Thomas Hoover

“ Zen worked hard to debunk the mysterious power we mistakenly ascribe to names and concepts, since the Zen masters knew these serve only to separate us from life. Shutting off the constant babble in our head is difficult, but the richness of experience and imagery that emerges is astounding. It is as though a screen between us and our surroundings has suddenly dropped away, putting us in touch with the universe. ”

“ She realized now that the Yoruba were still too few, too powerless to revolt. She wanted to tell him to forget his gods, his fool's dream of rebellion and freedom.
He glanced back at her and laughed. "But our gods, our Orisa, are already here, because our people are here." He looked away, his eyes hidden in the dark, and waited for a roll of thunder to die away. The wind dropped suddenly, for an instant, and there was silence except for the drumbeat of rain. "Our gods live inside us, passed down from generation to generation. ”

“ When I reached the stone-paved platform at the pinnacle, I felt Alex Goddard clasp my arm and turn me around to face the plaza below.
"They are waiting," he said, pointing toward the hazy square.
I looked down, and at first I couldn't see anything except rain and smoke, but then slowly a crowd materialized. The scattering of men I'd seen earlier had become an undulating sea of upturned faces painted with stripes and swirling circles of blue and white and red, a torch-lit garden of brilliant blos­soms. They all were looking up at us, at Sarah and me. ”

“ Noda's Zen garden, which deludes rational judgment by manipulating all the signposts we use to gauge distance and space, appeared to be limitless. The secret was that nothing actually ends: everything simply fades out and gets lost. It was a closed space that seemed for all the world as if it went on and on if you could only somehow see the rest of it. Yet peek only a few yards away, and you've got the mundane streets of sleepy Sasayama. ”

“ The taste of its honeyed sweetness enters the dream, and she finds herself drifting deeper into sleep as his arms encircle her, drawing her up against him with soft Yoruba words.
Her body seems to float, the dream deepening, its world of light and shadow absorbing her, beckoning, the softness of the bed gliding away.
Now she feels the touch of her soft cotton shift against her breasts and senses the hands that lower it about her. Soon she is buoyed upward, toward the waiting moon, past the jalousies at the window, noiselessly across the rooftop. . . . ”

“ The wonderful twisted trees, mighty mountain pines and cedars, loved by these early Chinese and later Japanese, which our Western superficial view first ascribed to some barbarian taste for monstrosities, really exhibit the deep Zen thinker in their great knots and scaly limbs that have wrestled with storms and frosts and earthquakes—an almost identical process through which a man's life-struggles with enemies, misfortunes, and pains have stamped themselves into the wrinkles and strong muscular planes of his fine old face. ”

“ These waters have flowed in the same cycle for millions, billions of years, mingling, evaporating, separating again—just as life on this planet continually replicates itself, growing and aging and dying, but not before producing the seeds of its replacement. How can something be at once both timeless and constantly changing? I ponder that a lot and I always end up thinking of this river meeting the sea. Down there, nature is a force unto itself, oblivious to good or evil, to human desires or human laws."
Bartlett was doing a riff on some obsession of his own, Stone decided. ”

“ Does the earth ask why the monsoons come? Does the seed ask why the sun shines each day? No. It's dharma. The dharma of the seed is to bear fruit. The dharma of the warrior caste is to do battle. Only feringhi, who live outside our dharma, ask 'why.' Truth is not something you 'understand.' It's something you're part of. It's something you feel with your being. And when you try to catch it with words, it's gone. Can the eagle tell you how he flies, Captain Hawksworth, or 'why"? If he could, he would no longer be an eagle. This is the great wisdom of India. ”

“ For a year or so I became, in my own mind at least, a sort of American ronin, a wandering samurai.
You see, the Japanese warriors had a code that said you ought to live every moment in full awareness of your own mortality. When you adopt this existential outlook, so they claimed, all regrets, emotions, complaints, can be seen as an indulgence. You're ready to meet life head-on, to risk everything at a moment's notice. That's the only way you ever discover who you really are, and it's supposed to make you marvelously detached. ”

“ As she squinted into the light, a shaft of Caribbean sun candled her deep-blue eyes. Her long ringlet curls were drawn back and secured with a tiara of Spanish pearls, a halfhearted attempt at demureness spoiled by the nonchalant strands dangling across her forehead. The dark tan on her face betrayed her devotion to the sea and the sun; although twenty-three years of life had ripened her body, her high cheeks had none of the plump, anemic pallor so prized in English women.
"Aye, but this time she's very different, Katy, make no mistake. Nothing in the Americas will ever be the same again. ”

