Book Review of The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki (560 pages) Reviewer: Rebecca Otowa Readers of this website may remember that I wrote a piece called “Insight on a Rainy Day” in August 2022, largely about the Heart Sutra (Hannya Shingyo) and its central message, “Emptiness is none other than form; form is …Read More
Tag: Zen
By Edward Levinson (aka Edo 恵道) hot water bottlememories of motherwarm me 湯たんぽや母の思い出暖めるyutanpo ya, haha no omoide, atatameru My earliest months living in Japan were in Kyoto. It was late fall and getting colder every day. Slowly I got used to the chilly (soon to be frigid) old wooden Japanese houses. One winter morning I …Read More
Ken Rodgers, KJ managing editor I greatly enjoyed talking with author Alex Kerr about his new book, Finding the Heart Sutra, on our WIK Zoom session on Sunday Nov. 29th. (A recording is available here—thanks to Lisa Wilcut and Rick Elizaga for their technical support!) As an additional reference I had intended to mention that …Read More
The World through the Magic Lantern – Nicolas Bouvier in KyotoBy Robert Weis ‘Scent of pine tree. Soaring foliage, stiff and alive with cicadas. In a cemetery a priest in a raspberry robe recites the sutras on a tomb, and it is like the sound of a distant fountain.’* Almost like an iconographic momentum, these …Read More
The following extracts are taken from pages 347-350 of In My Own Way, the autobiography of Alan Watts. *************** Ogata-sensei arranged to get us into Ryoanji -– The Temple of the Dragon Hermitage – after visiting hours, so that we could see the rock-and-sand garden in the stillness before twilight, when all the tourist and …Read More
Reggie Pawle combines being a Kyoto psychotherapist with being a Zen practitioner, which has enabled him to explore the world within while helping others find their true selves. Zen and psychotherapy go back to the 1950s in fact, with Carl Jung holding ground-breaking discussions in 1958 with Hisamatsu Shinichi, a Zen philosopher with the Kyoto …Read More
Kyoto Writing Competition
WiK Anthologies
The Nature of Kyoto (2023)
Eds. Lisa Twaronite Sone & Robert Weis
Foreword by Pico Iyer
Structures of Kyoto (2021)
Eds: Rebecca Otowa & Karen Lee Tawarayama
Foreword by Judith Clancy
Encounters with Kyoto (2019)
Eds: Jann Williams & Ian Josh Yates
Foreword by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Echoes (2017)
Eds: John Dougill, Amy Chavez, & Mark Richardson
Preface by Alex Kerr
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