Several years ago, an eminent British scientist was discussing his theories with a friend in a London restaurant. A fascinated eavesdropper at a nearby table, no longer able to contain herself, at last went over and said, “Excuse me, but I just couldn’t help listening to your conversation, because the ideas you were discussing sounded exactly like Mahayana Buddhism!” The scientist avowed almost total ignorance of this subject and asked for the names of some books that would enlighten him. The lady gave him titles which included works by both Dr. Suzuki and myself, and thus it was that, in the course of the marvelous interconnectedness of all things, this scientist and I became friends. Oddly enough, one of his special interests is the problem of simultaneous discovery—as when two or more investigators working quite independently in different parts of the world, hit upon that same scientific invention. For something of the same kind happens when, in modern times, we unknowingly rediscover the ideas of ancient India and China.
Indeed, there is an almost uncanny affinity between some of the major trends of modern Western thought and Buddhist philosophy. Bergson, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Schrodinger, Dewey, Korzybski, Heidegger, Whyte, Tillich—all in some quite significant respects think like Buddhists. But why stress the point? Few of them, if any, began their work with a serious study of Eastern thought, even though the book in your hands [Suzuki’s Outlines] was first published in 1907. Moreover, there is no sense in using this affinity as a pawn in the game of sectarian one-upmanship, as if to say, “See how up-to-date and scientific the Buddhists were in contrast to those superstitious Christians!” There is, perhaps, a trace of such one-upmanship in this book, but it is understandable enough considering that Dr. Suzuki wrote it at a time when Eastern philosophy commanded little of the intellectual respect which it enjoys today—thanks, in no small measure, to his own work. The importance of the parallels between Mahayana Buddhism and various trends in modern thought lies in a wholly constructive direction, which has nothing to do with any sort of sectarian propaganda for Buddhism. Indeed, a really serious student of the disciplines which Mahayana Buddhism involves would be simply dismayed by the propagation of Buddhism in the West as an organized religion.
Although Dr. Suzuki speaks here of Buddhism as a religion, this is only in the most vague and general sense of the term. For the study of its disciplines has nothing to resemble the considerations which would influence one to be a Roman Catholic rather than a Baptist, or vice versa. The real concerns of Buddhism are closer to psychotherapy, or even to something such as ophthalmology, than to the choice between differing systems of belief which we recognize in the West as adopting a religion. A convert to Buddhism is as unimaginable as a convert to cookery, unless the conversion means simply that one has become a cook instead of a cobbler, or that one has become interested in cooking well. For Buddhism, whether Hinayana or Mahayana, is not a system of doctrines and commandments requiring our belief and obedience. It is a method (one of the exact meanings of dharma) for the correction of our perceptions and for the transformation of consciousness. It is so thoroughly experimental and empirical that the actual subject-matter of Buddhism must be said to be an immediate, nonverbal experience rather than a set of beliefs or ideas or rules of behavior.
In sum, Buddhism is a method for changing one’s sense of identity, that is, of the way in which one experiences the fact of being alive. For it seems that, East and West, today as in 600 B.C., most people experience themselves as lonely and isolated selves or souls, minds or egos, confined within bags of skin. Both the external world of material events and the internal world of thought and feeling are realms which the self confronts as alien to and other than itself. The individual therefore experiences himself as something in, but not truly of, a universe which cares nothing for him, and in which he is a very impermanent fluke. Buddhism—in common with Vedanta and Yoga in India, and with Taoism in China—considers this sensation of separate identity a hallucination.
The hallucination is an unhappy by-product of the high degree to which man has developed the power of conscious attention—the power of concentrating awareness upon figures to the exclusion of their backgrounds, upon things and events to the exclusion of their environmental contexts. The penalty for this brilliant but circumscribed form of awareness is ignore-ance (avidya) of the ground that goes inseparably with the figure, of the context that goes with the event, and of the cosmic environment that goes with the individual organism. In short, an over-specialization in this mode of highly selective and exclusive consciousness gives man the illusion that he himself—his identity—is confined within his skin. But a proper correction of perception would show that “he” is as much the universe outside the skin as the system of organs within it. The behavior of the one is the behavior of the other, and the existence of the two is as interdependent, mutual, reciprocal, or correlative as that of front and back.
