Aan duiding van Zen-trekke by Breyten Breytenbach

Abstract

The author undertakes his analysis on the basis of his statement that he found it impossible to read Breytenbach without recourse to Zen-Buddhism. He deals briefly with the issue of the topicality of Zen-Buddhism. He analyses certain poems to point out the Zen-Buddhist experiential context and approach to reality before going on to a discussion of what constitutes Zen-Buddhism. The method of Zen-Buddhism, a looking into the self, a meditation, leads ultimately to a strongly ascetic lifestyle, and this spiritual discipline becomes determining for one's experience and life. He gives a diagrammatic representation of the implications of self-analysis in the Zen framework before analysing Breytenbach's poetry to indicate motifs and steps in the process. The analyses involve the theory of knowledge, the way to nirvana, the concepts of time and eternity and mysticism, a true acceptance of reality, the oneness of all things (including the "I", the awareness of mortality, death, the worldly, and in a long final section, the fallibility of language. The final conclusion is that the poetry in the relevant volumes demands a great deal of co-creative activity on the part of the reader. While Biblical and Zennist allusions converge, it emerges that Biblical referencesare merely communicative devices within a framework of over-arching Zen-Buddhist thought.
https://doi.org/10.4102/koers.v50i4.1059
PDF

Copyright information

  • Ownership of copyright in terms of the Work remains with the authors.
  • The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the Work, provided attribution is given to the place and detail of original publication, as set out in the official citation of the Work published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the Work on the authors’ or their institutions’ websites or institutional repositories.

Publication and user license

  • The authors grant the title owner and the publisher an irrevocable license and first right and perpetual subsequent right to (a) publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the Work in any form/medium, (b) to translate the Work into other languages, create adaptations, summaries or extracts of the Work or other derivative works based on the Work and exercise all of the rights set forth in (a) above in such translations, adaptations, summaries, extracts and derivative works, (c) to license others to do any or all of the above, and (d) to register the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for the Definitive Work.
  • The authors acknowledge and accept the user licence under which the Work will  be published as set out in https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (Creative Commons Attribution License South Africa)
  • The undersigned warrant that they have the authority to license these publication rights and that no portion of the copyright to the Work has been assigned or licensed previously to any other party.

Disclaimer: The publisher, editors and title owner accept no responsibility for any statement made or opinion expressed by any other person in this Work. Consequently, they will not be liable for any loss or damage sustained by any reader as a result of his or her action upon any statement or opinion in this Work. 
In cases where a manuscript is NOT accepted for publication by the editorial board, the portions of this agreement regarding the publishing licensing shall be null and void and the authors will be free to submit this manuscript to any other publication for first publication.

Our copyright policies are author-friendly and protect the rights of our authors and publishing partners.