INTRODUCTION

To sum things up in a word, Zen is wondrous. Searching for Zen apart from the wondrous is more stupid than looking for fish in the trees.

—SUZUKI DAISETSU, MŌZŌ ROKU (A RECORD OF DELUDED THOUGHTS, 1898)

Fine snow falling flake by flake. Each flake falls in its proper place.

—FROM CASE 42 OF THE BLUE CLIFF RECORD (HEKIGAN ROKU), TRANSLATED BY D. T. SUZUKI IN “EARLY MEMORIES”

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF D. T. SUZUKI’S ZEN

For nearly three-quarters of a century, Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō (1870–1966), better known in the West as D. T. Suzuki or Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, wrote, translated, and lectured about Zen Buddhism to audiences around the world. Through almost tireless efforts aimed at spreading Zen outside of Asia, the promotion to non-Japanese of those aspects of Japanese culture that he deemed most valuable, and enhancing appreciation for Zen and traditional culture within his home country, Suzuki was for much of the twentieth century the face of Buddhism across wide swaths of the globe. During a period when the nascent fields of Asian studies and religious studies overwhelmingly were dominated by white, male Europeans and Americans, Suzuki managed to enter into the scholarly conversation, making it more of a global one. His prominence as a spokesperson for Zen Buddhists and for Asians generally placed Suzuki in conversation with such important religious leaders, writers, and scholars as William Barrett, R. H. Blyth, Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Christmas Humphreys, Carl Jung, Thomas Merton, Gershom Scholem, Paul Tillich, Alan Watts, and many others. Suzuki’s lectures, writings, and personal conversations with others concerning Zen also proved pivotal in shaping the artistic careers of such cultural luminaries as John Cage, Leonara Carrington, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, and Gary Snyder. In sum, Suzuki’s work on Zen and Buddhism more generally made him one of the most culturally influential Asians of the twentieth century.

Although over time Suzuki’s positions concerning Zen doctrine and practice shifted, from start to finish Suzuki remained convinced of the efficacy of Zen for giving people an understanding of the deepest spiritual truths. Having trained intensively in Rinzai Zen with a series of teachers from the 1880s until the death of his primary teacher, Shaku Sōen (1860–1919), Suzuki wrote about the world through the lens of Rinzai Zen, which, despite its problems in the twentieth century, remained for Suzuki the reservoir of true Buddhist understanding and insight. In the last decades of his life, Suzuki tried to ensure that a solid foundation was established for the transplantation of Zen Buddhism in Europe and the United States, urging that what he regarded as essential Zen texts be translated into English, either directly by himself or by others. In the course of his long career, Suzuki wrote on a wide array of topics concerning Buddhism, Japanese culture, and such general topics as animal welfare, the role of women in society, and politics. Nonetheless, as Suzuki’s letters from the twentieth century, particularly during the post–Pacific War period, make clear, Zen remained central to him, even as he was engaged in ancillary projects. Without question, Suzuki’s work on Zen comprises the overwhelming bulk of his corpus.

Suzuki’s role as a spokesperson for Zen, Buddhism, and Japanese culture escapes easy characterization. Although closely affiliated with Rinzai Zen, particularly through his association with his Zen teachers Imakita Kōsen and Shaku Sōen and his long residence on the grounds of Engakuji and, later, Tōkeiji, a nearby sister temple, Suzuki held no rank other than that of an ordained Zen layman. For many years Suzuki worked as a university professor, teaching English at the Peer’s School (Gakushūin) and Ōtani University, but he did not hold a formal degree until the Ministry of Culture awarded him a doctor of letters (DLit) degree in 1934. While making major contributions to the scholarly (particularly Japanese) literature concerning the early history of Zen Buddhism and exploring such understudied figures as Bankei Yōtaku and the myōkōnin (wonderous good people) in the True Pure Land School, his understanding and presentation of the Buddhist tradition cleaved in many ways to traditional Rinzai understandings of Zen. In his views of the decline of Chinese Buddhism by the Ming dynasty, in the sources used for understanding koans, and even in his perennialism, Suzuki may owe as much to his immersion in Hakuin and other texts important to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Rinzai Zen as he does to various streams of American and European thought. At the same time, Suzuki brought his understanding of the Zen tradition into dialogue with numerous currents of modern thought, including existentialism, nineteenth-century idealism, pragmatism, psychoanalysis, psychology, Swedenborgianism, Theosophy, Transcendentalism, and many others. Like C. S. Lewis, who, without any formal church position, became a prominent intellectual spokesman for the Christian faith in the twentieth century, Suzuki is best viewed as an independent but deeply committed writer, scholar, and theoretician of Zen who sought to lay the intellectual foundations for the spread of that tradition outside Japan and the enhancement of appreciation for what he considered one of the most important treasures in Japan’s religio-cultural inheritance.

Having worked at the margins of most formal Buddhist institutions and shifting frequently between so many intellectual and religious perspectives, it should come as no surprise that Suzuki’s presentation of Buddhism and Zen has received much criticism, both during his lifetime and afterward. Beginning with the publication of his first English translations of Chinese Buddhist texts and studies of Mahayana Buddhism, much of the critique has centered on the question of Suzuki’s fidelity to “real” or “authentic” Buddhism or Zen in his presentation of the tradition, and he has frequently been accused of presenting a view that was indebted as much to European or American religion and philosophy as it was to Japanese Zen. This sort of critical appraisal began as early as 1908, with Louis de La Vallée Poussin writing in his review of Suzuki’s Outlines of Mahāyāna Buddhism that Suzuki’s “Mahāyānism is, beyond what is useful or admissible, tinged with Vedantism and with German philosophy,” accusing Suzuki of letting his religious passion obscure his objectivity with regard to Mahayana Buddhism, which, revealing his hand, La Vallée Poussin claimed was more properly understood as a “mysticism of sophistic nihilism.”1 Much more recently, a number of other scholars—James Ketelaar, Bernard Faure, T. Griffith Foulk, David McMahan, Elisabetta Porcu, Robert Sharf, and Judith Snodgrass—have pointed out gaps in Suzuki’s work and the numerous ways in which his presentation of Buddhism responded to and was molded by intellectual, social, and political currents that he traversed in his lifetime. In a pioneering article that has become the received wisdom about Suzuki in both its general argument and its details, Sharf has written convincingly about how Suzuki’s view of Zen awakening as a type of religious experience was shaped by the thought of William James and Suzuki’s close friend, the philosopher Nishida Kitarō.² Of equal importance, Bernard Faure, James Ketelaar, and Judith Snodgrass have analyzed how this modern Zen of Suzuki’s served multiple purposes, operating as a form of “reverse” or “secondary” Orientalism that added cache to Japanese Zen for Europeans and Americans, while raising the tradition’s prestige back in Japan.³ In addition, numerous analysts of Suzuki’s work, including art historians, Buddhologists, and intellectual historians, have taken him to task for giving far too sweeping an importance to the role of Zen Buddhism in the formation of Japanese culture and for bifurcating cultures along overly spiritualized, essentialized, and static East-West lines, even as much of his own intellectual development and influences belied such a neatly divided world. Taken collectively, these analyses of Suzuki’s work make clear that Suzuki’s pioneering portrayals of the history of Mahayana Buddhism, premodern Chinese Chan, and Japanese Zen were major contributions to the literature on Buddhism in the twentieth century, but one needs to be read them carefully, taking into account the historical, political, religious, and social contexts in which he wrote as well as the last half-century’s scholarly developments in these subjects.

Although Suzuki did a great deal to advance the historical study of Zen, particularly through his textual and philological research on Dunhuang Chan texts and his translation of massive amounts of previously untranslated Chinese, Japanese, and Sanskrit Buddhist literature into English, his main concern was never to provide an objective historical analysis of the Chan-Zen tradition, either for his domestic or for his foreign readers. In both Japanese and English, Suzuki argued that there were two approaches to the study of Zen: objective-historical and religious. Whether we agree that it is possible, Suzuki attempted to write about Zen from the latter perspective, thereby presenting “what Zen is in itself apart from its historical setting.”4 Suzuki saw his efforts, which he characterized as the “history of Zen thought” (Zen shisō shi), as methodologically different from the writings of such other historians of the tradition as Nukariya Kaiten and Ui Hakuju.⁵ His studies of the earliest representatives of the Zen tradition, for example, Bodhidharma and Huineng, and its key figures and texts in China and Japan were motivated not only to inform others about Zen and transmit Asian culture to the West, but also by Suzuki’s desire to connect his own experience of koan Zen to earlier iterations of the tradition.⁶ As Suzuki contended in his major study “The Koan Exercise,” until the time of Hakuin, the psychology of Zen—this was the key subject for Suzuki—“has been going on without much change for more than a thousand years, since the days of Hui-nȇng and his followers.”⁷

Suzuki attempted domestically and abroad to support the revitalization of the Zen tradition so that it would flourish in the twentieth century and become approachable by those whom he frequently referred to as “modern men.” Like Dharmapala, Okakura Tenshin/Kakuzō, Taixu, Vivekananda, and many other Asian religious modernists who reformulated their traditions, Suzuki worked on several levels to change the presentation and practice of Zen Buddhism and, more broadly, Japanese culture, which he viewed as fundamentally indebted to Zen, in order to revive the tradition. Suzuki was very deliberate in his project to create a modern Zen, or as he put it, “to elucidate its [Zen’s] ideas using modern intellectual methods (kindaiteki shi’i no hōhō).”⁸ In William James’s approach to religious experience as presented in The Varieties of Religious Experience, Suzuki saw an effective way to carve out a domain for religious life that rendered it independent of the realms of superstition, science, and institutional rigidity by affirming its psychological reality. Although Suzuki did see awakening (satori/kenshō) as the quintessential “religious experience” (shūkyōteki keiken), he also held that it was crucial to contextualize that experience to render it comprehensible. As he noted in Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, “no religious experience can stand outside a more or less intellectual interpretation of it. Zen may like to ignore its literary or philosophical side, and it is justified in doing so, but to think that this implies the absolute ignoring of all attempts at any form of interpretation would be a grievous error.”⁹ Providing the resources to allow those outside Japan to access the corpus of literature that Suzuki believed essential for understanding Zen fully was the focal point of work for Suzuki during his last two decades. In his letters and other writings, Suzuki outlined an ambitious project to translate a range of works that included the Platform Sutra, the sayings of Shenhui, the sayings of Dahui, the Transmission of the Lamp, and other classic Zen texts, including some that had only been discovered at Dunhuang in the twentieth century.

For Suzuki, the revitalization of Zen depended on making it more appealing to Westerners and increasing its relevance for modern society. Reflecting on his experiences in the United States in the early 1950s, Suzuki wrote to Akizuki Ryōmin, one of Suzuki’s close intellectual confidants, about these problems with the tradition: “In Zen today, the compassionate aspect is insufficient. Therefore it lacks opportunities for social engagement. In addition, it has no ‘logic’ (ronri). That’s something that Nishida always said. If we are going to get Westerners to accept it, somehow, logic is necessary. I want you to consider these matters deeply and make great progress. I entreat you to do this.”10 Similarly, Suzuki complained to Ruth Fuller Sasaki in a letter written in 1954 that the Rinzai Zen establishment in Japan had not done enough to make Zen approachable for the “modern man.” Reflecting on Suzuki’s intentional adaptation of Zen, David McMahan has provided a balanced appraisal of its hybrid nature that serves as a necessary corrective to some of the more negative views of Suzuki’s work.

Does this conceptual borrowing mean that Suzuki simply appropriated western sources and tried to pass them off as Zen? This would be too simplistic a reading. He was placing elements of Zen literature on a scaffolding constructed of a variety of western philosophical ideas in order to translate selected Zen ideas into that discourse. Sensing affinities between Zen and the Romantic-Transcendentalist vein of western metaphysics, Suzuki deployed its terminology to frame the issue of humanity and nature, allowing Zen to claim the broad outlines of the metaphysic and then presenting Zen themes to bring it to what he considered its fullest expression. This allowed him to bring Zen into the conversations of modernity—in both Japan and the West—though it did implicitly exaggerate the degree to which Zen can unproblematically claim the Romantic-Transcendentalist metaphysic as its own.¹¹

The various critiques of Suzuki produced since the 1990s provide an appropriate caveat to those approaching his work. Clearly, in reading his writings on Zen, we must take into account the various nationalistic, cultural, and intellectual currents that shaped his presentation of the tradition. At the same time, we also need to evaluate Suzuki’s work as an outgrowth of his lifelong immersion in and commitment to Rinzai Zen practice. Suzuki was not a charlatan who preyed upon the ignorance of Europeans and Americans by presenting a distorted description of Zen derived from a superficial, idiosyncratic, institutionally disconnected understanding of the tradition. Rather, as I show below, Suzuki’s letters, diaries, and a detailed chronology of his life based on multiple sources make clear that Suzuki remained steadily connected to Rinzai practice and institutions. In addition, these sources confirm the general accuracy of Suzuki’s autobiographical writings, including those published toward the end of his life.

Another major vein of Suzuki criticism, one occasionally combined with the questioning of his credentials and the authenticity of his approach as mentioned previously, centers on Suzuki’s Japanese nationalism and alleged support for Japan’s military aggression in Asia, including the Pacific War that raged from 1937 to 1945. Here, as with the critiques concerning the historical accuracy of Suzuki’s presentation of Zen, the scholarship provides us with a useful perspective on Suzuki’s work, particularly his presentation of the relationship between Japanese culture, Buddhism, and Zen. As I have noted in an introduction to Suzuki’s major work of this genre, Zen and Japanese Culture, like many Japanese intellectuals, including Okakura Kakuzō, Nishida Kitarō, Kuki Shūzō, and Harada Jirō, who contributed to the genre of Nihonjin ron/Nihon bunka ron (writings on Japaneseness/Japanese culture), Suzuki sought to valorize that which he saw as the best aspects of Japanese culture in the face of the onslaught of Westernization at all levels of Japanese life. Writing at a time when many intellectuals worldwide divided cultures broadly into “East” and “West,” Suzuki’s contributions to this genre frequently portrayed Japanese culture in static, essentialist terms that contrasted it against an equally problematic depiction of a monolithic “West.” Although Suzuki frequently wrote about common ground between “East” and “West,” pointing to the Romantics, Transcendentalists, and such Christian mystics as Swedenborg and Eckhart, Suzuki also asserted the ultimate superiority of Zen and, hence, Japanese culture.

