This is one of the few great books. My copy is worn out, stained, covered with notes. It brings together in a new way ideas from Zen, Taoism, Pure Land Buddhism, and the crafts heritage of Morris and Ruskin. It is more than a book about craft: it is a book about enlightenment and the world “before duality”. It deals in profound ways with the nature of tradition and what Yanagi saw as the roles of the ancient craft worker and the modern artist.

Mr. Yanagi sees folk art as a manifestation of the essential world from which art, philosophy, and religion arise and in which the barriers between them disappear. The implications of the author’s ideas are both far-reaching and practical.

Soetsu Yanagi is often mentioned in books on Japanese art, but this is the first translation in any Western language of a selection of his major writings. The late Bernard Leach, renowned British potter and friend of Mr. Yanagi for fifty years, has clearly transmitted the insights of one of Japan’s most important thinkers. The seventy-six plates illustrate objects that underscore the universality of his concepts. The author’s profound view of the creative process and his plea for a new artistic freedom within tradition are especially timely now when the importance of craft and the handmade object is being rediscovered.