Customer Reviews

Temple Dusk: Zen Haiku (English and Japanese Edition)

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Mitsu Suzuki, wife of zen master Shunryu Suzuki, is a true master of haiku in her own right and this is an outstanding collection of 175 poems. The book puts the haiku in English in three lines followed by the season, year and location. At the bottom of the page, it has a one line romanji above a one line Japanese version. I only wish that she had published more!

Spring loneliness
night mist embraces the stupa
soundlessly

Spring 1981
San Francisco

Many books have tried to make a case for the Zen Buddhist influence on Japanese haiku. But Zen influence on haiku is largely an American and British invention--mainly following on the misguided heels of R. H. Blyth. Contemporary American promoters of the "Zen view" of haiku generally don't "get it" at all. On the other hand, this book provides the absolute best example anywhere of a total interpenetration of Zen and haiku, in simply wonderful poems in Japanese with outstanding English translations. If you think Zen has something to do with haiku, or want to see how it might, toss all those assertions by blindered critics, and get this book in your hands, in your "hara". Then, maybe, you'll understand that it's not Zen influencing haiku, or haiku as an aspect of Zen practice, but simply poems that flow like ink from the brush, beautifully, simply, meaningfully.