Eternity has no elegy : a zen-oriented commentary on Yasunari Kawabata's Snow country and the artistic experience

Abstract

This paper posits a Zen-oriented philosophical framework wherein it is assumed that haiku poetry and literary fiction, the combination of which makes up the form of the novel in question, are suitable grounds for the investigation of the artistic experience out of which such a novel has been conceived. It is understood from the outset that the artistic experience is not limited exclusively to the work of art as oeuvre; that, moreover, the work of art itself is an indefinitely consolidated correlate of actual experience; and that, so being, it is both subject to and exemplary of the same qualities whose philosophical elaboration Zen has inherited from the teachings of the Buddha which preside over the phenomenic nature of reality. The paper incorporates three principal theoretical sources: 1) philosopher Francisco José Ramos’s second volume of the series “Estética del pensamiento,” titled La danza en el laberinto, which deals with the artistic experience and its relationship to Zen; 2) Rev. Dr. W. Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught, which expertly conveys an anthology of the Buddha’s teachings; and 3) Kenneth Yasuda’s The Japanese Haiku, for a thorough understanding of the history of the haiku and the conceptualization of its artistic possibilities, its form, and its direct relationship to natural phenomena.