Zen Buddhism

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

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ZEN BUDDHISM
during the war, and which were waiting to be translated into English as soon as he or some other competent translator could find the time. Some of these will be published in England in the next few years; his famous “Address to the Emperor of Japan" has already passed into a second edition under the title of The Essence of Buddhism.
And now new writers are beginning to appear. Mr. R. H. Blyth, who is writing the Professor's life, has himself after sixteen years in a Korean Zen monastery written, as a teacher of English in Japan, a rich compendious work, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics. The Buddhist Society, London, are publishing the collected works, slim though as yet they are, of W. J. Gabb, the author of Beyond the Intellect, and Tales of Tokuzan. I have written a little of Zen in my Studies in the Middle Way, and a brief exordium which I have called Walk On! Material for study is, therefore, available now in western lands, for books have appeared in German, notably Zen, der lebendige Buddhismus in Japan, by Ohasama and Faust, and Dr. Suzuki's Essays have appeared in French. Yet words are but marks on paper, or noises in the air; in the end it is work, hard work in the practice of direct, im-mediate living which alone produces the direct, im-mediate experience of Zen.