there is the action of the inner mentor that tells them, Now, all sensations can be borne almost to their maximum: its quite simply a bad habit and a lack of plasticity. Remain calm and you will see. (Something of the sort.) Then they are docile, they stay calm, and everything smoothes out. Smoothes out, and then the allergic reaction is over. So I think Ive learned the knack! Thats why I answered the doctor with such force.
0 1967-02-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Whats specific to each language (apart from a few differences in words) is the order in which ideas are presented: the construction of sentences. The Japanese (and especially the Chinese) have solved the problem by using only the sign of the idea. Now, under the influence from outside, they have added phonetic signs to build a sentence; but even now the order in the construction of the ideas is different. Its different in Japan and different in China. And unless you FEEL this, you can never know a foreign language really well. So we speak according to our very old habit (and basically its more convenient for us simply because it comes automatically). But when I receive, for instance, its not even a thought: its Sri Aurobindos formulated consciousness; then, there is a sort of progressive approximation of the expression, and sometimes it comes very clearly; but very often its a spontaneous mixture of French and English forms and I feel it is something else trying to be expressed. At times (it follows the notation), it makes me correct something; at other times it comes perfectly wellit depends. Oh, it depends on the limpidity. If you are very tranquil, it comes very well. And there, too, I see its not really French and not really English. Its not so much the words (words are nothing) as the ORDER in which things come up. And when afterwards I look at it objectively, I see its in part the order in which they come in French, and in part the order in which they come in English. And the result is a mixture, which is neither one language nor the other, and endeavours to express what might be called a new way of consciousness.
It leads me to think that something will be worked out that way, and that any too strict, too narrow attachment to the old rules is a hindrance to the evolution of expression. From that point of view, French is a long way behind EnglishEnglish is much more supple. But the languages in countries like China and Japan that use ideograms seem to be infinitely more supple than our own.
0 1967-07-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When it comes to languages, its very interesting. Those are things that come, stay for an hour or two, then go away; they are like lessons, things to be learned. And so, one day, there came the question of languages, of the different languages. Those languages were formed progressively (probably through usage, until, as you said, one day someone took it into his head to fix it in a logical and grammatical way), but behind those languages, there are identical experiencesidentical in their essence and there are certainly sounds that correspond to those experiences; you find those sounds in all languages, the different sounds with minor differences. One day (for a long time, more than an hour), it unfolded with all the evidence to support it, for all languages. Unfortunately, I couldnt see clearly, it was at night, so I couldnt note it down and it went away. But it should be able to come back. It was really interesting (Mother tries to recall the experience.) There were even languages I had never heard: Ive heard many European languages; in India, several Indian languages, chiefly Sanskrit; and then, Japanese. And there were languages I had never heard. It was all there. And there were sounds, certain sounds that come from all the way up, sounds (how can I explain?), sounds we might call essential. And I saw how they took shape and were distorted in languages (Mother draws a sinuous descending line that branches out). Sounds like the affirmative and the negativewhat, for us, is yes and noand also the expression of certain relationships (Mother tries to remember). But the interesting point was that it came with all the words, lots of words I didnt know! And at that time I knew them (it comes from a subconscient somewhere), I knew all those words.
At the same time, there was a sort of capacity or possibility, a state in which one was able to understand all languages; that is, every language was understood because of its connection with that region (gesture to the heights, at the origin of sounds). There didnt seem to be any difficulty in understanding any language. There was a sort of almost graphic explanation (same sinuous descending line branching out) showing how the sound had been distorted to express this or that or
0 1967-12-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some things are really interesting. For instance, Id like there to be To begin with, every country will have its pavilion, and in the pavilion, there will be the cuisine of that country, which means that the Japanese will be able to eat Japanese food if they want to(!), etc., but in the township itself, there will be food for vegetarians, food for nonvegetarians, and also a sort of experiment to find tomorrows food. You see, all this work of assimilation which makes you so heavy (it takes up so much time and energy from the being) should be done BEFORE, you should be able to immediately assimilate what you are given, as with things they make now; for instance, they have those vitamins that can be directly assimilated, and also (what do they call it? (Mother tries to remember) I take them every day. Words and I arent on very good terms!) proteins. Nutritive principles that are found in one thing or another and arent bulkyyou need to take a tremendous quantity of food to assimilate very little. So now that they are fairly clever with chemicals, that could be simplified. People dont like it, simply because they take an intense pleasure in eating(!), but when you no longer take pleasure in eating, you need to be nourished and not to waste your time with that. The amount of time lost is enormous: time for eating, time for digesting, and the rest. So I would like to have an experimental kitchen there, a sort of culinary laboratory, to try out. And according to their tastes and tendencies, people would go here or there.
And you dont pay for your food, but you must give your work, or the ingredients: for example, those who had fields would give the produce of their fields; those who had factories would give their products; or else your own work in exchange for food.
0 1968-03-02, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But were going to prepare a little brochure with the message and all these translationsinto Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. It will all be photographed, and then well restore the German text. Oh, the Russian text
But as a city of peace, its amusing! (Laughing) Its promising!
0 1968-04-23, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Here, in the French brochure, its Divine. I said if they wanted another word in Russian or German (in German T. translated it into the highest [Consciousness]; I told her, Its rather poor, but anyway), well, I said I wouldnt protest. In Chinese its Divine. I think its Divine in Japanese too.
In German, they asserted, Oh, if we put Divine, people will immediately think of God. I replied (laughing), Not necessarily, if theyre not idiots!
0 1969-01-04, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One of my brothers daughters (I think) married a Japanese and came here with her Japanese husb and I saw himand she has a flock of kids! But my brothers son and his other daughter, I dont know them.
No, I dont have any family sense!
03.04 - Towardsa New Ideology, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If, however, we take a right about turn and look away from the West to the Far East, we already see in Japan a different type of national self-government. It is based on an altogether different basis which may appear even novel to the modern and rationalistic European mentality. I am referring to the conception of duty which moulds and upholds the Japanese body politic and body social, as opposed to the conception of right obtaining royal rule in the Occident.
The distinction between the attitudes that underlie these two conceptions was once upon a time greatly stressed by Vivekananda, who was the first to strike two or three major chords that were needed to create the grand symphony of the Indian Renaissance. It is true Europe too had her Mazzini whose scheme of a new humanity was based on the conception of the duties of man. But his was a voice in the wilderness and he was not honoured in his own country.
03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, the Japanese, as a people, have developed to a consummate degree the sense of beauty, especially as applied to life and living. No other people, not even the old-world Greeks, possessed almost to a man, as do these children of the Rising Sun, so fine and infallible an sthetic sensibility,not static or abstract, but of the dynamic kinduniformly successful in making out of their work-a-day life, even to its smallest accessories, a flawless object of art. It is a wonder to see in japan how, even an unlettered peasant, away in his rustic environment, chooses with unerring taste the site of his house, builds it to the best advantage, arranges everything about it in a faultless rhythm. The whole motion of the life of a Japanese is almost Art incarnate.
Or take again the example of the British people. The practical, successful life instinct, one might even call it the business instinct, of the Anglo-Saxon races is, in its general diffusion, something that borders on the miraculous. Even their Shakespeare is reputed to have been very largely endowed with this national virtue. It is a faculty which has very little to do with calculation, or with much or close thinking, or with any laborious or subtle mental operationa quick or active mind is perhaps the last thing with which the British people can be accredited; this instinct of theirs is something spontaneous, almost aboriginal, moving with the sureness, the ruthlessness of nature's unconscious movements,it is a tact, native to the force that is life. It is this attribute which the Englishman draws from the collective genius of his race that marks him out from among all others; this is his forte, it is this which has created his nation and made it great and strong.
03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indian art is pre-eminently and par excellence the art of this inner re-formation and revaluation. It has thrown down completely and clearly the rigid scaffolding of the physical vision. We take here a sudden leap, as it were, into another world, and sometimes the feeling is that everything is reversed; it is not exactly that we feel ourselves standing on our heads, but it is, as if, in the Vedic phrase, the foundations were above and all the rest branched out from them downwards. The artist sees with an eye, and constructs upon a plan that conveys the merest excuse of an actual visible world. There are other schools in the East which have also moved very far away from the naturalistic view; yet they have kept, if not the form, at least, the feeling of actuality in their composition. Thus a Chinese, a Japanese, or a Persian masterpiece cannot be said to be "natural" in the sense in which a Tintoretto, or even a Raphael is natural; yet a sense of naturalness persists, though the appearance is not naturalistic. What Indian art gives is not the feeling of actuality or this sense of naturalness, but a feeling of truth, a sense of realityof the deepest reality.
Other art shows the world of creative imagination, the world reconstructed by the mind's own formative delight; the Indian artist reveals something more than that the faculty through which he seeks to create is more properly termed vision, not imagination; it is the movement of an inner consciousness, a spiritual perception, and not that of a more or less outer sensibility. For the Indian artist is a seer or rishi; what he envisages is the mystery, the truth and beauty of another worlda real, not merely a mental or imaginative world, as real as this material creation that we see and touch; it is indeed more real, for it is the basic world, the world of fundamental truths and realities behind this universe of apparent phenomena. It is this that he contemplates, this I upon which his entire consciousness is concentrated; and all his art consists in giving a glimpse of it, bodying it forth or expressing it in significant forms and symbols.
European the Far Westernart gives a front-view of reality; Japanese the Far Easternart gives a side-view; Indian art gives a view from above. 1 Or we may say, in psychological terms, that European art embodies experiences of the conscious mind and the external senses, Japanese art gives expression to experiences that one has through the subtler touches of the nerves and the sensibility, and Indian art proceeds through a spiritual consciousness and records experiences of the soul.
The frontal view of reality lays its stress upon the display of the form of things, their contour, their aspect in mass and volume and dimension; and the art, inspired and dominated by it, is more or less a sublimated form of the art of photography. The side-view takes us behind the world of forms, into the world of movement, of rhythm. And behind or above the world of movement, again, there is a world of typal realities, essential form-movements, fundamental modes of consciousness in its universal and transcendent status. It is this that the Indian artist endeavours to envisage and express.
--
A Chinese or a Japanese piece of artistic creation is more of a study in character than in form; but it is a study in character in a deeper sense than the meaning which the term usually bears to an European mind or when it is used in reference to Europe's art-creations.
Character in the European sense means that part of nature which is dynamically expressed in conduct, in behaviour, in external movements. But there is another sense in which the term would refer to the inner mode of being, and not to any outer exemplification in activity, any reaction or set of reactions in the kinetic system, nor even to the mental state, the temperament, immediately inspiring it, but to a still deeper status of consciousness. A Raphael Madonna, for example, purposes to pour wholly into flesh and blood the beauty of motherhood. A Japanese Madonna (a Kwanon), on the other hand, would not present the "natural" features and expressions of motherhood; it would not copy faithfully the model, however idealized, of a woman viewed as mother. It would endeavour rather to bring out something of the subtler reactions in the "nervous" world, the world of pure movements that is behind the world of form; it would record the rhythms and reverberations attendant upon the conception and experience of motherhood somewhere on the other side of our wakeful consciousness. That world is made up not of forms, but of vibrations; and a picture of it, therefore, instead of being a representation in three-dimensional space, would be more like a scheme, a presentation in graph, something like the ideography of the language of the Japanese themselves, something carrying in it the beauty characteristic of the calligraphic art. 2
An Indian Madonna owes its conception to an experience at the very other end of consciousness. The Indian artist does not at all think of a human mother; he has not before his mind's eye an idealized mother, nor even a subtilized feeling of motherhood. He goes deep into the very origin of things, and, from there seeks to bring out that which belongs to the absolute I and the universal. He endeavours to grasp the sense that : motherhood bears in its ultimate truth and reality. Beyond the form, beyond even the rhythm, he enters into bhva, the: spiritual substance of things. An Indian Madonna (Ganesh-janani, for example) is not solely or even primarily a human I mother, but the mother, universal and transcendent, of sentientand insentient creatures and supersentient beings. She embodies not the human affection only, but also the parallel sentiment that finds play in the lower and in the higher creations as well. She expresses in her limbs not only the gladness of the mother animal tending its young, but also the exhilaration that a plant feels in the uprush of its sap while giving out new shoots, and, above all, the supreme nanda which has given birth to the creation itself. The lines that portray such motherhood must have the largeness, the sweep, the au thenticity of elemental forces, the magic and the mystery of things behind the veil.
07.08 - The Divine Truth Its Name and Form, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You expect to see a divine form in each and all things? It may happen so. But I am not sure; I have the impression that there is a large part of imagination in such experiences. You may, for example, see the form of Krishna or Christ or Buddha in every being or thing. But I say that much of human conception enters into this perception. Otherwise what I was telling you just now would not be true. I said all who have the consciousness of the Divine, all who get the contact with the Divine, wherever one may be, to whatever age or country he may belong, all have the same essential experience. If it were not so, the Hindus would always see one of their gods, the Europeans one of theirs, the Japanese a third variety and so on. This may be an addition of each one's own mental formation, but it would not be the Reality in its essence or purity which is beyond all form. One can have a perception of the Divine Presence, a very concrete perception, one can have even a personal contact with the Divine, but it need not happen in and through the kind of form you imagine; it is something inexpressible, beyond all explanation or definition, it is evident only to one who has the experience. It may be as you are suddenly lifted up into a peculiar condition, you find yourself in the presence of the Divine which takes a form familiar to you, a form you have been accustomed to associate with the Divine, because of your education, your up-bringing and tradition. But, as I say, it is not the supreme essence of the experience: the form gives after all a limitation to the experience, takes away from it its universality and a large measure of its power.
***
07.42 - The Nature and Destiny of Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
However, even the commercialism of today, hideous as it is, has an advantage of its own. Commercialism means the mixing together of all parts of the world. It effaces the distinction between Orient and Occident, brings the Orient near to the Occident and the Occident near to the Orient. With the exchange of goods, there happens an exchange of ideas and even of habits and manners. In ancient days Rome conquered Greece and through that conquest was herself conquered by the culture and civilisation of Greece. The thing is happening today on a much greater scale and more intensely perhaps. At one time Japan was educating herself on the American pattern; now that America has conquered Japan physically, she is being conquered by the spirit of Japan; even in objects manufactured in America, you notice the Japanese influence in some way or other.
***
07.45 - Specialisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You must extend, enlarge, enrich your mind. It must be full of thoughts and ideas. It must be stored with the results of your observation and study. It must not be a poor mind, a mind, that is to say, that has not many ideas nor the capacity of reasoning and argument. Your mind must be capable of thinking of many different things, gathering knowledge of different kinds, considering a problem from many different sides, not following only a single line or track: it must be somewhat like a Japanese fan opening out full circle in all directions.
You have, for example, several subjects to learn at school. Well, learn as many as possible. If you study at home, read as many varieties as possible. I know you are usually asked and advised to follow a different way. You are to take as few subjects as possible and specialise. Yes, that is the general ideal: specialisation, to be an expert in one thing. If you wish to be a good philosopher, read philosophy only; if you wish to be a good chemist, do only chemistry; and even you should concentrate upon only one problem or thesis in philosophy or chemistry. In sports you are asked to do the same. Choose one item and fix your attention upon that alone. If you want to be a good tennis player, think of tennis alone. However, I am not of that opinion. My experience is different. I believe, there are general faculties in man which he should acquire and cultivate more than specialise himself. Of course, if it is your ambition to be a Monsieur or Madame Curie who wanted to discover one particular thing, to find out a new mystery of a definite kind, then you have to concentrate upon the one thing in view. But even then, once the object is gained, you can turn very well to other things. Besides, it is not an impossibility in the midst of the one-pointed pursuit to find occasions and opportunities to be interested in other pursuits.
