The word ‘Zen’ is in common usage in the West, and Zen itself is pursued as a way of life at various centres both in Europe and America. Before the turn of the present century, both the word and the practice were effectively unknown outside the Far East, and the change is due to a considerable extent to the work of one man, Dr D.T. Suzuki, a Rinzai Zen scholar of great distinction. It was via Suzuki’s works, chiefly the three volumes of Essays in Zen Buddhism published in the 1920s and 1930s, that the western world gained its first understanding of Zen. Suzuki buttressed this achievement by means of many further works, numbering some thirty books in English and over ninety in Japanese (still mostly untranslated) together with many articles in journals. He complemented the Essays by a range of more introductory works, translations of important sutras from the Sanskrit, works comparing elements of eastern and western thought, and to an increasing degree towards the end of his life, detailed studies of the Shin sect of Pure Land Buddhism. His English works owe their success not only to their authority and erudition, but also to the high quality of his English style. Suzuki is one of those non-native writers of English, like Conrad or Santayana, whose command of the language shames many of its native users. The lucidity of Suzuki’s English works makes their difficult subject-matter as accessible as it can be. Many have followed the pathway Suzuki opened, and western literature on Zen has proliferated since his time, but Suzuki will always have the distinction of having been the initiator of this process, and his place in the history of twentiethcentury thought is secure.
D.T. Suzuki was born in 1870 in Kanazawa, in the Ishikawa prefecture of Japan, the youngest of five children. Though the family profession was medicine, his parents were deeply involved with Buddhism, and he grew up in an ambience permeated by Zen and to some extent by Shin Pure Land practices. He went to university in Tokyo in 1890, but spent most of his time studying Zen at Engakuji (Kamakura) with the Masters Imagita Kosen and Shaku Soen. During this period, he was invited by the American scholar of Buddhism Dr Paul Carus to assist him in the editing and translation of Buddhist works for the West (Carus was closely associated with the Open Court Publishing House in Chicago). One effect of the invitation was to cause Suzuki to throw all his strength into trying to achieve enlightenment by means of the Zen techniques he was later to describe so brilliantly, and this he did. In one of his rare autobiographical pieces, Suzuki describes his state of mind immediately after enlightenment: ‘I remember as I walked back from the monastery to my quarters in the Kigen’in temple, seeing the trees in moonlight. They looked transparent and I was transparent too.’1 When Suzuki came to write about Zen, therefore, he did so from the vantage point not merely of scholarship but of profound personal experience.
Suzuki went to America in 1897, and stayed abroad for eleven years, working for ten of them as an editor at the Open Court Company, detained (as he put it) by poverty. This period not only laid the foundations of his scholarship – a number of translations date from these years – but also refined his already considerable command of English. He left America in 1908 and spent almost a year touring Europe (and translating Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell into Japanese). By the time he returned to Japan in April 1909 he had decided on what was to be his life’s work and mission: to make the West aware of the spiritual attainments of Zen. Uniquely placed to understand the achievements of East and West, Suzuki believed that each has much to offer the other. Despite its excellence in technology and in various other areas involving intellection, the West was regarded by Suzuki as having failed to penetrate, other than spasmodically, to certain areas of spiritual development long cultivated in the East, and these he determined to try to communicate. As he put it:
Technology and science are quite splendid, but they tend to create an attitude of indifference toward the value of the individual. Individuality is much talked of in the West, but it is in legal or political terms that it is prized. In terms of religion or faith, however, concern among Westerners with regard to individuality is extremely weak. Furthermore, with industrialization or mechanization, man comes to be used as a thing, and, as a result, the unbounded creativity of mankind is destroyed. Therefore, in order to emphasize the importance of true individuality and human creativity, I consider it necessary to write about Zen more and more.2
This is precisely what he went on to do. Back in Japan he secured a post teaching English that he held for twelve years or so (1909–1921), and during this time he continued to write, translate and publish indefatigably. He obtained his first major academic post when in 1921, at the age of 51, he was appointed Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Otani University. This year also saw the foundation of the influential journal The Eastern Buddhist which he coedited with his wife, Beatrice Lane Suzuki. Thereafter his long life is a record of unbroken and prolific scholarship, involving many visits abroad and resulting in worldwide acclaim as an authority on Zen and other aspects of Buddhism. This mode of life was punctuated only by the Second World War. He wrote that he regarded the war in the Pacific as a ridiculous conflict for his people to have initiated, and spent the war years at his home in Kamakura, writing. Suzuki was no friend to militarism, whatever its origin.
The round of publishing and of public appearances and meetings resumed after the war. Among many others, he met and impressed the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in 1953: Jung thereafter contributed prefaces and commentaries to eastern texts, including some by Suzuki himself. Suzuki was still writing at the end of his life. He died aged 95 in Tokyo in July 1966, greatly honoured by academic and religious communities throughout the world.