Suzuki’s contentions that Japan was the country where Zen meshed closely with the national spirit and was preserved in its purest form were coupled with a harsh view of the fate of Buddhism, particularly Chan, in China. Although reservedly sanguine about the prospects for the revival of Chinese Buddhism in his 1935 article “Impressions of Chinese Buddhism,” Suzuki grew more negative in his appraisal as writings concerning post–Yuan dynasty Chan appeared in English in the years following the Second World War.12 Like many Japanese scholars and religious leaders, Suzuki held that Chan had entered a precipitous decline in China in recent centuries. In letters and published writings, Suzuki noted the “degeneration” of Chan, although he inconsistently placed the terminus a quo for the decline variously at the end of the Yuan (1368) and the Ming (1644) dynasties.¹³ In a 1954 review of Heinrich Dumoulin’s The Development of Chinese Zen after the Sixth Patriarch, for example, Suzuki wrote, “While Zen is a Chinese production or development out of Indian Buddhism and there are still many Zen monasteries in China, it seems to have ceased to be a living spiritual force, as it once was, in the land of its birth. Apparently, Japan is the only place on earth where Zen is still kept alive.”¹⁴ Similarly, in a letter to the translator Chiang Yee, Suzuki commented that “Zen begins to decline after the Yuan. Works of the later Ming masters have added nothing new to the development of Zen thought.”15 Writing just months later to Cornelius Crane, Suzuki again noted that “Zen degenerated greatly after the Ming, and there is no Zen in China worth speaking’ [sic] of.”¹⁶

One of the most controversial aspects of Suzuki’s writing on Zen was the emphasis on the supposed connections between Zen and bushido (way of the warrior), particularly swordsmanship. Some authors have seen in Suzuki’s stress in these writings on “moving forward without hesitation,” “abandoning life and death,” and “the sword that kills and the sword that gives life” at the very least tacit support for Japanese militarism and expansionism in Asia during the twentieth century. Unquestionably, Suzuki argued in many of his writings on the Zen Buddhist foundations for Japanese culture about what believed were the deep connections between bushido, particularly swordsmanship, and Zen.

In his pride in Japanese culture, particularly Zen, as well as his support for the Russo-Japanese War and the colonization of Korea, Suzuki, like his teacher Sōen, did not transcend the views expressed by many intellectuals and cultural leaders of his generation. In arguing that Zen served as the basis for the finest expressions of Japanese culture, including bushido, Suzuki attempted to displace the increasing emphasis on Shinto as the foundation of Japanese life. In so doing, as Albert Welter observed, Suzuki attempted to do for Zen what Motoori Norinaga had attempted to do for Shinto.¹⁷ In addition, as Sueki Fumihiko has noted, like many Japanese intellectuals of his generation, Suzuki passively accepted Japanese imperial expansion and the increasing military aggression against China in the 1930s, although Suzuki did later admit his guilt for his failure to be more outspoken.¹⁸

Nonetheless, there are several important reasons to question the claim, made most pointedly by Brian Victoria, that Suzuki actively supported Japan’s aggression in the Pacific and in China and sought to bolster the spirit of the Japanese military through his writings. These charges have been disputed at length by Kemmyō Satō in collaboration with Thomas Kirschner, who have demonstrated convincingly that they are without much merit.¹⁹ In addition, Moriya Tomoe has stressed the evolving nature of Suzuki’s positions on war, imperialism, and nationalism. Moriya suggests that as Suzuki and his wife Beatrice Lane grew closer during the period of their courtship and married life, which began in 1904–1905, Beatrice may have influenced Suzuki to move away from the former positions he took on these issues.²⁰

Victoria bases most of his claims of Suzuki’s sympathy for Japanese actions in the Pacific War on the presence of articles by Suzuki, largely based on his earlier writings on Zen and bushido, that were included in such publications as Bushidō no shinzui (The Essence of Bushido) and Kaikōsha kiji (The Kaikō Association Report) the journal of a supporting organization for the army’s officer corps.²¹ Although in most of his articles on the subject of bushido, swordsmanship, and Zen Suzuki attempts to show the ways in which Zen practice, particularly in its emphasis upon equanimity in the face of death and unhesitating action, serves as the basis for training samurai, as Christopher Ives has argued there is little reason to believe these writings played a direct role in stoking support for Japanese aggression in Asia.22 In addition, Victoria’s claims concerning Suzuki’s ardent support for Japanese militarism and the Pacific War are based on decontextualized citations of Suzuki’s work and guilt by association, as Satō and Kirchner have argued. Based on the current evidence, we do not know whether Suzuki voluntarily provided the articles for the journals in question. Suzuki had spent considerable time abroad, maintained numerous international contacts, was fluent in English, and, until Beatrice’s death in 1939, had an American wife. All of these factors could only have made Suzuki an object of suspicion for the increasingly anti-Western Japanese authorities. It is therefore not too difficult to imagine that Suzuki, who was seventy-one years old when the article in Kaikōsha kiji was published, would have been reluctant to deny requests by those associated with the military for some of his writings on Zen and bushido. In addition, the Suzuki articles considered most damning by Victoria because of their placement alongside extremely jingoistic writings by other authors that are found in such collections as Bushidō no shinzui are remarkable for their almost complete failure to mention China or Japan’s other enemies, let alone condemn them. Nor does Suzuki use or valorize such concepts as “Japanese spirit” (Yamato damashii), dying for the imperial cause, or State Shinto, which are so common in the writings of other, Western-educated Japanese intellectuals, for example, Harada Jirō and Takakusu Junjirō, who supported the Japanese imperialism in a more full-throttled fashion. Given the placement of the articles, one would think that if Suzuki were in favor of the war, he would have taken full advantage of the opportunity to express his patriotism and support. Instead, Suzuki appears to have done little more than provide slightly augmented material from previously written articles on Zen and bushido to the editors of the military and martial journals mentioned above.

Far from being an ardent supporter of Japan’s Pacific War efforts, particularly once it became clear that meant engaging the United States and her allies, Suzuki wrote on several occasions during the late 1930s and 1940s that the war in Asia and against the Allies would cause great harm to Japan. In a letter written to the novelist Iwakura Masaji written in 1941, just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Suzuki spelled out clearly his opposition to the war, particularly the prospect of opening hostilities with the United States:

This war is certain to take Japan to the brink of destruction—indeed we can say that we are already there. The leaders of Japan cannot continue this fight forever; in their innermost minds they are deeply conflicted, and until this is taken care of there will be no betterment of the country’s fortunes. The New Order in East Asia was certain to fail before anything came of it. We must accept the consequences of what we have done as a nation—there is nothing we can do about it now. I must put off telling you my frank opinion of the situation until we meet directly. History attests to the dangers of entrusting the affairs of a nation to people with no religious convictions; is this not what Japan is dealing with right now?23

These words are hardly those of one who vigorously supported the Japanese war effort.

SUZUKI’S ZEN PRACTICE

Born in Kanazawa in 1870 into a family whose heads had served as physicians to the rulers of the domain, the Maeda, Suzuki lost his father, Ryōjun (later, Jyū), when Suzuki was only six years old. According to later accounts that Suzuki gave, his involvement with religion began early in life and developed direction while he was still living in the Kanazawa region. In particular, his early years were marked by several encounters with Buddhism that left a lasting mark on Suzuki. Following his father’s death, his mother, Masu, introduced Suzuki at an early age to a heterodox stream of True Pure Land Buddhism, the so-called Hiji bōmon (Secret Dharma Gate), that purported to convey the teachings of Shinran to his son, Zenran, and thereafter from teacher to disciple through a secret transmission that was popular in the Kanazawa region. Suzuki recalled, when speaking with Akizuki Ryōmin about his early years, having had a religious experience when, at the age of seven or eight, he participated in a Hiji bōmon ceremony at his home involving repetitive rocking while chanting the nembutsu. Suzuki retrospectively characterized this experience, in which an extremely focused consciousness is suddenly broken through an interruption (in this case, the sudden stopping of the rhythmic movement and chanting), as akin to the Buddha’s awakening when he glimpsed the morning star after being immersed in deep concentration.²⁴

Despite this early exposure to True Pure Land Buddhism through his mother, by his mid-teens, in an effort to resolve the discontent that arose as he contemplated the constraints he increasingly faced due to his family’s diminished financial circumstances, Suzuki engaged briefly with a Christian missionary to whom he had been introduced by a friend, but soon turned to Zen for solace. This was a natural inclination, since Suzuki’s family was formally affiliated with a small Rinzai Zen temple, Zuikōji, in Kanazawa. It was to the incumbent of Zuikōji that Suzuki directed his first inquiries about Zen. Suzuki states in “Early Memories” that he was disappointed by the incumbent of Zuikōji’s lack of learning about the most basic facts of Zen, but his interest in Zen was further stoked with the arrival of Hōjō Tokiyuki (1858–1929), who became a mathematics teacher at Suzuki’s upper middle school. Hōjō, who, like his mother Toshi, was part of the active circle of lay disciples of Imakita Kōsen, the incumbent of Engakuji, organized a small Zen group for the upper middle school students.²⁵ Although Suzuki was soon forced to withdraw from school for lack of money, he continued to hear from friends about the zazen group started by Hōjō and procured a printed copy of Hakuin’s Orategama that Hōjō had distributed to some students. (This work would remain of great importance to Suzuki in his early years of Zen practice.) Suzuki also heard stories about a visiting Zen teacher, Setsumon, from the Rinzai temple Kokutaiji, that Hōjō had invited to lead monthly sittings and conduct formal Zen interviews (sanzen) with the participating students. Cut off from school activities, Suzuki attempted to further his understanding of Zen directly by visiting Kokutaiji unannounced in order to have an interview with Setsumon. After an unpleasant journey to the temple, days of waiting for Setsumon to return, and harsh treatment during the initial interview, Suzuki soon returned home, feeling somewhat defeated by the whole experience.

Suzuki’s interest in Zen remained with him, despite these frustrating early experiences, as he began a somewhat peripatetic existence for the next few years. After serving as an English teacher at several elementary schools in Noto and Mikawa during 1888–1889, Suzuki moved to Kobe to be with his brother, following the death of his mother in April 1890. Suzuki then moved to Tokyo in 1891 to become a university student in Tokyo, first at Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō (later, Waseda University), and then, as a special student at Tokyo Imperial University, he continued pursuing his interest in Zen practice as well. Over the course of the next six years, Suzuki became more deeply involved in two subjects that would remain central to him for the rest of his life. As a university student, Suzuki was exposed in a formal way to the latest in European and American intellectual developments, particularly philosophy. He was also exposed to English spoken by native speakers in an extended fashion for the first time, despite having taught English for several years already.

While living in Tokyo, Suzuki resided at Kuchōkan, a boardinghouse for students who, like Suzuki, were from the Ishikawa region. The residence was founded by Hayakawa Senkichirō (1863–1922), a businessman from Kanazawa who became Minister of the Treasury during the 1890s. Like Hōjō Tokiyuki, Hayakawa and his mother, Katsumi, were avid disciples of Imakita Kōsen. It was through Senkichirō’s introduction that Suzuki made his way to Engakuji to begin practicing with Imakita in 1891.26 When, in January 1892, Imakita died, Suzuki continued his formal Zen practice with Shaku Sōen, Imakita’s successor as incumbent of Engakuji. Several months later, at the suggestion of his friend from Kanazawa, Nishida Kitarō, Suzuki began studying philosophy as a special student at Tokyo Imperial University.²⁷ Even though a university student, Suzuki soon was more engaged in Zen practice than he appears to have been in his academic studies, spending increasingly long periods of time residing in the residence for lay practitioners, Shōden’an at Engakuji. After a number of extended visits to Engakuji, Suzuki finally withdrew from his university studies in May 1895.

When Suzuki arrived at Engakuji, in Kita-Kamakura, he found himself at a monastery that was undergoing a revitalization of practical Zen training and that was one of the most important centers of Meiji-era lay Zen practice. Imakita Kōsen, like many Zen incumbents of his generation, remained rooted in many ways in intellectual trends of the late Edo period. Although surrounded by an environment in which “Western learning” and Western customs were the rage, Imakita, who was well versed in Confucian studies, eschewed such trends, claiming that a Zen student need only master two areas of learning: the course of intensive koan study (literally, the study of awakening; kenshōgaku) and, as an ancillary discipline, Chinese studies (kangaku).28 When Imakita arrived at Engakuji in 1877, he rebuilt the monk’s hall, emphasizing practical religious training while rejecting the growing trend toward literary study, particularly that which centered on Western learning. From the beginning of his incumbency, Imakita also presided over a growing circle of serious lay Zen practitioners at Engakuji, at first, according to oral accounts, allowing the lay practitioners (male and female) to use the zendō along with the clerics and then to use the subtemple, Shōden’an, where Suzuki later resided, as a center for lay Zen practice.²⁹ While Imakita was the incumbent at Engakuji, he allowed advanced lay students to teach Zen and recognized at least one layperson, Kawakiri Hōkin (1842–1910), as a dharma heir.³⁰ During his second formal interview (sanzen) with Imakita, with whom Suzuki was very impressed, Suzuki received Hakuin’s koan concerning the sound of one hand clapping, one of two koans frequently assigned to beginning students.

Shaku Sōen, Imakita’s successor as incumbent of Engakuji, had disregarded his teacher’s resistance to secular education and Western learning by studying at Keiō Gijuku (later, Keiō University). More cosmopolitan than Imakita, Sōen also studied Theravāda Buddhism as a novice monk in Ceylon from 1887 to 1890. While in Ceylon, Sōen met a number of Buddhists interested in reviving their traditions’ fortunes in an Asia that had been carved up by Western colonialism and inundated with Christian missionaries. In 1893, Sōen also served as one of Japan’s Buddhist representatives at the World Parliament of Religion, delivering his address, translated into English by Suzuki, along with other Asian religious leaders, including Dharmapala and Vivekananda. Thus, through Sōen, Suzuki’s early Zen practice at Engakuji introduced the young man not just to Zen but also to a worldwide network of Buddhists, Theosophists, and others interested in various manifestations of the tradition across Asia.³¹

Sōen, who soon after becoming the incumbent at Engakuji changed Suzuki’s koan from the “sound of one hand” to “Jōshū’s mu,” became Suzuki’s main Zen teacher. Suzuki’s practice at Engakuji remained intensive during the time he remained there prior to departing for the United States in February 1897, with the young lay student commenting in one letter to a friend that during intensive weeks of Zen practice (sesshin), he was only sleeping three hours per night and felt as though for a week there was no difference between night and day.32 For much of the period from 1894 to 1896, Suzuki remained at Engakuji, working on various English translations of Sōen’s lectures, traveling to Yokohama occasionally to study Pāli, and continuing his Zen practice with his teacher.³³

Suzuki’s letters from this period reveal a young man (Suzuki was in his mid-twenties at the time) searching for his path in life. For a time he contemplated following in his Zen teacher’s footsteps by heading to Ceylon for a period, going so far as to study Pāli and Sanskrit with Shaku Kōzen, a Japanese cleric who had during his seven years in Ceylon aided Sōen in his studies in that country. In 1895, Suzuki was immersed enough in practice at Engakuji that he wrote to his friend Yamamoto Ryōkichi that he was considering whether to get ordained as a Zen cleric, but by the following year, he seems to have discarded that prospect, at least temporarily, choosing instead to concentrate on life as a Zen layman and scholar.³⁴ When Paul Carus’s father-in-law, Edward C. Hegeler, a wealthy zinc producer and founder of The Monist, a magazine devoted to finding the scientific basis for religion, agreed with Sōen to cover Suzuki’s expenses if he came to assist his son-in-law in his efforts at The Monist, Suzuki, at Sōen’s recommendation, accepted the offer.³⁵ Suzuki remained in the United States from 1897 to 1908, and, after nearly a year of travel in Europe, he finally returned to Japan in March 1909.