08.19 - Asceticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You have seen Sannyasins lying upon nails. Why do they do that? Perhaps to prove their saintliness. But when they do so in public, well, the suspicion is legitimate that it is something like a pose. There are some perhaps who do the thing sincerely and seriously, that is to say, they do not do it merely to make a show. In their case we might ask why they do so. They say it is to prove to themselves their detachment from the body. There are others: they go a little further and say that one must make the body suffer in order to free the soul. But I tell you that the vital has a taste for suffering and imposes suffering on the body because of this perverse taste for suffering. I have seen children who, when they got hurt, would press the part hurt in order to get more pain and it was a pleasure to them. I have seen bigger persons also doing the same thingmorally I mean. It is a very well-known fact. I always tell people 'If you are unhappy, it is because you want to be unhappy. If you suffer, it is because you like suffering, otherwise you would not have the thing.' I call it an unhealthy state; for it is contrary to harmony and beauty; it is a kind of unhealthy need for strong sensations. Do you know, China is a country where they have invented the most atrocious kinds of torture, unthinkable ways? When I was in Japan I asked a Japanese who liked the Chinese very much, why it was so. He told me: 'It is because the people of the Far East, including the Japanese, possess very dull sensibility. They feel very little; unless the suffering is very strong they feel nothing.' They were obliged to use their intelligence for the discovery of extremely strong sufferings. Well, all people who are inconscient or tamasic the more inconscient they are the greater the tamashave their sensibility blunted; they need strong sensations if they have to feel them. This is what usually makes them cruel, because cruelty gives very strong sensations. The nerve tension produced in you when you impose suffering on someone, well, it does bring a sensation: they need that in order to feel, otherwise they would not feel. It is for that reason that whole races are particularly cruel. They are inconscient, inconscient vitally. They may not be unconscious mentally or otherwise. But they are unconscious vitally and physically, physically above all.
If one has a sense of beauty can he be cruel?
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
biologically grounded. Nonetheless, human languages differ. A native Japanese speaker cannot understand
a native French speaker, although it might be evident to both that the other is using language. It is possible
1.02 - The Ultimate Path is Without Difficulty, #The Blue Cliff Records, #Yuanwu Keqin, #Zen
As examples of chi-ching, Japanese commentaries conven
tionally refer to such things as 'twinkling the eyes,' 'raising the
1.03 - To Layman Ishii, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
Mount Sumeru, because inhabitants enjoy lives of interminable pleasure; and being enthralled in the worldly wisdom and skillful words (sechibens) of secular life. Dried buds and dead seeds (shge haishu) is a term of reproach directed at followers of the Two Vehicles, who are said to have no possibility for attaining complete enlightenment. t In the system of koan study that developed in later Hakuin Zen, hosshin or Dharmakaya koans are used in the beginning stages of practice (see Zen Dust, 46-50). The lines Hakuin quotes here are not found in the Poems of Han-shan (Han-shan shih). They are attributed to Han-shan in Compendium of the Five Lamps (ch. 15, chapter on Tung-shan Mu-ts'ung): "The master ascended the teaching seat and said, 'Han-shan said that "Red dust dances at the bottom of the well. / White waves rise on the mountain peaks. / The stone woman gives birth to a stone child. / Fur on the tortoise grows longer by the day." If you want to know the Bodhi-mind, all you have to do is to behold these sights.'" The lines are included in a Japanese edition of the work published during Hakuin's lifetime. u The Ten Ox-herding Pictures are a series of illustrations, accompanied by verses, showing the Zen student's progress to final enlightenment. The Five Ranks, comprising five modes of the particular and universal, are a teaching device formulated by Tung-shan of the Sto tradition. v Records of the Lamp, ch. 10. w Liu Hsiu (first century) was a descendant of Western Han royalty who defeated the usurper Wang
Mang and established the Eastern Han dynasty. Emperor Su Tsung (eighth century) regained the throne that his father had occupied before being been driven from power. x Wang Mang (c. 45 BC-23 AD) , a powerful official of the Western Han dynasty, and rebellious
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
something positively beneficial (consider, for the example, the post-war Japanese). The relationship
197
1.04 - The Crossing of the First Threshold, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Indian, Jain, Japanese, Jewish, Moslem, Persian,
Roman, Slavic, Teutonic, and Tibetan varieties), is an excellent introduction to
1.04 - The Discovery of the Nation-Soul, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Therefore in nations so circumstanced this tendency of self-finding has been most powerful and has even created in some of them a new type of national movement, as in Ireland and India. This and no other was the root-meaning of Swadeshism in Bengal and of the Irish movement in its earlier less purely political stages. The emergence of Bengal as a sub-nation in India was throughout a strongly subjective movement and in its later development it became very consciously that. The movement of 1905 in Bengal pursued a quite new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in themselves. We must not forget, however, that in the first stages these movements followed in their superficial thought the old motives of an objective and mostly political self-consciousness. The East indeed is always more subjective than the West and we can see the subjective tinge even in its political movements whether in Persia, India or China, and even in the very imitative movement of the Japanese resurgence. But it is only recently that this subjectivism has become self-conscious. We may therefore conclude that the conscious and deliberate subjectivism of certain nations was only the sign and precursor of a general change in humanity and has been helped forward by local circumstances, but was not really dependent upon them or in any sense their product.
This general change is incontestable; it is one of the capital phenomena of the tendencies of national and communal life at the present hour. The conception to which Ireland and India have been the first to give a definite formula, to be ourselves,so different from the impulse and ambition of dependent or unfortunate nations in the past which was rather to become like others,is now more and more a generally accepted motive of national life. It opens the way to great dangers and errors, but it is the essential condition for that which has now become the demand of the Time-Spirit on the human race, that it shall find subjectively, not only in the individual, but in the nation and in the unity of the human race itself, its deeper being, its inner law, its real self and live according to that and no longer by artificial standards. This tendency was preparing itself everywhere and partly coming to the surface before the War, but most prominently, as we have said, in new nations like Germany or in dependent nations like Ireland and India. The shock of the war brought about from its earliest moments an immediate and for the time being a militantemergence of the same deeper self-consciousness everywhere. Crude enough were most of its first manifestations, often of a really barbarous and reactionary crudeness. Especially, it tended to repeat the Teutonic lapse, preparing not only to be oneself, which is entirely right, but to live solely for and to oneself, which, if pushed beyond a certain point, becomes a disastrous error. For it is necessary, if the subjective age of humanity is to produce its best fruits, that the nations should become conscious not only of their own but of each others souls and learn to respect, to help and to profit, not only economically and intellectually but subjectively and spiritually, by each other.
1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Take, for instance, the construction of Golconde. I am not going to enter into an elaborate description of its development. Considering that our resources in men and money were then limited, how such a magnificent building was erected is a wonder. An American architect with his Japanese and Czechoslovakian assistants foregathered. Old buildings were demolished, our sadhaks along with the paid workers laboured night and day and as if from a void, the spectacular mansion rose silently and slowly like a giant in the air. It is a story hardly believable for Pondicherry of those days. But my wonder was at the part the Mother played in it, not inwardly which is beyond my depth but in the daylight itself. She was in constant touch with the work through her chosen instruments. As many sadhaks as possible were pressed into service there; to anyone young or old asking for work, part time, whole time, her one cry: "Go to Golconde, go to Golconde." It was one of her daily topics with Sri Aurobindo who was kept informed of the difficulties, troubles innumerable, and at the same time, of the need of his force to surmount "them. Particularly when rain threatened to impede or spoil some important part of the work, she would invoke his special help: for instance, when the roof was to be built. How often we heard her praying to Sri Aurobindo, "Lord, there should be no rain now." Menacing clouds had mustered strong, stormy west winds blowing ominously, rain imminent, and torrential Pondicherry rain! We would look at the sky and speculate on the result of the fight between the Divine Force and the natural force. The Divine Force would of course win: slowly the Fury would leash her forces and withdraw into the cave. But as soon as the intended object was achieved, a deluge swept down as if in revenge. Sri Aurobindo observed that that was often the rule. During the harvesting season too, S.O.S. signals would come to Sri Aurobindo through the Mother to stop the rain. He would smile and do his work silently. If I have not seen any other miracle, I can vouch for this one repeated more than once. During the roof-construction, work had to go on all night long and the Mother would mobilise and marshal all the available Ashram hands and put them there. With what cheer and ardour our youth jumped into the fray at the call of the Mother, using often Sri Aurobindo's name to put more love and zeal into the strenuous enterprise! We felt the vibration of a tremendous energy driving, supporting, inspiring the entire collective body. This was how Golconde, an Ashram guest house, was built, one of the wonders of modern architecture lavishly praised by many visitors. Let me quote the relevant portion of a letter from Sri Aurobindo, written in 1945 with regard to Golconde:
"...It is on this basis that she (Mother) planned the Golconde. First, she wanted a high architectural beauty, and in this she succeeded architects and people with architectural knowledge have admired it with enthusiasm as a remarkable achievement; one spoke of it as the finest building of its kind he had seen, with no equal in all Europe or America; and a French architect, pupil of a great master, said it executed superbly the idea which his master had been seeking for but failed to realise..."2
--
The two major activities that she took up during this period were the Ashram School and Physical Education which together form the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. Both of them, like the others, were born from tiny chromosomes and out of a compelling necessity, for the Japanese aggression had driven the children of the disciples in affected areas to seek shelter in the protecting arms of the Mother. She had now to devote much of her crowded time to the children who needed a special treatment, since they had not come for Yoga.
It was a challenging problem suddenly thrown upon her by Nature. Our Ashram life also took a different turn; the old barriers completely broke down under this influx. No longer a hermitage of peace, silence and inner expansion and acquisition, it had to be tested in the crucible of outer life. We soon became one spiritual family. The Mother had to look after the mental, vital and physical health of the green ones, both boys and girls. Along with the necessity, means also came forward to meet the demand. Sisirkumar Mitra from Vishwabharati, with a long teaching experience, and Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya from Calcutta, an expert in physical culture, came and were given charge of the two wings of education, mental and physical. Particularly in young Pranab, the Mother found an excellent instrument for physical culture and with his help she quickly built up the centre of physical education. I don't need to discuss the place and raison d'etre of physical education in our Ashram life when Sri Aurobindo has done it so well in his essay on The Divine Body.[6] My vision being more earthly, I can see that it has served the most important purpose of keeping the inflammable material of young boys, girls and children under a strict supervision through compulsory activities from 4.30 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. or so. One can very well imagine what would have been the moral effect on them, had there not been this central control, especially when the children here are given a great freedom of movement. Those young people who have cut themselves off from these collective activities suffer much from psychological troubles. Most of the ills of the youth outside have their origin in having no occupation after college and school hours. After Sri Aurobindo's passing, the Mother gave me one sound counsel, "Be in the atmosphere," by which she meant that I should not isolate myself from the collective activities. When there was a demand for more holidays, the Mother remarked, "I have started the School so that the children may not knock about in the streets." Since then, Sisirkumar has resisted the pressure of the students for more holidays.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
Muslim women in Yugoslavia, the holocaust of the Nazis, the carnage perpetrated by the Japanese in
mainl and China such events are not attri butable to human kinship with the animal, the innocent animal, or
1.05 - The Magical Control of the Weather, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
at the main. In a Japanese village, when the guardian divinity had
long been deaf to the peasants' prayers for rain, they at last threw
1.05 - War And Politics, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
We heard something from the Mother to this effect in one of her talks. She said, "Hitler was an idiot. In his normal moments he was no better than a concierge or a cordonnier and behaved and spoke of things in a most idiotic and stupid manner. He was possessed and made an instrument of by some other power and only when that happened he did extraordinary things. People who have seen him at that time said how he thumped, cried and screamed. The Japanese ambassador said, 'This man is mad. It is dangerous to have any alliance with him.' It is strange how the whole German race was stupid enough to follow this man. Such a thing would not have been possible in France or other countries."
Still there were others who dreamt of melting the heart of Hitler by non-violence. Sri Aurobindo remarked that his heart could be melted in only one way, by bombing it out of existence! Speaking about non-violence Sri Aurobindo told us in a talk on 28th October, 1940: "Gandhi has been forestalled in non-violence in Poland. The Polish (the Jews?) adopted non-violence against the Nazis and do you know the result? The Polish lady who is Ravindra's[1] friend wrote to Gandhi the account of the German oppression against the non-violent people. She cites 3 or 4 instances: 1) About 300 school-boys refused to salute Hitler. The result was that they were taken before their parents and shot down in their presence, 2) Some school-girls were taken to the soldiers' barracks and molested by them till they all died....
--
"The next day at about 2 p.m., after the All India Radio news at 1.30, there was a hot discussion among three sadhaks, including P, in his room. P took the standpoint of the purely spiritual man, who judges by looking at what is behind appearances. It seemed that he had already spoken with the Mother and thus was arguing forcefully for the acceptance of the Proposals. The second person was an experienced politician of the Gandhian Congress days and took the negative position. He argued the pros and cons of the Proposals and was of the opinion that the Indian leaders would reject them. The third a novice, with no political experience, was more for its acceptance. The discussion became hotter and hotter, so much so that the Mother, while going from Her bathroom to Her dressing room, was attracted by the unusual volume of sound. She did not enter Her dressing room, but turned Her steps towards P's room. Before entering there, She heard part of the argument. Then She stepped in and asked, 'What is it all about?' P said that one person argued that Cripps' offer would not be accepted by the Indian leaders. The Mother felt amused and inquired, 'Why?' By then She had sat on the chair that was in front of Her. It was a very unusual and interesting scene; the Mother, still in Her beautiful Japanese kimono just out of the bath, didn't seem to care to change Her dress, and was more interested in the arguments against the acceptance. Then She began to talk with a very calm and distinct voice. One could see that She who had entered a few minutes ago had been transported somewhere else and the voice was coming from that plane....
"She said something to this effect: 'One should leave the matter of the Cripps' offer entirely in the hands of the Divine, with full confidence that the Divine will work everything out. Certainly there were flaws in the offer. Nothing on earth created by man is flawless, because the human mind has a limited capacity. Yet behind this offer there is the Divine Grace directly present. The Grace is now at the door of India, ready to give its help. In the history of a nation such opportunities do not come often. The Grace presents itself at rare moments, after centuries of preparation of that nation. If it is accepted, the nation will survive and get a new birth in the Divine's consciousness. But if it is rejected the Grace will withdraw and then the nation will suffer terribly, calamity will overtake it.
--
The next issue, if not so great in magnitude, was the Japanese aggression. Japan, like a minor Hitler, had established its supremacy in the East. But Sri Aurobindo had never taken Japan's aggression very seriously. On the contrary, he once remarked that should Hitler become supreme in the West and turn his forces towards the East, Japan's power might be useful in confronting Hitler and checking his advance. This remark supporting as it were Japan's blaze of imperial conquest baffled me at the time. Did he want Japan's rise to serve as a counterblast to Hitler's problematic thrust towards the East? Or could it be read as a move to force America into the War? At any rate it was quite evident from our talks that Japan's dramatic conquests did not disturb him, as did Hitler's. But it was only when Japan's design on India, aided by some of our misguided patriots, was palpably clear, that Sri Aurobindo, as he himself avowed, used his spiritual Force against Japan and "had the satisfaction of seeing the tide of Japanese victory which had till then swept everything before it, change immediately into a tide of rapid, crushing and finally immense and overwhelming defeat".
We heard of the Japanese bombing of Calcutta and Vishakhapatnam, we also heard that Japanese warships had come to the Indian Ocean at Trincomali and the next information that reached us almost immediately was that they had exploded and sunk before they had time to invade India! In the North-East the I.N.A.[5] with the Japanese army at its back was triumphantly marching into Assam. The Indian army seemed to be in a panicky retreat, and the British Government, counting its imperial glory to be almost at an end, was preparing to leave India. The then Governor of Bengal seemed to have said at a cabinet meeting, "This time the game is up." When the words were reported to Sri Aurobindo he remarked, "Now the wheel will turn." For the Allies the situation at that moment was desperate everywhere, in Africa, in India, in Europe.
At this jubilant moment of the enemy, India's destiny intervened. A heavy downpour from heaven inundated the dense Assam jungles for days together, so that, bogged in the flood and mud, the invading army with its liberation force had to liberate itself from the wrath of Nature and beat an ignominious retreat. Yet rain during that season had never been heard of before.
In this context let us quote what the Mother said to a sadhak in 1927, when he asked how India was likely to get freedom. The Mother's prophetic reply was, "When a Japanese warship will come to the Indian Ocean." In fact, the Mother had visioned India's Independence In 1920. It was when she and Sri Aurobindo were in meditation, and she reached a state of consciousness from which she told Sri Aurobindo: "India is free."
