Word: japanized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Long rooted in Japan, Zen is an ancient Chinese technique of mind-breaking discipline aimed at freeing the will. All things bubble along in one interrelated continuum, says Zen. Why try to "grasp" or "stop" them? The real problem is spontaneity: how to "let go" and "go with" the permanent impermanence. The Zen disciple must destroy his ego-consciousness, until his real self calmly floats on the world's confusion like a pingpong ball skimming down a mountain stream...
...wrong. "Because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say 'To hell with it,' nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes." Square Zen is just as far off the true beam. It is "the Zen of established tradition in Japan, with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori." Though far better than "the common-or-garden squareness of the Rotary Club or the Presbyterian Church ... it is still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will...
Following the 1950 rediscovery of Haniwa sculpture by U.S.-born Isamu Noguchi (TIME, Jan. 10, 1955), who spotted the archaic objects as prize examples of primitive sculpture, Haniwa blossomed into a collector's craze from Japan to Manhattan. A rare piece brings as much as $10,000 today, and a good one worth $10 in 1952 currently costs $1,000 or more. Counterfeiters, doing a thriving trade, have learned to duplicate the primitive process of coiling ropes of clay into the rough form, then smoothing it into shape. They even grind up old Haniwa fragments to powder...
Last week Tokyo's largest private art gallery, the Bridgestone, owned by Western Art Collector Shojiro Ishibashi (whose name translates into stone bridge), was displaying 38 figures, one of the largest Haniwa exhibits ever held. Among the prize examples from private and public collections all over Japan were seven objects now officially classified as unexportable "Important Cultural Assets," only one cut below "National Treasure." (But even with Japan's leading Haniwa expert, Professor Fumio Miki, on watch, two examples had to be withdrawn as suspected fakes after the catalogue had gone to press...
Haniwa is an enigmatic art. The picturesque account given in the Nihon Shoki (chronicles of Japan compiled in the 8th century) credits Emperor Suinin (29 B.C.-A.D. 70) with substituting clay figures for the human retainers who customarily had been buried alive with their masters. Historians scuttled this colorful explanation by discovering that Haniwa figures were not made until centuries after inin's rule. Best bet is that the Haniwa figures, along with houses and boats, were meant to console the dead. Says Expert Fumio Miki: "We can only surmise from the data on hand that they were grave...