According to Suzuki’s autobiographical retrospectives produced in the last decade of his life, with the departure to the United States looming in the winter of 1896 (Suzuki set sail from Yokohama to the United States on February 7, 1897), he threw himself fully into his Zen practice during the last months at Engakuji, hoping to pass the koan that had been assigned to him by Sōen. It was during the December meditation intensive (sesshin) commemorating Śākyamuni Buddha’s awakening that Suzuki achieved kenshō, insight into the meaning of the koan. In an interview that became the article “Early Memories,” Suzuki described wrestling with his koan and the experience of kenshō.

Up until then I had always been conscious that mu was in mind. But so long as I was conscious of mu it meant that I was somehow separate from mu, and that is not a true samadhi. But toward the end of that sesshin, about the fifth day, I ceased to be conscious of mu. I was one with mu, identified with mu, so that there was no longer the separateness implied by being conscious of mu. This is the real state of samadhi.

But this samadhi alone is not enough. You must come out of that state, be awakened from it, and that awakening is prajna. That moment of coming out of samadhi and seeing it for what it is—that is satori. When I came out of that state of samadhi during that sesshin I said, “I see. This is it.”³⁶

At his next formal interview with Sōen, Suzuki passed all but one of a series of checking questions (sassho kōan). The next morning, according to his account, Suzuki passed the last checking question. That evening, Suzuki recalled, “I remember that night as I walked back from the monastery to my quarters in the Kigen’in temple, seeing the trees in the moonlight. They looked transparent and I was transparent too.”37 Although this particular account was written sixty-eight years following his experience, Suzuki’s recollections match closely a description he recounted to his friend, Nishida Kitarō, in 1902, in which, in the context of writing about William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Suzuki described his own “religious experience” (shūkyōteki keiken):

What this [James’s analysis of religious experience] brings to mind is when I formerly was in Kamakura, one night at the end of scheduled zazen, I left the zendō. Returning to my residence at the Kigen’in, in the moonlight I passed amid the trees. When, near the main temple gate, I started to descend, suddenly it was as if I forgot myself or, rather, I was not totally forgotten. However, the appearance of the different length shadows of the trees in the moonlight was just like a picture. I was a person in the picture and there was no separation between me and the trees. The trees were me. I had the clear thought that this was my original face. Even after finally returning to the hermitage I suddenly realized I was not the least bit hindered and somehow was suffused with a feeling of joy. Now it is difficult for me to describe in words my state of mind at that time.³⁸

According to Suzuki’s own accounts, his understanding deepened after his arrival in the United States, when, one day, he comprehended completely the Zen expression “the elbow does not bend outward.” Suzuki again recalled that “the elbow does not bend outwards might seem to express a kind of necessity, but suddenly I saw that this restriction was really freedom, the true freedom, and I felt that the whole question of free will had been solved for me.”³⁹

Contrary to much that has been written or said about Suzuki’s Zen practice, his experience of kenshō and his departure for the United States to work with Paul Carus did not mark the end of his formal Zen practice.⁴⁰ Suzuki remained in fairly close contact by mail with his teacher in Japan, communicating his impressions concerning life in the United States and describing his evolving ideas concerning Buddhism. Within months of his arrival in LaSalle, Illinois, to work with Paul Carus, Suzuki wrote in a letter to Nishida Kitarō that he once again was trying to decide whether he would be more effective in helping the Buddhist community by getting ordained as a cleric or “lending a hand from the side” in efforts to improve the understanding of Buddhism in Japan.⁴¹ Suzuki also accompanied Sōen in California during Sōen’s extended visit with the Russell family in 1905, remaining in San Francisco with his teacher, who taught Zen to a group of Americans gathered at the Russell mansion, until March 1906. Suzuki remained with Sōen during his teacher’s travels across the United States as well.

Following his return to Japan, Suzuki took up employment as a professor of English at Gakushūin, residing in Tokyo from 1909 to 1921. During those years, Suzuki took advantage of the train from Tokyo to Kamakura, once again spending a considerable amount of time, particularly during Gakushūin’s recesses from the academic schedule, at Engakuji and the nearby temple, Tōkeiji, where Sōen, who retired as incumbent of Engakuji in 1905, resided. Suzuki recalled in his brief autobiographical account Yafūryūan jiden, “During my stint at Gakushūin University I did not do much of anything in particular, except continually go to Kamakura for sanzen. By this time the train had been introduced and the transportation facilities were good, so I would constantly come here to Kamakura.”42 Kirita Kiyohide’s detailed chronology of Suzuki’s life, which is based on Sōen’s and Suzuki’s diaries, as well as numerous other documents, give evidence of Suzuki’s continued work with Sōen. During the period while he was at Gakushūin, Suzuki visited Engakuji or Tōkeiji during many of the school vacations. Although the record may not be complete, the chronology also notes a number of occasions—in 1915 and 1917, for example—when Suzuki had formal interviews (sanzen) with Sōen, a clear indication that Suzuki’s Zen training continued in earnest. Suzuki also spent a good deal of time working with Sōen on other matters, for example, going over the English translation of Sōen’s lectures Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot and visiting Sōen together with his American wife, Beatrice Lane Suzuki.

Suzuki in his autobiographical accounts says little about the extent of his formal koan training. In conversations with one of his confidants, Akizuki Ryōmin, however, Suzuki did mention that he had reached the stage in which he was working with Sōen on the kōjō (directed upward/going beyond) koans, which would have been an advanced stage of koan training at Engakuji in the early twentieth century. With Sōen’s death in 1919, however, Suzuki chose not to work formally with another Zen master. Based on this discussion, Akizuki speculates that if Sōen had lived a while longer, Suzuki eventually would have received permission from Sōen to become a lay Zen teacher.⁴³

Although many in Europe and the United States regarded Suzuki as a Zen teacher, he rejected that role, choosing instead to spread Zen through his lectures and writings. According to an account given by Robert Aitken, when he met Suzuki in Hawaii in 1949, he asked whether Suzuki was a Zen teacher. Suzuki responded that “I am a talker, not a teacher.”⁴⁴ Suzuki also made the same disclaimer to Donald Ritchie, although the two would meet regularly to discuss koan. Suzuki, as he often did with avid non-Japanese, provided Ritchie with the introduction needed for Ritchie to begin formal zazen practice at Engakuji, however.⁴⁵

Despite Suzuki’s reticence to take on the role as a formal Zen teacher, for much of his career, particularly from the time of Sōen’s death until Suzuki’s own death in 1966, Suzuki took as his mission spreading Zen outside Japan through his writings and, more directly, by providing introductions to non-Japanese who wanted to study Zen with Rinzai Zen teachers in Japan. In 1930 Suzuki worked, along with Kozuki Tesshū, the incumbent at Myōshinji in Kyoto, in the effort to construct a dojo (practice place) for non-Japanese interested in Zen, although, with Kozuki’s sudden death that year, the dojo for non-Japanese practitioners was closed.⁴⁶ To cite another example of this sort of assistance, when Suzuki met Ruth Fuller Everett (later, Ruth Fuller Sasaki), who came to Japan with a growing interest in Zen, he took her to Kozuki’s practice place. In addition, Suzuki gave Ruth Everett basic instruction in zazen, informing her that if she was really interested in Zen, she should study under an authentic master in Japan. When Ruth Fuller Everett returned to Japan in 1932, Suzuki introduced her to the incumbent at Nanzenji, Kono Mukai, who for a time served as her teacher. In a similar fashion, Suzuki later assisted such interested practitioners as Phillip Kapleau, Robert Aitken, and Donald Ritchie in their quest to practice Zen.

Suzuki’s writings concerning Zen and, more broadly, all aspects of Buddhism should be considered in the context of this immersion in Zen practice. Suzuki’s experience of Zen practice and the religious insights he reached, particularly during the time he worked with his most important teacher, Shaku Sōen, shaped Suzuki’s approach to the tradition in fundamental ways. As argued cogently by numerous scholars writing since the beginning of the 1990s, we need to see Suzuki’s presentation of Zen as a product of its times and heavily inflected by Suzuki’s engagement with contemporaneous European and American thought. Where most scholars (and practitioners) writing or speaking about Suzuki have failed to take his full measure, however, is with regard to the length and depth of Suzuki’s Zen practice and his continued faith, until the end of his life, in the efficacy of Rinzai Zen practice to bring individuals, be they Japanese, European, or American, to awakening. When viewed from the perspective of Suzuki’s commitment to the Zen tradition as a practitioner, believer, and theoretician, I believe we must see his efforts to modernize Zen, whether we view them as successful adaptations of the tradition or moves that transform the fundamental nature of Zen practice detrimentally, as being as much an outgrowth of Suzuki’s immersion in the tradition as it was a result of his familiarity with modern European and American religious movements (Swedenborgianism, Theosophy, New Thought), religious studies, philosophy, and psychology.

SUZUKI’S ZEN WRITINGS AND LECTURES

Suzuki’s career as an interpreter of Zen through writing and lectures began soon after his arrival at Engakuji in 1891. Although at first Suzuki wrote more about Buddhism than Zen per se, the translation work and general work he did touched on Zen, at least in part, because Suzuki’s early understanding of Buddhism largely derived from his training with Imakita and Sōen. When Sōen was preparing to deliver a brief speech at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in his capacity as a Japanese delegation member, he had Suzuki, despite his limited exposure to actual conversational English, translate the lecture “The Law of Cause and Effect as Taught by the Buddha.”

Even before heading to the United States, Suzuki would have had ample exposure to American and European ideas concerning religion. New Buddhist journals and newspapers, for example, Kaigai Bukkyō jijō (Conditions of Overseas Buddhism) and Ōbei no Bukkyō (European and American Buddhism), contained numerous articles concerning Buddhism and Theosophy, many of them translated from English publications. These journals also carried news about Buddhist developments in Europe, the United States, and such Asian regions as India and Siam. As a special student in philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, Suzuki also was exposed to recent Western philosophical developments, some of them taught by American and European lecturers. More directly, through Sōen, Suzuki learned of news of the various debates and discussions at the Parliament, as he helped his teacher communicate with a number of American interlocutors about Buddhism and religion. In 1895, Suzuki, at Sōen’s request, translated Paul Carus’s Gospel of the Buddha into Japanese (as Budda no fukuin) in order to demonstrate to the Japanese signs of growing Western interest in Buddhism, while introducing a new generation of Japanese to the life of the Buddha and his teachings.47 That same year, Suzuki also translated Carus’s article “Buddhism and Christianity.” These projects stimulated Suzuki to develop his own theories about the nature of religion, which he published in November 1896 as Shin shūkyō ron (A New Interpretation of Religion).

Suzuki’s began writing independent articles concerning Zen while he was still studying at Engakuji as a lay practitioner prior to departing for the United States in February 1897. The early articles, entirely in Japanese, were published in a variety of Buddhist journals, for example, Meikyō shinshi, Zenshū, Zengaku, and Nihonjin. Covering such topics as Zen and German philosophy, Zen and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the current popularity of Zen in Japan, and the phrase “not setting up words and letters,” the articles reflect the broad range of interests that remained with Suzuki for the rest of his career. In particular, in these writings, Suzuki demonstrates his interest in comparative thought and his desire to see Zen Buddhism in relationship to such intellectual currents as American Transcendentalism and continental philosophy. Even at this early stage in Suzuki’s career as a public Buddhist intellectual, one sees his ability to talk about Zen in idioms that appealed to a range of audiences inside and outside of Japan.

The publication of articles concerning different theoretical and practical aspects of Zen continued following Suzuki’s arrival in LaSalle, Illinois, where he worked at Open Court Press. Judith Snodgrass notes that, in particular, working with Carus on editorial tasks associated with the journal The Monist would have exposed Suzuki to new trends in philosophy, physiology, psychology, and religious studies in Europe and the United States.⁴⁸ During his time at Open Court, Suzuki also collaborated with Paul Carus on three translations of Daoist texts: the Daodejing (1898), Taishang ganying bian (1906), and Yinzhiwen (1906). Suzuki also continued to publish articles and books on Buddhism in English, Japanese, and even German. In an effort to refute what he believed were a number of misunderstandings concerning Mahayana Buddhism, Suzuki translated texts and expounded concepts that he believed were central to understanding the tradition correctly. To this end, Suzuki published his English translation of Śikṣānanda’s Chinese translation of the Dasheng qixin lun as Açvaghosha’s Discourse on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna in 1900. Suzuki also published a more extended defense of Mahayana’s legitimacy, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, in 1906. In that book Suzuki refuted charges leveled by such critics of Mahayana as Monier Monier-Williams, Samuel Beal, and Laurence Austine Waddell, while arguing that Mahayana was a genuine form of Buddhism.

In these articles and books, particularly those concerned with Zen, Suzuki interprets the tradition using Western physiology, psychology, and philosophy. In 1900, for example, Suzuki and Sōen copublished a pamphlet, Seiza no susume (A Recommendation for Quiet Sitting), that dealt at length with the method and benefits of zazen practice and proposed the technique as the most direct, effective means to build the character of Japanese youth. Although supposedly coauthored with Sōen, the pamphlet, which explains the psychological and physiological efficacy of zazen using William James and Carl Lange’s theory of emotion, in all likelihood was primarily the work of Suzuki.49 In the essay Suzuki criticized the tendency to overlook the best aspects of Japanese culture in the mad rush to promote all things Western. To bring his point home, Suzuki turned to the James-Lange theory of emotion, which proposed that emotion arose from physical stimuli within the body or, as James famously wrote, “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.”⁵⁰ Writing to convince a Japanese readership of Zen’s physiological and psychological efficacy, Suzuki commented that zazen practice, by allowing one not to react physically and reflexively to unexpected stimuli, enabled an individual to remain calm at all times. Suzuki concludes:

From ancient times in China and Japan, the ability of masters of zazen to never lose the feeling of freedom from worldly cares, and to remain composed whether encountering good or bad circumstances or dwelling within the realm of the six desires is, in addition to being due to the power (toku) of religious peace of mind, also the power given [to them] through the practice of this full-lotus sitting, we must not forget. The hypothesis of the two Western doctors is not based on the results of the Eastern zazen method, but they only infer it from the observation of everyday facts, [while] zazen masters, without knowing the theory, transmit the way personally to experience [it]. What is more, the conclusion of the two sides is the same, for it is not strange, is it, to say that the truth does not change no matter where one goes?⁵¹

In addition to this early piece concerning zazen, Suzuki also continued to translate talks by his teacher that were eventually incorporated into the book Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot, which was published in 1906.