“ Unlike formal European or Persian gardens, which are mainly surface and reward the viewer with all their decorative beauty on the first visit, Zen gardens present you with new pleasures and insights each time you study them. Because it conceals its profundity, Zen art is never fully knowable on first acquaintance; there is always something more when one is prepared to receive it.
Perhaps the most puzzling, yet curiously rewarding, aesthetic principle in Zen art is its seeming celebration of the ravages of time. The Zen Japanese consider a taste for newness the mark of the aesthetic parvenu. ”

“ Love, English, love is the sweetness of desert honey. It is life itself. But you, I think, have yet to know its taste. Because you are a slave to your own striving. But until you give all else over, as I have done, you can never truly know love. ”

“ What is the resilience of Zen that has allowed it to survive and flourish over all the centuries, even though frequently at odds philosophically with its milieu? And why have the insights of obscure rural teachers from the Chinese and Japanese Middle Ages remained pertinent to much of modern life in the West? On the other hand, why has there been a consistent criticism of Zen (from early China to the present day) condemning it as a retreat from reality—or worse, a preoccupation with self amidst a world that calls for social conscience? ”

“ Suddenly a chant rose up through the dense air, led by the young warrior Derin, who had devoted his life to Ogun. His cropped hair emphasized the strong line of his cheeks and his long, powerful neck. As he moved, now raising one shoulder then the other in time with the drums, his body began to glisten with sweat in the humid night air.
All the while, Atiba stood beside the mill, still keeping time with the pieces of iron. He nodded in silent approval as the men in the line began to revolve, their bare feet now slapping against the packed earth, arms working as though they held a bellows. ”

“ Together they had joined in one of the most demanding yet exquisite bonds two people can share. At that moment she felt—was it imagination?—like an ancient Fujiwara, celebrating some age-old tradition. . . .
The ceremony was over now. She bowed again, then lifted the bowl to admire the light crackle in the glaze, the slightly inturned lip.
"It's Raku. I think it's the finest I've ever seen."
"From my collection. It's by the hand of Chojiro, the seventeenth-century Korean who was in the employ of the Shogun Hideyoshi." He smiled. "I had it brought down to Kyoto especially for tonight. For you." ”

“ Hawksworth examined the bobbing balls anew. The coconut was yet another legend of the Indies. Stories passed that a man could live for days on the liquor sealed within its straw-matted shell.
The moon chased random clouds, but still the riverbank was illuminated like day. The damp air was still, amplifying the music of the night—the buzz of gnats, the call of night birds, even the occasional trumpet of a distant elephant, pierced the solid wood line on either side of the narrowing river. Hawksworth tasted the dark, alert, troubled. Where are the human sounds? ”

“ Unlike Daisen-in, the garden at Ryoan-ji is not a symbolic mountain scene. It is instead a work of abstract art on a canvas of sand which goes beyond a symbolic representation of a landscape scene to provide a distillation of the very universe. It is internationally regarded as the very essence of Zen, and it is almost impossible to describe, in either words or pictures. It has a spirit that seems to rise up for those who come into its presence, evoking an immediate response even in someone who has no understanding of Zen. ”

“ We inherit the spirit of our fathers, just as we take on their strength, their appearance. Whether we are free or slave, they will never abandon us." He touched her hand gently. "Tonight, at last, perhaps you will begin to understand."
She stared at him, relieved that the darkness hid the disbelief in her eyes. She had never seen any god, anywhere, nor had anyone else. His gods were not going to make him, or her, any less a slave to the branco. She wanted to grab his broad shoulders and shake sense into him. Tonight was the first, maybe the last, time that Briggs Hall would be theirs alone. ”

“ Tam noticed that Mori watched his departure with a wistful . . . worshipful, gaze.
After he was gone, a reverent stillness settled around them. Even Ken, normally talkative, was subdued. What's going on here? she puzzled. One thing was sure: Japan was like a magical onion, with layers to be peeled away slowly. Each time you learn something new, yet you never really get to the core.
When the last dishes had been cleared and nothing remained on their low table except fresh kettles of sake, Noda leaned back and broke the silence. She realized he was speaking to her. ”

“ But to the Japanese sabi is first and foremost the essence of beauty, whether in a weathered house or temple, the frayed golden threads of fabric binding a Zen scroll, a withered bough placed in the tokonoma alcove, or an ancient kettle rusty with time. The ideal of sabi, which became part of the Zen aesthetic canon of beauty, was perfectly at home in the tea ceremony, where even the utensils were deliberately chosen for their weathered look.
Sabi, however, seemed an incomplete ideal to Sen no Rikyu. The fact that rich objects are old does not make them less rich. ”

“ The Portuguese crewmen on the St. Sebastian had begun throwing themselves into the sea, terrified at the sight of the Bon Ventura's blazing hull drifting slowly across their bow. The wind had freshened again and was pushing the burning galleon rapidly now. The blaze had become an inferno, fueled by casks of coconut oil stored below decks on the galleon, and Hawksworth involuntarily shielded his eyes and face from the heat that, even at their distance, seared the Discovery. ”

