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I can see why Suzuki and Jung hit it off so well that the latter would write such a glowing foreword to Daisetsu’s Introduction, seeing as how both of them include imagery for their readers’ contemplation. The final chapter of the Manual has sketches of what to expect to see when visiting a Zen temple in Japan, but rather than explaining everything, hints are dropped about each image’s significance.

There is much that I have to learn about the origins of Buddhism in India, China, Tibet and Korea, but it feels like the most fertile ground for Zen practices is found in Japan, with the three masters Dai-o, Daito and Kwanzan poetically pondering the imported meditation practices, admonishing their monks for complicating matters. Muso and Hakuin keep the Zen incense smouldering with the simple life in garden temples.

Much like the lesser prequels to a beloved film trilogy, one has to honour and understand the vision of the authors that came before. Chinese Zen Buddhists have plenty of intriguing conversations (and sketches of oxherding) for the mysterious ways and no-ways that would be left behind while Zen goes to Japan. The translated texts here give a fuller picture of the anecdotes presented in Suzuki’s Introduction.

With the help of a friendly insider Bombardov, the play inches closer and closer to its debut on the Independent Theatre stage. Most of the meddlers in Maxudov’s way he can patiently endure but the greatest issues come with the Stanislavskian stand-in and his dreaded method - everything the playwright likes about his work gets thrown out the window with the Vasilievich bath water. Then Bulgakov audaciously reveals...

A Very Short Introduction at its best has an author who knows one cannot say everything related to its subject so instead chooses a few pertinent examples related to a theme, and explores them one chapter at a time. Here, the alliterative chapter headings argue that art has been seen, mostly through the eyes of philosophers and theorists, as a blend of revulsion and attraction while art adapts to technology.

Running the gauntlet of theatre folk in a range of locations, from plush offices to the sidewalk repertoire poster, Maxudov encounters the good, the bad and just plain awful amongst these theatre people. His script is built up and torn to shreds by secretaries, impresarios and fellow playwrights while Maxudov watches bemusedly his words being put through the wringer. Volkodav invokes other artists to shame his rival.

Things fall apart as the Fuller estate empties due to Elliot and Duncan’s shenanigans: Lloyd is back in the hospital, Momoko is wasting away in his absence, Phoenix and Ocean are ready to bolt and Cass might even get custody of the three siblings if Yumi doesn’t step up and unite her fractured family. She gets help from an unexpected corner, reporter Jill whose Kali-like castration of Rhodes swings back the pendulum.

All joking aside, the tone of Suzuki's analysis and presentation of the Sutras matches the depth and unfathomable thoughts on reality, being and the many opposites that are all not what the Buddha means. Finding a middle path through these examples takes several lifetimes to fully grasp, made all the more confusing with the way the get-out-of-every-evil Kwanzeon Bosatsu get mentioned, yet Tathagata remains a mystery.

Even Suzuki himself seems a bit puzzled by the presence of the Dharanis in Zen Buddhism, claiming it to be a hold-over from the Chinese Zen masters that has no direct relation to Zen practiced in Japan. Reading over the mostly English translation, these prayers for protection from evil spirits seem a little too much rah-rah Buddha than the quiet contemplation over a garden spade one may or may not have in one’s hand.

Going beyond a scholarly understanding of the names of those who receive praise and prayers, the first section of this book goes ahead and presents as many of the recitations translated into English, except where only Sanskrit seems to fit. Don’t know what a Sangha is or how many times to adore Kwanzeon? Too bad since you’re not going to learn any more about them in this chapter! Past and future, however, are viewed.

After a very insightful lecture at a local Sangha temple, outlining the way in which Buddha awoke, and having read the companion book, Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism, it is time to delve a bit deeper into the many ways that have sprung from the Eight-Fold Path. Once again Suzuki is inviting Westerners into understanding the method of monks and how they meditate but seems to be holding back key points.

Friend and fellow psychoanalyst M.-L. von Franz lectures in support some of Jung’s wilder and harder to demonstrate theories of mind by delving into divination, what she sees as the ancient practice of primitive (perhaps bicameral minded) cultures. It extends everywhere within consciousness: from calculations by counting five on our fingers to probabilistic estimations of very small and extremely fast quantum events.

This short survey rounds out the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy-filled career with three Plutarchian character studies that increase in wonder while mind and motivation become more and more hidden: Timon may have every reason to hate fickle Athens, Antony and Cleopatra’s love goes beyond all bonds, and Coriolanus switches from rage to reason with barely a soliloquy for the audience’s insight. Wells ponders why tragedy?

Perhaps a wry rebuke of the frothy family reunions in Shakespearean romances, or the sycophantic Jonsonian masque, Ford rips open the sewer grate of Stuart England and revels in blood and incest to that may have been a sensation in the pre-Puritan party town, perhaps even the reason for the Cromwell revolution. Hard to imagine how audiences back then would have responded but I definitely see how Artaud got its heart.

Taking a meditatively long time to get beyond the not-Zen parts of his introduction, the last three chapters lay down what Zen is while still refraining from intellectualizing it. Chiefly, it is the all-important satori that Jung mentioned in his foreword, a synchronous moment where everything is understood, itself becoming a koan for monks to master through zazen and mindful work at Zendo.