Apart from Suzuki’s translations of Sōen’s lectures, his first article about Zen in English appeared in the Journal of the Pali Text Society in 1907. In the article, which traces very briefly the traditional history of Zen until the time of Huineng (638–713), Suzuki also outlined the fundamental principles of Zen. Although the essay is a relatively early effort to explain Zen to a non-Japanese readership, in it Suzuki argues for the ultimacy of Zen as a religion using a strategy that he would detail at great length in his most important writings from the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, as Judith Snodgrass has observed, Suzuki argues for the legitimacy of Mahayana as a form of Buddhism capturing the true spirit of the tradition’s founder, Śākyamuni Buddha, and that Zen, as a form of Mahayana popular in East Asia, was an effective means of transmitting that spirit directly through a lineage of awakened teachers.52 In sum, Suzuki thus links his work on Mahayana Buddhism, for example, his translation of the Awakening of Faith and Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, with his writing on Zen, which Suzuki sees as the most distinctive Chinese expression of Mahayana teaching. The core of all religious life, according to Suzuki, is mysticism, for without it, there is no difference between religion and mere morality. More specifically, Buddhism, according to Suzuki, was first and foremost about the enlightenment of Śākyamuni. For Suzuki, Zen, more than any other form of Buddhism, transmitted the Buddha’s “enlightened subjectivity.”⁵³ In his summary, Suzuki emphasizes that Zen focuses upon mind as the proper domain of study and the source of awakening. According to Suzuki, unlike the rest of the Buddhist tradition, which stresses doctrine as contained in its literature, practitioners of Zen see this “Buddhist lore as something superfluous, for it is no more than a secondhand commentary on the mind, which is the source of enlightenment and the proper subject of study.”⁵⁴

Following his return to Japan in 1909, after his long sojourn in the United States and Europe, Suzuki began to write about Zen, primarily in Japanese, with even greater regularity. Although Suzuki wrote for numerous Buddhist newspapers and journals, once Sōen founded the Zendōkai (Zen-Way Society) in Tokyo in 1910, Suzuki became the editor-in-chief of, and a regular contributor to, the official organ of the society, the magazine Zendō. Over the next few years, Suzuki wrote at least one article on Zen for each issue of the monthly periodical, discussing such topics as the relationship between Zen and philosophy, koan, zazen practice, and the nature of religion in general. By 1913, Suzuki published a number of these essays in the volume Zengaku no taiyō (The Principles of Zen Study) and, the following year, in an expanded version including even more articles from Zendō called Zen no dai ichigi (The Cardinal Meaning of Zen).⁵⁵ In the preface to Zen no dai ichigi, Suzuki noted that the book was written for general readers in the hope that they would come to a greater appreciation of what was “the most distinctive product of the Asian intellectual realm.”⁵⁶

Although Suzuki was actively writing about Zen for journals and publishing books in Japanese about Zen, he wrote little in English on the subject, apart from a 1915 article, “Zen and Meditation.”57 That brief article was published in the journal The Mahayanist, which was founded by the convert Buddhists William McGovern and M. T. Kirby in order to render “Northern Buddhism,” in other words, the Mahayana Buddhism of China, Korea, and Japan, more understandable to a non-Asian audience.⁵⁸ Along with the founders of the organization and Suzuki, Beatrice Lane Suzuki, Shaku Sōen, and Nukariya Kaiten, a Sōtō cleric who was among the earliest Japanese to write about Zen in English, also contributed to the journal. Although short lived, the Mahayanist and the Mahayana Association served as precursors to the organization and journal founded by the Suzukis in 1921 in order to enhance the understanding of Mahayana Buddhism outside of Japan.

In 1917, Suzuki began producing a steady stream of articles about Zen at the behest of the expatriate British journalist J. W. Robertson Scott (1866–1962), who was publishing a journal, The New East, while residing in Japan. Scott, who was engaged in a study of rural life in Japan during World War I, started The New East with official British government backing in order to further mutual understanding between Japan and the West. Suzuki published six articles in The New East, covering such topics as Zen as the spiritual heritage of the East, whether Zen was nihilistic, the nature of satori, and koan. Scott recommended that Suzuki republish the essays as an introductory book on Zen, but Suzuki did not act on that suggestion until 1934, when he published them with several additional chapters as An Introduction to Zen Buddhism.⁵⁹

Following the death of Sōen in 1919 and changes in the leadership of Gakushūin that Suzuki found problematic, Suzuki accepted a position as professor of Buddhist philosophy at Ōtani University (Ōtani Daigaku) in Kyoto, an appointment Suzuki would hold formally until his retirement in 1960. With the move to Ōtani University, Suzuki entered one of the most productive phases of his lengthy career. The combination of having, for the first time in his life, a university position appropriate to his interests, a supportive spouse who was deeply interested in Buddhism and a native speaker of English, and financial support for his work from wealthy patrons, particularly Ataka Yakichi (1873–1949), gave Suzuki an unprecedented amount of security and freedom. Along with writing extensively about Zen, during his pre–Pacific War years at Ōtani University Suzuki published articles concerning general Mahayana Buddhism and, as would be expected given his position at a True Pure Land–affiliated university, the relationship between Zen and Pure Land practice.

Soon after their arrival at Ōtani, Suzuki and Beatrice, along with such important Shin scholars as Akanuma Chizen (1884–1937), Sasaki Gesshō (1875–1926), and Yamabe Shūgaku (1882–1944), founded the Tōhō Bukkyō Kyōkai (The Eastern Buddhist Society), which served as the home for the publication of The Eastern Buddhist, the bimonthly English-language journal where Suzuki and others published articles on Buddhism. Much like the earlier English-language journal, the Mahayanist, to which both Suzuki and Beatrice had contributed articles, the Society and its journal were founded in order to enhance understanding of Mahayana Buddhism. With the disastrous consequences of World War I still on their minds, the founders wrote in the initial issue of The Eastern Buddhist,

Buddhism is a religion of peace and enlightenment, and especially the Mahāyāna school which has been cherished and developed by Far Eastern people has so much light in it that it ought not be kept under a bushel. We the Mahāyānists, want to make the whole world better acquainted with its teachings and see if there are not things in them which may be beneficially utilised for the amelioration of life. We have already suffered too much from sordid industrialism and blatant militarism. Some of a higher idealism must be infused into our lives.60

The organizers of the Society noted that one purpose of the organization and its organ was to expose Japanese Buddhists to aspects of their tradition, for example, Sanskrit and Pāli texts, about which, heretofore, they had remained ignorant. At the same time, it was the founder’s hope that their efforts would create a more accurate understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, because

Buddhism is not a faith of the past, while it is full of the ancient wisdom. It is alive with faith and force, and the highest ideal of the Eastern people must be sought in it. By the organization of the present Society, we therefore hope that the beacon of Buddhism, especially of Mahāyāna, will be placed in a higher stand than before not only in the land of its birth but in the West where unfortunately it has so far not been presented in its perfect form.⁶¹

From the journal’s founding until publication was temporarily suspended from July 1939 to 1949, Suzuki contributed regularly to it, publishing many of the essays that later were incorporated into the books Suzuki published from 1927 to 1938. Although, like the chapters of the three volumes of Essays in Zen Buddhism, Suzuki’s contributions were wide ranging, as a whole the writings of this period were part of Suzuki’s overall project to enhance the understanding of Mahayana Buddhism and demonstrate the legitimacy of Zen as a distinctive expression of the living tradition.

Suzuki, between the ages of fifty-one and sixty-nine, in a staggeringly impressive flurry of activity that serves as an inspiration to all late-middle-aged writers, published many of his best-known (and most frequently anthologized) works about Zen in English. These titles include some of his most in-depth works on Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, for example, the three-volume Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927, 1933, 1934); an English translation, separate study of, and index to the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra (1930, 1932, 1934); and, with Hokei Idzumi, a critical edition of the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra (1934, 1935, 1936).

In addition, feeling that the three volumes of Essays in Zen Buddhism might prove overly detailed for general readers, Suzuki assembled the introductory articles about Zen from The New East into An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934). In order to give readers a comprehensive picture of Zen doctrine and practice, Suzuki also compiled the Manual of Zen Buddhism (1935), an anthology containing many of the liturgical texts, chants, and writings by Chinese and Japanese Zen teachers that had become part of the practical canon of the Rinzai tradition. The volume also provided a brief guide to the various figures that one was likely to encounter in the statues, paintings, and other forms on display in Zen temples. In an effort to present a full picture of Japanese Zen, Suzuki also published a guide, illustrated by Satō Zenchū, The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk (1934), that detailed, albeit in highly idealized fashion, various Rinzai practices, including initiation to monastic life, work, ceremonies, and meditative practice.

Suzuki was equally prolific in Japanese, publishing serious scholarly studies of writings attributed to important early Chan/Zen figures, including Bodhidharma, Huineng, and Shenhui. In addition, perhaps in part in response to Arthur Waley’s criticism that he had failed to utilize newly discovered materials from Dunhuang for his Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series), Suzuki began ambitiously working with early Chan materials, publishing in Japanese influential critical editions of the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (Liuzu tanjing, 1934); works attributed to Bodhidharma, for example, Tonkō shutsudo shōshitsu issho (1935), which Suzuki had tracked down in the Beijing National Library in 1934; and a Dunhuang edition of the collected sayings of Heze Shenhui (1934).62 Suzuki’s visit to China also catalyzed the writing of his survey “Impressions of Chinese Buddhism,” which was published in The Eastern Buddhist in 1935.⁶³ That same year, Ōtani University awarded Suzuki, who still held no formal academic credentials, an honorary DLit degree, in recognition of his work on the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra. Although Suzuki continued to publish steadily for the rest of his career, the main foundations for his presentation of Buddhism and, more specifically, Zen were laid during this period.

It was during this same period that Suzuki also expanded greatly his writing and lecturing concerning the relationship between Zen and Japanese and, more broadly, East Asian culture. Suzuki gave form to his ideas for this work against a general intellectual backdrop in which such Japanese intellectuals as Okakura Kakuzō, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, Kuki Shūzō, Nukariya Kaiten, and others sought to delineate the nature of Japanese culture in what scholars now consider static and essential terms, in contradistinction to European and American cultures, which increasingly were characterized as mechanical, overly technological, and ultimately threatening to Japanese interests at home and abroad. Picking up on themes on which he touched in articles decades earlier, Suzuki began to speak and write with regularity about what he argued was the fundamental importance of Zen to all the arts—martial, visual, and literary—of Japan. For much of the 1930s, Suzuki periodically lectured and wrote about the relationship between Zen and Japanese culture, delivering in 1935 on behalf of the Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai) a talk that was published the following year as a pamphlet, Buddhist Philosophy and Its Effects on the Life and Thought of the Japanese People. Suzuki also included the lengthy chapters “Buddhist, Especially Zen Contributions to Japanese Culture” and “The Zen Life in Pictures” in Essays in Zen Buddhism (Second Series).64 These materials concerning Buddhism and Japanese culture and, occasionally, Zen and Japanese culture, plus several other lectures delivered in Japan on such topics as the Japanese and nature, became the basis for Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture, which was published in English in 1938 as part of the Ataka Buddhist Library. Republished in 1959 as Zen and Japanese Culture, the book became one of Suzuki’s most famous, influential, and controversial works.⁶⁵ By 1942, the Japanese art critic Kitagawa Momoo (1899–1969) had translated Suzuki’s book in two parts, Zen to Nihon bunka (1940) and Zoku Zen to Nihon bunka (1942). A German translation of the work, Zen und die kultur Japans, was also published in 1941. In the preface to the Japanese translation, Suzuki commented that increasingly the Japanese resembled a young turtle that had drawn into its shell for protection. In words that echoed his 1913 preface to Zen no dai ichigi, Suzuki wrote that because Japan’s cultural heritage was “a priceless jewel,” true cultural maturity required that the Japanese share their treasure with others.⁶⁶ Suzuki thus clearly viewed his book as an effort to show the rest of the world, particularly those in Europe and the United States, that which he considered the very heart of Japanese culture, Zen. Through the Pacific War and the postwar era, Suzuki would continue writing about the Buddhist spiritual underpinnings of Japanese and East Asian culture in such major works as Japanese Spirituality (Nihonteki reisei) and the untranslated late collection of essays Tōyōteki na mikata (The Eastern Perspective).

By the end of this productive period at Ōtani, Suzuki experienced several life-changing events. For much of 1938 and 1939, Suzuki needed to tend to Beatrice, whose failing health required ever more medical attention and prolonged hospitalization at St. Luke’s International Hospital (at the time, Great East Asia Central Hospital) in Tokyo. With the death of Beatrice on July 16, 1939, Suzuki lost his beloved wife as well as his closest American collaborator and the coeditor of The Eastern Buddhist. During this same period, Japan became increasingly repressive with the mobilization for the war in China and, shortly thereafter, the Pacific War. Although Suzuki, now sixty-nine, continued lecturing on a fairly regular basis and attended faculty meetings and special events at Ōtani, he spent ever longer periods of time in Kamakura at the Shōden’an on Engakuji’s grounds. There Suzuki began planning with the new incumbent of Tōkeiji, Inoue Zenjō (1911–2006), for the construction of the Matsugaoka Archive that eventually would serve as Suzuki’s library and workplace.

Suzuki’s productivity in this period was markedly less compared to the preceding twenty years, no doubt due to censorship and growing material constrictions on the populace as the war came home to Japan. As might be expected, given the hostility against all things European and American during the Pacific War years, Suzuki published little in English from 1939 to 1945. The prolonged war with China also created an unreceptive (at best) environment in which to continue his investigations of Chinese Chan. During wartime, Suzuki, whose work on Zen had primarily focused on the Chinese tradition during the Tang and the Song (even if he used much later sources), turned more of his attention to Japanese Zen. One of the most notable and controversial projects of the period was the publication of a major work, Nihonteki reisei (1944), an extension of the explorations that produced Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture. In Nihonteki reisei Suzuki attempted to delineate the fundamental religious consciousness (reisei) of the Japanese.67 Although this work dealt much more with Hōnen, Shinran, and the Pure Land tradition than with Zen, as in Zen and Its Influence on Japanese Culture, Suzuki saw a fundamental structural compatibility between Japanese culture and Zen that allowed the tradition to flourish in Japan. Unlike in China, where, according to Suzuki, Zen/Chan really never penetrated deeply into ordinary life, in Japan, “There appears to be an essential rapport between Zen and the Japanese character. The intelligentsia above all the samurai took to it immediately. In general, it pervaded literature and the arts and came to be the very foundation of Japanese life.”⁶⁸ The 1944 edition of Nihonteki reisei, unlike the second edition, which served as the basis for the English translation, contained a chapter concerning “Zen of the Diamond Sutra” (“Kongokyō no Zen”) that reflected the influence of Suzuki’s ongoing conversations with Nishida Kitarō and other philosophers of the Kyoto School concerning the Asian and Japanese philosophical foundations for Zen thought.⁶⁹ Following the war, Suzuki continued to wrestle with these issues, publishing three more works concerning the nature of Japanese spirituality.

