The Face of the Buddha - Tapa dura

The book is beautifully produced, and as a late addition to the Empson canon it is a fitting tribute to an exceptionally brilliant poet and critic. (John Batchelor (New College, Oxford), Modern Language Review 2017.)

It's an absolutely exemplary piece of writing-about-thinking, taut and alert; it's also wryly critical of the racist assumptions about inscrutability and much else that bedevil much European scholarship on the subject. (Keith Miller, Times Literary Supplement)

...The Face of the Buddha is a work of proficient and provocative art history. (David Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement)

What [Empson] was ... a thinker with an incisively original mind and a fine, lucid, and always lively prose style ... He was also a talented mathematician and a remarkable poet ... He probably possessed most of the natural intellectual gifts of a good philosopher ... (David Bentley Hart, First Things)

... richly learned ... (New Statesman)

It is a masterpiece, his descriptions subtle and amusing. (Peter Swaab, Sunday Telegraph)

it is a marvel and delight to have a new book from his prime ... The Face of the Buddha is brilliantly imaginative, grand in its intellectual scope, fired by intense convictions about religion, art and politics. Hats off to the British Library for spotting it, Rupert Arrowsmith for his fine editorial work, and OUP for its richly illustrated edition. We're only in June, but this must surely be one of the books of the year. (Peter Swaab, Daily Telegraph)

Here it is now, an amazing find, carefully edited to be the book that Empson would have published back then, with his own illustrations. It is fascinating both to those who cherish Empson and those moved by Buddhist sculpture - and if you happen to qualify on both counts, an uncovenanted treasure. (David Sexton, London Evening Standard)

wonderful book ... Here is a great mind pondering a great subject. (Kevin Jackson, Literary Review)

The introductory essay by Myanmar-based scholar and poet Rupert Arrowsmith is a tour de force of insights into Empson, Buddhist art and Buddhism itself. (Acumen)

Taking up a teaching appointment in Tokyo in 1931, the English poet and literary critic William Empson found himself captivated by the Buddhist sculptures of ancient Japan, and spent the years that followed in search of similar examples all over Korea, China, Cambodia, Burma, India, and Ceylon, as well as in the great museums of the West. Compiling the results of these wide-ranging travels into what he considered to be one of his most important works, Empson was heartbroken when he mislaid the sole copy of the manuscript in the wake of the Second World War. 'The Face of the Buddha' remained one of the great lost books until its surprise rediscovery sixty years later, and is published here for the first time. The book provides an engaging record of Empson's reactions to the cultures and artworks he encountered during his travels, and presents experimental theories about Buddhist art that many authorities of today have found to be remarkably prescient. It also casts important new light on Empson's other works, highlighting in particular the affinities of his thinking with that of the religious and philosophical traditions of Asia.

Edited by the global culture historian Rupert Arrowsmith, this edition comes with a comprehensive introduction that makes 'The Face of the Buddha' as accessible to the general reader as it is to the professional scholar, and is fully illustrated throughout with Empson's original photographs.