Dharma Library

Matsuo Basho was the great innovator in haiku poetry in 17th century Japan. He was also a Zen Buddhist, though he seems to have been sometimes a Buddhist priest and at other times a travelling poet, sometimes in a black robe, sometimes not. He was also an innovator in writing prose travel journals: the haibun form, which was a prose journal with haiku poems.

The haiku aesthetic was already well…

Traditional koan study under a fierce Japanese Roshi is tough.

…each session had its own special terror. Novice monks were repeatedly whacked with a kyosaku that looked more like a long baseball bat. Monitors patrolled the room menacingly, taunting and poking with the stick to see if your attention would wander from Mu. But zendo drama paled in comparison to meeting Mu in the dokusan room. “What…

Nanjing has been the unhappy site of two terrible massacres: the annihilation of the Taiping rebels in 1864; and the Japanese atrocity of 1937. In the gardens behind Qixia monastery there are grottoes containing ancient Buddha sculptures beheaded by the Taiping rebels who were intolerant monotheists, and again vandalised in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Qixia Temple, Nanjing, May 2008

In…