Suzuki’s Zen studies also took a notably Japanese turn during the war years. Suzuki’s major scholarly work of the period, Zen shisōshi kenkyū—daiichi—Bankei Zen (1943; Studies in the History of Zen Thought, vol. 1, Bankei Zen), was concerned primarily with Japanese Zen, in particular, the persons Suzuki considered the most paradigmatically Japanese: Bankei Yōtaku (1622–1693) and, to a lesser degree, Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769) and Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253).⁷⁰ In assessing these figures in terms of their “Japaneseness,” Suzuki expanded on reflections concerning the basis for “Japanese spirituality” begun in such works as Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture and Japanese Spirituality. Not until after the war, in 1951, did Suzuki publish the second volume of the series, which dealt at length with Bodhidharma and Huineng, although Suzuki had been immersed in that work during the 1930s. During the war years, Suzuki published the collected sayings and writings of the notable Rinzai masters Shūhō Myōchō (aka, Daitō Kokushi, 1282–1337), Bassui Tokushō (1327–1387), and Getsuan Sōkō (1326–1389). Most importantly, it was during the war years that Suzuki became fascinated with the then lesser-known but distinctive Zen master Bankei Yōtaku, whom he considered one of the most distinctive figures in the history of Japanese Zen. In the first volume of “Studies in the History of Zen Thought” and in several other volumes that he wrote or edited, Suzuki explored Bankei’s “Unborn Zen” (fushō Zen), noting that “slightly before Hakuin’s time, however, Bankei appeared. His ‘Unborn Zen’ espoused a fresh departure for the first time since the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma. Unborn Zen is truly one of the most original developments in the entire history of Zen thought. Bankei, indeed, must be considered one of the greatest masters that Japan has ever produced.”71 Oddly, despite Suzuki’s high appraisal of Bankei’s contribution to Zen, this was one of the portions of his writing on Zen not to be translated into English during Suzuki’s lifetime.

With the end of the Pacific War, Suzuki was once again free to work outside Japan and publish in English as well as Japanese. At seventy-five years of age, Suzuki entered the final phase of his career as growing interest in Asia, sparked by the war and the Allied Occupation of Japan, brought Zen and other aspects of Japanese culture to the attention of Europeans and Americans. The end to the barriers that had increasingly constrained cultural exchange from the late 1930s until the end of the war also were lifted, allowing foreigners interested in Zen to travel to Japan, where many of them sought Suzuki’s advice. Although during the war years Suzuki had directed much of his scholarly energy toward Japanese Buddhism, the greatly reduced controls on publication in the postwar years allowed him once again to publish work begun before the war concerning Chinese Zen, particularly his research on two towering figures in Zen history, Bodhidharma and Huineng. Studies begun years before that remained unpublished through the war years, for example, the second and posthumously published third volumes of Suzuki’s Zen shisōshi kenkyū finally were released. Suzuki also continued work in Japanese that he began during wartime concerning another important figure in Zen history, Rinzai Gigen (Linji Yixuan, d. 866), completing a book about him, Rinzai no kihon shisō (Rinzai’s Fundamental Thought), in 1949. A small portion of Suzuki’s work on Rinzai, a small translated passage from the Linji lu (Record of Rinzai), was also published in the 1958 issue of the literary magazine Chicago Review, which was devoted to Zen, alongside articles by Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Alan Watts.⁷² In addition, Suzuki’s reflections on Rinzai’s teachings found their way into a great deal of his postwar writings on Zen. Finally, during the postwar period, Suzuki continued work on the Rinzai Zen cleric and painter Sengai Gibon (1750–1837). Suzuki had begun writing about Sengai in 1936, valorizing Sengai’s humor, free-spiritedness, and independence in a brief Japanese essay, but it was not until after the Pacific War that he published a series of essays, some accompanying the 1961 Sengai calendar, drawing attention to Sengai’s paintings that had been collected by the petroleum magnate Idemitsu Sazō. After Suzuki’s death in 1966, Eva van Hoboken edited Suzuki’s introductory comments and analysis of many of the scrolls in the Idemitsu Sengai collection, publishing Suzuki’s most extended work on Zen painting, Sengai: The Zen Master.73

In the last year of the Pacific War, much of the remaining stock of Suzuki’s English-language publications on Zen, along with the molds and printing plates required to reprint the works, had been destroyed, particularly during the bombing of Tokyo and the accompanying fires in 1945. Following the war, in accordance with Suzuki’s plan to issue a uniform edition of his English-language works, most of his major publications on Zen were reissued, some of them in revised editions. As Suzuki’s reputation grew due to his increased participation in conferences and teaching at colleges in the United States after the war, Christmas Humphreys, William Barrett, and others issued new anthologies of his old essays and new lectures and writings, making Suzuki’s work on Zen more visible and accessible outside of Japan than it had ever been.

With renewed access to an Anglophone readership, Suzuki also published several new books on Zen that grew out of projects from the 1930s and 1940s that he had been unable to publish in English. As noted above, in his writing on Bodhidharma and Huineng in Japanese, Suzuki made use of relatively unexamined Dunhuang manuscripts and editions of writings attributed to Bodhidharma and the Platform Sutra as well as the usual received texts long in circulation in Japan. One outgrowth of work with these documents was the publication in 1949 of The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, Suzuki’s most extended reflection on the Platform Sutra and the important Zen concept of “no-mind” (C. wunian/wuxin; J. munen/mushin).⁷⁴ The immediate postwar years and, perhaps, increased interactions with non-Japanese interested in Zen, for example, Christmas Humphreys, Philip Kapleau, Richard DeMartino, and R. H. Blyth, prompted Suzuki to take another stab at presenting Zen in an updated form to Westerners, whom Suzuki characterized as approaching Zen with a “modern scientific spirit.” The result of this effort was Suzuki’s last general book-length overview of Zen in English, Living by Zen (1949), which, in the process of explicating Zen, incorporated much of Suzuki’s thinking that grew out of his previous work on such diverse topics as Bankei, Saichi, Pure Land practice, and even Christianity.⁷⁵

By 1949, Suzuki once again began traveling abroad for extended periods of time, living a life that was considerably more peripatetic than it was during the prewar period, despite nearing eighty years of age. From 1949 to 1964, Suzuki participated in a wide range of conferences, for example, the Second, Third, and Fourth East-West Philosophers’ Conferences at the University of Hawaii (1949, 1959, 1964), two Eranos conferences in Ascona, Switzerland (1953 and 1954), and a “workshop” concerning Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis in Cuernevaca, Mexico (1957). Suzuki also began a variety of teaching engagements in the United States at the University of Hawaii (1949), Claremont Graduate School (1951), and Columbia University (intermittently from 1951 to 1957), where he held a series of seminars, open to auditors from outside the university as well as students, that were funded by Cornelius Crane. During the same period, Suzuki also engaged in a steady stream of lectures around the globe at colleges and universities, religious organizations (both Buddhist and Christian), and a wide variety of cultural events, including an opening address at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Finally, over the last decades of Suzuki’s life, religious, philosophical, and cultural developments in Europe and America—for example, an increased interest among Catholics and other Christians in ecumenical dialogue, the rise of existentialism, enhanced interest among psychologists in religion (Jungians and neo-Freudians, for example), and modernist trends in the arts—helped stimulate interest in Suzuki’s work. Suzuki’s travels allowed him to interact with a variety of new interlocutors concerning Zen. In addition to convert Buddhists who sought out Suzuki’s assistance in finding Zen teachers in Japan or establishing Zen groups in the United States—the Cambridge Zen Society is one example—Suzuki, who by the late 1950s was Buddhism’s most prominent Asian spokesman, also entered into conversations about Zen with Western scholars of Asian religions and culture, Christian theologians and clerics, religious studies specialists, the Beats, and many other shapers of culture in the United States and Europe.

During the post–Pacific War years, the various venues for Suzuki’s lectures and the wide range of interlocutors with whom he engaged spurred Suzuki to think about and present Zen in novel ways. In an effort to address the concerns and perspective of each audience, Suzuki often utilized the specific vocabulary of his conversation partners to render Zen more understandable to them. At the same time, Suzuki maintained a critical stance toward what he regarded as misunderstandings of Zen or reductionist attempts to see Zen as a sort of primitive psychoanalysis or undeveloped version of more sophisticated philosophies or religious traditions. Some of these lectures appeared as articles in a wide range of journals and conference volumes, for example, Charles Moore’s multiple edited volumes on comparative philosophy, issues of the Eranos Jarbuch, and Erich Fromm’s Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, rather than in Suzuki’s own monographs or self-edited works. A number of other talks, particularly those delivered to Buddhist groups in the United States and Europe, were collected in volumes issued in conjunction with the Buddhist Society, London, and the Zen Studies Society, both of which, through their founders (Christmas Humphreys and Cornelius Crane, respectively), had close ties to Suzuki in the postwar era.76

SUZUKI’S APPROACH TO ZEN

Suzuki’s understanding and presentation of Zen flow from his own intensive practice of Rinzai Zen with Imakita Kōsen in 1891 and Shaku Sōen from 1892 to 1919, as well as his ongoing, extensive study of Zen literature that formed the basis for his writings on the tradition. Whether one accepts the possibility of the awakening experiences attested to by Suzuki in his autobiographical accounts, letters, and conversations, Suzuki’s writings make clear that he wrote about Zen as one who had achieved deep insight into the Rinzai tradition. Although never ordained as a Rinzai cleric and without formal ties to any stream of Zen, Suzuki’s long association with Sōen, his lengthy stays, off and on, for much of his adult life in the environs of Engakuji, and the understanding born from Zen training and years of study convinced Suzuki of the validity of the Rinzai tradition’s approach to practice. Suzuki was also certain that the system of koan study in which he had engaged with Sōen, although problematic in important ways, remained the most effective method for achieving a true understanding of Buddhism.

At the same time, Suzuki’s approach to Zen was deeply inflected by his ongoing engagement with European and American philosophical and religious literature. Suzuki’s primary teacher, Sōen, as noted above, was part of a stream of Rinzai Zen, centered at Engakuji, that was unusually supportive of lay Zen practice, approving of lay Zen teachers, and receptive to reframing Zen teachings in light of contemporaneous global conversations concerning religion, Buddhism, philosophy, and science. Thus, as I have noted above, even before departing for the United States, Suzuki had begun trying to understand and write about Zen from the perspectives of European and American philosophy and the nascent fields of religious studies and psychology of religion. Suzuki’s efforts to write about Buddhism and, more generally, religion using the vocabularies of contemporaneous Western philosophy and science began prior to his departure for the United States as an outgrowth of Suzuki’s own study and his exchanges, often mediated by Sōen, with Paul Carus. In 1896, while still smitten with Carus’s efforts to establish a scientifically sound religion, Suzuki wrote Shin shūkyō ron (A New Interpretation of Religion). In describing this general work on the nature of religion to Carus in a letter, Suzuki noted that his book “may be said in some points to be an exposition of your view on religion.”77 Suzuki added in another letter to Carus the next year that his arguments in Shin shūkyō ron were “your philosophy plus Buddhism plus my own opinion.”⁷⁸ Further evidence of the early attempt by Suzuki to utilize science to demonstrate the scientific validity of Zen can be seen clearly in Suzuki’s essay, described in the previous section, “A Recommendation for Quiet Sitting,” in which he uses the James-Lange theory of emotion to explain the efficacy of zazen, as I have already noted above.

Soon after arriving in the United States to work with Carus at The Monist, however, Suzuki abandoned efforts to explain his experience of Zen and Buddhism in general in terms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science. Although at first influenced by Paul Carus’s efforts to understand religion scientifically, Suzuki quickly grew critical of the conflation of science and religion, claiming that such religious concepts as “no birth and no death” (fushō fushi), the “absolute” (zettai), and god (shin) could not be grasped by “limited, contradictory reason,” but only subjectively through “immediate experience.” This was why Zen resorted to nonlogical koan, for example, Zhaozhou’s mu and the sound of one hand clapping.79 In place of Carus’s Christian monism that strove to harmonize religion with science, Suzuki found himself drawn to William James’s evolving ideas about psychology, particularly the connections between will and belief as expressed in his Principles of Psychology (1890) and the nature of religion as detailed in the published version of his Gifford Lectures, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). It was not long after the publication of the latter work that Suzuki felt he had found the key for understanding his own experiences of Zen practice and a strategy for explaining religion more generally. In particular, it was James’s bracketing of religious history, institutions, and doctrine in favor of personal religious experiences that appealed to Suzuki. Writing excitedly about the recently published Varieties of Religious Experience to Nishida in 1902, Suzuki noted that unlike Carus and others, James’s work captured the very depths of people’s religious lives. Rejecting the idea that religious experience (shūkyōteki keiken) was a delusion or superstition, according to Suzuki, James made an effort to study mystical experiences as psychological realities. In so doing, James carved out a space for religious experience that was separate from both science and philosophy but real nonetheless.⁸⁰ The letter is revealing, as it shows clearly the sort of intellectual exchange between Suzuki and Nishida that would continue for much of their lives, as both men wrestled with how to bring their understanding of Buddhism into conversation with the shifting trends in religious studies, psychology, and philosophy taking place in the twentieth century.

One of the most important features of Varieties for Suzuki was the methodological emphasis on what James called “personal religion” rather than on religion’s institutional or doctrinal aspects. Although for James this was in part a strategic move to bracket consideration of religious institutions, doctrine, liturgy, and the like in order to isolate the experiences necessary for the construction of a psychology of religion, James did also make an ontological claim that made personal religion the heart of all religious life:

In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case;—so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.⁸¹

Continuing on in an effort to define religion as it would be used in Varieties, James added, “Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”82 At the heart of James’s catalog and analysis of these events was an ambiguity with regard to what lay at their foundation—the question of whether these experiences were sui generis—that generated a range of interpretations in the United States and Europe. Like theologians and psychologists of religion who, taking their lead from Schleiermacher, sought to ground religion in personal experience, for example, Georg Wobbermin, Rudolf Otto, and eventually Eliade, Suzuki saw James’s work as providing clues for preserving religious experiences from reductionism.⁸³ Although rarely mentioning James in his English writings, Suzuki remained interested in the author for decades. While teaching at Ōtani University, for example, Suzuki conducted courses centered on the Varieties of Religious Experience as well as other related works in the philosophy and psychology of religion by Rudolf Otto and William Kelley Wright. Suzuki found in James’s approach a means to understand his own religious experiences, for example, the sense of oneness with the moonlit landscape he felt at Engakuji at the time he passed his first koan with Sōen just before departing for the United States, as he wrote to Nishida in 1902.

Suzuki used James as a jumping-off point for the development of his own Buddhist-centered theory of the nature of religion and mysticism. Suzuki constructed this approach contemporaneously with those like Otto, who halfway around the globe were developing perennialist views of religion as fundamentally grounded in religious or mystical experience. Suzuki’s reinterpretation of the early modern Rinzai emphasis on kenshō to a notion of Zen and Buddhism centering on a universal, generalizable “religious experience” marked a major shift in the way Zen practice was understood in Japan, as Robert Sharf has argued in his pioneering analysis of Suzuki’s Zen.⁸⁴ This is not to say that kenshō was not emphasized in Suzuki’s lay practice at Engakuji prior to his encounter with James, however. The emphasis on kenshō and even a sort of proto-perennialism clearly can be seen in works like Hakuin Ekaku’s autobiography, Itsumadegusa, and Orategama, as well as in many of the other Chinese works cited by Hakuin.⁸⁵ In addition, letters from his early days at Engakuji indicate that Suzuki and the other lay practitioners were fascinated by the notion of satori, for example, arguing whether those who, violating the principle of secrecy concerning the exchanges with one’s Zen teacher, went public with claims of having solved a koan had actually achieved “great awakening” (daigo).⁸⁶ In Suzuki’s post-Varieties interpretation of Zen practice, however, he interprets satori as one of the many types of mystical/religious experiences, thus universalizing and further emphasizing its importance. As Anne Taves observed, this is a major epistemic shift in the history of religions: “We should distinguish between ‘religious experience’ as an abstract concept, which has played a prominent role in modern religious thought, and ‘religious experiences’ (in the plural) as specific behavioral events, which I refer to in what follows as ‘experiences deemed religious.’”87

The shift to approaching Zen from the perspective of comparative religious studies and centering the discussion of the tradition on the experience of awakening, that is, what James had called “mystical states of consciousness,” marked a major departure from much previous writing on Zen in both English and Japanese. In a brief, positive review of Suzuki’s Japanese work, Zen to wa nan zo ya, Masutani Fumio noted the significance of the shift, which set Suzuki’s approach apart from that of others in Japan writing about Zen. According to the reviewer, previous work that approached the subject through logic could not give a complete explanation of “not setting up words.” Continuing, Masutani noted, “As opposed to this [logical approach] Suzuki’s takes the perspective of the psychology of religion in this book. ‘A special transmission outside the scriptures, Not setting up words,’ in other words, is a mystical experience (shinpiteki keiken). The foundation of Zen is not logic but psychology.”⁸⁸ Interestingly, in the review Masutani compares Suzuki to Dean William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a prominent English Christian modernist and well-known columnist for the Evening Standard newspaper, who held that modern Christianity would have to be based upon mystical experience, not the claims of miracles, if it were to be relevant in the modern age.

