Art and Poems

About a Poem: Henry Shukman on Hakuin Ekaku’s “The Monkey is Reaching”     The monkey is reachin For the moon in the water. Until death overtakes him He’ll never

To promote oneself is, apparently, a necessary part of being an artist. But how are we to marry this with being a Buddhist, one who has taken the Bodhisattva Vow

…the secret truth is that art is useless… Its “purpose” is to delight with its purposelessness, to demonstrate that in our lives of “getting and spending” there must be one

Perhaps there is a parallel between the artist wrestling with his medium, bending it to the shape he seeks, and a dharma practitioner wrestling with the equally intractable medium of

    According to the Buddhist scholar Robert Sharf, the relationship between Zen and art is neither simple nor obvious. Indeed, it is a matter that we in the West

Why the relationship between Zen and art is neither as simple nor as obvious as this cliché implies… For better or worse, “Zen and the Art of…” has become a