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The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation by Robert E. Carter (review)

I enjoyed reading this recent book by Robert Carter. As the title indicates, it is about the practice of self-cultivation as evidenced in the Japanese arts. By “arts” here, the author means a variety of traditional practices that involve the use and incorporation of the body and the mind and that result in something of aesthetic value and, ultimately, self-cultivation. The arts he covers are aikidō, landscape gardening, chadō (the way of making, serving, and drinking tea), ikebana (flower arranging), and pottery making, to which he dedicates a chapter each. I appreciated the book from multiple angles, first and foremost as a scholar of Japanese philosophy and religious thought. In addition, I appreciated it as someone who had grown up in Japan and has some familiarity with Japanese customs and culture and who has been interested in the martial arts since childhood and trained in an aiki-related art when living in Japan. The book, however, is not just for the scholar. Anyone interested in self-cultivation as practiced in Japan in its various guises, be it martial, aesthetic, or religious, would find reading this book worthwhile. I also think that Carter has succeeded in introducing the difficult philosophical concepts of Nishida, Nishitani, Dōgen, and Zen Buddhism to the nonspecialist or even nonacademic and in employing them in his explanations of the Japanese arts of self-cultivation. The author, however, did not limit his research to scholarly or academic works. Rather, much of the book is based on his