The focus on “personal religion” gave Suzuki a means to write about Buddhism and to connect the earliest aspects of the tradition to its more distant forms, Mahayana and, especially, Zen. Within years of Varieties’s publication, Suzuki began building on James’s methodological strategy and inherent perennialism to interpret Zen, writing that mystical experience is the vital force at the heart of all religious traditions. In his first extended English-language article on Zen, “The Zen Sect of Buddhism,” Suzuki comments, “Though mysticism has been frequently misinterpreted and condemned, there is no doubt that it is the soul of the religious life, that it is what gives to a faith its vitality, fascination, sublimity, and stability. Without mysticism the religious life has nothing to be distinguished from the moral life, and, therefore, whenever a faith becomes conventionalized, and devoid for some reason or other, of its original enthusiasm, mysticism invariably comes to its rescue.”⁸⁹ For Suzuki, this mystical dimension thus distinguished religion from philosophy and morality. In his extended analysis of koan in Essays in Zen Buddhism (Second Series), Suzuki touched on the same theme: “All religion is built upon the foundation of mystical experience. Without which all its metaphysical or theological superstructure collapses [sic]. This is where religion differs from philosophy.”⁹⁰

At its most fundamental, according to Suzuki, mystical experience is the same as the enlightenment that is the summum bonum of Zen. This type of religious experience animates all religion, not just Zen or Buddhism alone. Suzuki, shearing Zen of its historical and institutional accoutrements, states that the ultimate goal of Zen is the acquisition of “a new viewpoint of looking at life and things generally,” or satori. In this essentialized form, Zen was not just a stream of Buddhism that arose and developed in East Asia, but the fount of the vital force driving all religious life:

As I conceive it, Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy and religion. Every intellectual effort must culminate in it, or rather must start from it, if it is to bear any practical fruits. Every religious faith must spring from it if it has to prove at all efficiently and livingly workable in our active life. Therefore Zen is not necessarily the foundation of Buddhist thought and life alone; it is very much alive also in Christianity, Mahommedanism, in Taoism, and even in positivistic Confucianism. What makes all these religions and philosophies vital and inspiring, keeping up their usefulness and efficiency, is due to the presence in them of what I may designate as the Zen element. Mere scholasticism or mere sacerdotalism will never create a living faith. Religion requires something inwardly propelling, energizing, and capable of doing work.91

The emphasis on mystical experience or “religious experience” (shūkyōteki keiken) is a unifying thread that runs through the essays produced for The Eastern Buddhist and later incorporated into the set of works published between 1927 and 1939, which was the period of Suzuki’s greatest literary productivity. In these essays, Suzuki uses this notion of a fundamental awakening experience or “enlightenment” as a tool for analyzing various aspects of Buddhism, including such topics as the early teachings of Śākyamuni, the Mahayana sutras, and numerous facets of Zen practice and history. In the process Suzuki builds an argument for the legitimacy of Zen as an orthodox expression of Buddhism that rests on the central importance of religious experience. To accomplish this task, Suzuki, improvising on James’s stress on personal religion, argues that Buddhism, at its foundation, is about the spiritual experience of the Buddha, because “Enlightenment and emancipation are the two central ideas of Buddhism.”⁹² Later in the same essay Suzuki adds, “when we reflect, both philosophically and from the Zen point of view, on the life of the Buddha and on the ultimate principle of Buddhahood, we cannot help thinking of his Enlightenment as the most significant and most essential and most fruitful part of Buddhism.”⁹³ Vital, therefore, for understanding Buddhism is what Suzuki called the “Doctrine of Enlightenment.” To the extent that Mahayana Buddhism and Zen successfully describe and transmit the awakening experience of the Buddha, they too, despite presenting the teachings in radically different forms, are legitimate expressions of the tradition. Suzuki, critiquing contemporaneous scholarly portrayals of Buddha’s early teachings, particularly those of Western scholars, contends that Buddha’s enlightenment involved more than just an intellectual understanding of the teachings. In one of the most eloquent and foundational essays in his corpus, “Enlightenment and Ignorance,” Suzuki opens with a critique of Buddhist scholars for overemphasizing Buddhist doctrine and the philosophical presentation of the teachings at the expense of grasping the existential nature of an awakening so powerful that it “made the whole universe tremble in six different ways”:94

Strange though it may seem, the fact is that Buddhist scholars are engrossed too much in the study of what they regard as the Buddha’s teaching and disciples’ exposition of the Dharma, so-called, while they neglect altogether the study of the Buddha’s spiritual experience itself. According to my view, however, the first thing we have to do in the elucidation of Buddhist thought is to inquire into the nature of this personal experience of the Buddha, which is recorded to have presented itself in his inmost consciousness at the time of Enlightenment (saṃbodhi).⁹⁵

Many Buddhist scholars, according to Suzuki, understand the Buddha’s awakening in solely intellectual terms, for example, as the understanding of the Twelvefold Chain of Causation or the Four Noble Truths, but “In truth, so long as we confine ourselves to intellection, however deep, subtle, sublime, and enlightening, we fail to see into the gist of the matter.”⁹⁶ Instead, the enlightenment of the Buddha is “an absolute state of mind in which no ‘discrimination’ (parikalpana or vikalpa) takes place, and it requires a great mental effort to realize this state of viewing all things ‘in one thought.’”⁹⁷ Emphasizing a point that would become central to his presentation of Zen and human psychology, Suzuki wrote that the mental exertion of the Buddha is more than an intellectual act. Instead, it involved “an operation of the will—and the will is the man.”⁹⁸ Elaborating about the nature of the Buddha’s awakening, Suzuki continues, “Enlightenment, therefore, must involve the will as well as the intellect. It is an act of intuition born of the will. The will wants to know itself as it is in itself, yathābhūtam dassana, free from all its cognitive conditions.” Suzuki concludes, using language that echoes his descriptions of working with koan, “The Buddha attained this end when a new insight came upon him at the end of his ever-circulatory reasoning from decay and death to Ignorance and from Ignorance to decay and death, through the twelve links of Paṭicca-samuppāda. The Buddha had to go over the same ground again and again because he was in an intellectual impasse through which he could not move further on. He did not repeat the process, as is originally imagined, for his own philosophical edification.”⁹⁹ Breaking through this impasse, the Buddha achieved awakening.¹⁰⁰

Focusing on the spiritual experience of the Buddha and the practitioner, Suzuki also links Mahayana and Zen to the Buddha, in the process, as Snodgrass has noted, establishing the orthodoxy of Eastern Buddhism.¹⁰¹ Writing on a wide range of Mahayana sutras in the three volumes of Essays in Zen Buddhism and in Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, Suzuki analyzed the dizzying mythic imagery of these texts, making the sweeping claim that “The sutras, especially Mahayana sutras, are direct expressions of spiritual experiences; they contain intuitions gained by digging down deeply into the abyss of the Unconscious; and they make no pretension of presenting them through the mediumship of the intellect.”102 Far from being a sign of the immaturity or irrationality of the Indian mind, “the reason for the introduction of supernaturalism into the Mahāyāna literature of Buddhism was to demonstrate the intellectual impossibility of comprehending spiritual facts.”¹⁰³

One example of Suzuki’s stress on reading Mahayana texts through the lens of religious experience, that is, satori, can be seen in his analysis of the concept of the “bodhisattva’s abode,” which draws many of its references from the Gaṇḍavyūha section of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, a text that remained important to Suzuki as a subject for his essays, lectures, and teaching until the end of his life. For Suzuki, the story of Sudhana entering, with Maitreya’s guidance, the gloriously adorned Tower of Vairocana in the Gaṇḍavyūha concerns the fundamental question of what is the source from which all our activities arise, or, as it is presented in the Gaṇḍavyūha, what is the “abode of Bodhisattvahood.”¹⁰⁴ The answer given by the author of the Gaṇḍavyūha, according to Suzuki, is not one that fruitfully yields its meaning through intellectual analysis, just as it is not the case with the Buddha’s awakening, as we have seen above. Noting that some of the finest Buddhist thinkers attempted to understand the Vairocana Tower primarily through philosophical speculation, Suzuki accepts that their analyses are notable contributions to human intellectual culture. Nonetheless, Suzuki warns, “the outcome of the systematisation of the Gaṇḍavyūha has been a pushing away of its spiritual value behind the screen of intelligibility, and consequently that the general reader now comes to discover its original message in the conceptualism of speculative analysis itself.”¹⁰⁵ Being overly wedded to this approach to the Mahayana texts results in turning them into part of a philosophical system, according to Suzuki, a mistake made not just by “European Buddhist scholars,” but also by Fazang (643–712), “one of the finest philosophical minds of China,” whose “analysis may satisfy the intellect, but the intellect is not all of our being.” Rather than approaching Mahayana literature in this fashion, “We with Fa-tsang and Sudhana must once be in the Tower itself and be a witness to all the Vyūhālaṅkāras [adornments] shining by themselves reflecting one another unobstructedly. In matters religious, life and experience count far more than analysis. Therefore the Tower with all its Vyūhas must come out of one’s own life.”¹⁰⁶

Like many writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Suzuki had a tendency to see cultural phenomenon through the lens of essential national characteristics. He thus interprets these elaborate supernaturalistic (or mythic) descriptions of the Tower and other realms as the product of the Indian spiritual imagination that renders spiritual experience in this imaginatively ornate fashion. Commenting on the tendency toward such rococo descriptions in a wide variety of Mahayana texts, Suzuki argues that “the introduction of supernaturalism into the Mahāyāna literature of Buddhism was to demonstrate the intellectual impossibility of comprehending spiritual facts.” In the hands of Chinese Buddhists, particularly Zen masters, however, such descriptions of spiritual facts took on radically different form, for “the Chinese have no aptitude like the Indians to hide themselves in the clouds of mystery and super-naturalism.” Instead,

The Chinese genius was to demonstrate itself in some other way. When they began inwardly to assimilate Buddhism as the doctrine of Enlightenment, the only course that opened to their concrete practical minds was to produce Zen. When we come to Zen after seeing all the wonderful miracles displayed by the Indian Mahāyāna writers, and after the highly abstracted speculations of the Mādhyamika thinkers, what a change of scenery do we have here? No rays are issuing from the Buddha’s forehead, no retinues of Bodhisattvas reveal themselves before you, there is indeed nothing that would particularly strike your senses as odd or extraordinary, or as beyond intelligence, beyond the ken of logical reasoning.107

In his studies of Chinese Buddhism, Suzuki traces the transition from Indian Mahayana Buddhism to the rise of Zen in China. Paying little attention to other schools of Chinese Buddhist thought, Suzuki sees the rise of Zen as the development of a truly Chinese idiom for discussing the “Doctrine of Enlightenment,” which, as we have seen above, was for him the heart of Buddhism. Whether there was a direct transmission of the doctrine of enlightenment from the Buddha through a lineage to Bodhidharma or it arose with Bodhidharma in China is unimportant, according to Suzuki, to the extent that “Zen is true, and has an enduring value.”¹⁰⁸ This process of adaptation, according to Suzuki’s account, begins with Bodhidharma and is completed after the time of Huineng, at which time true Zen, as Suzuki defines it, came into being. At the hands of Chinese Zen masters, the doctrine of enlightenment, portrayed with mythic imagery in India, takes a mundane turn as the Indian Mahayanist interpretation of the doctrine was applied by the Chinese to “the actualities of life”:¹⁰⁹

The people you associate with are all ordinary mortals like yourselves, no abstract ideas, no dialectical subtleties confront you. Mountains tower high towards the sky, rivers all pour into the ocean. Plants sprout in the spring and flowers bloom in red. When the moon shines serenely, poets grow mildly drunk and sing a song of eternal peace. How prosaic, how ordinary, we may say! but here was the Chinese soul, and Buddhism came to grow in it.¹¹⁰

The genius of Chinese Zen, Suzuki writes, citing a verse attributed to Layman Pang, is to express the extraordinary realms of the Indian Mahayana sutras through everyday actions: “How wondrously supernatural! And how miraculous this! I draw water, I carry fuel!” With this shift in perspective, “Samantabhadra’s arms raised to save sentient beings become our own, which are now engaged in passing the salt to a friend at the table, and Maitreya’s opening the Vairocana Tower for Sudhana is our ushering a caller into the parlour for a friendly chat.”¹¹¹

Central to Suzuki’s understanding of religious experience was his own interpretation of satori (awakening) or kenshō (seeing into one’s own nature), as those terms were used in the Rinzai Zen tradition in which Suzuki had trained. As I have noted above, Suzuki’s view of his own awakening experience and subsequent koan training with Sōen was also deeply shaped by Suzuki’s reading of William James and other European and American philosophers and religious thinkers. According to Suzuki, “the central fact of Zen lies in the attainment of ‘Satori’ or the opening of a spiritual eye.”112 Satori, as Suzuki understood it, was the same thing as what earlier Buddhists referred to as the awakening or realization of prajna (wisdom).¹¹³ In other words, “Zen discipline” aims at that which was described in a variety of Mahayana texts, namely, “realising the Unconscious which is at the basis of all things and this Unconscious is no other than Mind-only in the Gaṇḍa as well as in the Laṅkā. When Mind is attained not as one of the attainables but as going beyond this existence dualistically conceived, it is found that Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and all sentient beings are reducible to this Mind, which is the Unconscious.”¹¹⁴ Reiterating the Chinese transformation of Mahayana’s vision of awakening at the hands of Chinese Zen teachers, Suzuki continues,

The Indian genius makes it develop into a Dharmadhātu which is so graphically depicted in the form of the Vairocana Tower with all its Vyūhas and Alaṅkāras. In the Chinese mind, the heavenly glories resplendent with supernatural lights, so wonderfully described in the Gaṇḍa, are reduced more into the colours of this grey earth. Celestial beings are no more here, but hard-toiling men of the world. But there is no sordidness or squalor in Zen, nor is there any utilitarianism. In spite of its matter-of-factness, there is an air of mystery and spirituality in Zen, which has later on developed into a form of nature-mysticism. Hu Shih, the Chinese scholar, thinks Zen is the revolt of Chinese psychology against abstruse Buddhist metaphysics. But the fact is that it is not a revolt but a deep appreciation. Only the appreciation could not be expressed in any other way than in the Chinese way.¹¹⁵

Over the course of his career, Suzuki wrote numerous articles and book chapters expounding the meaning of the related concepts of satori and kenshō, which according to Suzuki were synonymous. The concept of satori remained central to Suzuki’s thinking about Zen throughout his career, although the language he used to explain the term evolved and his explanations became more discursive with time, as he sought the best ways to explain the concept’s meaning. There is a certain ambiguity and inconsistency in the manner that Suzuki used the term, for at times Suzuki seems to be writing about an experience of awakening, while at other moments he uses the term to indicate a particular state of awakened mind.

At its most basic, for Suzuki satori refers to an overcoming of the fundamental dualism that underlies all ordinary human experience. The satori of Zen was the enlightenment (saṃbodhi) that was described in all Buddhist texts, from the earliest Buddhist sutras to the collected sayings of the Zen masters. Opposed to satori/enlightenment, according to Suzuki, was Ignorance (avidya), a persistently dualistic apprehension of the world that was the root of human dissatisfaction, longing, and suffering. Suzuki summed up this view that satori was identical with the awakening of the Buddha in Living by Zen:

Satori in this respect reflects the general characteristics of Buddhist teaching, especially that of prajñā philosophy. The prajñā begins its thinking with denying everything; the idea, however, is not to build up a system of philosophy, but to free us from all our egoistic impulses and the idea of permanency, for these are the source of human miseries and not at all intellectually tenable and spiritually altogether unsound. They are the outgrowth of Ignorance (avidyā), declares the Buddha. Satori is enlightenment (saṃbodhi) just the opposite of ignorance and darkness. Enlightenment consists in spiritually elucidating the facts of experience and not denying or abnegating them. The light whereby satori illuminates the continuum also illuminates the world of divisions and multitudes. This is the meaning of the Buddhist diction: Shabetsu (difference) and byōdō (sameness) are identical.116

Suzuki’s definition of ignorance and satori was rooted in his understanding of human psychology, in particular, the manner in which we became estranged from the deepest truths of existence. Suzuki does not explicitly state the sources of the language he uses to characterize the arising of ignorance and its destruction through satori or enlightenment, but one can detect echoes of the Mahayana texts, important in the Zen tradition in China, with which he worked closely, for example, the Awakening of Faith, the Gaṇḍavyūha, the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, and the Vajrasamādhi Sūtra. At the heart of Suzuki’s understanding of the emergence of ignorance and the return to awakening was what he later called an “advaitist” view of the world that, he contended, served as the foundation much of Asian thought and religion. About this nondualistic perspective Suzuki stated, “Advaitism is not the same as monism; it simply asserts that reality is nondualistic. Monism limits, whereas advaitism leaves the question open, and refuses to make any definite statement about reality. It is not-two, which not the same as one. It is both yes and no, yet it is neither the one nor the other.”¹¹⁷ Suzuki contended that advaitism distinguished Eastern from Western thinking. Thus, although the world was fundamentally not dualistic, Suzuki believed that much of Asian culture was grounded in this nondualism, while Western culture was not.¹¹⁸

Suzuki’s notion of the relationship between enlightenment and ignorance developed in the context of the nineteenth-century idealism and continental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), and Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), as well as the critique and development of their thought by his colleague Nishida Kitarō, in particular relying on such terms as “will,” “Subconscious,” and “Unconscious” to render in English Buddhist concepts. One can also clearly see how Suzuki, while developing language for explaining ignorance and the awakening that was satori in Buddhism, engaged with the notion of “pure experience” being developed in the first half of the twentieth century by William James and Nishida Kitarō, who was stimulated by James’s efforts to detail the contours of a philosophy of “radical empiricism.” As James wrote in one of his opening forays into the subject, an essay titled “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”: “My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known.”119 Similarly, through his reading of James and James’s own psychological and philosophical inspirations for this notion of pure experience, particularly Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson, Nishida Kitarō, stressing a monistic vision of ultimate reality, described “pure experience” as “pure” because it is consciousness prior to being divided into a subject and object.¹²⁰

The language Suzuki used to describe these concepts shifted with time and encounters with different audiences. Although the dangers of misunderstanding and misleading resonances are considerable in the effort to render Buddhist technical terms in Euro-American philosophical language, in so doing, Suzuki managed to write about Buddhism in a manner that appealed to both Anglophone and Japanese audiences. As new trends in European and American intellectual life became prominent, Suzuki would adopt slightly different terminology, ranging from the philosophical to the psychological, to describe the nature of nondualistic reality. In the course of his career, Suzuki would use such terms as “will,” “Unconscious,” “Self,” and the Japanese kokoro to represent the “abyss of absolute nothingness” for the source from which “all things are produced” and to which they all return. According to Suzuki, when properly understood the encounter dialogues of the Zen teachers were all “expressions directly bursting out of an abyss of absolute nothingness,” that is, kokoro.¹²¹

In writings from the 1920s onward, Suzuki would frequently write about will as the most basic aspect of the person, for, as noted above, “the will is the man.” Elaborating further on the importance of the will, Suzuki noted that “The will is prior to the intellect, the intellect starts from the will.”¹²² Will, as Suzuki defines it,

is more basic than the intellect because it is the principle that lies at the root of all existences and unites them all in the oneness of being. The rocks are where they are—this is their will. The rivers flow—this is their will. The birds fly—this is their will. Human beings talk—this is their will. The seasons change, heaven sends down rain or snow, the earth occasionally shakes, the waves roll, the stars shine—each of them follows its own will. To be is to will and so is to become. There is absolutely nothing in this world that has not its will. The one great will from which all these wills, infinitely varied, flow is what I call the “Cosmic (or ontological) Unconscious,” which is the zero-reservoir of infinite possibilities.¹²³

For Suzuki, will was basic to Zen, but he warned against seeing will in static terms: “Where this will acts there is Zen, but if I am asked whether Zen is a philosophy of will, I rather hesitate to give an affirmative answer. Zen is to be explained, if at all explained it should be, rather dynamically than statically.”124 For Suzuki, one important dynamic expression of the will was the koan.

Suzuki, using language that echoes descriptions found in the Awakening of Faith and the Vajrasamādhi Sūtra, explains the emergence of basic ignorance as a result of a spontaneous bifurcation of the will/consciousness into an actor and a “knower,” the latter of which becomes “the spectator and critic, and even aspires to be the director and ruler.”¹²⁵ This, according to Suzuki, is the Ignorance that is the source of human suffering:

With this arises the tragedy of life, which the Buddha makes the basis of the Fourfold Noble Truth. That pain (duḥkha) is life itself as it is lived by most of us, is the plain, undisguised statement of facts. This all comes from Ignorance, from our consciousness not being fully enlightened as to its nature, mission, and function in relation to the will. Consciousness must first be reduced to the will when it begins to work out its “original vows” (pūrvapraṇidhāna) in obedience to its true master. “The awakening of a thought” marks the beginning of Ignorance and is its condition. When this is vanquished, “a thought” is reduced to the will, which is Enlightenment. Enlightenment is therefore returning.¹²⁶

The return, in which the divided self is directly apprehended as a “continuum,” that is, as an “all-embracing whole” that is complete in itself, was satori. Satori, Suzuki wrote, using a new, postwar vocabulary in 1949, “is the apprehending of the continuum as such, as not subject to differentiation and determination.”¹²⁷ Although in explicating the arising of ignorance and the return to enlightenment Suzuki described the deepest function of mind as the “sub-conscious” or “supra-conscious,” he warns that ultimately these terms are conventions, for there is no “‘beyond,’ no ‘underneath,’ no ‘upon’ in our consciousness. The mind is one indivisible whole and cannot be torn in pieces.”¹²⁸ Returning toward the end of his career to language he first used at the start of the twentieth century, Suzuki drew from Daoism in order to sketch what he argued was the basis for nondualistic thinking in East Asian thought. In that context, Suzuki characterized awakening as the experience of myō (literally, the wonderous), that is, “the feeling reflecting the mystic experience of Identity (gendō, xuantong), in which nothingness (jōmu, changwu) and somethingness (jōu, changyou) are indistinguishably merged as one, though differentiated in name.”¹²⁹

In stressing the fundamental importance of will, Suzuki joined a global conversation about the subject that had been taking place among philosophers since Schopenhauer, who defined will as that cosmic power underlying all experience, that is, the noumenal realm of the “thing-in-itself.”¹³⁰ Suzuki’s contemporaries William James and Nishida Kitarō as well, at the start of the twentieth century wrote extensively about the notions of “pure experience,” will, and the nondual nature of consciousness/reality. In particular, Suzuki must have been familiar with the work of his friend Nishida, who, beginning with An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyū) and continuing in Intuition and Reflection in Self Consciousness (Jikaku ni okeru chokkan to hansei), as well as other works, characterized will as “the immediate, absolute process of creation.”131 As James Heisig has summarized in his analysis of the latter work, for Nishida, “Not only is the absolute of will the basis of the self, it is, he suggests, the final principle of reality itself.”¹³² For Nishida, as for Suzuki, we should note, this reality is fundamentally one in nature, that is, there is a single principle undergirding it.¹³³ Or, as Nishida wrote in 1921, “The absolute annuls all thought and distinction, but the best approximation to the truth of it is absolute will. . . . Up to this point I have grasped reality as self-consciousness, but behind all self conscious systems lies this absolute will.”¹³⁴ One can see similarities in the writings of both men in the 1920s, with Suzuki developing his notion of will as fundamental to humans and the alternation between ignorance and enlightenment as a departure and return with Nishida’s notions of absolute will and reality as “both infinite development and infinite return; both egressus and regressus.”¹³⁵ Although, as with their exchanges concerning James’s psychology of religion, the frequent intellectual conversations between Nishida and Suzuki make it difficult to assess just who was influencing whom, it is clear that they shared a rich philosophical and religious lexicon that was tied to intellectual developments around the globe. As Nishida pushed his philosophy toward a religious conception of absolute will, Suzuki used the same term to elucidate the philosophical underpinnings of Zen. Unlike Nishida, however, whose works remained largely unavailable to non-Japanese readers, Suzuki’s writings were available widely to those in Europe and the United States, which allowed him to participate actively in these cross-cultural intellectual discussions.

Suzuki was a committed Zen layman, but, except for his relationships with Imakita and Sōen, he held no formal ties to specific Zen institutions. Nonetheless, Suzuki remained a steady and, at times, surprisingly doctrinaire partisan of Japanese Rinzai-style Zen practice. The deep imprint of the Japanese Rinzai tradition on Suzuki can be detected in the sources he used as the basis for his presentation of Zen history and koan, particularly in the works produced in the 1920s and 1930s when he produced his most systematic, sustained presentation of the tradition. Suzuki drew on those works until the end of his life, urging those wanting to understand how to approach koan properly to study them. Listed among these sources one finds many Ming Chinese and Korean works concerning koan, including Sŏn’ga kwigam (C. Chanjia guijian) by Ch’ŏnghŏ Hyujŏng (1520–1604), Changuan cejin (J. Zenkan sakushin) by Yunqi Zhuhong (1535–1615), and Boshan’s Boshan sanchan jingwu (J. Hakusan sanzen keigo). The former two works were cited by Rinzai teachers from the early Edo period onward and held an important place in Hakuin’s autobiographical and Zen writings, thus cementing their role as part of the Rinzai “practical canon” for koan study.136 All of these works described the method of working with the koan in psychological detail, making them useful for Suzuki as he attempted to explicate Zen to Americans and Europeans. As Dale Wright astutely observed, “It is interesting to note that in his own writings about the kōan, Suzuki draws heavily upon this Yüan/Ming literature. This was naturally the literature most applicable to Suzuki’s task, that of explaining to us in an entirely different cultural context why the great Zen masters said and did such ‘strange things.’”¹³⁷

Although Suzuki believed that transformative religious experiences occurred in many religious traditions, as I have noted above, he contended that in most mystical traditions the achievement of a deep understanding of “the continuum,” that is, satori, was a matter of happenstance. The system of koan training that was developed and preserved by the Rinzai Zen tradition in Japan was not subject to the vicissitudes of fortune determining the occurrence of religious experiences, as in other traditions. Rather than occurring spontaneously and haphazardly, for those who practice Rinzai Zen with a “competent master,” using koans in conjunction with the zazen (seated meditation), “Zen-experience is possible and a state of satori will surely come.”¹³⁸ Suzuki, while acknowledging the flaws in the koan system developed by Hakuin and his disciples, also believed it was essential for ensuring that Zen did not degenerate into mere passivity: “The systematisation of kōan is, therefore, the one thing that is most characteristic of Zen. It is this that saves Zen from sinking into trance, from becoming absorbed in mere contemplation, from turning into an exercise in tranquillisation.”¹³⁹

At the heart of Zen practice, according to Suzuki, was a combination of zazen and koan, both of which were indispensable for successful realization. Suzuki saw zazen as an indispensable aid to reaching a thorough understanding of Zen, for, “even when the kōan is understood, its deep spiritual truth will not be driven home to the mind of the Zen student if he is not thoroughly trained in zazen. Kōan and zazen are the two handmaids of Zen; the first is the eye and the second is the foot.”¹⁴⁰ Nonetheless, although the practice of seated meditation was necessary for the Zen student to realize fully the meaning of the koan, at the same time zazen practice alone was nothing more than “a secondary consideration,” because Zen did not consider meditative concentration (dhyana) an end in itself.¹⁴¹ Overemphasis on the practice of zazen created a stumbling block to true realization. Suzuki made the point forcefully in an interview with Ueda Shizuteru that focused on Rinzai’s teachings. In response to Ueda’s contention that Rinzai continued his zazen practice subsequent to awakening, thus demonstrating the practice’s centrality to the tradition, Suzuki acknowledged that Rinzai had done a great deal of zazen, but added that Rinzai’s awakening “was the working of that which makes one do zazen rather than the working of zazen itself. That’s why I tell you you must see that which makes one do zazen. When we are caught by zazen, we come to see various kinds of strange mental pictures. Those who make zazen the focus are apt to take those pictures as essential. Psychologists and psychoanalysts are fond of these mental conditions. This is harmful.”142 Reducing the practice of Zen to zazen led to the overemphasis of superficial psychological phenomena rather than a true understanding of what Rinzai called the “True Man” (nin): “Rinzai revealed only the Man. He cast all other things aside. When Bokujū told Rinzai to go and ask Ōbaku something, Rinzai replied he didn’t know what to ask. Though he then spent three years under Ōbaku doing zazen, he still didn’t understand. So what is important is not zazen itself. We must look intensively at this state of our own non-understanding. This will not come about only through zazen.”¹⁴³ This perspective concerning the subsidiary role played by zazen in Zen practice came across not only in Suzuki’s interviews and writings, but also strongly in his interactions with Americans interested in Zen practice. In an interview, Dr. Albert Stunkard, for example, who was introduced to Zen by Suzuki, recalled that Suzuki downplayed the importance of zazen while emphasizing insight, although Suzuki explained to Stunkard such details of zazen as how to time the period of sitting with a stick of incense, giving Stunkard an incense burner from his student days for that purpose.¹⁴⁴