Sri Aurobindo: How?
--
Today the achievement of India's freedom is attributed to various factors: the August movement, Non-cooperation, the Terrorist movement, the I. N. A. and others; the factor that played the decisive part is either not admitted or ignored altogether. From Sri Aurobindo's pronouncements we can assert that his Force was principally responsible for the success of the Allies and the defeat of the Japanese, thereby helping India to gain her freedom. In fact, India's freedom had been his constant dream from his very boyhood. Even during his intense sadhana in Pondicherry, it was always in his mind and he indefatigably worked for it in the yogic way till he became convinced that freedom was inevitable. As far back as 1935, when I asked him if he was working for India's freedom, he replied, "That is all settled, it is a question of working out only.... It is what she will do with her independence that is not arranged for and so it is that about which I have to bother."
The other causes then could be considered no more than contributory, even if indispensable factors. Out of all these, I may make some comment on the claims of the I. N. A. Whatever significance there may be in its claims, the role it played was fraught with most dangerous consequences. I wonder how our countrymen had no apprehension of them. It was a fatal game the I.N.A. played, thinking that the Japanese, after the conquest of India, would peacefully leave the country letting the I.N.A. enjoy the fruit of its victory, or that India would be able to fight and drive them out. Sri Aurobindo pointing out what would have been our condition, had Japan entered India, said, "Japan's imperialism being young and based on industrial and military power and moving westward, was a greater menace to India than the British imperialism which was old, which the country had learnt to deal with and which was on the way to elimination."
Our Ashram came in for a good deal of suffering and inconvenience in the wake of the War: the wrath and abuse of our countrymen, the resentment of a number of our own inmates for our support of the War and the loss of some other valiant sons in the great holocaust. It had to open its doors to the children of all disciples who were in the danger zone, so we were all of a sudden changed into a large community without sufficient means to maintain ourselves. And due to the general embargoes and restrictions imposed by the Government the most necessary food supply was either cut off or reduced to a minimum. Last of all, and the greatest irony of fate, the Ashram in spite of all our help was suspected of being a nest of spies or enemy agents. Police search was apprehended and even the question of disbanding the Ashram was in the air. Perhaps the British Government had never entirely believed that Sri Aurobindo, once the most dangerous enemy of the British Empire, could really become their ally. Was he not still engaged in secret revolutionary activities, his war-contribution serving just as a smoke-screen? Unfortunately, in the Ashram itself there were some who wished for Hitler's victory, not for love of Hitler but because of their hatred of British domination. Sri Aurobindo conveyed through us a stern message to them: "If these people want that the Ashram should be dissolved, they can come and tell me and I will dissolve it instead of the police doing it.... Hitlerism is the greatest menace that the world has ever met."
Another inconvenience, but of short duration, that we had to pass through was the threat of bombing by the Japanese Air Force. As soon as the alert for a blackout was given, all lights in the Ashram had to go off. Sri Aurobindo sat up in bed, the Mother on a chair in Sri Aurobindo's room; the two of us who were on duty at the time also sat there, Champaklal very near the Mother.... After a short while when the all-clear signal was given, we would revert to our duty. One day, putting a dark shade over Sri Aurobindo's table lamp, the Mother said with a smile, "Your lamp lights up three streets, Lord." "So I should be darkened?" he asked smiling. In truth, I do not think that any Japanese aeroplane flew over Pondicherry. I was very much amused at the sight of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo taking this human precaution against any possible threat. But that is their way. Because they are Divine and possess a great occult power, one would suppose that all the human measures were otiose or a mere show as I thought in my callow days. But I saw in this case and in many others that the Mother was in grim earnest. Even if Sri Aurobindo and she were sure of an eventual success, they would keep applying the pressure of their Force till the issue was decided beyond any question.
A little later, there was a lot of preparation against possible bombing and bombardment. Sandbags were piled up and trenches dug. It is reported that when the Mother was apprised of the preparations, she remarked in private, "There is such a strong Presence of Divine Force and Peace in the atmosphere that an attack is most improbable."
--
"As he was uttering those words, the possible dates were still whizzing through his mind like the numbers of a spinning roulette wheel.... Suddenly the wheel stopped with a jar... Mountbatten's decision was instantaneous. It was a date linked in his memory to the most triumphant hours of his own existence, the day in which his long crusade through the jungles of Burma had ended with the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire....
"His voice constricted with sudden emotion, the victor of the jungles of Burma about to become the liberator of India announced:
1.07 - The Ideal Law of Social Development, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Individual man belongs not only to humanity in general, his nature is not only a variation of human nature in general, but he belongs also to his race-type, his class-type, his mental, vital, physical, spiritual type in which he resembles some, differs from others. According to these affinities he tends to group himself in Churches, sects, communities, classes, coteries, associations whose life he helps, and by them he enriches the life of the large economic, social and political group or society to which he belongs. In modern times this society is the nation. By his enrichment of the national life, though not in that way only, he helps the total life of humanity. But it must be noted that he is not limited and cannot be limited by any of these groupings; he is not merely the noble, merchant, warrior, priest, scholar, artist, cultivator or artisan, not merely the religionist or the worldling or the politician. Nor can he be limited by his nationality; he is not merely the Englishman or the Frenchman, the Japanese or the Indian; if by a part of himself he belongs to the nation, by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity. And even there is a part of him, the greatest, which is not limited by humanity; he belongs by it to God and to the world of all beings and to the godheads of the future. He has indeed the tendency of self-limitation and subjection to his environment and group, but he has also the equally necessary tendency of expansion and transcendence of environment and groupings. The individual animal is dominated entirely by his type, subordinated to his group when he does group himself; individual man has already begun to share something of the infinity, complexity, free variation of the Self we see manifested in the world. Or at least he has it in possibility even if there be as yet no sign of it in his organised surface nature. There is here no principle of a mere shapeless fluidity; it is the tendency to enrich himself with the largest possible material constantly brought in, constantly assimilated and changed by the law of his individual nature into stuff of his growth and divine expansion.
Thus the community stands as a mid-term and intermediary value between the individual and humanity and it exists not merely for itself, but for the one and the other and to help them to fulfil each other. The individual has to live in humanity as well as humanity in the individual; but mankind is or has been too large an aggregate to make this mutuality a thing intimate and powerfully felt in the ordinary mind of the race, and even if humanity becomes a manageable unit of life, intermediate groups and aggregates must still exist for the purpose of mass-differentiation and the concentration and combination of varying tendencies in the total human aggregate. Therefore the community has to stand for a time to the individual for humanity even at the cost of standing between him and it and limiting the reach of his universality and the wideness of his sympathies. Still the absolute claim of the community, the society or the nation to make its growth, perfection, greatness the sole object of human life or to exist for itself alone as against the individual and the rest of humanity, to take arbitrary possession of the one and make the hostile assertion of itself against the other, whether defensive or offensive, the law of its action in the world and not, as it unfortunately is, a temporary necessity,this attitude of societies, races, religions, communities, nations, empires is evidently an aberration of the human reason, quite as much as the claim of the individual to live for himself egoistically is an aberration and the deformation of a truth.
1.08 - Psycho therapy Today, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
nonentity of its bearers; or a long succession of Japanese artists who
discard their own name and adopt the name of a master, simply adding
1.09 - To the Students, Young and Old, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The second example is from the other end of the world, from Japan. You have just arrived in this beautiful country for a long stay and very soon you find out that unless you have at least a minimum knowledge of the language, it will be very difficult for you to get along. So you begin to study Japanese and in order to become familiar with the language you do not miss a single opportunity to hear people talking, you listen to them carefully, you try to understand what they are saying; and then, beside you, in a tram where you have just taken your seat, there is a small child of four or five years with his mother. The child begins to talk in a clear and pure voice and listening to him you have the remarkable experience that he knows spontaneously what you have to learn with so much effort, and that as far as Japanese is concerned he could be your teacher in spite of his youth.
In this way life becomes full of wonder and gives you a lesson at each step. Looked at from this angle, it is truly worth living.
1.2.01 - The Call and the Capacity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If the question be of Indian Yoga itself in its own characteristic forms, here too the supposed inability is contradicted by experience. In early times Greeks and Scythians from the West as well as Chinese and Japanese and Cambodians from the East followed without difficulty Buddhist or Hindu disciplines; at the present day an increasing number of occidentals have taken to
Vedantic or Vaishnava or other Indian spiritual practices and this objection of incapacity or unsuitableness has never been made either from the side of the disciples or from the side of the Masters. I do not see, either, why there should be any such unbridgeable gulf; for there is no essential difference between spiritual life in the East and spiritual life in the West, - what difference there is has always been of names, forms and symbols or else of the emphasis laid on one special aim or another or on one side or another of psychological experience. Even here differences are often alleged which do not exist or else are not so great as they appear. I have seen it alleged by a Christian writer
1.52 - Killing the Divine Animal, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
are found in the Japanese island of Yezo or Yesso, as well as in
Saghalien and the southern of the Kurile Islands. It is not quite
--
one which was given to the world by a Japanese writer in 1652. It
has been translated into French and runs thus: "When they find a
--
summer. This butchery begins in the first Japanese month. For this
purpose they put the animal's head between two long poles, which are
1.55 - Money, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
A couple of Japanese wrestlers may be worth more than Phidias, Robert Browning, Titian and Mozart in terms of butchers' meat. We might alter that incorrect truism "money cannot by anything worth having" to "things worth having cannot be estimated in terms of money." You see, no counting. The operation to save your child's life: do you care if the surgeon wants five pounds or fifty? Of course, you may not have the fifty, or be obliged to retrench in other ways to get it; but it makes no odds as to what you feel about it. What is the value of a University Education? The answer is that it is a pure gamble. The student may use his advantages to make a rich marriage, to attract the wife of a millionaire, to earn a judgeship or a post in the Cabinet, to earn 500 a year as a doctor, 150 as a schoolmaster or he may die in the process. So with all the spiritual values; they are, in the most literal sense, inestimable. So don't start to count!
Most obviously of all, when it comes to The Great Work, money does not count at all. I do not write of any Magical work, in the restricted sense of the phrase. Shaw says: "Admirals always want more battleships" and J.F.C. Fuller: "if a lawyer, more wretches to hang." It applies to any one whose heart is in his job. (Of course, in this case, money is like all other things of value; nothing counts but the Job.) This, too, is sound Magical doctrine.
1.60 - Between Heaven and Earth, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
The Japanese would not allow that the Mikado should expose his
sacred person to the open air, and the sun was not thought worthy to
1916 12 05p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Turn towards the earth. The usual injunction was heard in the silence of the immutable identification. Then the consciousness became that of the One in all. Everywhere and in all those in whom thou canst see the One, there will awake the consciousness of this identity with the Divine. Look. It was a Japanese street brilliantly illuminated by gay lanterns picturesquely adorned with vivid colours. And as gradually what was conscious moved on down the street, the Divine appeared, visible in everyone and everything. One of the lightly-built houses became transparent, revealing a woman seated on a tatami in a sumptuous violet kimono embroidered with gold and bright colours. The woman was beautiful and must have been between thirty-five and forty. She was playing a golden samisen. At her feet lay a little child. And in the woman too the Divine was visible.
***
1929-04-21 - Visions, seeing and interpretation - Dreams and dreaml and - Dreamless sleep - Visions and formulation - Surrender, passive and of the will - Meditation and progress - Entering the spiritual life, a plunge into the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The two beings who were always appearing and speaking to Jeanne dArc would, if seen by an Indian, have a quite different appearance; for when one sees, one projects the forms of ones mind. To what you see you give the form of that which you expect to see. If the same being appeared simultaneously in a group where there were Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintoists, it would be named by absolutely different names. Each would say, in reference to the appearance of the being, that he was like this or like that, all differing and yet it would be one and the same manifestation. You have the vision of one in India whom you call the Divine Mother, the Catholics say it is the Virgin Mary, and the Japanese call it Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, and others would give other names. It is the same Force, the same Power, but the images made of it are different in different faiths.
What is the place of training or discipline in surrender? If one surrenders, can he not be without discipline? Does not discipline sometimes hamper?
1929-07-28 - Art and Yoga - Art and life - Music, dance - World of Harmony, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
True art is a whole and an ensemble; it is one and of one piece with life. You see something of this intimate wholeness in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt; for there pictures and statues and all objects of art were made and arranged as part of the architectural plan of a building, each detail a portion of the whole. It is like that in Japan, or at least it was so till the other day before the invasion of a utilitarian and practical modernism. A Japanese house is a wonderful artistic whole; always the right thing is there in the right place, nothing wrongly set, nothing too much, nothing too little. Everything is just as it needed to be, and the house itself blends marvellously with the surrounding nature. In India, too, painting and sculpture and architecture were one integral beauty, one single movement of adoration of the Divine.
There has been in this sense a great degeneration since then in the world. From the time of Victoria and in France from the Second Empire we have entered into a period of decadence. The habit has grown of hanging up in rooms pictures that have no meaning for the surrounding objects; any picture, any artistic object could now be put anywhere and it would make small difference. Art now is meant to show skill and cleverness and talent, not to embody some integral expression of harmony and beauty in a home.
--
Look again at what the moderns have made of the dance; compare it with what the dance once was. The dance was once one of the highest expressions of the inner life; it was associated with religion and it was an important limb in sacred ceremony, in the celebration of festivals, in the adoration of the Divine. In some countries it reached a very high degree of beauty and an extraordinary perfection. In Japan they kept up the tradition of the dance as a part of the religious life and, because the strict sense of beauty and art is a natural possession of the Japanese, they did not allow it to degenerate into something of lesser significance and smaller purpose. It was the same in India. It is true that in our days there have been attempts to resuscitate the ancient Greek and other dances; but the religious sense is missing in all such resurrections and they look more like rhythmic gymnastics than dance.
Today Russian dances are famous, but they are expressions of the vital world and there is even something terribly vital in them. Like all that comes to us from that world, they may be very attractive or very repulsive, but always they stand for themselves and not for the expression of the higher life. The very mysticism of the Russians is of a vital order. As technicians of the dance they are marvellous; but technique is only an instrument. If your instrument is good, so much the better, but so long as it is not surrendered to the Divine, however fine it may be, it is empty of the highest and cannot serve a divine purpose. The difficulty is that most of those who become artists believe that they stand on their own legs and have no need to turn to the Divine. It is a great pity; for in the divine manifestation skill is as useful an element as anything else. Skill is one part of the divine fabric, only it must know how to subordinate itself to greater things.
1951-04-12 - Japan, its art, landscapes, life, etc - Fairy-lore of Japan - Culture- its spiral movement - Indian and European- the spiritual life - Art and Truth, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What is the difference between Japanese art and the art of other countries, like those of Europe, for example?
The art of Japan is a kind of directly mental expression in physical life. The Japanese use the vital world very little. Their art is extremely mentalised; their life is extremely mentalised. It expresses in detail quite precise mental formations. Only, in the physical, they have spontaneously the sense of beauty. For example, a thing one sees very rarely in Europe but constantly, daily in Japan: very simple people, men of the working class or even peasants go for rest or enjoyment to a place where they can see a beautiful landscape. This gives them a much greater joy than going to play cards or indulging in all sorts of distractions as they do in the countries of Europe. They are seen in groups at times, going on the roads or sometimes taking a train or a tram up to a certain point, then walking to a place from where one gets a beautiful view. Then at this place there is a small house which fits very well into the landscape, there is a kind of small platform on which one can sit: one takes a cup of tea and at the same time sees the landscape. For them, this is the supreme enjoyment; they know nothing more pleasant. One can understand this among artists, educated people, quite learned people, but I am speaking of people of the most ordinary class, poor people who like this better than resting or relaxing at home. This is for them the greatest joy.
