Peter Haskel, Sword of Zen : Master Takuan and His Writings on Immovable Wisdom and The Sword Tale

The word "Zen" has now become part of everyday vocabulary in the global context.It can represent a variety of entities, including interior design, lines of cosmetic products, or Asian things in general.The English phrase "Being Zen" indicates a kind of lifestyle that is simple, peaceful, and is good for body and mind.What Peter Haskel introduces in Sword of Zen, however, is of a much more serious nature, and directly concerns the matter of life and death.The subject of the present book, Takuan Sh (1573-1646), was a monk of the Rinzai Zen school.He lived in Japan from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, a period in which Japan experienced a drastic transformation from an age of disturbances marked by the rivalry of warlords to political unification under the Tokugawa Shogunate.Takuan was born to a warrior family in Tajima province (present-day Hyogo Prefecture).He became a monk at the age of ten and received dharma transmission from Itt Jteki (1539-1606) after harsh training under several masters.At the age of thirty seven, he was appointed as abbot of Daitokuji, the main Rinzai Zen temple in Kyoto.The name of Takuan is familiar to many Japanese due to the monk's close relationship to the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604-1651) and to Iemitsu's sword master Yagy Munenori (1571Munenori ( -1646)).The stories about his witty and refined conversations with them, including some apocryphal anecdotes, have been handed down to the present.Peter Haskel's Sword of Zen is a book about Takuan's life and teachings, and it consists of three parts.The introduction provides an overview of the historical background and a commentary on Takuan's two writings on the art of swordsmanship, Record of the Marvelous Power of Immovable Wisdom (Fudchi shinmyroku;