Through the use of such koan as “Jōshu’s mu” or Hakuin’s “sound of one hand,” the Zen master could guide the student toward an intellectual impasse where, at last, “the intellect is to give its place to the will.”¹⁴⁵ According to Suzuki, it was essential for the student to digest the koan with his whole being, not just his intellect, practicing (kufū suru) with the koan by using his abdomen rather than his head. Although acknowledging that this language was, perhaps, “ante-scientific,” Suzuki contended it was indicative of the need to move beyond mere intellectual or philosophical understanding of the koan.¹⁴⁶ Here again, Suzuki focuses on will as the central factor for successful koan practice, for, “when the will or spirit of inquiry is strong and constantly working, the koan is necessarily kept without interruption before the eye, and all the other thoughts that are not all cogent are naturally swept off the field of consciousness. This exclusion and sweeping off is a by-product, it is more or less accidental. This is where the koan exercise is distinct from mere concentration and also from the Indian form of Dhyāna, that is, meditation, abstraction, or thought-cessation.”¹⁴⁷

Suzuki’s approach to koan practice and his understanding of the underlying stories drawn from the transmission records, biographies, and collected sayings of Zen masters shared a great deal with the received Rinzai tradition in Japan in which he had trained under the tutelage of Imakita and Sōen. Suzuki deliberately gave much more discursive explanations of koan and koan practice than those provided by contemporaneous monastic Zen teachers who wrote in Japanese or English, but Suzuki’s descriptions are consonant with the understanding expressed by such twentieth-century teachers as Asahina Sōgen (1891–1979), who trained at Engakuji, like Suzuki, and eventually became that temple’s incumbent.148 Although a lay Buddhist who remained without a formal affiliation to a particular denomination of Buddhism, Suzuki consistently held that the best way to reach a complete understanding of Zen and Buddhism was to work through the system of koan established by Hakuin and his disciples with a certified Rinzai master, preferably, at least for a time, in the context of a traditional Rinzai Zen monastery. In the effort to understand “What Is Zen?” Suzuki wrote, “The best way to understand it will be, of course, to study and practice it at least some in years in the Meditation Hall.”¹⁴⁹ According to Suzuki, if a person of average intelligence and “a good amount of perseverance and indefatigability” were to devote himself or herself fully to the combination of zazen, formal interviews with the master, liturgy, and work that are integral to Japanese Rinzai Zen monastic life, they should be able “to probe within a space of ten years into every intricacy of the teachings of Zen.”¹⁵⁰

At the hands of several of his postwar editors, Suzuki’s views about formal monastic practice were often overlooked, as new anthologies neglected to include essays concerning this important part of Suzuki’s writing on Zen.¹⁵¹ By contrast, the books concerning Zen produced by Suzuki during his most productive period of writing about Zen—from 1921 to 1939—frequently contain chapters describing aspects of monastic life, practice, and liturgy, albeit in a very idealized and anachronistic fashion. For example, both Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series) and An Introduction to Zen Buddhism include chapters concerning life in the meditation hall (zendō). More pointedly, according to Suzuki’s preface to Manual of Zen Buddhism, which contained translations of many of the liturgical texts used in Rinzai Zen monasteries, the Manual, along with An Introduction to Zen Buddhism and The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, were parts of a trilogy intended to provide non-Japanese readers a complete picture of Zen life that encompassed Zen teachings, monastic life, and the liturgical materials associated with monastic training.¹⁵² As Suzuki characterized this trilogy in the final volume of the set to be published, Manual of Zen Buddhism, “In my Introduction to Zen Buddhism (published 1934), an outline of Zen teaching is sketched, and in The Training of a Zen Monk (1934) a description of the Meditation Hall and its life is given. To complete a triptych the present Manual has been compiled. The object is to inform the reader of the various literary materials relating to the monastery life.”¹⁵³

Given this positive assessment of Rinzai Zen training and his respect for a number of Rinzai teachers, it was natural that Suzuki would steer non-Japanese toward Rinzai practice. From as early as the 1930s, when he worked to open an international Zen training center in Kyoto with Kozuki Tesshū, Suzuki introduced Americans and Europeans interested in Zen to Rinzai teachers he considered legitimate, effective teachers open to training foreigners. Suzuki directed such non-Japanese Zen aspirants as Cornelius Crane, Eva von Hoboken, Phillip Kapleau, Richard DeMartino, Bernard Phillips, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Lunsford P. Yandell, and others to study directly with teachers who were part of the Rinzai establishment, for example, Asahina Sōgen (1891–1979), Shibayama Zenkei (1894–1979), and Yamada Mumon (1900–1988), as well as leaders of Rinzai lay practice groups, for example, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi and Osaka Kōryū, chief teacher at the Shakamunikai (Śākyamuni Society) in Tokyo.

Due to his preference for Rinzai-style koan training, Suzuki was critical of new Zen movements inside and outside of Japan. When, for example, Bernard Phillips, Phillip Kapleau, and Richard DeMartino began practicing with Yasutani Hakuun, a Tokyo-based disciple of Harada Sōgaku and an important leader of the Sambōkyōdan lineage that became increasingly influential with American and European Zen practitioners, Suzuki expressed great dismay. Suzuki wrote to Richard DeMartino in 1964 that the “psychological Zen” of Yasutani and others “is not Zen.” Asserting that the training methods used by proponents of this stream of Zen were overly harsh, Suzuki continued, “I met Yasutani, but he has no philosophy. The initial experience, i.e., satori, is most important, therefore. And philosophical reflections are not to be neglected or set aside in the understanding of Zen, for they are to be included in Zen proper.”154 As American students of Yasutani proliferated, Suzuki grew more strident in tone, writing in 1965 to Lunsford Yandell, another American interested in Zen, that Yasutani’s approach was “too indiscriminate or too ‘grandmotherly’ as we say in Japan.”¹⁵⁵ Suzuki also warned his supporter, Cornelius Crane, the founder of the Zen Studies Society in New York, who was also searching for a teacher in Japan, that to gain the correct understanding of Zen, eventually Kapleau and Phillips would have to work with a “good Rinzai master.”¹⁵⁶ Fearing that the overemphasis on the experience of satori was harmful, Suzuki continued, “Zen is not a mere play of thought or ‘experience’ so called. Zen is really a most serious business. From some reports I get from his associates here in Japan and from America, and also from reading some of his works, I am afraid that Yasutani does not fully realize the harm he is doing. His handling of Zen is injurious to its development in America. His way may lead his adherents even to mental aberrations.”¹⁵⁷

As more works on Zen were published, Suzuki also wrote critically, especially in his letters, concerning those whom he felt were writing without deep insight into Zen, noting that “To understand Zen satori is needed. Without this experience no amount of talk is of any use in elucidating what Zen is. What such writers with no satori may write cannot be of first-hand significance.”¹⁵⁸ In addition to this “personal experience,” which could require “a number of years” to acquire, writing about Zen or coming to a full understanding of it also required a thorough study of “the whole range of Zen literature,” particularly, according to Suzuki, the sermons and encounter dialogues (mondō) contained within the collected sayings (goroku) of the Tang and Song dynasty Zen.¹⁵⁹ Judged from the perspective of both practical and academic familiarity with Zen, Suzuki found the work of such authors as Garma C. Chang, Heinrich Dumoulin, and Ronald Shaw wanting.

In addition, Suzuki cast a harsh eye on the popularization of Zen in the United States and Europe during the early 1960s, although in part his own writings helped catalyze its growing prominence. As Zen became a fad in Europe and the United States, Suzuki was critical—harshly so, at times—of the misappropriation of Zen by writers, artists, musicians, and psychologists experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Responding to the mistaken identification by such psychologists as Timothy Leary of drug-induced altered states of consciousness with religious awakening, Suzuki complained in a 1965 preface to R. H. Blyth’s translation of the Mumonkan that the “new world” of Zen,

has been the subject of gross misunderstanding and fantastic interpretation by those who have never actually had the Zen experience. Among such interpreters we count the modern addicts to uses of so-called psychodelic [sic] drugs (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, etc.). That the visions have really nothing to do with Zen, psychologically or spiritually, is ascertainable when one carefully studies, for instance, Case XIX of this book. Zen is not concerned with these visions, as the drug takers are, but with the “person” who is the subject of the visions. . . . As long as these psychologists are charmed with the phenomenology of consciousness, they can never get into the identity of experience itself. They are forever on the surface of reality and never look into the secrets of the “Here-Now,” which transcends the relative world of knowing and not-knowing, of seeing and not-seeing. The “supreme reason” does not lie in the domain of mystical visions of any kind.160

Commenting on the phenomenon in the article “Religion and Drugs,” Suzuki rejected the attempts to conflate drug-induced psychedelic experiences with Zen. Reflecting from the perspective of his study of Rinzai’s teachings, Suzuki warned that these sorts of hallucinatory states were dismissed by many Zen teachers, because they distracted the practitioner from the real focus of Zen, “the true man of no rank.” From this perspective, an experience, however “mystical” it might seem, was not the point of focus, but rather it was essential for the Zen practitioner to know firsthand the “true man who is doing the seeing.”¹⁶¹

The invocation of Zen by some Beat writers who helped popularize Zen in the 1950s and 1960s also irritated Suzuki, who lamented, “Lately there have taken place some incidents around me. One of them is the rise of the so-called ‘beat-generation’ which is at present calling public attention not only in America but also in Japan. They grossly misrepresent Zen and there are some people to [sic] imagine that Zen is really responsible for the movement.”¹⁶²

At the same time, although Suzuki contended that the established koan system in Rinzai Zen was the best means for ensuring that a practitioner would achieve deep spiritual insight, he was aware of the artificiality of the system and widespread abuses in koan study. Like other contemporaneous critics of Rinzai practice, for example, the pseudonymous Hau Hōō, the former Ōbaku Zen cleric Kawaguchi Ekai, and Suzuki’s confidant, the Rinzai cleric Akizuki Ryōmin, Suzuki attacked the formulaic practice of koan Zen in Japan.163 Suzuki viewed the systematization of the koan that took place over the course of the history of Zen as a necessary evil, an artificial construct that “harbours grave pitfalls,” but which, nonetheless, preserved the heart of Zen teaching.¹⁶⁴ Continuing at length concerning the dangers of formal koan practice, Suzuki wrote:

This is the real reason why masters of the past devised the method of giving koan to their students. It was, as I have been saying, an expression of the deepest compassion—what Zen calls “grandmotherly kindness.” But along with that kindness goes an accordingly great danger. The danger lies in the tendency to formalization. It may happen that a petty thief crowing like a cock at dawn will get past the barrier by deceiving the gatekeeper into opening the gates. As a matter of fact, in the koan system such fellows do get past, or rather we should say that they are passed through. The danger that the goods will be sold cheap is something intrinsic to the system. In any construct devised by man a pattern invariably evolves. When the pattern becomes fixed, the quick of life cannot move within it. When the realm of true reality which is free of samsaric suffering is treated in such a way that it comes to resemble the fixed gestures and patterned moves learned in a fencing class, Zen ceases to be Zen. At times patterns work well and are useful. And they do have the virtue of universal currency. But no living thing is produced from that alone. I suppose, though, there are some who even find enjoyment in such a counterfeit, lifeless thing, much as they would divert themselves with games of chess or mahjong.¹⁶⁵

According to Suzuki, the system of koan gave the trainee access to satori and a true understanding of Zen, but the koan system was, unlike the most well-known koans, which were “alive to the very core,” subject to abuse by those for whom Zen consisted merely of “climbing up the gradation of the koans one after another.”¹⁶⁶ Those who took such a formulaic approach, however, were missing the main point of Zen, which, Suzuki wrote, was “the unfolding of a man’s inner life.” Without “faith and personal effort,” Zen became nothing more than “a mere bubble.” If the practitioner had the proper spirit of inquiry, truly grasping the meaning of a handful of koans or even just one of them could reveal the depths of Zen.¹⁶⁷ Although the koan system as practiced in Rinzai Zen was “the only method nowadays to master Zen anywhere . . . at the same time it is liable to induce students to cherish a very limited and imperfect interpretation of Zen. The spirit of Zen is thereby destroyed or crippled. Japan is at present suffering from this type of Zen. The so-called roshis and their disciples are unable to transcend the koan.”¹⁶⁸ In an interview conducted toward the end of his life, Suzuki called for reform of the whole koan system, speaking with admiration about those who, like the Tokugawa-period Zen master Bankei, rejected classical koan as unnecessary for an understanding of Zen. Although at times Suzuki expressed great frustration about the failure of Westerners to grasp what he was trying to transmit about Zen, seeing the tenacity of the Rinzai koan system as the model for Zen training, Suzuki, late in life, called for a contemporary “Bankei” who “has been trained in the mold and then decides to go forward on his own.” Chances are, Suzuki continued, that it quite possibly would be “someone among the Westerners who has the strength to do this.”169

Furthermore, in interviews and his private correspondence, Suzuki, a lay Buddhist who wished to disseminate Zen broadly, occasionally voiced criticism of the Zen establishment, including many of the Zen masters, for their insularity and conservatism. Suzuki commented in the preface to his 1927 essay collection Zuihitsu Zen (Zen Essays), for example, “In any case, the thing called ‘Zen’ should not be cloistered in the monastery. It should also be made available in the world.”¹⁷⁰ Writing to Ruth Fuller Sasaki to get answers concerning the Blue Cliff Record from her teacher, Gōtō Zuigan (1879–1965), Suzuki complained about the lack of attention to vow (praṇidhāna) and to liberating others in contemporaneous Rinzai approaches to the text, concluding that “Most of the so-called roshi in Japan are a self-sufficient or self-complacent sort of teachers. They are not modern men.” What was necessary, Suzuki continued, was a concrete, rather than merely intellectual, interpretation of the doctrine of reaching out to sentient beings in order to liberate them (geke shujō).¹⁷¹

In a brief preface to a book concerning koan by Akizuki Ryōmin that was written just more than a year before his death, Suzuki summed up his views concerning the strengths and weaknesses of Rinzai practice in Japan, as well as his vision for the future of Zen. Writing about the use of koan to move one from a world of “working” to a world of “seeing,” in just a few sentences Suzuki alludes to both Nishida’s philosophy and Dongshan Liangjie’s Five Ranks/Five Positions. In calling on those cloistered in monasteries to make their teachings accessible to all, Suzuki expressed his hopes for Zen in the modern world:

Thinking about it, there is nothing so mysterious as human existence. After falling into a snare of our own making, we then writhe in agony, and we contrive to get free. It really makes one wonder what life is for. From “moving,” or in other words “working,” it is good to go on and participate in a world of “seeing,” but the one who “sees” comes to see himself as an independent existence completely isolated from the one at “work.” A person who has moved from “working” to “seeing” must now once again return to the midst of work. Is that not the meaning of “Finally returning to sit at ease among the dust and ashes”? I love this phrase. I believe in modernizing this sentiment so that Zen can serve as a vital force today.¹⁷²

Richard M. Jaffe