The Gion Festival: Exploring Its Mysteries intimately covers this renowned 1150-year-old festival. Stunning photos of priceless artwork complement explanations of legends and esoteric secrets. Discover insider details on the Gion Festival community, including spiritual, cultural and artistic contexts that are not available anywhere else in English.
For lovers of Japanese culture who want to navigate the festival with finesse, this book is a must have.
(Worldwide)
(Worldwide)
(Japan Only)
(US Only)
The Gion Festival: Exploring Its Mysteries A month of rituals, five processions, countless deities, shrines and portable shrines, thirty-four floats, antique treasures and fine arts, otherworldly music, an array of spiritual traditions, family heirlooms on display, kimono, people-watching, thousands of dedicated volunteers, more than 1150 years of history—the Gion Festival is truly a world-class celebration.
Presented annually by thousands of volunteers, the Gion Festival is a fascinating self-organizing institution. With more than a millennium of rich history, it offers an excellent case study for sustainability and community resilience.
Catherine Pawasarat also teaches Esoteric Buddhism and meditation at Planet Dharma and Clear Sky Center.
Catherine Pawasarat is a U.S.-born English and Spanish literature major who went to Kyoto, Japan in 1989, learned the language, and became a journalist, interpreter, translator, and editor. She specialized in sustainability, human rights issues, and traditional Japanese arts.
Her residence in a traditional Kyoto townhouse in the heart of the famous Gion Festival neighborhood in the early 1990s marked the beginning of decades of fieldwork on this gigantic, 1,150-year-old purification ritual and its community.
She lived in the Brazilian Amazon for a year in the late 1990s to study plant medicine. Shortly after she returned to Kyoto, she met Buddhism and meditation teacher Acariya Doug Duncan, and began an intensive spiritual apprenticeship rare in the West. She and Doug Sensei have practiced, taught and trained in spiritual awakening and conscious community through Clear Sky Retreat Center and Planet Dharma since 2005.
The most comprehensive English language book on the Gion Festival is now available in paperback or e-book formats.
(Worldwide)
(Worldwide)
(Japan Only)
(US Only)