And in that country, for each season there are known sites. For instance, in autumn leaves become red; they have large numbers of maple-trees (the leaves of the maple turn into all the shades of the most vivid red in autumn, it is absolutely marvellous), so they arrange a place near a temple, for instance, on the top of a hill, and the entire hill is covered with maples. There is a stairway which climbs straight up, almost like a ladder, from the base to the top, and it is so steep that one cannot see what is at the top, one gets the feeling of a ladder rising to the skiesa stone stairway, very well made, rising steeply and seeming to lose itself in the skyclouds pass, and both the sides of the hill are covered with maples, and these maples have the most magnificent colours you could ever imagine. Well, an artist who goes there will experience an emotion of absolutely exceptional, marvellous beauty. But one sees very small children, families even, with a baby on the shoulder, going there in groups. In autumn they will go there. In springtime they will go elsewhere.
--
Now, I ought to say, to complete my picture, that the four years I was there I found a dearth of spirituality as entire as could be. These people have a wonderful morality, live according to quite strict moral rules, they have a mental construction even in the least detail of life: one must eat in a certain way and not another, one must bow in a certain way and not another, one must say certain words but not all; when addressing certain people one must express oneself in a certain way; when speaking with others, one must express oneself in another. If you go to buy something in a shop, you must say a particular sentence; if you dont say it, you are not served: they look at you quizzically and do not move! But if you say the word, they wait upon you with full attention and bring, if necessary, a cushion for you to sit upon and a cup of tea to drink. And everything is like that. However, not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain. And what energy they have! Their whole vital being is turned into energy. They have an extraordinary endurance but no direct aspiration: one must obey the rule, one is obliged. If one does not submit oneself to rules there, one may live as Europeans do, who are considered barbarians and looked upon altogether as intruders, but if you want to live a Japanese life among the Japanese you must do as they do, otherwise you make them so unhappy that you cant even have any relation with them. In their house you must live in a particular way, when you meet them you must greet them in a particular way. I think I have already told you the story of that Japanese who was an intimate friend of ours, and whom I helped to come into contact with his soul and who ran away. He was in the countryside with us and I had put him in touch with his psychic being; he had the experience, a revelation, the contact, the dazzling inner contact. And the next morning, he was no longer there, he had taken flight! Later, when I saw him again in town after the holidays, I asked him, But what happened to you, why did you go away?Oh! You understand, I discovered my soul and saw that my soul was more powerful than my faith in the country and the Mikado; I would have had to obey my soul and I would no longer have been a faithful subject of my emperor. I had to go away. There you are! All this is au thentically true.
Why are great artists born at the same time in the same country?
1953-04-29, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The beings who were always appearing and speaking to Jeanne dArc would, if seen by an Indian, have quite a different appearance; for when one sees, one projects the forms of ones mind. You have the vision of one in India whom you call the Divine Mother; the Catholics say it is the Virgin Mary, and the Japanese call it Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy; and others would give other names. It is the same force, the same power, but the images made of it are different in different faiths.
Questions and Answers 1929-1931 (21 April 1929)
1953-05-27, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If I understand well what you mean, you expect to see a form, like the form of Krishna for example, or the form of Christ, of Buddha, in every person? That seems to me childishness. But still I do not say that it cannot happen; I think it may happen. But there is in it much human consciousness added to the perception, for that would no longer be exactly what I have just told you: for those who have the consciousness of the Divine, when they are in contact with the Divine, whoever they may be, whatever age, whatever country they may belong to, the experience is the same. Whereas if it were as you say, then Indians would see one of their divinities, Europeans one of theirs, the Japanese one of their own, and so on. Then it would no longer be a pure perception, there would already be an addition of their own mental formation. It is no longer the Thing in its essence and purity, which is beyond all form.
But one may have a perception, and a very concrete perception of the Divine Presence, yes. One may have a very personal contact with the Divine, yes. But not in this way. And it is inexpressible, except for those who have had the experience. If you do not have an experience, I could speak to you for hours about it, you would understand nothing; it escapes all explanation. It is only when one has the experience that one can understand. And what do you expect? When you speak or write about things, there is necessarily a mental addition, otherwise you would not be able to speak, you would not be able to write. Well, it is this mental addition that has made people try to give an explanation of their experience, and then they have said or written things like this: I see images of God. These are ways of speaking. It is possible that the thing you are speaking about may happen: to be suddenly in a particular state and see a Divine Presence and this Presence taking a form thats familiar to youone is accustomed to associate certain forms with the Divine, due to ones education, tradition, and that takes an external form. But it is not the supreme essence of the experience, it is the form, and this gives a sort of limitation to the experience, it must take away from it its universality and a great deal of its power.
1953-07-22, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When someone came to see me, I asked to be left alone, I lay quietly in my bed and I passed two or three days absolutely quiet, in concentration, with my consciousness. Subsequently, a friend of ours (a Japanese, a very good friend) came and told me: Ah! you were ill? So what I thought was true. Just imagine for the last two or three days, there hasnt been a single new case of illness in the town and most of the people who were ill have been cured and the number of deaths has become almost negligible, and now it is all over. The illness is wholly under control. Then I narrated what had happened to me and he went and narrated it to everybody. They even published articles about it in the papers.
Well, consciousness, to be sure, is more effective than doctors pills! The condition was critical. Just imagine, there were entire villages where everyone had died. There was a village in Japan, not very big, but still with more than a hundred people, and it happened, by some extraordinary stroke of luck, that one of the villagers was to receive a letter (the postman went there only if there was a letter; naturally, it was a village far in the countryside); so he went to the countryside; there was a snowfall; the whole village was under snow and there was not a living person. It was exactly so. It was that kind of epidemic. And Tokyo was also like that; but Tokyo was a big town and things did not happen in the same fashion. And it was in this way the epidemic ended. That is my story.
1953-10-21, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah! as for Buddhism. The people of the South and the North have different kinds of imagination. The southern people are generally more rigid, arent they? I dont know, but for Buddhism, the Buddhism of the South is quite rigid and doesnt allow any suppleness in the understanding of the text. And it is a terribly strict Buddhism in which all notion of the Godhead in any form whatsoever, is completely done away with. On the other hand, the Buddhism of the North is an orgy of gods! It is true that these are former Buddhas, but still they are turned into gods. And it is this latter that has spread into China and from China gone to Japan. So, one enters a Buddhist temple in Japan and sees There is a temple where there were more than a thousand Buddhas, all sculptureda thousand figures seated around the central Buddha they were there all around, the entire back wall of the temple was covered with images: small ones, big ones, fat ones, thin ones, women, menthere was everything, a whole pantheon there, formidable, and they were like gods. And then too, there were little beings down below with all kinds of forms including those of animals, and these were the worshippers. It was it was an orgy of images. But the Buddhism of the South has the austerity of Protestantism: there must be no images. And there is no divine Consciousness, besides. One comes into the world through desire, into a world of desire, and abandoning desire one goes out of the world and creation and returns to Nirvanaeven the nought is something too concrete. There is no Creator in Buddhism. So, I dont know. The Buddhism of the South is written in Pali and that of the North in Sanskrit. And naturally, there is Tibetan Buddhism written in Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhism written in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism in Japanese. And each one, I believe, is very very different from the others. Well, probably there must be several versions of the Ramayana. And still more versions of the Mahabharata that indeed is amazing!
(Nolini) Of the Ramayana also.
1953-10-28, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
True art is a whole and an ensemble; it is one and of one piece with life. You see something of this intimate wholeness in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt; for there pictures and statues and all objects of art were made and arranged as part of the architectural plan of a building, each detail a portion of the whole. It is like that in Japan, or at least it was so till the other day before the invasion of a utilitarian and practical modernism. A Japanese house is a wonderful artistic whole; always the right thing is there in the right place, nothing wrongly set, nothing too much, nothing too little. Everything is just as it needed to be, and the house itself blends marvellously with the surrounding nature. In India, too, painting and sculpture and architecture were one integral beauty, one single movement of adoration of the Divine.
Questions and Answers 1929-1931 (28 July 1929)
--
If it is necessary, it will be done. But fundamentally, these are things in the making. For, the advantage of modern times and specially of this hideous commercialism is that everything is now mixed up; that things from the East go to the West, and things from the West to the East, and they influence each other. For the moment this creates a confusion, a sort of pot-pourri. But a new expression will come out of itit is not so far from its realisation. People cannot intermix, as men today are intermixing, without its producing a reciprocal effect. For instance, with their mania of conquest, the nations of the West which conquered all sorts of countries in the world, have undergone a very strong influence of the conquered countries. In the old days, when Rome conquered Greece it came under the influence of Greece much more than if it had not conquered it. And the Americansall that they make now is full of Japanese things, and perhaps they are not even aware of it. But since they occupied Japan, I see that the magazines received from America are full of Japanese things. And even in certain details of objects received from America, one now feels the influence of Japan. That happens automatically. It is quite strange, there always comes about a sort of equilibrium, and he who made the material conquest is conquered by the spirit of the vanquished. It is reciprocal. He made the material conquest, he possesses materially, but it is the spirit of the conquered one who possesses the conqueror.
So, through mixing The ways of Nature are slow, obscure and complicated. She takes a very long time to do a thing which could probably be done much more rapidly, easily and without wastage by means of the spirit. At present there is a terrible wastage in the world. But it is getting done. She has her own way of mixing people.
1953-11-18, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the number of plantsnobody has ever known and nobody will probably ever know the number of different plants there are upon earth. Yet when a list is made of the number of plants men know and use, it is ridiculously small. I believe, when I was in Japan, the Japanese used to tell me that Europeans eat only three hundred and fifty types of different plants, whilst they use more than six hundred. That makes a considerable difference. They used to say: Oh, how you waste your food! Nature produces infinitely more than you know; you waste all that. Have you ever eaten (not here, but in Europe) bamboo sprouts? You have eaten bamboo sprouts? You have eaten palm-tree buds? Coconut buds?That, indeed, makes a marvellous salad, coconut buds. Only, this kills the tree. For a salad, one kills a tree. But when there is a cyclone, for instance, which knocks down hundreds of coconut trees, the only way of utilising the catastrophe is to eat all the buds and make yourself a magnificent dish. Havent you ever eaten coconut buds? As for me, I was not surprised, for I had eaten bamboo sprouts before they sprang up from the groundsomewhat like the asparagus. It is quite a classical dish in Japan. And their bamboos are much more tender than the bamboos here. Their bamboos are very tender and their sprouts are wonderful.
Still, thats how it is. It seems in Europe one knows how to use only three hundred and fifty varieties of vegetables from the vegetable kingdom, whilst in Japan they use six hundred of them and more. But perhaps if people knew, they would not die of hunger, at least those who live in the countryside. Voil
1954-07-21 - Mistakes - Success - Asuras - Mental arrogance - Difficulty turned into opportunity - Mothers use of flowers - Conversion of men governed by adverse forces, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One must have a strong grip and an unshakable resolution. As in our Japanese story of the other day, that soldier who had a knife in his knee in order to make sure of not falling asleep and when he felt very sleepy, he turned the knife in such a way that it hurt him still more. One must have something like that. This, this is determination: to know what one wants and to do it. There we are!
Mother, may I ask something?
1954-09-08 - Hostile forces - Substance - Concentration - Changing the centre of thought - Peace, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There were hundreds of people at his meetings. They would all sit on their knees as one does in Japan. He struck a table with a stick and everyone brought down his mental force to the stomach; and then they remained like that for oh! at least half an hour. And after half an hour he struck the table a second time and they released their mental force and began chatting not very much, for the Japanese do not talk much, but nevertheless they talk.
There now! But mark that there was something very true, in the see that if ever you have a headache I advise you to do this: to take the thought-force, the mental force and even if you can draw a little of your vital force, that tooand make it come down, like this (gesture of very slowly sliding both hands from the top of the head downwards). Well, if you have a headache or a congestion, if you have caught a touch of the sun, for instance, indeed if anything has happened to you, well, if you know how to do this and bring down the force here, like this, here (showing the centre of the chest), or even lower down (showing the stomach), well, it will disappear. It will disappear. You will be able to do this in five minutes. You can try, the next time you have a headache I hope you wont have a headache but the next time you have it, try this. Sit upright, like this (movement showing an sana posture). The Japanese say you should sit on your heels but that might disturb your meditation, sitting like thatthey call it sitting at ease. The Indian fashion is like this (gesture), otherwise you must sit like this (gesture); this is harder when you are not accustomed to it.
So, sit quite at ease and then take all your force as though you were taking, you see all the energy in your head, take it and then make it come down, down, down, like this, slowly, very carefully, right down here, down to the navel. And you will see that your headache will disappear. I have made the experiment many times It is a very good remedy, very easy; there is no need to take pills or injection; it gets cured in this way. So there you are!
1956-05-23 - Yoga and religion - Story of two clergymen on a boat - The Buddha and the Supramental - Hieroglyphs and phonetic alphabets - A vision of ancient Egypt - Memory for sounds, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The first time I came to India I came on a Japanese boat. And on this Japanese boat there were two clergymen, that is, Protestant priests, of different sects. I dont remember exactly which sects, but they were both English; I think one was an Anglican and the other a Presbyterian.
Now, Sunday came. There had to be a religious ceremony on the boat, or else we would have looked like hea thens, like the Japanese! There had to be a ceremony, but who should perform it? Should it be the Anglican or should it be the Presbyterian? They just missed quarrelling. Finally, one of them withdrew with dignity I dont remember now which one, I think it was the Anglican and the Presbyterian performed his ceremony.
It took place in the lounge of the ship. We had to go down a few steps to this lounge. And that day, all the men had put on their jacketit was hot, I think we were in the Red Seathey put on their jackets, stiff collars, leather shoes; neckties well set, hats on their heads, and they went with a book under their arm, almost in a procession from the deck to the lounge. The ladies wore their hats, some carried even a parasol, and they too had their book under the arm, a prayer-book.
--
From right to left. Chaldean languages are written like that. Chinese and Japanese also. Only Aryan languages are written from left to right.
(Meditation)
1964 02 05 - 98, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But then, when you have had the experience very sincerely that is, when you are not fooling yourselfit is necessarily only one point, one way of saying the thing, thats all. And it cannot be more than that. Besides, it is very easy to observe that when you are in the habit of using a particular language, it comes in that language; for me it always comes either in English or in French, it does not come in Chinese or in Japanese! The words are inevitably English or French; and sometimes there is a Sanskrit word but that is because, physically, I learnt Sanskrit. I have occasionally heardnot physicallySanskrit pronounced by another being; but it does not crystallise, it remains nebulous; and when I come back to an entirely material consciousness, I remember a vague sound, not a precise word. Therefore, it is always an individual angle from the very moment it is formulated.
You must have a kind of very austere sincerity. You are seized with enthusiasm, because the experience brings an extraordinary power: the Power is there it is there, before the words, and it diminishes with the words but the Power is there and with this Power you feel very universal, you have the feeling: It is a universal revelationyes, it is a universal revelation, but when you put it into words, it is no longer universal; then it is relevant only for minds that are built to understand this way of speaking. The Force is behind, but you have to go beyond the words.
1.anon - Eightfold Fence., #Anonymous - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Attributed to the god Susanoo. This is the first poem to be found in the kojiki the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry.
1.dz - A Zen monk asked for a verse -, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
"Mind itself is buddha" -- difficult to practice, but easy to explain;
1.dz - Ching-chings raindrop sound, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
Because the mind is free --
1.dz - Coming or Going, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
The migrating bird
1.dz - Impermanence, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
To what shall
1.dz - In the stream, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
In the stream,
1.dz - Like tangled hair, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
Like tangled hair,
1.dz - One of fifteen verses on Dogens mountain retreat, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
Joyful in this mountain retreat yet still feeling melancholy,
1.dz - One of six verses composed in Anyoin Temple in Fukakusa, 1230, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
Drifting pitifully in the whirlwind of birth and death,
1.dz - The track of the swan through the sky, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
The track of the swan through the sky
1.dz - The Western Patriarchs doctrine is transplanted!, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
The Western Patriarch's doctrine is transplanted!
