Word: zenning
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...they begged alms last week in the Japanese city of Kobe, Zen Buddhist monks from the great temple of Shofukuji (Good Omen) met an unusual reception. Instead of showing reverence, people cracked seemingly typical Zen koans (problem riddles). "You look like the one who was admiring nude pictures," giggled one housewife, slamming the door in a novice priest's face. Snapped another tart-tongued woman: "Wash out your mind before I fill your bowl...
...once sickly child ("At the time, my navel was down-beamed"), Murata became fascinated as a young man with health fads, began delving into the Spartan training of the Zen Buddhist priests. By 1951, at the age of 55, he had built up a whole philosophy around the navel's influence on health. He started the Hesoten (literally, Navel Heaven) Society, swooped down upon factory and-office to proclaim that "the heaven-pointed navel receives blessings therefrom." The navel, he told his growing audiences, is "a medal of culture with which every person is born. Polish it. Value...
...said, kissing her, digging her, all choked up with love and Zen and a mouthful of popcorn to go with the beer. "Sam is giving me a big party, and then I got to go." Sam was my friend and he was hip and I called...
...swung open, and a bearded, haunted, serene face appeared, and it was a poet and he had been out there everywhere and he had dug it all and he was back. He knew, man, he knew it and we knew it, that he knew. He was crammed full of Zen-wisdom and his eyes were wise and wild and his whole body was bandaged. He was beat...
This vision helps to illustrate Author Kerouac's unhappy faculty for confusing freedom with irresponsibility, for abusing the Zen Buddhist idea of the inseparability of good and evil by using it as an excuse for self-indulgence. Kerouac's protest against the urban work life (which he once called "the midtown sillies world") and the suburban home life of the U.S. middle class ("all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen") is trenchant but scarce!" new. And Kerouac's cult of "spontaneous writing" makes his pages at least as sloppy as they are sprightly...