A Zen Harvest [Paperback]

One of the vital aspects of traditional Rinzai Zen koan study in Japan isjakugo, or capping-phrase exercises. When Zen students have attained sufficient mastery of meditation or concentration, they are given a koan (such as the familiar What is the sound of one hand clapping?) to study. When the student provides a satisfactory response to the koan, he advances to thejakugoexercisehe must select a capping phrase, usually a passage from a poem among the thousands in a special anthology, the only book allowed in the monastery.

One such anthology, written entirely in Chinese, was translated by noted Zen priest and scholar Soiku Shigematsu asA Zen Forest: Sayings of the Masters.Equally important is a Japanese collection, theZenrin Segoshu,which Mr. Shigematsu now translates from the Japanese, including nearly eight hundred poems in sparkling English versions that retain the Zen implications of the verse.