1.dz - Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm,
1.dz - True person manifest throughout the ten quarters of the world, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
The true person is
1.dz - Wonderous nirvana-mind, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
Because the flowers blooming
1.dz - Worship, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
Beneath the snows
1.dz - Zazen, #Dogen - Poems, #Dogen, #Zen
Original Language Japanese
The moon reflected
1.fcn - a dandelion, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese a dandelion now and then interrupting the butterfly's dream [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi
1.fcn - Airing out kimonos, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese Airing out kimonos as well as her heart is never enough. [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi <
1.fcn - cool clear water, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese cool clear water and fireflies that vanish that is all there is... [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi <
1.fcn - From the mind, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese From the mind of a single, long vine one hundred opening lives. [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi <
1.fcn - hands drop, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese hands drop all things on the ground-- the clear water [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi <
1.fcn - loneliness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese loneliness lies within the listener-- a cuckoo's call [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi <
1.fcn - on the road, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese on the road today's rain the seed for clear water [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi <
1.fcn - skylark in the heavens, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese skylark in the heavens . . . what do you think of the boundless sky? <
1.fcn - spring rain, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese spring rain-- all things on earth become beautiful [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi <
1.fcn - To the one breaking it, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi Original Language Japanese To the one breaking it -- the fragrance of the plum. [2598.jpg] -- from Chiyo-ni: Woman Hiaku Master, Translated by Patricia Donegan / Translated by Yoshie Ishibashi <
1.fcn - whatever I pick up, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese whatever I pick up is alive -- ebbing tide [2726.jpg] -- from Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition, by Gabriel Rosenstock <
1.fcn - without a voice, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese without a voice the heron would disappear -- morning snow [2726.jpg] -- from Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition, by Gabriel Rosenstock <
1f.lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it rose the white,
ghost-like height of Mt. Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now
1.he - Hakuins Song of Zazen, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki Original Language Japanese All beings are primarily Buddhas. It is like water and ice: There is no ice apart from water; There are no Buddhas apart from beings. Not knowing how close the truth is to them, Beings seek for it afar -- what a pity! They are like those who, being in the midst of water, Cry out for water, feeling thirst. They are like the son of the rich man, Who, wandering away from his father, Goes astray amongst the poor. It is all due to their ignorance That beings transmigrate in the darkness Of the Six Paths of existence. When they wander from darkness to darkness, How can they ever be free from birth-and-death? As for the Dhyana practice as taught in the Mahayana, No amount of praise can exhaust its merits. The Six Paramitas--beginning with the Giving, Observing the Precepts, And other good deeds, variously enumerated, Such as Nembutsu, Repentance, Moral Training, and so on -- All are finally reducible to the practice of Dhyana. The merit of Dhyana practice, even during a single sitting, Erases the countless sins accumulated in the past. Where then are the Evil Paths to misguide us? The Pure Land cannot be far away. Those who, for once, listening to the Dharma In all humility, Praise it and faithfully follow it, Will be endowed with innumerable merits. But how much more so when you turn your eyes within yourselves And have a glimpse into your self-nature! You find that the self-nature is no-nature - The truth permitting no idle sophistry. For you, then, open the gate leading to the oneness of cause and effect; Before you, then, lies a straight road of non-duality and non-trinity. When you understand that form is the form of the formless, Your coming-and-going takes place nowhere else but where you are. When you understand that thought is the thought of the thought-less. Your singing-and-dancing is no other than the voice of the Dharma. How boundless is the sky of Samadhi! How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom! Being so is there anything you lack? As the Absolute presents itself before you The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus, And your person -- the body of the Buddha. [2139.jpg] -- from Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki
1.he - Past, present, future- unattainable, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Past, present, future: unattainable, Yet clear as the moteless sky. Late at night the stool's cold as iron, But the moonlit window smells of plum. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.he - The Form of the Formless (from Hakuins Song of Zazen), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki Original Language Japanese When you understand that form is the form of the formless, Your coming-and-going takes place nowhere else but where you are. When you understand that thought is the thought of the thought-less. Your singing-and-dancing is no other than the voice of the Dharma. How boundless is the sky of Samadhi! How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom! Being so is there anything you lack? As the Absolute presents itself before you The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus, And your person -- the body of the Buddha. [2139.jpg] -- from Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki <
1.he - The monkey is reaching, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Norman Waddell Original Language Japanese The monkey is reaching For the moon in the water. Until death overtakes him He'll never give up. If he'd let go the branch and Disappear in the deep pool, The whole world would shine With dazzling pureness. [1799.jpg] -- from Essential Teachings of Zen Master Hakuin, by Norman Waddell <
1.he - You no sooner attain the great void, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese You no sooner attain the great void Than body and mind are lost together. Heaven and Hell -- a straw. The Buddha-realm, Pandemonium -- shambles. Listen: a nightingale strains her voice, serenading the snow. Look: a tortoise wearing a sword climbs the lampstand. Should you desire the great tranquility, Prepare to sweat white beads. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.is - A Fisherman, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by John Stevens Original Language Japanese Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind. A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure. Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in and out of the clouds; Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs night after night. [1795.jpg] -- from Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu, Translated by John Stevens
1.is - a well nobody dug filled with no water, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Stephen Berg Original Language Japanese a well nobody dug filled with no water ripples and a shapeless weightless man drinks oh green green willow wonderfully red flower but I know the colors are not there [1796.jpg] -- from Crow With No Mouth: Fifteenth Century Zen Master Ikkyu, Translated by Stephen Berg <
1.is - Every day, priests minutely examine the Law, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Sonya Arutzen Original Language Japanese Every day, priests minutely examine the Law And endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn How to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon. [bk1sm.gif] -- from Ikkyu and the Crazy Cloud Anthology: A Zen Poet of Medieval Japan, by Ikkyu / Translated by Sonya Arutzen <
1.is - Form in Void, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese The tree is stripped, All color, fragrance gone, Yet already on the bough, Uncaring spring! [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.is - I Hate Incense, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by John Stevens Original Language Japanese A master's handiwork cannot be measured But still priests wag their tongues explaining the "Way" and babbling about "Zen." This old monk has never cared for false piety And my nose wrinkles at the dark smell of incense before the Buddha. [1795.jpg] -- from Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu, Translated by John Stevens <
1.is - Ikkyu this body isnt yours I say to myself, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Stephen Berg Original Language Japanese Ikkyu this body isn't yours I say to myself wherever I am I'm there [1796.jpg] -- from Crow With No Mouth: Fifteenth Century Zen Master Ikkyu, Translated by Stephen Berg <
1.is - inside the koan clear mind, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Stephen Berg Original Language Japanese inside the koan clear mind gashes the great darkness [1796.jpg] -- from Crow With No Mouth: Fifteenth Century Zen Master Ikkyu, Translated by Stephen Berg <
1.is - Like vanishing dew, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Sam Hamill Original Language Japanese Like vanishing dew, a passing apparition or the sudden flash of lightning -- already gone -- thus should one regard one's self. [2159.jpg] -- from The Poetry of Zen: (Shambhala Library), Edited by Sam Hamill / Edited by J. P. Seaton <
1.is - Many paths lead from the foot of the mountain,, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by R. H. Blyth Original Language Japanese Many paths lead from the foot of the mountain, But at the peak We all gaze at the Single bright moon. [2669.jpg] -- from Zen and Zen Classics, by R. H. Blyth <
1.is - only one koan matters, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Stephen Berg Original Language Japanese only one koan matters you [1796.jpg] -- from Crow With No Mouth: Fifteenth Century Zen Master Ikkyu, Translated by Stephen Berg <
1.is - sick of it whatever its called sick of the names, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Stephen Berg Original Language Japanese sick of it whatever it's called sick of the names I dedicate every pore to what's here [1796.jpg] -- from Crow With No Mouth: Fifteenth Century Zen Master Ikkyu, Translated by Stephen Berg <
1.is - The vast flood, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by R. H. Blyth Original Language Japanese The vast flood Rolls onward But yield yourself, And it floats you upon it. [2669.jpg] -- from Zen and Zen Classics, by R. H. Blyth <
1.is - To write something and leave it behind us, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by R. H. Blyth Original Language Japanese To write something and leave it behind us, It is but a dream. When we awake we know There is not even anyone to read it. [2669.jpg] -- from Zen and Zen Classics, by R. H. Blyth <
1.jc - On this summer night, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Edwin A. Cranston Original Language Japanese On this summer night All the household lies asleep, And in the doorway, For once open after dark, Stands the moon, brilliant, cloudless. [1469.jpg] -- from Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, Edited by Jane Hirshfield
1.jkhu - A Visit to Hattoji Temple, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Arthur Braverman Original Language Japanese Lone mountain dominating three provinces White clouds cover a green peak Summit soaring to great heights Old temple nearly a thousand years A monk meditates alone in a moonlit hall A monkey cries in the mist in an old tree Saying to worldly folk: "Come here; free yourselves of karmic dust." [2472.jpg] -- from A Quiet Room: The Poetry of Zen Master Jakushitsu, Translated by Arthur Braverman
1.jkhu - Gathering Tea, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Arthur Braverman Original Language Japanese To the branch's edge and the leaf's under surface be most attentive Its pervasive aroma envelopes people far away The realms of form and function can't contain it Spring leaks profusely through the basket [2472.jpg] -- from A Quiet Room: The Poetry of Zen Master Jakushitsu, Translated by Arthur Braverman <
1.jkhu - Living in the Mountains, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Arthur Braverman Original Language Japanese Neither seeking fame nor grieving my poverty I hide deep in the mountain far from worldly dust. Year ending cold sky who will befriend me? Plum blossom on a new branch wrapped in moonlight [2472.jpg] -- from A Quiet Room: The Poetry of Zen Master Jakushitsu, Translated by Arthur Braverman <
1.jkhu - Rain in Autumn, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Arthur Braverman Original Language Japanese Look at the moon before you point or speak Illuminating the sky an unstained round light If your face doesn't possess the monk's discerning eye You become blinded by evening rains of autumn [2472.jpg] -- from A Quiet Room: The Poetry of Zen Master Jakushitsu, Translated by Arthur Braverman <
1.jkhu - Sitting in the Mountains, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Arthur Braverman Original Language Japanese Rock slab seat legs folded sitting alone Not loathing noise not savoring silence The carefree clouds concur [2472.jpg] -- from A Quiet Room: The Poetry of Zen Master Jakushitsu, Translated by Arthur Braverman <
1.ki - Autumn wind, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Autumn wind -- mountain's shadow wavers. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto
1.ki - blown to the big river, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese blown to the big river floating away... cherry blossoms - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - Buddha Law, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Buddha Law, Shining In a leaf dew. [2115.jpg] -- from A Box of Zen: Haiku the Poetry of Zen, Koans the Lessons of Zen, Sayings the Wisdom of Zen, Edited by Manuela Dunn Mascetti / Edited by Timothy Hugh Barrett <
1.ki - Buddhas body, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese Buddha's body accepts it... winter rain [2652.jpg] -- from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger <
1.ki - by the light of graveside lanterns, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese by the light of graveside lanterns eating rice - totally naked <
1.ki - does the woodpecker, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese does the woodpecker stop and listen, too? evening temple drum [2726.jpg] -- from Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition, by Gabriel Rosenstock <
1.ki - Dont weep, insects, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Don't weep, insects -- Lovers, stars themselves, Must part. [2115.jpg] -- from A Box of Zen: Haiku the Poetry of Zen, Koans the Lessons of Zen, Sayings the Wisdom of Zen, Edited by Manuela Dunn Mascetti / Edited by Timothy Hugh Barrett <
1.ki - even poorly planted, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese even poorly planted rice plants slowly, slowly... green! [2652.jpg] -- from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger <
1.ki - First firefly, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese First firefly, why turn away -- it's Issa. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.ki - From burweed, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese From burweed, such a butterfly was born? [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.ki - In my hut, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese In my hut mice and fireflies getting along [2720.jpg] -- from This Dance of Bliss: Ecstatic Poetry from Around the World, Edited by Ivan M. Granger <
1.ki - into morning-glories, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese into morning-glories with one shoulder bare... holy man - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - Just by being, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Just by being, I'm here -- In snow-fall. [2115.jpg] -- from A Box of Zen: Haiku the Poetry of Zen, Koans the Lessons of Zen, Sayings the Wisdom of Zen, Edited by Manuela Dunn Mascetti / Edited by Timothy Hugh Barrett <
1.ki - mountain temple, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese mountain temple-- deep under snow a bell - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - Never forget, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Never forget: we walk on hell, gazing at flowers. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.ki - now begins, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese now begins the Future Buddha's reign... spring pines - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - Reflected, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Reflected in the dragonfly's eye -- mountains. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.ki - rice seedlings, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese rice seedlings-- the old Buddha's weary face - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - serene and still, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese serene and still the mountain viewing frog - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - spring begins, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese spring begins-- at least I'm human fifty years now - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - spring day, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese spring day-- even after sunset Eastern Mountains can be seen - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - stillness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese stillness-- in the depths of the lake billowing clouds [2720.jpg] -- from This Dance of Bliss: Ecstatic Poetry from Around the World, Edited by Ivan M. Granger <
1.ki - swatting a fly, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese swatting a fly looking at a mountain - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - the distant mountains, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese the distant mountain's blossoms cast their light... east window - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - the dragonflys tail, too, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese the dragonfly's tail, too day by day grows old - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ki - Where there are humans, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Where there are humans You'll find flies, And Buddhas. [2115.jpg] -- from A Box of Zen: Haiku the Poetry of Zen, Koans the Lessons of Zen, Sayings the Wisdom of Zen, Edited by Manuela Dunn Mascetti / Edited by Timothy Hugh Barrett <
1.ki - without seeing sunlight, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David G. Lanoue Original Language Japanese without seeing sunlight the winter camellia blooms - from the website http://haikuguy.com/issa/ <
1.ms - At the Nachi Kannon Hall, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese The Milky Way pours waterfalls over this human world the cold rushing tumbling sounds echo through the blue sky Veneration to the Great Compassionate Avilokiteshvara How lucky I am to have no trouble hearing [2206.jpg] -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu
1.ms - Beyond the World, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese This place of wild land has no boundaries north south east or west It is hard to see even the tree in the middle of it Turning your head you can look beyond each direction For the first time you know that your eyes have been deceiving you [2205.jpg] -- from East Window: Poems from Asia, Translated by W. S. Merwin <
1.ms - Buddhas Satori, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese For six years sitting alone still as a snake in a stalk of bamboo with no family but the ice on the snow mountain Last night seeing the empty sky fly into pieces he shook the morning star awake and kept it in his eyes [2205.jpg] -- from East Window: Poems from Asia, Translated by W. S. Merwin <
1.ms - Clear Valley, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese The water that can't be muddied with any stick is deeper than depth The sky and the water are a single deepening blue If you really want to find the source of the Sixth Patriarch's fountain don't look for it on the one bank or the other or in the middle of the stream [2206.jpg] -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu <
1.msd - Barns burnt down, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Barn's burnt down -- now I can see the moon. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto
1.msd - Masahides Death Poem, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Yoel Hoffman Original Language Japanese while I walk on the moon keeps pace beside me: friend in the water [1852.jpg] -- from Japanese Death Poems, Translated by Yoel Hoffman <
1.msd - When bird passes on, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese When bird passes on -- like moon, a friend to water. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.ms - Hui-nengs Pond, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese The Dharma spring of the Sixth Patriarch has never run dry it is flowing even now a single drop has fallen and spread far and deep Don't be caught by the decorations at the edge and the wall around it In the dead of night the moonlight strikes the middle of the pond [2206.jpg] -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu <
1.ms - Incomparable Verse Valley, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese The sounds of the stream splash out the Buddha's sermon Don't say that the deepest meaning comes only from one's mouth Day and night eighty thousand poems arise one after the other and in fact not a single word has ever been spoken [2206.jpg] -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu <
1.ms - No End Point, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese The whole world is clear and empty to the ten directions There is no end point And yet when we look carefully there is one after all You fly out of this world looking backward riding the giant roc into the hollow of a lotus thread to live there where heaven and earth were never divided [2206.jpg] -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu <
1.ms - Old Creek, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Nelson Foster and Josh Shoemaker Original Language Japanese Since before anyone remembers it has been clear shining like silver though the moonlight penetrates it and the wind ruffles it no trace of either remains Today I would not dare to expound the secret of the stream bed But I can tell you that the blue dragon is coiled there. [2207.jpg] -- from Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, Edited by Nelson Foster / Edited by Josh Shoemaker <
1.ms - Snow Garden, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese Flowers with six petals have covered the whole ground and frozen everywhere Heaven and earth have disappeared into this one pure color A pine and a cedar by the stone stairs are still green Shen-kuan must have lost sight of the mind of the great vessel [2206.jpg] -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu <
1.ms - Temple of Eternal Light, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese The mountain range the stones in the water all are strange and rare The beautiful landscape as we know belongs to those who are like it The upper worlds the lower worlds originally are one thing There is not a bit of dust there is only this still and full perfect enlightenment [2206.jpg] -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu <
1.ms - The Gate of Universal Light, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese The great light of compassion illuminates this world in every part As a boy Sudhana stood before the gates When your eyelids have fallen across the whole of the empty world the gate will open at the snap of a finger as it did then to let him pass [2205.jpg] -- from East Window: Poems from Asia, Translated by W. S. Merwin <
1.ms - Toki-no-Ge (Satori Poem), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by W. S. Merwin Original Language Japanese Year after year I dug in the earth looking for the blue of heaven only to feel the pile of dirt choking me until once in the dead of night I tripped on a broken brick and kicked it into the air and saw that without a thought I had smashed the bones of the empty sky [2206.jpg] -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu <
1.nkt - Autumn Wind, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Edwin A. Cranston Original Language Japanese While I wait for you, My lord, lost in this longing, Suddenly there comes A stirring of my window blind: The autumn wind is blowing.