“ No man who owned a preto slave would be left alive. With all the powerful branco slaveholders dead, the drums proclaimed, the white indentures would rise up and join with the Yoruba. Together they would seize the island.
Oh Shango, please. She gripped the sides of the thin mattress. Make him understand. No white will aid them. To the branco the proud Yoruba warriors are merely more preto, black and despised. Make him understand it will be the end of his dream. To rise up now will mean the slaughter of his people. ”

“ The early Japanese, who saw in nature the expression of life's spirit, naturally found the flower a congenial symbol for an abstract philosophy like Buddhism. In the years preceding Zen's arrival in Japan, a parallel but essentially secular taste for flowers permeated the aristocratic court civilization of the Heian, where lovers attached sprays of blossoms to letters and eulogized the plum and cherry as symbols of life's transient happiness. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to describe blossoms as the foremost symbol of Japan's great age of love poetry. ”

“ What's so honorable about Rajputs slaughtering each other?"
"Warriors are bound by their dharma to join in battle against other warriors. A warrior who fails in his duty sins against the dharma of his caste." Vasant Rao paused. "But why am I bothering to tell you this? I sound like Krishna, lecturing Arjuna on his duty as a warrior."
"Who's Krishna? Another Rajput?"
"He's a god, Captain Hawksworth, sacred to all Rajputs. He teaches us that a warrior must always honor his dharma." ”

“ Jeremy had listened as the silence once more settled around them. For the first time he'd become aware of the creaking of the boards as the Rainbowe groaned at anchor. After so much death, he'd found himself thinking, you begin to notice the quietness more. Your senses are honed. Could it be even creatures of the field are the same; does the lowly hare feel life more exquisitely when, hounds baying on its scent, it hovers quivering in the grass?
He wondered what he would do if the musket on the table were primed and in his hands. ”

“ Tea bowls, the major expression of Zen art, seem at once both primitive and strikingly modern. To begin to understand this contradiction we must go back to our own nineteenth century in the West, when tastes ran to decoration for its own sake and the rule of perfect, symmetrical, polished form was the aesthetic ideal. Into this smug, serene sea of aesthetic sureties, which in some ways reached back to the ancient Greeks, the English critic John Ruskin threw a boulder when he wrote:
Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. ”

“ Her body seemed frozen in space as nothing moved save her feet. The bells on her ankles became a continuous chime, increasing in tempo with the drum and the sarangi until the rhythmic phrase itself was nothing more than a dense blur of notes, Suddenly the drummer and instrumentalist fell silent, conceding the room to Sangeeta's whirring bells. She seemed, at the last, to be treading on pure air, her feet almost invisible. When the intensity of her rhythm became almost unbearable, the drummers and sarangi player reentered, urging the excitement to a crescendo. ”

“ At the same time, the bald clay, the streaks of glaze, the hand-formed sculpture, allow one to recognize the materials and the process of formation. When the potter keeps no secrets, one enters into the exhilaration of his moment of creation. Once again, this is a deliberate aesthetic device, reminding one that the potter is an individual artist, not a faceless craftsman. The look and feel of Zen ceramics make them seem forerunners of the modern craft-pottery movement, but few modern potters are blessed with the rich legacy of Zen aesthetic ideals that made these ceramics possible. ”

“ She felt his hands touch her shift, and she reached gently to stop him.
Over the years in Brazil so many men had used her. She had been given to any white visitor at the plantation who wanted her: first it was Portuguese traders, ship captains, even priests. Then conquering Hollanders, officers of the Dutch forces who had taken Brazil. A hundred men, all born in Europe, all unbathed and rank, all white. She had sensed their branco contempt for her with anger and shame. To this black Yoruba, this strong, proud man of Africa, she would give herself freely and with love. ”

“ You know, the Hindus believe life and death are an endless cycle that dooms them to repeat their miserable existence over and over again. I myself prefer to think that this one life is itself cyclical, ever renewing. What was new, exciting, yesterday is today tedious and tiresome. So tomorrow brings us both rebirth. For you it is Agra, for me Goa. But I expect to see Surat again, as no doubt do you. Who knows when our paths will cross once more?" Mukarrab Khan watched as a eunuch shoved wide the door leading onto the torchlit garden. ”

“ The almost universal Western attitude toward Japanese cuisine was voiced many centuries ago by the European visitor Bernardo do Avila Giron, who declared, "I will not praise Japanese food for it is not good, albeit it is pleasing to the eye, but instead I will describe the clean and peculiar way in which it is served."2 Beauty counts as heavily as taste at a formal table, and to say Japanese food is "served" is like calling the members of a string quartet fiddlers. The Japanese devote more artistic resources to the rites of food than any other people on earth. ”