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The Zen Buddhist monastery Daitokuji in Kyoto has long been revered as a cloistered meditation centre, a repository of art treasures, and a wellspring of the "Zen aesthetic." Gregory Levine's Daitokuji unsettles these conventional notions with groundbreaking inquiry into the significant and surprising visual and social identities of sculpture, painting, and calligraphy associated with this fourteenth-century monastery and its enduring monastic and lay communities. The book begins with a study of Zen portraiture at Daitokuji that reveals the precariousness of portrait likeness; the face that gazes out from an abbot's painting or statue may not be who we expect it to be or submit quietly to interpretation. By tracing the life of Daitokuji's famed statue of the chanoyu patriarch Sen no Riky-u (1522-91), which was all but destroyed by the ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98) but survived in Rash-omon-like narratives and reconstituted sculptural forms, Levine throws light upon the contested status of images and their mytho-poetic potential. Levine then draws from the seventeenth-century journal of K-ogetsu S-ogan, Bokuseki no utsushi, to explore practices of calligraphy connoisseurship at Daitokuji and the pivotal role played by the monastery's abbots within Kyoto art circles. The book's final section explores Daitokuji's annual airings of temple treasures not merely as a practice geared toward preservation but also as a space in which different communities vie for authority over the artistic past. An epilogue follows the peripatetic journey of the monastery's scrolls of the 500 Luohan from China to Japan, to exhibition and partial sale in the West, and back to Daitokuji. Illuminating canonical and heretofore ignored works and mining a trove of documents, diaries, and modern writings, Levine argues for the plurality of Daitokuji's visual arts and the breadth of social and ritual circumstances of art making and viewing within the monastery. This diversity encourages reconsideration of stereotyped notions of "Zen art" and offers specialists and general readers alike opportunity to explore the fertile and sometimes volatile nexus of the visual arts and religious sites in Japan.
“I was born at the end of World War II, and so I was young in the ’60s. This means that I belong to the so-called (at least in Hungary) ‘great generation’. Young people of this generation, especially in America and Western Europe, rebelled against the existing system, showing their dissatisfaction by protests, new types of music and by outrageous clothes and behaviour. We – here and in the other socialist countries – experienced this, only because of the limitations of the repressive system, in a much gentler way. I have never been a rebel myself, and yet what tied me to this great generation was my desire to know the world much better, to be more informed than the average, to be a real cosmopolitan. That is why I studied languages and travelled much more than most.” “The evolution of people’s lives can be very diverse. Many people ask what makes someone successful or less successful. Genetics, education, its narrower and broader environment, circumstances, luck, etc. can all influence the evolution of an individual’s life. Success itself is subjective. Success can be material and not material, and the measurement of success always contains a kind of comparison to someone else. The concept of happiness further complicates this already very complex issue.I would say that success comes hand-in-hand with satisfaction. If people are satisfied with what they have achieved, they can claim to be successful and vice versa. Full satisfaction, of course, can be very misleading. People’s ways of life are very similar to a product’s life-cycle curve, as taught in marketing. Birth is followed by youth, then early adulthood, mature adulthood and ends with ageing.”
“Any settlers in the family?” “You don’t look Turkish at all, are you an émigré?” “Where are you originally from?” From an early age, I started hearing these questions. Either in school, during a cab ride, in the office or in my new social circles. I face these questions right after we start chatting... and this happens often. I always expect it. “Gökhan, where are you from?” I evolved: my height, my features, my voice, my gestures, the way I think, and many more but the answer to this question has never changed: “My ancestors used to live in Greece. They were there for a few generations. With the convention concerning population exchange between Turkey and Greece, my ancestors moved here permanently.” What I kept hearing on the grapevine eventually became a solid truth. I came to grasp the fact that my ancestors lived in Drama, Ptolemaida and Eleftheroupoli in Greece. All this longing to flee from my homeland and desire to get to know other places would clearly relate to a genetic interpretation. However, I still couldn’t say it all fit. "Kutluer compares and contrasts his Turkish roots, his old social surroundings to his new encounters in Bergamo and Montenegro. Starting from the relief of “getting out,” he dwells with the deep sense of nostalgia, the inevitable feeling of exile and loneliness; yet knowing that going back is not always an option and it is not the same land that one goes back to. Echoing some Turkish-German literature like Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Güney Dal, Feridun Zaimoğlu he battles the layers of integration to a new environment in reflection to his feelings of what once was a home to its aftertaste." – Elif Naz, Editor