1.nkt - Lets Get to Rowing, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Edwin A. Cranston Original Language Japanese At Nikitatsu We have waited for the moon Before boarding our boat; Now the tide is in at last -- Come, let's get to rowing <
1.ryz - Clear in the blue, the moon!, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Clear in the blue, the moon! Icy water to the horizon, Defining high, low. Startled, The dragon uncoils about the billows. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto
1.wby - Imitated From The Japanese, #Yeats - Poems, #William Butler Yeats, #Poetry
object:1.wby - Imitated From The Japanese
author class:William Butler Yeats
1.wby - In Memory Of Alfred Pollexfen, #Yeats - Poems, #William Butler Yeats, #Poetry
Where the Indians trade or Japanese?
He never found his rest ashore,
1.wby - Upon A Dying Lady, #Yeats - Poems, #William Butler Yeats, #Poetry
They had a priest say Mass, and even the Japanese,
Heel up and weight on toe, must face the wall
1.whitman - Salut Au Monde, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
You Japanese man or woman! you liver in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra,
Borneo!
1.yb - a moment, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese a moment in life's brevity -- autumn sunset [2658.jpg] -- from The Moon Over Tagoto: Selected Haiku of Buson, Translated by Gabriel Rosenstock / Translated by John McDonald
1.yb - Clinging to the bell, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Sam Hamill Original Language Japanese Clinging to the bell, he dozes so peacefully, this new butterfly [2159.jpg] -- from The Poetry of Zen: (Shambhala Library), Edited by Sam Hamill / Edited by J. P. Seaton <
1.yb - In a bitter wind, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Sam Hamill Original Language Japanese In a bitter wind a solitary monk bends to words cut in stone [2159.jpg] -- from The Poetry of Zen: (Shambhala Library), Edited by Sam Hamill / Edited by J. P. Seaton <
1.yb - Miles of frost, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Miles of frost -- on the lake the moon's my own. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.yb - Mountains of Yoshino, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Mountains of Yoshino -- shedding petals, swallowing clouds. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.yb - On these southern roads, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Original Language Japanese On these southern roads, on shrine or thatched roof, all the same, swallows everywhere <
1.yb - Short nap, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto Original Language Japanese Short nap -- waking, spring was gone. [1506.jpg] -- from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto <
1.yb - spring rain, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese spring rain -- pond and river are one [2658.jpg] -- from The Moon Over Tagoto: Selected Haiku of Buson, Translated by Gabriel Rosenstock / Translated by John McDonald <
1.yb - The late evening crow, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Sam Hamill Original Language Japanese The late evening crow of deep autumn longing suddenly cries out [2159.jpg] -- from The Poetry of Zen: (Shambhala Library), Edited by Sam Hamill / Edited by J. P. Seaton <
1.yb - This cold winter night, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Sam Hamill Original Language Japanese This cold winter night, that old wooden-head Buddha would make a nice fire [2159.jpg] -- from The Poetry of Zen: (Shambhala Library), Edited by Sam Hamill / Edited by J. P. Seaton <
1.yb - white lotus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese white lotus a monk about to cut it -- between two minds [2658.jpg] -- from The Moon Over Tagoto: Selected Haiku of Buson, Translated by Gabriel Rosenstock / Translated by John McDonald <
1.yb - winter moon, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Gabriel Rosenstock Original Language Japanese winter moon -- bowing to a monk on the bridge [2658.jpg] -- from The Moon Over Tagoto: Selected Haiku of Buson, Translated by Gabriel Rosenstock / Translated by John McDonald <
1.ymi - at the end of the smoke, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Michael Haldane Original Language Japanese at the end of the smoke from the smudge, humming mosquitoes
1.ymi - Swallowing, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Ivan M. Granger Original Language Japanese Swallowing the open field -- pheasant's cry [2652.jpg] -- from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger <
2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Do you know of a Japanese healer, Dr. Kobayashi, a famous surgeon, who is a Yogi following the Amitabha Buddha school of Sadhana? During his medical practice he found that the method he was following was not correct. So he followed an inner process. He makes the patients sit in meditation with him and asks them to concentrate on the navel and to aspire that the Light may come down and set right the affected organ. By now he has cured thousands of patients; of course, his personal influence is indispensable in bringing down the Light.
He has cured tumours and many uterine complaints; he has even cured cancer. He is especially successful in curing diseases of women. His theory is that the disease is due to a passive congestion in the affected part. That is to say, the nerves there get congested and the vital force is not able to reach that part. What the Light does is that it brings about a subtle and quick vibration in the affected part, thereby restoring normal circulation. But whatever the theory, this is a method of curing diseases by pure, subtle force. Something from the occult plane comes down and removes the obstacle from the physical plane.
--
Probably, the Hatha Yogins used to do what this Japanese doctor is doing, with their knowledge of the vital-physical currents. For instance, they could set right all the disorders below the navel by controlling the Vyana the vital current that works in the whole system. They would find out which Prana is less, then send the required current of vital energy which would work the disease out of the system.
(After a pause) I was thinking of the carbon dioxide explanation of Samadhi. It may be perfectly true so far as a particular kind of Samadhi is concerned. For example, there is a state in which a complete withdrawal into a certain aspect of the Infinite takes place. It is attained by stilling the mind even the physical mind altogether. But there are other kinds of concentrations where that explanation would not apply at all. In such concentrations the mind is quite clear, in fact, the mind can be very active and there is no carbon dioxide in the brain.
--
Disciple: Jean Herbert says that the Japanese are also like that. They are very polite and formal but once you can make friends they are very good friends.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. The Japanese are very polite in their manners and conduct, they don't admit you to their private life. They have a wonderful power of self-control. They don't lose their temper or quarrel with you; but if their honour is violated they may kill you. They can be bitter enemies. And where honour is concerned, if they do not kill you, they may kill themselves at your door. For instance, if a Japanese killed himself at an Englishman's door it would be impossible for the latter to live there any more. Even in crime the Japanese have a strange sense of values. If a robber entered a house and the householder told him that he required some money, the robber would part with some of it; but if he said that he had a debt of honour to pay, then the robber would leave all the money and go away. Imagine such a housebreaker in England or America! The Japanese also have a high sense of chivalry. In the Russo- Japanese war when the Russians were defeated the Mikado almost shed tears thinking of the Czar of Russia! That was his sense of chivalry.
When a congregation of fifty thousand persons was caught in a fire due to an earthquake there was not a single cry, not a mutter. All men were standing up and chanting a Buddhist hymn. That is a heroic people with wonderful self-control.
--
Nakashima's mother when she returned from America to Japan as is the custom with the Japanese was so horrified to see the present-day Japan that she went back to America! That the Japanese are not a spiritual race can be seen from the case of H, who was a great patriot and full of schemes for the future, but at the same time did not like the modern trends of Japan. He used to say: "My psychic being has become a traitor."
Disciple: Have you read Noguchi's letter to Tagore defending Japans aggression?
2.05 - Apotheosis, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
1854, the texture of Japanese life became so imbued with
significant formalization that existence to the slightest detail was
2.06 - On Beauty, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: I was thinking how some races have the sense of beauty in their very bones. Judging from what is left to us, it seems our people once had a keen sense of beauty. For example, take pottery, or Indian wood-carving which, I am afraid, is dying out now. Greece and ancient Italy had the perception of beauty. The Japanese are a remarkable people even the poorest have got the aesthetic sense. If they produce ugly things, it is only for export to other countries. I am afraid the Japanese are losing that sense now because of the general vulgarisation. In Germany Hitler must have crushed all fine things out of existence music, philosophy, etc. How can anything develop where there is no freedom? I hope Mussolini has kept some sense of art.
Disciple: He is very proud of Italians as a nation of artists! A friend of mine visited Italy and found that the Italians still have a sense of beauty and art.
2.07 - On Congress and Politics, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: Tagore's internationalism seems to have received a rude shock in China at the passing of the Japanese Exclusion Bill.
Disciple: It seems from his writing that he is an internationalist first and looks on nationalism as something dispensable.
--
Sri Aurobindo: We in India take time to assimilate and put into life this new national idea of the West. Other Asiatic nations like the Japanese and the Turks have been able to catch it. There is a great difference between the Indian and the Japanese mind. The Japanese have got the mental discipline and capacity to organise. We in India have not that sort of ordered and practical mind. In Japan everyone lives for the Mikado and the Mikado is the symbol of the nation he embodies the spirit of the nation. Everyone is prepared to die for him. This we could never have in India; Japan was more feudal in its past than any other Asiatic nation.
Disciple: Is there no similarity between the political institutions of the Middle Ages and the organisations of Chandragupta in India?
2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: D writes in his book that the Japanese have given up their music which requires harmony and taken up European music and instruments. Is that true?
Sri Aurobindo: For that we must ask Pavitra here.
Disciple: I think Japanese instruments also are found in plenty. You also find European instruments, orchestra, etc. There are places where you find Japanese music and drama patronised and there are many who like them very much. They have also made improvements in their instruments to suit modern requirements. The talk turned to a Theosophical Lodge started by an European in Japan.
Sri Aurobindo: I don't think it came to much.
--
Sri Aurobindo: Probably even in that Lodge there were more foreigners than Japanese.
Disciple: There were only two Japanese, one Dutch, one Pole, and so on. The Japanese mind is not interested in these things philosophy, metaphysics, etc.
26 SEPTEMBER 1926
21.01 - The Mother The Nature of Her Work, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Mother thus brings the golden light into the head of humanity, the top rung of his consciousness, and that work of initiation, diksha,into the Life Divine she started in France. From France she went to Japan for the next stage of her work. In Japan she came to the Far East. She spent five years, five long years in that country. Japan is the land of the Zen system of meditation, that is to say, a special way of entering into an inner consciousness, not a rational mental consciousness but a gaze inward into an occult and more sensitive region. The Japanese as a nation represent indeed a very sensitive vitality, an artistic vitality that seeks order and beauty in life, in the mode of living. For the golden light to manifest and have its play in the physical world and possess its body as it were, a vitality of this kind is necessary to acquire it and hold it. The Japanese wrestlers are well-known for their vital strength, self-controlled strength; usually they possess, almost all of them, you must have noticed, in pictures at least, a big tummy, and it is, they believe, the store-house of vital strength. This does not mean that r advise you to develop a big paunch, on the contrary. However, even in physical activities, more than the mere physical strength, the vital strength is necessary. Yes, the Japanese have a vital, strong, controlled, ordered, sensitive. You may remember one or two Prayers of the Mother in her Prires et
Mditations.She speaks of the cherry-blossom which is the emblem of the Japanese artistic sense, the feeling for beauty, a purified sense-perception: not a rough and crude and violent (lower) vital, but a fine, a pleasant intimate feeling and orderly happiness, that is what the cherry-blossom means. Mother described also a vision of hers, a beautiful picture it was, a Japanese mother and her child: it was an image of the new child that was born in humanity. A new world is thus ushered in in the land of the cherry-blossom, the hew vital world, for all the world.
The Mother is creative consciousness; wherever she happens to be, wherever she is called upon to be, her very presence moves for creation, creating a new world and a new dimension of being and consciousness, according to the need of time and place. And it is a whole world she creates and her creation endures, for it is an added achievement in the evolution of the. human being.
2.1.1.04 - Reading, Yogic Force and the Development of Style, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Why is it inexcusable? I dont know what the Japanese or the Soviet Russian writers have contri buted, but I feel quite happy and moral in my ignorance. As for reading Dickens in order to be a literary man, thats a strange idea. He was the most unliterary bloke that ever succeeded in literature and his style is a howling desert.
19 September 1936
2.11 - On Education, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: No. The Japanese are more naturally disciplined. I mean they take to discipline very easily.
26 AUGUST 1926
2.12 - On Miracles, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: They have been there for twenty thousand years. They are not new. Japan is a country of wooden houses and a Japanese goes to sleep dressed so that he can jump out at the first sign of danger. The Japanese are accustomed to keep their most precious possessions in one place. So, if there is a fire or earthquake, he simply runs out with them and then builds the house over again.
They are accustomed to live dangerously. Only recently they have begun to introduce the American style and stone buildings have been constructed. But that has brought disastrous consequences. The whole city of Yokohama is practically destroyed.
--
Sri Aurobindo: Formerly also there were such earthquakes but they were not so disastrous. Besides, electricity and waterworks and other such installations add to the danger. They have been trying to use reinforced concrete and they believe it may serve the purpose. The Japanese have reduced their infant mortality to the minimum. Moreover, they are a very hygienic people they are the cleanest people in the world.
Disciple: Even in India now there is an awakening of the sanitary sense.
2.13 - Psychic Presence and Psychic Being - Real Origin of Race Superiority, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Below the human level there is, ordinarily, hardly any individual formation there is only this presence, more or less. But when, by the growth of the body round the spark of Divine Consciousness, humanity began upon the earth, certain human organisms became in the course of this progressive growth sufficiently perfected, and by their opening and receptivity allowed a junction with certain beings descending from above. This gave rise to a kind of divine humanity, what may be called a race of the lite. If only they had remained by themselves, these people would have continued as a race unique and superhuman. Indeed many races have made claims to be that: the Aryan, the Semitic and the Japanese have all in turn considered themselves the chosen race. But in fact there has been a general levelling of humanity, a lot of intermixture. For there arose the necessity of prolongation of the superior race, which drove it to intermix with the rest of humanitywith animal humanity, that is to say. Thus its value was degraded and led to that great Fall which is spoken of in the worlds scriptures, the coming out of Paradise, the end of the Golden Age. Indeed it was a loss from the point of view of consciousness, but not from that of material strength, since it was a tremendous gain to ordinary humanity. There were, certainly, some beings who had a very strong will not to mix, who resented losing their superiority; and it is just this that is the real origin of race-pride, race-exclusiveness, and a special caste distinction like that cherished by the Brahmins in India. But at present it cannot be said that there is any portion of mankind which is purely animal: all the races have been touched by the descent from above, and owing to the extensive intermixture the result of the Involution was more widely spread.
Of course one cannot say that every man has got a psychic being, just as one cannot refuse to grant it to every animal. Many animals that have lived near man have some beginnings of it, while so often one comes across people who do not seem to be anything else than brutes. Here, too, there has been a good deal of levelling. But on the whole, the psychic in the true sense starts at the human stage: that is also why the Catholic religion declares that only man has a soul. In man alone there is the possibility of the psychic being growing to its full stature even so far as to be able in the end to join and unite with a descending being, a godhead from above.