Normal commonsense is almost a conspiracy to prevent people from seeing that this is true. Our languages, our habitual but learned modes of thought and perception, and our social conventions as a whole make it amazingly difficult to see and to feel the individual and the universe as one field, one system, and one process of activity—in short, as one Self. Man therefore regards the birth and death of individual organisms as the beginning and end of selves, not realizing that they come and go like leaves upon a tree, and that the tree—so to say—is the actual self. But this realization requires an expansion and deepening of consciousness so that the narrow spotlight of normal attention discovers the origin from which it shines.
The real content and work of Buddhism is, then, this very expansion of consciousness. And just this, rather than any set of concepts, is what it has to contribute to the development of modern thought. For, as we shall shortly see, Western philosophy and science have arrived at theoretical points of view remarkably close to those of Mahayana Buddhism. But for the most part those viewpoints remain theoretical: there is no actual and corresponding change in the state of consciousness, and, as a result, the individual knows things without feeling them. In other words, the scientist of the twentieth century knows in theory, from his study of ecology and biology, that he is an organism-environment field. But in practice he feels subjectively as if he were still in the sixteenth or second century, sensing himself as an organism merely in and confronting its environment. He has never felt the new identity which his theory suggests, and may even fear such an experience as some form of pathological and “regressive” mysticism.
I want to review the main respects in which I feel that philosophical and scientific thought in this twentieth century runs parallel to Mahayana Buddhism. But it may, as a preliminary, be worth asking whether there has been any historical influence of the latter upon the former. The question is peculiarly difficult to decide, for, although reliable information about Buddhist philosophy has been available at least from the beginning of this century, it has not—until recently—been something in which the academic philosopher or scientist would admit a serious interest, unless, of course, he were an orientalist or philologist. His interest would then be purely formal, concentrating, as a rule, upon the literary and antiquarian aspects of Buddhism as distinct from its philosophical and experimental content. Nevertheless, there is evidence that a number of Western scholars have had a practical interest in these materials, which they were cautious in admitting to their colleagues.
On the one hand, there was the traditional association of Buddhism with heathenish idolatry and with cultures which it was convenient for Western colonialism to define as backward and primitive. On the other hand, around the turn of the century Eastern philosophy was widely associated with various forms of Theosophy, and thus with the stress of the latter upon occult or psychic phenomena, which in no way commended it to the temper of scientific thought at that time. Yet from shortly before 1900 there has appeared a slowly increasing volume of work on Mahayana Buddhism, and other types of Eastern philosophy, that is both scholarly and sympathetic to the practical and experimental aspect of this philosophy. The present work [Suzuki’s Outlines] is one of the earliest examples of this trend, and, in comparison both with its author’s later works and with the general progress of Buddhist scholarship, the present-day reader may not at once appreciate what a remarkable achievement it is.
So far as I can see, Dr. Suzuki was the first Asian, Buddhist or Hindu, to combine a fine mastery of English with a scholarly knowledge of his own philosophical tradition that was at once sound by Western standards and sympathetic to the subject, and then to write a systematic account of an Asian philosophy, the Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism. Searching the bibliographies, I find nothing comparable from an Asian hand at any earlier date.1 Suzuki was, then, the first great scholar-interpreter of the East to the West to come out of Asia, and it is marvelous to reflect that as I write this, in the summer of 1963, he is still alive and vigorous, approaching the age of 94. His best known work did not appear until twenty years after the Outlines, for it was in 1927 that he published the first volume of Essays in Zen Buddhism. It was shortly after this that James Bissett Pratt made the celebrated remark that there two kinds of cultured people: those who have read Suzuki and those who have not. It would have been pointless to say this unless a great many people of culture had indeed read him. Perhaps some literary detective will one day trace out the actual channels of Suzuki’s influence. It cannot have been negligible, but at the same time ideas have a way of being “in the air,” so that we catch them without knowing their source.
What are, then, some of the dominant trends in Western scientific thought which are so closely akin to Mahayana Buddhism? First of all, there is relativity in its most general sense—the recognition that there is no universal truth that can be stated in any meaningful proposition. Everything that is so, is so for a particular observer or in relation to a particular situation. It is obviously impossible to speak simultaneously from or for all possible points of view. (The last two sentences may appear to be universal propositions, though actually they are no more than statements about observation and description.) There is thus no way of making any valid proposition about Reality, Being, or the nature of all things. This is the general consensus of modern analytical philosophy—logical positivism, scientific empiricism, or whatever it may be called. So far as it goes, this is also the Mahayanist doctrine of sunyata or “voidness,” which is not, as some have believed, the assertion that the universe does not really exist, but that all propositions or concepts about the universe are void and invalid.
