Description: This book comprises ten letters written by Chiang Hsun to the young artist Yamin, yet it is also a collection of thoughtful musings dedicated to all ordinary people. Within its pages, he guides us back to the origins of aesthetic experience, awakening our "senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind," and mobilizing all our senses to perceive scent, weight, texture, form, and color--to savor the beauty of all things in the world. His prose is straightforward and refined, eschewing superficiality and pretentiousness. He calls upon us to shed superficiality and quietly savor the profound reflections brought by touch, taste, and sound. "The metaphysical is called the Way; the physical is called the vessel." Ultimately, the understanding and cultivation of life cannot be separated from emptiness and renunciation.
