A Beginner's Guide to Japan Quotes

“The mother of Jesus, I sometimes remember, was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“If you think, ‘I breathe,’ ” said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, “the ‘I’ is extra.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover around it. It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you”—too intrusive—and there are said to be twenty ways of saying “I.” Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not. A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in twenty-nine different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or twenty-seven other things.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out. · What we see and smell and hear is real, it reminds us; what we think about that is not. · In much the same spirit, the Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“Nothing sets you (or at least me) free creatively,” says the untamed film director and Monty Pythonite, Terry Gilliam, “like having a set of limitations to explore.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“If they can’t get to Europe, they’ll find their way to a local theme-park Eiffel Tower. Even a place that we write off as “inauthentic,” they realize, can arouse emotions that are entirely authentic.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae. What is the virtue of speaking Japanese, Lafcadio Hearn noted, if you cannot think in Japanese?”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“Screens in a Zen meditation place are pulled back at dusk, to let the mosquitoes in. · A monastery, for St. Benedict, was “a school for charity.” A Zen temple might be called a school for clarity. The challenge in either tradition is to see how one leads to the other.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“To Marcel Duchamp’s blithe “There is no solution, because there is no problem,” the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, “There is no problem, because there is no solution.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“When he gives lectures in the West, I heard the Dalai Lama say in Japan, the audience tunes out the minute he starts speaking about ritual and comes to life as soon as he speaks about philosophy; in Japan, the formula is reversed.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“Japanese “indifference to the Mystery of the Universe,” my cousin’s great-grandfather was wise enough to add, “is that which enables them to give more time and to spend more energy on the solution of the problems nearer at hand.” · That same indifference binds them together, because there’s no need for individual speculation or debate in a choir; Shinto, lacking arguments, cannot be refuted.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“When one tries to discuss with [the Japanese] the problems of higher philosophy or religion, in the real sense of the term,” the great-grandfather of my first cousin complained in a book he published in 1933, after visiting Japan from his home in Bombay, “one feels that their religion begins and ends in ringing the bells, twice clapping their hands and then bowing with joined hands.” · Intelligence in Japan is emotional and social, someone should have told him; analysis is as inappropriate here as eating noodles with a knife and fork.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations