D. T. Suzuki & the Dawn
of Zen in the West
October 18, 2017 James Ford
Patheos
Teitaro Suzuki was born on
this day, the 18th of October, in 1870 in Kanazawa, in Ishikawa
Prefecture, Japan. He was born into a Samurai family, his father,
like his father, and then his father before, was a physician.
Suzuki’s father’s death when he was a child plunged the family into
poverty. The questions that rise out of seeing the vagaries of life
drove him into a deep spiritual quest. While he was raised in the
Jodo Shinshu tradition he began to look beyond that tradition,
reading and speaking with people, particularly drawn to
Christianity and eventually to Zen.
Young Teitaro was not able
to afford to enter university, so after High School he became a
school teacher. A few years later with the help of an older
brother, he entered the University of Tokyo studying classical
Buddhist languages while at the same time beginning to sit at
Engakuji Rinzai Zen temple. He became the student of the master
there, Imakita Kosen, under whom he had his first experiences of
kensho. He also received his Buddhist name, Daisetsu, which means
“great humility.” Although in later years he would say it actually
meant “great clumsy.” When Kosen Roshi died Suzuki continued with
the rosh’s principal heir, Soen Shaku.
Later, when Soyen Shaku,
Kosen Roshi’s successor as the master of Engakuji was in America
for the World Parliament of Religions he became friends with the
publisher and scholar Paul Carus. Carus asked the roshi if he would
stay and help him with translating and publishing Zen Buddhist
texts into English. Soen Roshi declined, but recommended his lay
student Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki.
With that Suzuki moved to
Illinois and into the Carus household. There he assisted in
translating the Tao Te Ching, not a Buddhist text, but important.
And then began work on what would become Outlines of Mahayana
Buddhism. There Suzuki also met, fell in love with, and married
Beatrice Erskine Lane.
The couple returned to
Japan where Suzuki took up a professorship at Otani University. At
that time he also met Shinichi Hisamatsu and became connected,
although never formally with the Kyoto School of Buddhist
philosophers. Suzuki would teach in Japan and the united States for
the rest of his life, and for a number of years later in his career
as a visiting professor at Columbia.
D. T. Suzuki, as he was
best known, would travel widely, lecturing across North America and
Europe. And most importantly, perhaps, he wrote. Eventually, over a
hundred books. Much of these efforts focused on Zen.
His circle of influence
included the Catholic monk, peace activist and mystic, Thomas
Merton, psychologists like Eric Fromm, Karen Horney, and most
notably Carl Jung, musicians like John Cage, poets like Gary Snyder
and Alan Ginsberg, and, perhaps most importantly Alan Watts. Watts
own books on Zen were essentially popularizations of Suzuki’s work.
And they were very popular. Through them if washed
through
Watts’ idiosyncratic,
Suzuki’s Zen perspectives reached the general educated English
speaking readership like an atomic bomb.
There are many reasons to
criticize D. T. Suzuki, some of them even deserved. In the run up
to the Second World War and through it, Suzuki clearly supported
Japanese imperialism and more troubling he seemed to endorse
anti-semetism.
And, even as Watts’ Zen was
idiosyncratic, less so, but also so was Suzuki’s. As far as Zen is
concerned he presented a not fully historical, but rather a
romanticized version of the Zen dharma that subsequent scholars and
teachers have had to work with, against, and around. On the other
hand his resonances with Idealism, German and English Romanticism
and particularly American Transcendentalism probably made Zen
accessible in ways that would otherwise not be so. Suzuki can
probably best be categorized as a modernist Buddhist.
These criticisms noted, his
scholarship was impeccable, and his contributions remain
solid.
And, to put it baldly, if
there were no D. T. Suzuki, Zen in the West even vaguely as we
experience it, would not exist.
It is said that D. T.
Suzuki’s last words were “Don’t worry. Thank you! Thank
you!”
Yes. Thank you! Endless
bows.