Rilke, Zen Master: On Awakening to Beauty. Part 1. About a Broken Nose

In this fantasy book, the outstanding twentieth-century poet R. M. Rilke (1875—1926) speaks with enlightened masters of non-doing about the most intimate thing, beauty. On the one hand, there are allusions to the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng and the Records of the Teacher Linji; on the other, there are Rilke’s own works: koan-like poems on Buddha and a few others (from the New Poems), fragments of the poet’s essay on the sculptor Auguste Rodin and extracts from his letters.