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    Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art
    Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art
    Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art
    Ebook71 pages38 minutes

    Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art

    By Arthur Waley

    2.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJul 1, 2009
    Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art

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      In this paper Arthur Waley gets away with inaccuracy, slovenly scholarship and infelicitous judgements only because his audience knows even less about his subject than he does.

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    Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art - Arthur Waley

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Zen Buddhism, by Arthur Waley

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: Zen Buddhism

           and Its Relation to Art

    Author: Arthur Waley

    Release Date: July 21, 2013 [EBook #43273]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ZEN BUDDHISM ***

    Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed

    Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

    produced from images generously made available by The

    Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

    The cover image was produced by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

    ZEN BUDDHISM

    and Its Relation to Art

    By

    ARTHUR WALEY

    LONDON:

    LUZAC & CO., 46, Great Russell Street, W.C.1.

    1922

    ZEN BUDDHISM

    ZEN BUDDHISM

    AND ITS RELATION TO ART

    Books on the Far East often mention a sect of Buddhism called Zen. They say that it was a school of abstract meditation and that it exercised a profound influence upon art and literature; but they tell us very little about what Zen actually was, about its relation to ordinary Buddhism, its history, or the exact nature of its influence upon the arts.

    The reason of this is that very little of the native literature which deals with Zen has yet been translated, perhaps because it is written in early Chinese colloquial, a language the study of which has been almost wholly neglected by Europeans and also (to judge by some of their attempts to translate it) by the Japanese themselves.

    The present paper makes no attempt at profundity, but it is based on the study of original texts and furnishes, I hope, some information not hitherto accessible.

    Before describing the origins of Zen itself I must give some general account of Buddhism. At the time when it reached China[1] there were two kinds of Buddhism, called the Lesser Vehicle and the Greater. The former, Primitive Buddhism, possessed scriptures which in part at any rate were genuine; that is to say, they recorded words actually used by Shākyamuni. The ordinary adherent of this religion did not hope to become a Buddha; Buddhas indeed were regarded as extremely rare. He only aspired to become an Arhat, that is an ascetic ripe for annihilation, one who is about to escape from the wheel of reincarnation—whose present incarnation is an antechamber to Nirvāna. To such aspirants the Buddha gives no assistance; he is what children in their games call home, and his followers must pant after him as best they can.

    Those who found this religion too comfortless invented another, which became known as Mahāyāna, the Greater Vehicle. Putting their doctrines into the mouth of Shākyamuni, they fabricated ad hoc sermons of enormous length, preached (so they asserted) by the Buddha himself in his second period to those who were ripe to receive the whole truth.

    The great feature of this new Buddhism was the intervention of the merciful Bodhisattvas, illuminati who, though fit for Buddhahood, voluntarily renounced it in order to help mankind.

    The first Buddhist books

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