Zen Telegrams by Paul Reps

Author:Paul Reps
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0-8048-2023-6
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

500 yen to well-dressed persons

200 yen to students

100 yen to anyone poor

10 yen to lovers of Buddha

"No one elected to pay ten yen," someone has observed, "so perhaps each loved himself more than Buddha." But thousands came to "read-see" and many stayed long. Each always seemed to find some particular one he liked for his own reasons, and Reps would give it to him or sell it at the price the buyer chose, and then draw another to hang in its place, sometimes the same one, sometimes a new one.

After that, Osaka wanted a show, then Tokyo, then Kyoto again—and now I hear talk of Washington, Honolulu, Rome. The picture-poems were televised, newsreeled, radioed, written about, and even reproduced on silken obi in microscopic stitches of silk for elegant ladies. And his creating of the poems still continues, so that I've found myself with almost two hundred to choose from. To fit the space, I've had to winnow these down to seventy-nine, arranging them in four sections of sixteen each and one section of fifteen. The titles given in the table of contents are not formal titles but only key words that I've found convenient as memory aids.

Seventy-nine poems? "No," comments Reps, speaking both to me and to future readers of this book, "actually there's only one poem, and that one too a weightless gift. Any one is for one person. Like intimate conversation, it is not meant to be seen-heard by others. All this writing and exhibiting and publishing may seem far from 'one for one'—or as near as you let it be. Perhaps then, only perhaps, one of these is for you. Should this be so, you are welcome to take it out of the book and hang it on your wall, knowing it was done for you with delight."

Meredith Weatherby

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