Really didn’t want Rarus’s diary to end, and in a way it never will. The astute slave would have continued to follow Caesar through the election, perhaps up to the point when some of the heads for “three-headed monster” get lobbed off: Pompey is building a theatre where Caesar will later be stabbed, a war in Parthia is suggested that will end with Crassus dead and a mouthful of gold. And Rarus plays the widow’s part.

Still can’t shake the feeling that most of these strategies are abetting teachers to pull a pedagogical fast one on their students, citing the “teacher’s prerogative” (p. 98) to swindle ELL students out of authentic learning opportunities. Reiss makes up for this long con by later warning a risk for pairing up these marks with “buddies” as lousing up the lesson for both - wish we got here before plans were handed in.

The big four are staged together by establishing a basecamp in the witty revenge tragedy Hamlet, elevated in sublimity of Othello and Macbeth towards the “Mount Everest of plays” (p. 75) King Lear. Standard hyperbole with supporting snippets of dialogue and notes on film adaptations (including two of Kurosawa’s). An intriguing viewpoint suggests the slow death of Mac’s imagination.

The cranky, pro-life small town farmer Lloyd is surprisingly okay with having his farm taken over by the Seeds of Resistance and their hippie friends to put on Fourth of July sit-in. Will, another cranky farmer whose crop is in danger, has another point of view and may become the anti-liberal poster boy Elliot and his employer Duncan would like to have promoting their client’s seeds and disrupting the peaceful event.

The odd account of the sudden rise in fortune that came with Maxudov’s first novel being published and his waking-from-a-dream when he can’t find a trace of the journal nor the high life he experienced in Paris, not even his enigmatic publisher, spurs him on to start writing his next work, a play. I’m not sure if the cart was before the golden horse all this time, or if the 3-D box on his page was an inspired vision.

Mummlius Spicer wrestles control of the narrative away from Rarus, as only a small scroll picks up the story of Caesar’s success in Spain. The historian (I think) makes some statement about poetry which cuts across the ages, how “Commercial practices don’t take on patina” (p. 149) and can’t repay every Roman killed in battle at Catilina’s last fight, slaves in the mines in Spain and whatever Pompey was doing in Asia.

Wells has written and edited so much work on Shakespeare that he could have probably written these chapters in his sleep, or allowed a text generator to assemble his thoughts on the early tragedies. It kind of reads that way: a retread of the plays’ synopses sprinkled with notes from recent stage and film productions. And yet the way he quotes Titus, Juliet and Brutus shows his skilled hand at affective storytelling.

Another half dozen or so characters are introduced, none of them as yet connected to Esther, but with the Anton Chekhov shooting gallery established by the end of the first half of this novel, someone is bound to get shot in the second? Still seems doubtful, but then all of a sudden Mr. Guppy shows up and connects the vampire-like Lady Dedlock to the orphaned girl, and somehow Lil' Jo becomes a marked street urchin.

Getting closer to an explanation of Zen, Suzuki shares his research by way of riddles, non sequiturs and interactions between monk and master that border on slapstick. All the while, he reveals that it will make sense when our conscious mind switches off from time and space along with the other binaries we use to define us. Even Buddha himself is denied an straightforward account of his life, but a spade reveals all.

Once more unto the Oxfordian breach with a detailed look at the tragedies that Shakespeare wrote. Unlike the thematic study of Shakespeare’s comedies and the forthcoming histories (I imagine them being grouped together by successive kings rather than dates in which the plays were composed), Wells uses a standardized view of the Aristotlean purpose for watching plays in a genre that Shakespeare makes hard to pin down.

An amazing find for the historian, as well as an Arts-Based Research like myself, coming across the diary of Rarus, Caesar’s slave who has the political and financial acumen sorely missed in our Mr. C., Cicero, Catalina and a host of other speculators. Of course Rarus spends what little he has in tumultuous times to win back the love of Caebio. The whole chapter is the mirror world of Tiro in Harris’s Cicero Trilogy.

Successfully sidestepping National Socialists and McCarthy-era Republicans, Brecht's short stay in the United States was both very productive and ultimately frustrating. Opportunities to work with fellow German emigrant Fritz Lang ruined by Hollywood studio system, and even a welcoming Broadway demanded Communism cut from his plays. In these six years, he only was able to get Duchess onto the American stage.

A calm before the storm flashback to a lava tube has Yumi and Lloyd sharing a moment of wonder together, referred to in the next chapter which is worlds away from the father-daughter relationship they once shared. The Seeds seem to have dragged Frankie away from the mothership to return to Idaho which will inevitably bring back Elliot to continue to mess up with his PR job. Yumi wants back to her own private volcano.

A calm before the storm flashback to a lava tube has Yumi and Lloyd sharing a moment of wonder together, referred to in the next chapter which is worlds away from the father-daughter relationship they once shared. The Seeds seem to have dragged Frankie away from the mothership to return to Idaho which will inevitably bring back Elliot to continue to mess up with his PR job. Yumi wants back to her own private volcano.