Word: zens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...crazed theology student dynamiting Chartres Cathedral would be an approximate Western equivalent of a crime that shocked all Japan in 1950. It was the burning of the 14th century Zen temple of Kinkakuji ("Golden Pavilion") by a Zen Buddhist acolyte. The arsonist intended to die in the blaze, but he lost his nerve. At his trial he said, "I hate myself, my evil, ugly, stammering self." But he had no regrets about burning down the Kinkakuji. He envied the Golden Temple its beauty, and he was possessed with "a strong desire for hurting and destroying anything that was beautiful...
...sightseeing-bus companies: a total of 51 crashes, 15 deaths, 843 injured. President Hatano's manager did some oriental-style brain-storming and came up with an idea any adman would be glad to put on the train for Westport. The idea: send the bus drivers to a Zen Buddhist temple to cool off with a little meditation...
Last week 33 of the company's drivers and five of its female guides returned to work after completing the first course at Kamakura's 13th century Zen temple, Engakuji. For five days they rose at 4:30 a.m., cleaned their own rooms and swept the temple grounds, and meditated. Anyone who found his mind wandering was supposed to unclasp his hands as a signal, whereupon a waiting monk gave him three sharp thwacks with a stick. Twice a day Chief Abbot Sogen Asahina, 59, lectured them. "When you are in your bus, seated at the wheel...
...summer fiction, Wallach's fable is funny enough. He tells of a soulful young swimming-pool salesman who leaves Manhattan because "inside stuffy little apartments a million parakeets mess up their cages and refuse to say an intelligent word"-a conception subtle with the flavor of Zen-Zen, the West Coast's cultural mouthwash. In California, the hero sells pools frantically, working toward that aqueous millennium when "canoe trips from San Francisco to Tia Juana would be feasible, all by swimming pool and with no portage more than thirty yards...
...grookish goofiness and all, Kerouac's book is a pleasant boyhood novel. Doctor Sax, which was written in 1952, comes from the apparently bottomless hopper that the author had filled before his bestselling On the Road was published. Perhaps because it contains no such adult concerns as marijuana, Zen Buddhism or women to dull his exuberance, it is Kerouac's best book...