2.16 - The 15th of August, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
At four o'clock all gather at the usual place of sitting the verandah. All sit there full of hope in silence; one or two whisper to each other. The mind of the company is silently repeating, "When will he come? May he come." It is 4:15; the old familiar and yet new 'tick' behind the door! Slowly a door opens. The Master steps out first, behind him the Mother in a white creamy sari with broad red border. He sits in his usual broad Japanese chair. The Mother sits on the right side on a small stool. For a short time about five minutes there is complete silence!
Then he glances at each one separately. The minutes are melting into the silence. There is again a wave of emotion in all; all bathe again into an ocean of some divine emotion. How wonderful if the whole of Eternity would flow in this experience! Time, poor Time, its flow is blamed by men. But where is the fault in the flow of Time? If so much Love and such Divine Delight can have its play let poor Time flow and have its Eternity! And let the world become Divine! Another powerful aspiration that comes to the surface is: "Expression is not needed let the whole of Eternity flow away in this silence!"
2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Look at the Japanese soldier slapping the European officers though they do deserve it; and the Japanese commander challenging Chiang-Kai-Shek to come out in the open field, and Japanese men attacking their political leaders all this is inconceivable. This sort of swaggering is not at all Japanese. In old times, the Japanese, even while fighting, had perfect sympathy with those with whom they fought.
Disciple: But without brutalities (killing innocent inhabitants) it would be difficult to win the war.
--
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. They are the most organised and able soldiers in the world excepting the Japanese. But the Japanese are numerically less and financially poorer.
Even so during the last war the Germans could not throw up any remarkable military genius like the French General Foch. If Foch had been made the Commander-in-Chief of the Allies sooner, the war would have ended much earlier.
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The Tibetans are more familiar with occultism than with spirituality. The Europeans are more taken up with these occult things. They either believe everything or nothing. That explains their attraction for Tibet, Bhutan and other places with occult atmosphere. Nowadays stories and novels are being written with these themes. Japanese Zen Buddhism, and Chinese Taoism have also attracted their attention.
I also wrote some stories but they are lost; the white ants have finished them and with them has perished my future fame as a story-teller. (Laughter)
--
Disciple: A Japanese general predicts a hundred-year war to civilize the world!
Sri Aurobindo: The idea is first to drive out the Europeans from Asia, but the Japanese will go about it silently without bragging.
Disciple: Will Indian freedom come a long time after?
--
In the war between Russia and Japan, the Japanese admitted that the Russian artillery was remarkable, it did not miss the mark, but the infantry was not good, for even when they got a very good opportunity they did not take advantage of it. On the other hand, the Japanese army is perhaps the best in the world. In spite of overwhelming numbers against them in China, they have been able to conquer. Chiang Kai-shek had trumpeted that he would defeat the Japanese in a very short time. They did not reply but at the end of each defeat the Japanese were further inside China than before.
Disciple: They say that the Japanese are not good in the air. They missed their aim many times.
Sri Aurobindo: Idon't know about that. The Japanese are good at concentrating on one thing at a time, but a pilot is required to concentrate on many points at the same time.
Disciple: Mussolini is asking all Italian firms to close down at Djibouti, and thus create dissatisfaction. He is trying to cut off the railway connecting Djibouti and Abyssinia and make another line through Eritrea to Asmara.
--
Disciple: No news except what C gives me. Mahatma Gandhi advised the Japanese visitor Dr. Kagawa to include Shantiniketan and Pondicherry in his itinerary without seeing these, his visit to India would be incomplete.
Sri Aurobindo: Oh that? I have heard about it.
--
Sri Aurobindo: The Mikado claims to be the descendant of the Sun Goddess. The Mikado named Maigi believed that and used to do what was necessary after feeling the inspiration within him. There are two types of features among the Japanese: tall people with a long nose and a fine aristocratic face; they are said to have come from Australia and Polynesia. It is they who gave the Samurai culture to Japan; I met at Tagore's place a painter of this type, he had magnificent features. The other is the usual Mongolian type.
Disciple: The dictators psychology is an authority-complex. People under the dictator feel that they are great and that the dictator in this case Hitler is fighting for them, not they who fight for him. Perhaps the dictators find a competitor in God and religion. So they try to crush religion.
2.21 - 1940, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: Oh yes. The Germans know everything. Their children are taught the most wonderful details about the cities and even villages in England and France. They have got a school where they train future governors for England. So far as organisation is concerned there are only two races who cannot be surpassed: the Germans and the Japanese. In the last war they found maps in Germany of English villages in which even the position of trees and houses were indicated.
There was a reference to Hiranyagarbha which P took to Sri Aurobindo. He had explained, two days back, that Hiranyagarbha has nothing to do with Supermind. Besides Hiranyagarbha is a Being, while Supermind is not.
2.2.3 - Depression and Despondency, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In speaking of the Buddhist and his nine years of the wall and other instances the Mother was only disproving the view that not having succeeded in seven or eight years meant unfitness and debarred all hope for the future. The man of the wall stands among the greatest names in Japanese Buddhism and his long sterility did not mean incapacity or spiritual unfitness. But apart from that there are many who have gone on persisting for long periods and finally prevailed. It is a common, not an uncommon experience.
***
2.25 - List of Topics in Each Talk, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
| 30-12-38 | Homeopathic dosing; possession, mania; Sri Aurobindo in England; Japanese culture; European civilisation |
| 10-01-39 | Systems of medicine; curing by yogic power |
--
| 22-01-39 | Fasting; Russian and Japanese armies; Mussolini and France; Western visitors and Ashram; inner voice and standards of right and wrong |
| 23-01-39 | Cosmic Will, Karma, Mukti; Cosmic Spirit, psychic. Overmind; Hitler, Mussolini; Nirvana, Self, adhikra;. Yoga and external conduct; philosophy, Sadhana, Divine Light |
2.3.3 - Anger and Violence, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But is it true that even anger which is of the lower vital and therefore close to the body, invariably produces these effects?1 Of course the psychologist cant know that another man is angry unless he shows physical signs of it, but also he cant know what a man is thinking unless the man speaks or writesdoes it follow that the state of thought cannot be fancied without its sign in speaking or writing? A Japanese who is accustomed to control all his emotions and give no sign (if he is angry the first sign you will have of it is a knife in your stomach from a calm or smiling assailant) will have none of these things when he is angrynot even the ebullition in the chest,in its place there will be a settled fire that will burn till his anger achieves itself in action.
***
30.13 - Rabindranath the Artist, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Among Indians, the Bengalis are supposed to have particularly acquired a capacity for appreciation of beauty. That this acquisition has been largely due to the contri bution of the Tagore family can by no means be denied. We do not know how we fared in this respect in the past. Perhaps our sense of beauty was concerned with the movements of the heart or at most with material objects of art. Perhaps, we had never been the worshippers of beauty in the outer life like the Japanese. Yet whatever little we had of that wealth of perfection within or without had died away for some reason or other. The want of vitality, the spirit of renunciation, poverty, despair, sloth, an immensely careless and extreme indiscipline made our life ugly. At length the influence that had especially manifested around Rabindranath came to our rescue and opened a new channel to create beauty.
Why should we speak of our own country alone, why should we try to keep his influence confined to Bengal or India only? I believe Europe, the West, have honoured him so much not primarily for his poetry. The modern world, freed from its life devoid of beauty due to the unavoidable necessity of technology and machinery of utility and efficiency, was eager at last to follow in the footsteps of Rabindranath to enter into an abode of peace and beauty, a garden of Eden.
3.2.03 - Jainism and Buddhism, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is no reason why the passage about Buddhism [in an essay of the correspondent] should be omitted. It gives one side of the Buddhistic teaching which is not much known or is usually ignored, for that teaching is by most rendered as Nirvana (Sunyavada) and a spiritualised humanitarianism. The difficulty is that it is these sides that have been stressed especially in the modern interpretations of Buddhism and any strictures I may have passed were in view of these interpretations and that onesided stress. I am aware of course of the opposite tendencies in theMahayana and the Japanese cult of Amitabha Buddha which is a cult of bhakti. It is now being said even of Shankara that there was another side of his doctrine but his followers have made him stand solely for the Great Illusion, the inferiority of bhakti, the uselessness of Karmajagan mithy.
***
33.05 - Muraripukur - II, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Japanese soldiers too in one of their encounters with the Russians in the Russo- Japanese War did not wait to build a bridge over the ramparts of a ditch; they made a solid bridge with the pile of their dead as they jumped in one after the other and let the army march over their bodies. To save oneself does not mean that one should, like Nandalal of the comic skit, take a vow to "keep oneself alive at any cost, for the good of the country and all", or live by the bourgeois doctrine that one should always save oneself anyhow, even by the sacrifice of one's wife, atmanam satatam rakset darairapi dhanairapi.
That is why we used to tease Paresh Mallick and called him a descendant of Nandalal. Have I told you the story? He was once deputed to present Kingsford, the Presidency Magistrate, with a live bomb packed in the form of a book; the bomb was to explode as soon as the book was opened. Paresh went in the garb of an Englishman's bearer. We looked out every day for an account in the papers of some serious accident to Kingsford. But nothing happened. He seemed to be attending court regularly and was apparently quite safe and sound. So we had to ask Paresh at last if he had in fact reached the bomb to its destination or whether he had thrown it away somewhere to save his own skin. However, the bomb was found later among a pile of books belonging to the Magistrate. It had been lying there safely and caused no harm. The people were demanding vengeance upon Kingsford because he had sentenced a young student, Sushil, to flogging, simply because the boy was involved in a tussle with the police. That was an occasion for us terrorists. Sushil later on joined the revolutionary group at Manicktolla.
33.15 - My Athletics, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let me in this connection tell you another amusing story. One day there came to the Post Office a packet addressed to the Mother from Japan. It was war time and the rules were very strict, leg. any kind of undesirable matter should find entry. One of the Post Office employees, a Frenchman, opened the packet in my presence. He found in it- nothing else except a single sheet of paper with something on it that looked like a sketch - just the branch of a tree. The official handed me the paper with obvious disappointment, adding his comment, "Une branche quelconque" - "some sort of a branch!" The "branche" happened to be a fine piece of Japanese painting. But who would appreciate that? Not in any case a detective of the Post Office. I mentioned the incident to Sri Aurobindo. He could never forget the story; at the slightest opportunity he would come out with that "une branche quelconque".
Now to come back to the point. I was speaking of the kind of exercise I had in those days, that medieval period of our existence, perhaps you would call it. The second item in my physical education programme was still more impressive. It consisted in giving a very careful wash to my clothes when I took my bath. This allowed some exercise to the limbs and body and I considered this as the minimum needed for keeping up the physical tone; it did duty for push-ups and dumb-bells and everything else. I should add another item: that was walking, a kind of morning walk. Early in the morning every day I used to go out and deliver to the sadhaks the letters written to them by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In those days, of course, the Ashram houses were not so many and not so far apart, so it was not exactly a 1500 or 5000 metre walking race.
33.17 - Two Great Wars, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Eventually, the situation grew more and more serious. Pavitra too received a call to leave here and join the colours; he then held the rank of Captain. I believe he had to report to the local barracks for duty. The Mother went so far as to make the necessary arrangements for his work during the period he might be away, though he did Rot have to go after all. You remember how the Mother herself had to leave here soon after the outbreak of the First War and was not able to return till after the end, six years later.. The Japanese were now coming close upon us. The Andamans were already in their hands, and Madras was not so far away. They had overrun Burma and were at the gates of East Bengal on the north-eastern front, with the Indian National Army of Subhash Chandra Bose. Our Doctor Jyotish, who was then serving as a medical officer in the Indian Army, had been sending out frantic SOS calls from his station at Imphal city, then practically a besieged garrison. From French Indo-China the French were running away and were on their way back through Pondicherry in the hope of reaching their own country some day - but which country? They said the Japanese might be expected any time and that we should start learning their language. Some thought we had better concentrate on German instead, for the Germans were going to occupy India. Hitler was at the time pouncing on England and Churchill alone stood up fearless against that furious onslaught.
It was at this time that, as you have already heard from the Mother, there began a rush of young children, or rather of people with young children, seeking shelter in the safety of the Ashram. In fact, we who lived here under the direct protection of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not get into much of a panic. Nor was there noticeable any great austerity in our day-to-day life, and we did not have to undergo much privation either in the matter of food or clothing. Let me here tell you a rather amusing anecdote. One of the inmates of the Ashram who happened to be away on some business chanced to meet one of our prominent nationalist leaders. The conversation naturally turned on the question of India's future. The leader asked him what Sri Aurobindo thought of the impetuous march of Japan. To that our friend replied somewhat like this: "There is nothing to fear; for the Japanese will not be able to come in, they will have to retire. So we have been assured by our Master." The leader's reaction was a smile of incredulity. I do not know if our friend ever had a chance later to remind the leader of Sri Aurobindo's prophecy. Most of our political leaders had not realised at the time how chimerical it was to hope to free India with the help of Japan, Germany or even Russia, that is, by accepting their rule which would have been simply to exchange our masters. The new bondage would have been terrible, for the neo-imperialism of their ruling cliques was no more than a modern version of the old intoxication of power; to escape from them would have needed some more centuries of struggle.
I may in this connection tell you another story, a true story and a very pleasant and reassuring one. Some of you may have been actually eye-witnesses. Not so long ago, the air was thick with rumours of a possible danger of a crisis for India: this was a little before the Chinese attack. Was India going to be invaded and subjugated by a foreign Power once again? India was no doubt big and had ample .resources in manpower. But her manpower was little more than that of a rabble, it lacked the cohesion of organised military strength. The question was put to the Mother at the Playground. The Mother gave a smile and, pointing to the map of India on the wall, said, "Can't you see. who is guarding India? Isn't the north-eastern portion of Kashmir a lion's head with its jaws wide open?" The portion indicated does have the appearance of a lion's head as you can see if you look at it closely. Its nozzle projects with wide open mouth facing the front, as if ready to swallow up anyone who dares to come. It is the Lion of Mother Durga. Another little piece might be added to this story. Matching the lion on our northern frontier, there is an elephant dangling its trunk on the southern tip of India bordering the sea; that too is clearly visible on the map. It is as if giving the warning, "Here am I, the coast-guard ever on the watch. Beware!" It is the Elephant on which rides Lakshmi - gajalaksmi,the divine Mother of Plenty and Beauty. The elephant is the symbol of material power,
7.07 - Prudence, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Japanese have a picturesque way of expressing their idea of prudence.
They have in one of their temples an image of a meditating Buddha seated on a lotus-blossom. In front of him are three little monkeys, one with its hands over its eyes, another over its ears, and the third covering its mouth. What do these three monkeys signify? By its gesture the first one says:
7.14 - Modesty, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
HO IS this coming to the door of this Japanese house?
It is the flower-artist, the man who is skilled in arranging flowers.
--
Perhaps the Japanese artist really thinks that his work deserves compliments. I cannot tell his thoughts. But at any rate he does not boast and his behaviour is pleasing.
On the other hand, we smile at people who are vain.
7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
one of theirs, the Japanese a third variety and so on. This
may be an addition of each one's own mental formation,
--
you notice the Japanese influence in some way or other.
MUSIC ITS ORIGIN AND NATURE
Big Mind (non-dual), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
In Japanese I am Kanzeon, or Kannon. Other cultures and spiritual traditions call me by different names. I manifest as whatever is necessary in this world to alleviate suffering and to bring unconditional love to all beings.
--- Yin or Feminine Compassion
--
Japanese there's only one word for us, which in Japanese is shin (heart mind). But in the Western world, and in English, it's good to make this distinction so it's clear that I,
Integrated Compassion or Big Heart am the yin aspect of the yin/yang symbol, and
BOOK II. -- PART I. ANTHROPOGENESIS., #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
boat beneath the surface; and their action has been reproduced for centuries past . . . . by Japanese
artists." ("Mythical Monsters," p. 11 Introd.).
