Exerpts from, Yasunari Kawabata, Japan the Beautiful and Myself.

"Shinran (1173-1262), the founder of the Shin sect, once said: 'The good shall be reborn in paradise, and how much more shall that be the case with the bad.' This view of things has something in common with Ikkyuu's world of the Buddha and the world of the devil, and yet at heart the two have their different inclinations. Shinran also said, 'I shall not take a single disciple.' 'If you meet a Buddha, kill him. If you meet a patriarch of the law, kill him.' In these two statements, perhaps, is the rigorous fate of art."

"In Zen there is no worship of images. Zen does have images, but in the hall where the regimen of meditation is pursued, there are neither images nor pictures of Buddhas, nor are there scriptures. The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and thoughts. He departs from the self and enters a realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless. There are of course masters of Zen, and the disciple is brought toward enlightenment by exchanging questions and answers with his master, and he studies the scriptures. The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment by his own efforts." ... The Zen practice of sitting in silent meditation derives from Bodhidharma."

"'And what is it, the heart?
It is the sound of the pine breeze
there in the painting.'"

"Here we have the spirit of Oriental painting. The heart of ink painting is in space, abbreviation, what is left undrawn. In the words of the Chinese painter Chin Nung: 'You paint the branch well, and you hear the sound of the wind.' And the priest Doogen once more: 'Are not these the cases? Enlightenment in the voice of the bamboo. Radience in the heart of the peach blossom.'"

"The Japanese garden too, of course, symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, for the asymmetrical has the power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of the rocks gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs."

"'gently respectful, cleanly quiet,' there lies concealed a great richness of spirit; and the tea room, so rigidly confined and simple, contains boundless space and unlimited elegance."