Word: zen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...structure that comes closest to satisfying Tange's new ideal is his Kagawa Prefectural Office, completed last year. With its massive exposed beams rising in tiers, ceramic Zen symbols emblazoned on its walls, and a rock garden in the tradition of the Ryoanji Temple, it strikes an unmistakably Japanese note in the modern idiom of reinforced concrete. As well as recalling the past, Tange believes his building must also "make an image of our new social structure." For Tange this means the new democracy in which citizens are now invited to become part of the government. To welcome them...
Last week the six winners looked more like close-cropped Spartans cut loose in Athens. Donning black robes and boarding bicycles, they found Oxford a startling experience. They met their tutors, pondered invitations to join the Zen Buddhist club, learned where to sneak in after college gates close at midnight. The headiest shock was Oxford's enfolding leisure. Suddenly there was time to talk all night, to sleep until noon. "Back there," mused the go-go Air Academy's Brad Hosmer, 21, "I barely had time to read a book a week." Muttered another unbound lieutenant: "I keep...
...Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima. A masterly exercise in reason-why literature-in this case, why a demented Buddhist priest, loathing beauty, burns down a magnificent 14th century Zen temple...
With no particular sense of vocation, but simply following in his Zen-priest father's footsteps, young Mizoguchi becomes an acolyte at the Golden Temple. From the 5 a.m. reveille ("opening of the rules") to the evening meal ("medicine") to the 9 p.m. bedtime ("opening of the pillow") the daily ritual is, to Mizoguchi, a crushing bore, though U.S. readers may find it novel and fascinating. He soon discovers that the temple Superior's path of self-enlightenment is strewn with cigarettes, sake and geishas. Mizoguchi's behavior is scarcely more admirable. A diabolical, clubfooted fellow acolyte...
...reason-why literature, in which Japanese writers are still covertly psychoanalyzing the loss of World War II. Mizoguchi is both poor and common, and Temple champions a kind of cultural revolt of the masses, with its rejection of all that is feudal and aristocratic. There is a lot of Zen beatnik in Mishima's hero, and at his worst he is a glorification of the East-West culture bum who has neither the courage nor the talent to remake the world he hates...