But unlike, say, logical positivism, the Mahayana does not rest its enquiry here and busy itself with logical trivia. It goes on to concern itself with a knowledge of the universal, of Reality, which is nonverbal. Sunyata has, as it were, a positive aspect that is experienceable but unmentionable. This must be approached through a further meaning of the term, which is that in the real, nonverbal world there are neither things nor events. This is a point of view, which, in the modern West, is associated with various forms of semantics, and especially with the work of Korzybski, Sapir, Whorf, and, to some extent, the earlier Wittgenstein. For this work has made it clear that things and events are units, not of nature, but thought. Basically the thing or event is any area of space or span of time upon which attention may be focused. Thus to assimilate the world to our thinking we have to break it down into these manageable units. This is the way we apply the calculus to the measurement of curves, and also the way in which we ingest our food. Food has to be reduced to gulps or to bite-sized units. But as cows do not grow ready sliced, the natural universe does not exist ready thinged. This does not mean that the real world is a formless and unvaried mush. It exists just as we perceive it, but not necessarily as we conceive it.
Therefore to conceive the world as a multiplicity of separate things is to ignore the basic unity that exists between widely distant bodies in space, just as it exists between the proportionately distant molecules of one’s own body. Our clumsy attempts to account for one event by others through the mysterious connections of causality, is simply a failure to see that the events so connected actually constitute a single event, and that this in turn (looking at it one way) makes up, or (looking at it another) expresses The Event, which Mahayanists call the Dharmakaya, the Body of Being.
Part of the discipline of Buddhism is therefore the cultivation of intellectual silence, for certain periods of time. This is to be aware of whatever happens to be, without thinking about it, without forming words and symbols in the mind. The world is then seen in its fundamental state of tathata, for which English has only the awkward equivalent of “thusness” or “suchness.” But it represents what Korzybski called the “unspeakable,” that is, the nonverbal level of reality. The point of the Buddhist discipline is to see that life is, in itself, quite unproblematic. There are such specific problems as how to build a bridge or put out a fire, but there is no Problem of Being unless one creates it for oneself out of nothing. For, as Wittgenstein saw, we manufacture the Problem of Life by asking questions or making demands upon ourselves or others which are meaningless or self-contradictory. We make a complex game out of the world by setting values upon nature’s chips, and then confuse the game with the world itself. In Wittgenstein’s (1922/1960) own words:
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. (6:41)2
The Mahayanist would go on to point out that realizing that there is no value in the world does not mean that it is valueless, for this word, as we use it, implies the negative value-judgment that the world is chaotic, absurd, meaningless, and so forth. Tathata, suchness, is simply the world as beyond valuation, whether positive or negative. At this level, the world is also accidental in the sense of such terms as svayambhu (self-existent, becoming so of itself) or the Chinese Tzu-jan (spontaneous, of itself so, nature, natural). The English “accidental” has the misleading sense of something happening at random in a world that is supposed to be orderly.
Sunyata and tathata are therefore basic and complementary terms. Sunyata means that all such terms as eternal or temporal, one or many, real or unreal, being or nonbeing, good or bad, are inapplicable to the world as a whole. Each of these words has meaning only in terms of its opposite, or of some contrast. But there is nothing outside the whole with which to contrast it. Thought is really a system of classification, of sorting experiences into intellectual boxes. Every class, every box must have both inside and outside, but the world as a whole has no outside and therefore no inside: it is in no class. Sunyata means, further, that the world is not actually divided into, or composed of, separate things and events. For very division is also a union, an interdependence. The figure stands out sharply against the background, but without the background the figure is not manifest. Sunyata is the exhaustion of thought in its attempt to grasp existence. But when thought relaxes its hold, the world is, not conceived but experienced, as tathata. That is to say, all that happens seems to be self-explanatory, self-sufficient, and complete just by happening. Yet in such a way that one doesn’t say, “So what?” but, “My God!” Or, “Well, I’ll be damned!”