Suzuki’s central achievement is to have made the West aware of the goal and methods of the Rinzai school of Zen, derived very largely from the codification by Hakuin. As in all Zen, the goal is enlightenment, and the experience of enlightenment is called in Japanese satori (C: wu). The method advocated as the surest means to satori is the mental discipline of koan meditation: although Suzuki refers occasionally to zazen (the central practice in Dogen’s Zen), it was manifestly far less important to him than the koan exercise. Indeed, sometimes he writes of zazen as if it were in danger of leading merely to quietism or mental calm, and this is in many ways the antithesis of Zen.
Suzuki accepts as his fundamental metaphysical belief the thesis that being-as-is or reality is nondual: it is an undifferentiated oneness. From this it follows that all the divisions imposed on experience by the intellect are false, down to the most basic metaphysical categories of space, time and identity. Being-as-is is neither temporal nor spatial and contains (so to speak) absolutely no divisions, not even that between self and not-self. Apprehension of reality is possible, and this apprehension is satori. It follows further that satori cannot be achieved merely by thinking about it, nor learned from books or a master, though a master can help us achieve it: satori is incommunicable, and can only be directly experienced.
Satori, in Suzuki’s analysis, has eight important properties:3
This last feature is especially important, and is a strict consequence of Zen metaphysics. Since reality is a divisionless oneness, it must be immutable: were it changeable, it would be describable in concepts and so not nondual. Since no events or changes are ascribable to being-as is, reality is not in time: without events there is no time, and therefore reality is eternal. (Eternity is the mode of being in which no temporal predicates apply, not everlasting being in time.) Since it is the direct apprehension of reality, satori cannot be an event in time. It is, as mystics are forced to say in a vocabulary designed to deal with temporal existence, a timeless moment. Zennists put the point as follows: satori occurs when consciousness realizes a state of ‘one thought’ (J: ichinen). Ichinen is an absolute point without duration. Thus Suzuki writes: ‘Satori obtains when eternity cuts into time or impinges upon time, or, which is the same thing after all, when time emerges into eternity.’5 Those who achieve satori are freed from the tyranny of ordinary time consciousness, in which we crave the eternal amid relentless mutability.
Finally, it follows that, properly speaking, satori is not an intuition, since an intuition is a mental event in a consciousness operating at ordinary conceptual levels. There is no self/notself distinction in being-as-is nor any distinction between mental and non-mental. Therefore satori cannot be the mental event of an individual. Instead, ‘When [reality] perceives itself as it is in itself there is a satori.’6 Satori is reality, so to speak, conscious of itself.
The attainment of satori is the goal of Rinzai Zen, and the method which has been evolved for its attainment is the koan exercise. The major obstacle to satori is the conventional operation of the mind engaged in conceptual, discriminatory thought, and koans are designed to bring this type of mental activity to a halt. The koan exercise forces the dissolution of our mundane mental activity, breaking it up at its foundations and permitting the efflorescence of our true being, ‘the original face’ or Buddha-nature. A koan is a puzzle which cannot be solved by any amount of conceptual thought: the more ratiocinative effort is put into solving it, the more impenetrable it becomes. The best known is perhaps Hakuin’s ‘one hand’: we all know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand?7 So long as this problem is approached by means of the pathways of conceptual thought and conventional logic, it is insoluble, a blank wall facing the mind. It can only be solved by those who have attained satori: from the perspective of nondual insight, it is solved with ease, as are the rest of the 1,700 koans it is said to be necessary to resolve before one can claim to be a Zen Master or roshi. To solve the koan is not to understand anything; rather it is to experience the presence of reality (the divisionless oneness) as much in one hand as in two.
The koan exercise was adopted by Zennists in the tenth and eleventh centuries (CE), chiefly to prevent Zen from falling into either of two degenerate states, a subject of mere logical debate on the one hand, or simply quietism on the other. The Masters decided that it was necessary to use the insight gained from nondual apprehension as a means to help aspirants to satori. The Master gauges the state of readiness of the aspirant, and sets a koan of the appropriate degree of difficulty. The aspirant is instructed to bring all his or her powers to bear on solving it. The impenetrability of the koan to rational analysis brings the mind to the highest possible tension, leaving it with two options only: ‘either to break down and possibly go out of mind, or to go beyond the limits and open up an entirely new vista, which is satori.’8 By means of question and answer sessions or mondo the Zen Master can estimate how far the aspirant has progressed along this road, and can tell when satori is imminent. At this point, the Master will use whatever means is needed to bring about satori and this means can be a word, a gesture or, not infrequently, a blow; and satori follows.
While the bulk of Suzuki’s scholarship is devoted to Zen, it is not by any means confined to it, and to see him solely as a Zen scholar is to underestimate the range of his achievement. Thus he wrote a book comparing the mysticism of Meister Eckhart with that of the Japanese (Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist, 1957). The subject other than Zen to which he devoted most effort, however, is Pure Land Buddhism, notably in its Shin version. (Pure Land is the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan, with more adherents than Zen.) He wrote of this at many points in his career, and it came to bulk larger in his thought as he grew older. The goal of Pure Land adherents is rebirth in the Pure Land of Buddha Amitabha (another way of describing enlightenment), and the chief means which has been evolved to secure this end is the mantra or repeated incantation of Buddha’s name called the Nembutsu, Namu Amida Butsu in Japanese (C: o-mi-to-fo: ‘Reverence to Amida Buddha’).9 This practice is more complex than might at first appear, having certain analogies with the koan exercise in respect of the suppression of ordinary conceptual thought and the bringing about of enlightenment. When, late in life, Suzuki wrote a book attempting to pick out the essence of the religious consciousness of the Japanese, it was on Shin that he focused principally, rather than Zen (though Zen, of course, is far from ignored):
Shinshu experience is really nothing else than the experience of Japanese spirituality. That it emerged within a Buddhist context was a matter of historical chance – it does not prevent in the least the essential quality of the Shin Sect from being identified with Japanese spirituality.10
Suzuki’s thought is open to the objections inherent in nondualism: chiefly, how to give an account of why an eternal, perfect unity should manifest itself as a temporal, mutable and divided universe, and why this universe should involve so much suffering and evil. Again, some of his own formulations are open to question, e.g. whether the assertion that satori has a noetic content is consistent with the thesis that no conceptual articulations apply to reality. Such difficulties, however, should not lead us to underestimate the extent of Suzuki’s achievement. Behind his entire output lies an optimistic and cheering belief: different cultures can be brought to understand one another. Bridges can be built, and we are not condemned to live in the windowless boxes to which relativistic theories of culture would seek to consign us. Suzuki set out to build such a bridge, and he succeeded.
References to D.T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism, London, Luzac, Ist, IInd, IIIrd series, 1927/1933/1934 are given as EZB; to his An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, London, Rider, 1983, as IZB; and to his Living by Zen, London, Rider, 1982, as LBZ.
1 Early Memories in M. Abe (ed.), A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki Remembered, New York and Tokyo, Weatherhill, 1986, p. 11.
2 An Autobiographical Account in Abe, op. cit., p. 25.
3 cf. EZB, Ist series, pp. 213–250; IInd series, pp. 16 sqq; LBZ, ch. III; IZB, ch. VIII, and in many other places.
4 EZB, IInd series, pp. 18–19.
5 LBZ, p. 53. cf. Nichiren’s Tendai doctrine of ichinen sanzen.
6 op.cit., p. 50.
7 cf. the essay on Hakuin in this book, pp. 181–187.
8 LBZ, p. 165.
9 On mantras, cf. Tibetan philosophy: Introduction in this book, pp. 105–108 and see also the essay on Nichiren, pp. 167–174.
10 D.T. Suzuki, Japanese Spirituality (Nihon-teki reisei [1944]), trans. N. Waddell, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 1972, pp. 20–21.
(Restricted to Suzuki’s English-language works)
Essays in Zen Buddhism, Ist series, 1927; IInd series, 1933; IIIrd series, 1934
Introduction to Zen Buddhism, 1949
The Zen Doctrine of No-mind, 1949
Living by Zen, 1950
Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist, 1957
the Buddha, Dogen, Bankei, Hakuin, Nishida
Abe, M. (ed.), A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki Remembered, New York and Tokyo, Weatherhill, 1986
Suzuki, D.T., Essays in Zen Buddhism, London, Luzac: Ist series 1927; IInd series 1933; IIIrd series, 1934
Suzuki, D.T., The Field of Zen, New York, Harper & Row, 1970 (1st edn London, the Buddhist Society, 1969)
Suzuki, D.T., An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, London, Rider, 1983 (1st edn 1949, revised 1969)
Suzuki, D.T., Japanese Spirituality, trans. N. Waddell, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 1972; first published as Nihon-teki reisei, Tokyo, Daitoshuppansha 1944
Suzuki, D.T., Living by Zen, London, Rider, 1982 (1st edn 1950)
Suzuki, D.T., Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist, London, Allen & Unwin, 1988 (1st edn 1957)
Suzuki, D.T., The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, Berkeley, Wingbow Press, 1974 (1st edn Kyoto, Eastern Buddhist Society, 1934)
Suzuki, D.T., The Zen Doctrine of No-mind, London, Rider, 1991 (1st edn 1949; 2nd edn 1969)