Yinyuan's Mount Fuji Garden at Manpukuji

I was delighted to peek inside the East Abbot's Compound 東方丈 at Manpukuji when I visited Kyoto in early June 2017. If I am right, the garden is the famous Mount Fuji Garden Yinyuan built. Yinyuan felt deep affection towards Mount Fuji 富士山 and wrote several poems about it. See my another post Yinyuan and Mount Fuji.

Meeting Thomas Kirchner at Hanazono and Rinzairoku Documents from Ruth Sasaki

Thanks to George Keyworth's arrangement, on June 2 2017 we visited Thomas Kirchner, an American Zen monk at Hanazono University International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism 花園大学国際禅学研究所. He has worked with Ruth Fuller Sasaki to translate Linji Yixuan's Record of Linji 臨濟錄, which is available for download from here. (I wrote a review of the book in. Journal of Chinese Religion, vol. 37 (2009): 133—138. ) He told us a lot of personal stories about working with Ruth Sasaki, Iriya Yoshitaka 入矢義高 , and Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山(also known as Yokoi). He also showed us several binders of original translations and notes. These are all part of modern Zen history and need to be rescued from dust collecting.

Iriya Yoshitaka Notes to Rinzai roku, photo by Jiang Wu

Yanagida Seizan's note and translation, photo by Jiang Wu

Yanagida Seizan's note and translation, photo by Jiang Wu

Yanagida Seizan's note and translation, photo by Jiang Wu

Yanagida Seizan's note and translation, photo by Jiang Wu

Ruth Sasaki's note and translation, photo by Jiang Wu

Photos from the First International Conference on the Chinese Buddhist Canon, Tucson, 2011

It is great that selected photos from our first international conference on the Chinese Buddhist canon are still online from the College of Humanities page. We did a lot for event planning. But unfortunately the university never kept the original conference website. The opening ceremony and Dr. Lancaster's keynote speech was posted on Youtube and some papers, significantly revised, were published as Spreading Buddha's Word in East Asia.