Overview

Explores Japanese literary Zen through the landscape arts of poetry, prose, painting, and gardens expressed in the writings of Japan's Five Mountain monks.

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9780791439098

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Reviews

This book presents concrete data-biographical, intellectual-historical, and art-historical-pertaining to eminent Zen Buddhist monks of the Muromachi period who have not previously been the object of serious study. Parker challenges the entrenched views of Japanese scholars who dismiss the Zen monk artists and art critics of the period as spiritual degenerates who had succumbed to worldly enticements. His weaving together of the themes of illusion, playfulness, and non-dualism and his use of them to explicate the attitudes toward art evinced in the writings of medieval monks is original and provocative. - T. Griffith Foulk, University of Michigan

Author Information

Joseph D. Parker is Associate Professor of East Asian Thought at Pitzer College.

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