An Introduction to Zen Buddhism.

Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Society,, 1934. Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience First edition, first printing, with the rare jacket and slipcase. Suzuki presents Zen "as a wonderfully unthinkable way of being in the world, free of myth, ritual, rules, institutions, hierarchy, language, logic" (Cole, p. 8). Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963, D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) introduced Zen to Western audiences and shaped post-war American culture. His ideas were "followed by American avant-garde masters such as Jackson Pollock and John Cage, while young beatnik writer Jack Kerouac personally tried to secure this Eastern guru's blessing after the publication of his novel The Dharma Bums" (Hrdlicka & Machova, p. 285). This work grew out of essays which Suzuki wrote during the First World War and published in the Tokyo magazine New East. Provenance: with the loosely inserted business card of Reverend George Warren Hinman (1869-1940), Honorary Assistant to the President, Foochow College, Fuzhou, China. Before serving in China, Hinman was posted to Japan. The Hinman family had strong ties to the Oberlin area, and they most likely presented this copy to the Ohio State University Library at some point following George Hinman's death. Octavo. Original black cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt. With dust jacket and original card slipcase. Ex-Ohio State University Library, with its stamp embossed on the title page. Cloth and gilt bright, edges a little foxed; jacket spine lightly worn, flaps without price as issued, slipcase creased: a near-fine copy in the like jacket and slipcase. Alan Cole, Patriarchs on Paper: a Critical History of Medieval Chan Literature, 2016; Josef Hrdlicka & Mariana Machova, Things in Poems: From the Shield of Achilles to Hyperobjects, 2023.