--
difference between an Englishman, an African negro, and a Japanese or Chinaman. On the other hand
it is formally denied by most naturalists that mixed human races, i.e., the seeds for entirely new races,
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese
region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and Recent
--
Hindus, Chinamen, Japanese, etc. Compare the tall Sikhs and Punjabees, the Afghans, Norwegians,
Russians, Northern Germans, Scotchmen, and the English, with the inhabitants of central India and the
BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
their secret computations, the Japanese have the same figures in their cycles. As to the Brahmins, their
Puranas and Upanishads are a good proof of it. The latter have passed entirely into Gnostic literature;
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
true Lao-tse doctrine from all but his initiated priests. The Japanese, among whom are now to be found
the most learned of the priests and followers of Lao-tse, simply laugh at the blunders and hypotheses of
--
others. The Japanese Secret Science of the Buddhist Mystics, the Yamabooshi, has "seven precious
things." We will speak of them, hereafter.
--
called by the Japanese Yamaboosis, the mystics of the Lao-Tze sect and the ascetic monks of Kioto,
the Dzenodoo -- the "seven jewels." Only the Japanese and the Chinese
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 174 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
--
The same hierarchy, with the same numbers, is found in the Japanese system, in the "Beginnings" as
taught by both the Shinto and the Buddhist sects. In this system, Anthropogenesis precedes
--
(b) As in the Japanese system, in the Egyptian, and every old cosmogony -- at this divine FLAME, The
"One," are lit the three descending groups. Having their potential being in the higher group, they now
--
disposed (material) spirits are born. It would be too long to give here the Japanese names, but once
translated they stand in this order: -(1.) The "Invisible Celibate," which is the creative logos of the noncreating "father," or the creative
--
Such are the Japanese exoteric fables, the rind that conceals the kernel of the same one truth of the
Secret Doctrine. Turning back to the esoteric explanations in every cosmogony: -(d) The Third order corresponds to the Atma-Buddhi-Manas: Spirit, Soul and Intellect, and is called the
Book of Imaginary Beings (text), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
England. Japanese paper currency still commemorates the
killing of the Serpent.
Conversations with Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
That great peace is there, behind. I have the feeling of a transparent milieu. I wonder whether this is not the experience the Christian mystics describe as the glassy sea and the Japanese as the Crystal Palace?
THERE are two principal forms under which one becomes aware of it: one is analogous to the sensation of a transparent stirless sea and the other of an ethereal expanse.
Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
of the Japanese, tells us a very remarkable story. A troop of Japanese
pilgrims one day, as they were traversing a desert, saw coming toward
--
gliding silently between their ranks. Then the Japanese saw themselves
double, each phantom having become the perfect image and, as it were,
the mirage of each pilgrim. The Japanese were afraid, and prostrated
themselves, and the bonze who was conducting them began to pray for
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
a sudden it broke out. The Japanese are Kshatriyas, and their aesthetic sense
is of course well known. But European influence has spoiled all that, and see
--
merly they could look upon their opponents with sympathy. Look at. Japanese sentries boxing European officers. Not that the latter don't deserve it.
Look also at the Japanese commander challenging Chiang-Kai-Shek to
come out into the open field. This sort of bragging is not at all truly Japanese.
NIRODBARAN: But, without brutalities like the killing of innocent citizens,
--
SRI AUROBINDO: God knows! The Japanese are such fine warriors, such a patriotic and self-sacrificing nation, that one would believe the contrary. But
they are doing these things probably because of two supposed reasons: first,
--
the world, except for the Japanese. But the Japanese are numerically fewer
and financially poorer. The Germans, even with their great soldierly qualities, could not throw up any remarkable military genius like Foche. If Foche
--
PURANI: The Japanese, Jean Herbert says, are also like that. Generally they
are only polite and formal, but once you can make a friendship they are very
--
the Englishman to live there any more. If a robber entered a Japanese house
and the householder told him that he required some money, the robber
--
The Japanese have a high sense of chivalry too. In the Russo Japanese
War, when the Russians were defeated the Mikado almost shed tears thinking of the Czar. That was a true sense of chivalry.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: Ah, self-control is not enough for Yoga. The Japanese are
more an ethical than a spiritual race. Their ethical rules are extremely difficult to follow.
--
Naka's mother, when she returned from America to Japan, as is the custom with the Japanese, was so horrified to see the present day Japan that she
at once went back.
That the Japanese are not a distinctly spiritual race can be shown from
an example. Hirasawa, a friend of Richard's and the Mother's, was a great
--
NIRODBARAN: Yes. She has written a novel about Japan also, where she attributes to Japanese Jiu-jitsu some mystic power and makes it a symbol of it.
SRI AUROBINDO: I thought that Japanese spirituality is in the Japanese religion
which is called Zen Buddhism. There the disciples have to bear blows from
--
the Japanese Ministers and related some general's declaration about a hundred years' war.
SRI AUROBINDO: Oh, yesto make the world civilised and to drive all the Europeans out of Asia! But it is very unusual for the Japanese to talk as this
general has done. They never speak of anything beforehand. They get everything ready and act.
--
Mother once asked a Japanese friend of hers whether Japan's navy would
help India in case of war, he replied, "Don't trust Japan. If she once gets in, it
--
since lost. The Japanese are the only race that can be said to have preserved
beauty in their life. But now even they are fast losing it under European influence.
--
In the war between Russia and Japan, the Japanese admitted that the
Russian artillery was remarkable: it didn't miss the mark; but the infantry
--
advantage of it. On the other hand, the Japanese army is perhaps the best in
185
--
defeat the Japanese in a very short time. They didn't give any reply, but at
the end of each such defeat we find them farther advanced in China than before.
PURANI: They say the Japanese are not good in the air. They missed their targets many times.
SRI AUROBINDO: I don't know about that. The Japanese are good at concentrating on one thing at a time, but aeronautic requires concentration on many
points at once.
--
people have that sense. If the Japanese produce anything ugly, they export it
to other countries! But I am afraid they are losing their aesthetic sense because of the general vulgarisation. By the way, the Chinese and the Japanese
originally got their artistic impulse from India. Their Buddhist images have
--
NIRODBARAN: How far back in history do the Japanese rulers go?
SRI AUROBINDO: The Mikado claims to be a descendant of the Goddess of the
--
SRI AUROBINDO: In Japanese drawings of flowers and landscapes, there is
some expression of the Reality.
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
SATYENDRA: The Japanese radio has been declaring that England must
concede the demands. Otherwise they will have to take the necessary steps.
--
PURANI: It seems according to N.S.N. that on 27th May the Japanese Army
was routed by the Chinese.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: Can't be believed! The Japanese claim that only eighty
thousand Japanese have been killed so far, while the Chinese make it out to
be half a million. Evidently neither number is true. Even if the Chinese estimate is true, it doesn't seem to make any difference to the war, and the Chinese are nowhere near driving out the Japanese. War is still going on. The
Chinese are braggarts and the Japanese follow a silent policy till the whole
thing is done.
PURANI: After the resignation of the Japanese Cabinet, it is probable that
Prince Konoye will be the Premier. He doesn't know what will be the policy,
Fascist or otherwise. If Fascist, the Japanese may line up with the Axis.
SRI AUROBINDO: If they do that, they will be bound to the Axis and later
on Italy and Germany may want to enter in the East, which the Japanese
won't like and which is against their policy. Japan's aim is to turn all the Europeans out of Asia. So if she joins the Axis it will be only to suit her present
--
(After a while) I don't want the Japanese to go down in the fight against
the Chinese because they may be needed as a counter-balance against Germany or Russia when, in case England goes down, they try to come to Asia.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, this is the first time he has spoken about it publicly. (Then addressing Purani) You have seen some Japanese commercial
man's proposal?
--
under Japanese influence.
After some time Purani brought in the subject of art.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: Very fishy. The Japanese are showing themselves as
masters and want others to submit. For espionage the British give regular
--
SRI AUROBINDO: No, the manner of death is not convincing. The Japanese are becoming bullies now. It is the new spirit of the Nazis and Fascists
they have got from the West.
--
Americans are very haughty and disdainful; they haven't understood the Japanese as, for instance, people like Lafcadio Hearn did. And they are now
being paid back.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: Only the Japanese have lost their clear mind and high
vision by Western contact, and their soldiers also are not what they were.
--
The British have started arresting the Japanese.
SRI AUROBINDO (laughing): Yes, and they say it is not retaliation. Extraordinary coincidences, I suppose.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: How? On the contrary this is the time, when other nations are engaged elsewhere. The only thing is that the Japanese are very involved in China. Don't know how effective this move will be.
10 AUGUST 1940
--
Indo-China, there must be Hitler's pressure on the Ptain Government to accede to the Japanese demand.
SRI AUROBINDO: Quite possible.
PURANI: Hitler may want the Japanese to act as a check against the British
and keep them engaged in the East while he carries the invasion.
--
the Japanese are a remarkable people. To them the first thing comes first;
they can wait for the next. Once their scheme is fixed, they can wait for
--
The Ptain Government has again declared its intention to resist a Japanese
move in Indo-China.
--
PURANI: It must be the Japanese pressure behind.
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: It is like the Japanese. In Japan there is a fire every
week, a typhoon each fortnight and an earthquake every month. Mother said
--
that Japanese.1
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, I gave him the name but not Sannyasa. (Laughter)
--
SRI AUROBINDO: Absence of consciousness. (Laughter) The world is inconscient. Consciousness grows in it but along with its development the Inconscient also remains, like a crust, so that the development is always lim[1] Sundarananda the name given to the Japanese architect of Golconde, George
Nakashima.
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
tragedy, whether Greek, Indian, or Japanese, characterization is often
achieved by standardized masks; in the comedy, down to Moliere,
--
opment in the Japanese arts inspired by Zen Buddhism: swordsmanship,
archery, Judo, calligraphic painting. The method to reach perfection
--
avant-garde films, or Japanese KabuH, perhaps; novel experiences
which compel him to strain his imagination, in order to make sense of
--
Egyptian painter saw in stereotyped cliches; so does the Japanese Zen
artist.
--
goes on to Chinese Chippendale, the impact of Japanese colour-
prints on Manet and Degas, and of primitive African sculpture on the
--
The Japanese have a word for it: shibuyu The colour-scheme of a
kimono so discreet, subdued, and apparently dull that there seems to be
--
tion. Sesshu, perhaps the greatest of Japanese painters (a contemporary
of Leonardo's), was a master of the leaving-out technique; yet he used
--
(which, in the case of a Japanese koto or samisen, would be above my
head anyway). As I am listening, the mathematical relations between
--
Suzuki, D. T., Zen and Japanese Culture. London: Luzac, 1959.
Taton, R., Reason and Chance in Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson, 1957.
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
also by the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindus, the Siamese, the Arabs, the
Persians, and by various nations of America. Among the Greeks and the Romans, this hope
the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
22) Wisdom is like unto a beacon set on high, which radiates its light even in the darkest night. ~ Buddhist Meditations from the Japanese
23) And when the benevolence of benevolences manifests itself, all things are in her light and in joy. ~ The Zohar
--
15) He who contemplates the supreme Truth, contemplates the perfect Essence; only the vision of the spirit can see this nature of ineffable perfection. ~ Buddhist Mediations from the Japanese
The Unknowable Divine View Similar The Divine Becoming
--
15) He who contemplates the supreme Truth, contemplates the perfect Essence; only the vision of the spirit can see this nature of ineffable perfection. ~ Buddhist Mediations from the Japanese
The Unknowable Divine View Similar The Divine Becoming
--
28) An attentive scrutiny of thy being will reveal to thee that it is one with the very essence of absolute perfection. ~ Buddhist Writings in the Japanese
29) O my friend, hearken to the melody of the Spirit in thy heart and in thy soul and guard it as the apple of thy eyes. ~ Baha-ullah, "The Seven Valleys"
--- Overview of noun japanese
The noun japanese has 2 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (1) Japanese, Nipponese ::: (a native or inhabitant of Japan)
2. (1) Japanese ::: (the language (usually considered to be Altaic) spoken by the Japanese)
--- Overview of adj japanese
The adj japanese has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (10) Japanese, Nipponese ::: (of or relating to or characteristic of Japan or its people or their culture or language; "the Japanese Emperor"; "Japanese cars")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun japanese
2 senses of japanese
Sense 1
Japanese, Nipponese
=> Asian, Asiatic
=> inhabitant, habitant, dweller, denizen, indweller
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> person of color, person of colour
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 2
Japanese
=> Altaic, Altaic language
=> Ural-Altaic
=> natural language, tongue
=> language, linguistic communication
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun japanese
2 senses of japanese
Sense 1
Japanese, Nipponese
=> Ryukyuan
=> Jap, Nip
=> geisha, geisha girl
=> shogun
Sense 2
Japanese
=> Ryukyuan
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun japanese
2 senses of japanese
Sense 1
Japanese, Nipponese
=> Asian, Asiatic
Sense 2
Japanese
=> Altaic, Altaic language
--- Similarity of adj japanese
1 sense of japanese
Sense 1
Japanese, Nipponese
--- Antonyms of adj japanese
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun japanese
2 senses of japanese
Sense 1
Japanese, Nipponese
-> Asian, Asiatic
=> coolie, cooly
=> Oriental, oriental person
=> Indian
=> Eurasian
=> Afghan, Afghanistani
=> Altaic
=> Armenian
=> Bangladeshi
=> Bengali
=> Bhutanese, Bhutani
=> Burmese
=> Byzantine
=> Cambodian, Kampuchean
=> Chinese
=> East Indian
=> Malay, Malayan
=> Hindu, Hindoo, Hindustani
=> Hmong, Miao
=> Indonesian
=> Irani, Iranian, Persian
=> Iraqi, Iraki
=> Israelite
=> Israeli
=> Japanese, Nipponese
=> Jordanian
=> Korean
=> Kurd
=> Kuwaiti
=> Lao, Laotian
=> Lebanese
=> Malaysian
=> Maldivian, Maldivan
=> Nepalese, Nepali
=> Pakistani
=> Parthian
=> Sinhalese, Singhalese
=> Sherpa
=> Syrian
=> Taiwanese
=> Tajik, Tadzhik
=> Thai, Tai, Siamese
=> Tibetan
=> Turki
=> Kazakhstani
=> Vietnamese, Annamese
=> Singaporean
=> Sri Lankan
=> Trojan, Dardan, Dardanian
=> Iberian
=> Mongoloid
=> Timorese
Sense 2
Japanese
-> Altaic, Altaic language
=> Turki, Turkic, Turko-Tatar, Turkic language
=> Tungusic, Tungusic language
=> Mongolian, Mongolic, Mongolic language
=> Korean
=> Japanese
--- Pertainyms of adj japanese
1 sense of japanese
Sense 1
Japanese, Nipponese
Pertains to noun Japan (Sense 2)
=>Japan, Nippon, Nihon
INSTANCE OF=> Asian country, Asian nation
--- Derived Forms of adj japanese
1 sense of japanese
Sense 1
Japanese, Nipponese
RELATED TO->(noun) Japanese#1
=> Japanese, Nipponese
--- Grep of noun japanese
chino-japanese war
imperial japanese morning glory
japanese
japanese allspice
japanese andromeda
japanese angelica tree
japanese apricot
japanese archipelago
japanese banana
japanese barberry
japanese barnyard millet
japanese beech
japanese beetle
japanese bittersweet
japanese black pine
japanese brome
japanese capital
japanese carpet grass
japanese cedar
japanese cherry
japanese chess
japanese chestnut
japanese clover
japanese crab
japanese deer
japanese deity
japanese flowering cherry
japanese honeysuckle
japanese hop
japanese iris
japanese islands
japanese ivy
japanese lacquer tree
japanese lawn grass
japanese leaf
japanese leek
japanese lilac
japanese lime
japanese linden
japanese maple
japanese medlar
japanese millet
japanese monetary unit
japanese morning glory
japanese oak
japanese oyster
japanese pagoda tree
japanese persimmon
japanese pink
japanese plum
japanese poinsettia
japanese privet
japanese quince
japanese radish
japanese red army
japanese red pine
japanese rose
japanese snowbell
japanese spaniel
japanese spurge
japanese stranglehold
japanese sumac
japanese table pine
japanese tree lilac
japanese umbrella pine
japanese varnish tree
japanese wistaria
japanese yew
russo-japanese war
sino-japanese war