One of the profoundest insights of Mahayana Buddhism has its modern counterpart in the transactionalism of John Dewey, and in the organismic philosophy of Whitehead, and of the biologists von Bertelannfy, Goldstein, and Woodger.3 Suzuki wrote his Outlines before he had begun his exhaustive study of a text known as the Avatamsaka Sutra, a text that represents the high point of Mahayanist philosophy. The central theme of the Avatamsaka is what is known as the dharmadhatu theory of the mutual interpenetration of all things and events. Dr. Takakusu (1947) expressed it as follows:
Buddhism holds that nothing was created singly or individually. All things in the universe—matter and mind—arose simultaneously, all things in it depending upon one another, the influence of each mutually permeating and thereby making a universal symphony of harmonious totality. If one item were lacking, the universe would not be complete; without the rest, one item cannot be. (p. 40)
The word “simultaneously” in the above passage is perhaps not quite happily chosen. Everything in the universe has not come into being at the same time. The idea is rather that all events, past, present, and future, here and elsewhere, are mutually interdependent. The earlier event A does not occur unless the latter event B is assured, just as an electric current does not depart from the positive terminal until the negative terminal is connected. A departure requires a point of arrival. Furthermore, although event A may be defined as having ceased before event B begins, the occurrence of B will depend upon A having happened. It is in this way that all depends upon each, and continues to do so even when the individual event has vanished. A universe in which, say, Socrates did not, or could not, exist would not be this kind of universe.
The Avatamsaka likens the cosmos to a many-dimensioned network of gems, in which each contains the reflection of all the others—ad infinitum. Any one implies all the rest, because all project themselves into each. Many people have some intellectual difficulty in grasping this kind of reciprocal or polar relationship, even though the principle is as simple as two sticks supporting each other in the form of an inverted V: the one does not stand without the other. This is in some respects remarkably close to Dewey’s theory (Dewey & Bentley, 1954) of the transactional nature of the relationship between the individual and the world. The term transaction is chosen in preference to interaction or reaction because of its stress upon the mutuality of the relationship. In the transaction of buying and selling, the two operations go to together: there is no buying without selling, or selling without buying.
Thus a living, individual organism is not only part of the world, but it goes with a world of just this nature, as apples go only with apple trees. But, conversely, this kind of a world—a world of light and sound, weight and texture—is what it is in terms of our organic structure. Only eyes can evoke light from the sun. It appears, then, that as the organism is something in the world, the world is at the same time something in the organism, since light and sound, shape and substance, are states of the organism.
This is further clarified by the biologists and ecologists who see, no longer organisms in environments, but organism-environments which are unified fields of behavior. In describing the behavior of any organism, the biologist soon finds that he is also describing the behavior of the environment. He realizes, then, that he must talk in terms of a new entity—the organism-environment. This has the interesting consequence that attributes which have formerly been ascribed to the organism alone—intelligence in particular—must also be ascribed to the environment. It is for this reason that biologists now speak of the evolution of environments as well as that of organisms, for a given organism will arise only in an environment that is sufficiently developed to maintain it.
This sort of thing was difficult to see so long as science was set on explaining things by a purely analytical method—that is, by trying to account for the larger units of the world by studying the structure of the smaller units that “compose” them. (Note the transitive verb.) This approach had the indispensable merit of giving us a clear picture of the whole structure, but it led to the illusion that the smaller units, such as cells or molecules, were in some way responsible or causative of the larger, of organisms. But, as von Bertelannfy (1960) showed so clearly, what a cell is and does depends upon the kind of system or context in which it is found. Blood in a test-tube is not the same thing as blood in the veins, because, for one thing, it is behaving differently.
Insights of these kinds have been enormously helped by the recognition that in science one speaks, not so much of what things are as of what they do. The world is described as behavior or process, so that what was formerly “thing” is now simply “event.” One no longer asks what (thing) is behaving in such-and-such a way; one simply describes the behavior and says where it is happening. In other words, action does not have to be ascribed to an agent defined as something quite different from action. The agent, too, can be sufficiently described as action. This is precisely the Buddhist anatman doctrine that deeds (karma) exist but no doers, that human behavior is not propelled by a subjective soul or ego.
Thus as Western science approaches a view of the world as a unified field of behavior, it approaches an idea of the Dharmakaya, the Universal Body (Organism), or of the Dharmadhatu, the Universal Field. But only the idea. The empirical approach of Western science should be sympathetic to the principle that hypothesis must be followed by experiment and observation. If, therefore, the hypothesis that man is organism-environment, individual-universe, is to be translated into experience, what is to be done? Obviously, the individual must find out how or what he is prior to and behind all ideas and images of himself. He must somehow strip off his masks, his identification of himself with stereotypes and roles, and find out what he is existentially, or, as Buddhists would say, what he is in the domain of “suchness.”
