Quotessence
Home / Authors / Reginald Horace Blyth Books
Reginald Horace Blyth

Reginald Horace Blyth Books

Author

Haiku: Haiku

A source page for quotes linked to Reginald Horace Blyth.

0 quotes

Related Quotes

“What is Zen? Zen means doing anything perfectly, making mistakes perfectly, being defeated perfectly, hesitating perfectly, doing anything perfectly or imperfectly, perfectly. What is the meaning of this perfectly? How does it differ from perfectly? Perfectly is in the will; perfectly is in the activity. Perfectly means that at each moment of the activity there is no egoism in it… our pain is not only our own pain; it is the pain of the universe. The joy of the universe is also our joy. Our failure and misjudgment is that of nature, which never hopes or despairs, but keeps on trying. R. H. Blyth”

Zen
Author:Reginald Horace Blyth
Create image

“The establishment of inner harmony is to be attained neither in the past nor in the future, but where the past and future meet, which is the now. When you have attained that point, neither future nor past, neither birth nor death, neither time nor space exist. It is that NOW which is liberation, which is perfect harmony, to which the men of the past and the men of the future must come.”

MenPastSpacePerfectHe ManBirthHarmonyLiberationEstablishmentPerfect Harmony
Book:Games Zen Masters Play: Writings of R. H. Blyth
Create image

“Or, to express this in another way, suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with seeing into our own nature, poetry is the something that we see, but the seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience.”

WayNaturePerfectVisionSeeingCreationDiscoveryConnectionsPoetry IsProfessorsAnother WayIndivisible
Author:Reginald Horace Blyth
Create image

“There is a Hindu myth about the Self or God of the universe who sees life as a form of play. But since the Self is what there is and all that there is and thus has no one separate to play with, he plays the cosmic game of hide-and-seek with himself. He takes on the roles and masks of individual people such as you and I and thus becomes involved in exciting and terrifying adventures, all the time forgetting who he really is.”

SelfPlayDreamRememberDiesUniverseGamesBornForgetFantasySelf EsteemIdentityEternalMythEsteemSelf RespectCosmosCosmicHide And SeekTrue Identity
Author:Reginald Horace Blyth
Create image

“These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.”

LoveMindStatesLonelinessCreationAcceptanceMoralityDemandGratefulSimplicityAppreciationCharacteristicsState Of MindSelflessnessHaikuMaterialityLove And Courage
Author:Reginald Horace Blyth
Create image

“The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.”

WayLifeNightFallHoursSunFourMountainTwentiesShiningSnowValleysPaleHaikuGraspingSun ShinesSnow Falling
Book:The genius of haiku: readings from R.H. Blyth on poetry, life, and Zen
Create image

“It is not merely the brevity by which the haiku isolates a particular group of phenomena from all the rest; nor its suggestiveness, through which it reveals a whole world of experience. It is not only in its remarkable use of the season word, by which it gives us a feeling of a quarter of the year; nor its faint all-pervading humour. Its peculiar quality is its self-effacing, self-annihilative nature, by which it enables us, more than any other form of literature, to grasp the thing-in-itself.”

WorldGivingYearsArtSelfWholeUseFeelingsFormLiteratureNatureQualityGroupsHumourParticularSeasonsWhole WorldRemarkablePeculiarQuartersHaikuBrevity
Book:Haiku: Haiku
Create image

“We walk, and our religion is shown even to the dullest and most insensitive person in how we walk. Or to put it more accurately, living in this world means choosing, choosing to walk, and the way we choose to walk is infallibly and perfectly expressed in the walk itself. Nothing can disguise it. The walk of an ordinary man and of an enlightened man are as different as that of a snake and a giraffe.”

MenWorldWayMeanPersonsDifferentActionWalksThis WorldOrdinaryEnlightenedDisguiseSnakesOrdinary ManInsensitiveGiraffe
Book:Zen in English literature and oriental classics
Create image

“Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time [1950's] because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen.”

BookSchoolPoetryInterestAttentionFourExpressionBeatsAssumptionPoeticVolumeTranslationsHaikuGaryGinsberg
Author:Reginald Horace Blyth
Create image

“Regarding R. H. Blyth: The first book in English based on the saijiki is R. H. Blyth's Haiku, published in four volumes from 1949 to 1952. After the first, background volume, the remaining three consist of a collection of Japanese haiku with translations, all organized by season, and within the seasons by traditional categories and about three hundred seasonal topics.”

FirstsBookThreeFourHundredSeasonsBackgroundsTraditionalOrganizedCollectionsCategoriesVolumeTopicsTranslationsHaiku
Author:Reginald Horace Blyth
Create image