Zen Art for Meditation

Zen art possess a unique power to fuse aesthetic appreciation, personal intuition, and knowledge of life into one creative event. The work of Zen painters like Niten, Liang Kai, and Toba, and of haiku poets like Basho, Buson, and Isssa reflects the wholeness, spontaneity, and humanity of this vision. Zen Art for Meditation is a treasure, guiding its readers toward the silence and mind-expanding emptiness of Zen meditation through its collection of paintings and poems. Commentary by the authors complements the fullness these paintings represent -- the fullness not only of the beautiful pictorial space but also of the enlightened mind.

Stewart W. Holmes has made extensive forays--via general semantics and Zen--into the realm of nonverbal experience. As an officer of the Cambridge Buddhist Association, he was well acquainted with its former president, the eminent Zen scholar Daisetz Suzuki. Dr. Shinichi Hisamatsu, the founder of the Association, was his first Zen master. Among his other publications are Meaning in Language and articles for a number of journals. At present Dr. Holmes, who holds a Ph.D. in English from Yale University, is on the English faculty of Castleton State College, Vermont.

Chimyo Horioka, who is responsible for the nonverbal aspects of this volume, is Far Eastern Librarian in the Asiatic Department of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and author of many articles on Buddhist art. A priest of the Shingon sect and graduate of Koyasan University, he also studied philosophy at Hamburg and Koenigsberg universities. He has been president of the Cambridge Buddhist Association since the death of Dr. Daisetz Suzuki in 1966.