When Buddhism is called the dharma, the word has the meaning of method rather than doctrine. For, speaking very strictly, there are no Buddhist doctrines. The method is essentially a dialogue between a Buddha, a person who is awakened to his real identity, and an ordinary individual, who experiences himself as a separate being. The dialogue begins when the latter raises a question, which may be as radical and simple as how to escape from suffering. What happens then is that the teacher (though the Asian idea of a guru is not really what we mean by a teacher) proposes an experiment. He does not give an answer, but rather suggests something that the enquirer might do to test the grounds upon which he bases his problem. He may suggest that since suffering is the consequence of desire, the solution is to eliminate desire, and then send the enquirer away to try that. Thus what appear to be the doctrines of Buddhism, as that the origin of suffering is desire or craving, are in fact only the opening stages of a dialogue (involving also a series of experiments)—a dialogue that may conclude in a way that is hardly foreshadowed at the beginning.
The essential principle of the dialogue is the application of sunyata—that is, to let the enquirer find out that nothing that he can do, or refrain from doing, think, or refrain from thinking, will answer his question. For his question is based upon the false assumption that “he” is something separate from all that he experiences, something to which the universe happens, something that confronts, but is not, everything else in the world. The aim of the teacher is to show that this separate “experiencer” of the world is fictitious; that it can neither do nor not do, and that all stratagems of thought designed to grasp the world to the satisfaction of the experiencer are futile. In short, the dialogue, and the experiments in meditation and thought-control that go along with it, is constructed to bring the enquirer to a complete impasse. He comes to the point of finding all his philosophical and metaphysical notions absurd, all his motivations the wrong ones, and of being in a situation where he has nothing left to grasp for spiritual or psychological security.
At this point he has no alternative but to let go, or rather, a letting go comes about through the whole of his being, since it is an action no longer attributed to the ego as agent. He is, as it were, thrown into sunyata like a person falling, for the first time, into water, into the ocean of relativity. Because, in water, there is nothing to be grasped, the rule of floating is to let go—and then the water bears one up.
Analogously, at this moment sunyata is experienced in a peculiarly positive way, for which Mahayana philosophy supplies no clear theoretical basis, no real explanation of why it happens. Almost invariably, with this full letting go, the individual finds himself deeply in love with the world. As the sutras say, there is aroused within him a great compassionate heart. It turns out that although the Dharmakaya is always described in negative terms that make it sound entirely abstract and arid, the real experiential Dharmakaya is quite otherwise. Whatever it may be in itself, when realized in human experience it becomes the force of karuna—the compassion of one who knows that, in some way, all suffering is his own suffering, and all “sentient beings” the disguises of his own inmost nature. It is in these final steps that Mahayana Buddhism may have some contribution for Western culture.
1. I am, of course, speaking of interpretive studies, not translations. Suzuki’s only competitor for this honor would be Swami Vivekananda, but his approach was avowedly that of preacher and popularizer rather than scholar. Bunyu Nanjio and Junjiro Takakusu, both eminent scholars, published work in English before 1900, but in the form of catalogues and articles on minutiae. The next work by an Asian, comparable to Suzuki’s, seems to be Sogen Yamakami’s (1912) Systems of Buddhistic Thought.
2. “Outside the world” would seem to mean: in terms of some symbolic system, e.g., thought or language, which represents the world.
3. Joseph Needham (1956, pp. 291–303), also a biologist of the organismic school, has produced ingenious, if not wholly convincing, reasons for the idea that Whitehead’s philosophy of organism may be traced back to the Taoist Chuang-Tzu—through Leibniz’s monadology, deriving from Leibniz’s study of the first Latin translation of Taoist literature.
Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. F. (1954). Knowing and the known. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Needham, J. (1956). Science and civilization in China (Vol. 2). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Takakusu, J. (1947). Essentials of Buddhist philosophy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
von Bertelannfy, L. (1960). Problems of life. New York, NY: Harper.
Wittgenstein, L. (1960). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London, UK: Routledge.
Yamakami, S. (1912). Systems of Buddhistic thought. Calcutta, India: Calcutta University Press.
Reprinted from Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (pp. ix–xxv) by D. T. Suzuki, 1963, New York: Schocken Books. Work in public doman, per Schocken Books, February 11, 2016.