Books by Stephen Addiss
Old Taoist
by Stephen Addiss, Jonathan Chaves, J. Thomas Rimer
In the literary and artistic milieu of early modern Japan the Chinese and Japanese arts flourished side by side. Kodojin, the "Old Taoist" (1865-1944), was the last of these great poet-painters in Japan. Under the support of various patrons, he composed a number of Taoist-influenced Chinese and Japanese poems and did lively and delightful ink paintings, continuing the tradition of the poet-sage who devotes himself to study of the ancients, lives quietly and modestly, and creates art primarily for himself and his friends.
Portraying this last representative of a tradition of gentle and refined artistry in the midst of a society that valued economic growth and national achievement above all, this beautifully illustrated book brings together 150 of Kodojin's Chinese poems (introduced and translated by Jonathan Chaves), more than 100 of his haiku and tanka (introduced and translated by Stephen Addiss), and many examples of his calligraphy and ink paintings. Addiss's in-depth introduction details the importance of the poet-painter tradition, outlines the life of Kodojin, and offers a critical appraisal of his work, while J. Thomas Rimer's essay puts the literary work of the Old Taoist in context.
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Tao Te Ching (Hackett Classics)
by Stephen Addiss, Lao Tzu, Stanley Lombardo, Burton Watson
This translation captures the terse and enigmatic beauty of the ancient original and resists the tendency toward interpretive paraphrase found in many other editions. Along with the complete translation, Lombardo and Addiss provide one or more key lines from the original Chinese for each of the eighty-one sections, together with a transliteration of the Chinese characters and a glossary commenting on the pronunciation and meaning of each Chinese character displayed. This greatly enhances the reader's appreciation of how the Chinese text works and feels and the different ways it can be translated into English.
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The Zen Art Box
by Stephen Addiss, John Daido Loori
A work of Zen art is a teaching in visual form, intended to be contemplated not only for its beauty, but for the secrets it contains about being fully human, fully alive. As teaching, Zen art can be profound, perplexing, serious, humorous—sometimes all within the same piece; as art, it stands somewhere outside standard aesthetic conventions, even those of other schools of Buddhist art. It is most often identified with the expressive medium of calligraphy or brush painting, but whatever the mood or medium, each work is the tangible record of an unrepeatable moment in the artist’s mind, an expression on paper of his or her understanding of the nature of things.
The Zen Art Box contains forty images of brush painting and calligraphy, each beautifully reproduced in fine quality on a 6 1/2" x 9" card that you can display on the enclosed folding easel stand. The back of each card includes an explanation of the art by Stephen Addiss along with commentary from John Daido Loori on the Zen wisdom contained in it. Also included is a 32-page color-illustrated booklet with essays on Zen art by both the authors.
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Haiku: An Anthology of Japanese Poems (Shambhala Library)
This celebration of what is perhaps the most influential of all poetic forms takes haiku back to its Japanese roots, beginning with poems by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters Basho, Busson, and Issa, and going all the way up to the late twentieth century to provide a survey of haiku through the centuries, in all its minimalist glory. The translators have balanced faithfulness to the Japanese with an appreciation of the unique spirit of each poem to create English versions that evoke the joy and wonder of the originals with the same astonishing economy of language. An introduction by the translators and short biographies of the poets are included. Reproductions of woodblock prints and paintings accompany the poems.
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