The Zen Buddhist Philosophy of D. T. Suzuki

Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki was, in the words of Rossa Ó Muireartaigh, ‘a great intellectual multi-tasker’. D. T. Suzuki was a Zen historian, a religious scholar of Zen and Buddhism, a translator, an apologist for Zen and Buddhism among English speakers, a social commentator, a philosopher. Rossa Ó Muireartaigh’s book  The Zen Buddhist Philosophy of D. T. Suzuki: Strengths, Foibles, Intrigues, and Precision  is an introduction to these facets of Suzuki’s intellectual work with a particular focus on the philosophy of Zen including Suzuki’s role in its promotion among English speakers.

Here, we will first dive into the library of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) guided by the themes in Ó Muireartaigh’s book. We do that with a selection of seventeen books from the library inspired, in different ways, by  The Zen Buddhist Philosophy of D. T. Suzuki . Following this list is a web exhibition that looks at a specific theme running through Ó Muireartaigh’s book, namely, the binary of ‘the East’ versus ‘the West’. Both the book list and the exhibition accompany the  Omboeken event , organised by VU’s library, devoted to  The Zen Buddhist Philosophy of D. T. Suzuki .

All of the books, and articles, presented here are available from VU’s library. Click on a title’s link and that will take you to its entry in the library catalogue, where you can check if the book is available and order it if so. As you enjoy these works, be sure to  explore VU’s full library catalogue , including the library’s  Special Collections  such as its  collection of maps  or its  collection of manuscripts and early printed books .

The tour of these works is organised around the central themes in  The Zen Buddhist Philosophy of D. T. Suzuki . The book consists of three main chapters on the notions of ‘self’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘world’ in Zen Buddhism, particularly according to the writings of D. T. Suzuki. Suzuki was not just an ‘intellectual multi-tasker’ but also an intellectual, and geographical, multi-traveller. From his student days in Tokyo, where he took classes in American literature, through his Zen practice with Imakita Kōsen and Shaku Soyen in Japan and with Paul Carus in the United States, to his writing and translation work on Zen Buddhism in the United States, and his eventual return to Japan, Suzuki's life and work spanned from ‘the East’ to ‘the West’ and back. The ‘East’ versus ‘West’ binary is something Suzuki insisted on—ironically, according to Rossa Ó Muireartaigh, given Zen’s aim of dispelling all sorts of other dualities.

Many of the books featured here, and their authors, have followed paths similar to Suzuki’s own meandering path. They have zigzagged—back and forth, forth and back, geographically and intellectually—through distinct countries, languages, and cultures. These works, much like Ó Muireartaigh’s book itself, are thus also an invitation to think and rethink all sorts of dualities, including that of ‘the East’ versus ‘the West’. The final section below is just such a rethinking—a web exhibition based on Suzuki’s life, it takes us through Suzuki’s aforementioned meandering path through countries, languages, and cultures that can’t be neatly mapped onto anything like a binary category.

The first two books relate to the duality of ‘self’ and ‘world’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’—a duality that, outside our everyday experiences, Suzuki, and Zen, rejects.

If Zen has a philosophical standpoint, however, it cannot be limited to the notion of ‘self’—it must be much more encompassing. The notions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘world’ provide the two other pieces in Ó Muireartaigh’s summary of this larger standpoint. And there is no better place to learn more about them than Suzuki’s own books. VU’s library catalogue offers four of these books, here accompanied by a popular early introduction to Zen for the English-speaking readership.

It is worth pointing out a common thread to the four books by Suzuki surveyed below—they all reveal the sprawling network of connections Suzuki made in much more than just a scholarly sense. His influence was for some spiritual, for others intellectual, and for still others existential and even practical (and, often, some or all of the above). The story of these books thus reveals something about how Suzuki lived his life—and it is important to keep the latter in mind as one explores Suzuki’s writings.

Given the vast influence of Suzuki and his work over so many others, it is no surprise that the image of Zen—what we may call ‘Zen’—its construction and faithfulness to Zen, particularly as it appears in Suzuki’s work, has become a contentious issue. Ó Muireartaigh spends a good deal of space on this issue. The following selection of books casts light on some of the aims where Zen shot its arrows, at times piercing them with novel clarity, at other times letting them bend the arrows in more or less forceful ways.

 Zen in the Art of Archery  by Eugen Herrigel

The belief that there is an intimate connection between kyūdō, or traditional Japanese archery, and Zen can be traced back to Eugen Herrigel’s  Zen in the Art of Archery .

 Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West  by Shoji Yamada

Herrigel’s image of Zen and archery, however, claims Shoji Yamada, is a myth. Yamada tells the story of Herrigel’s book—and its role in creating the myth of Zen in archery—in his 2009 book  Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West .

 Ozu: His Life and Films  by Donald Richie

Asked about an aesthetic that embodies the spirit of Zen, a cinephile would most likely invoke the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu. This image is largely due to the work of Donald Richie—the film historian who introduced Japanese cinema and aesthetics to English-speaking cinephiles.

Nationalism, Violence, and Zen

One ongoing controversy around Zen Buddhism, and Suzuki, among others, is its relation to nationalism and violence, particularly of its leaders during the early twentieth century.

Zen and the Left

The last four books take us beyond the Zen Buddhism of Suzuki, or Japan, and into larger debates, particularly from the left. They also hark back to the duality of ‘the East’ versus ‘the West’, inviting us—with Ó Muireartaigh—to think and rethink it in a new light.

Suzuki passed away in July of 1966. The following year, The Eastern Buddhist published a  special issue  devoted to his life and work. The Eastern Buddhist was founded in 1921 by Suzuki and his wife, Beatrice Lane, as the first English-language Buddhist journal in Japan. A number of the authors we encountered here are among the people who paid tribute to Suzuki’s life in this commemorating  special issue . Reading their personal stories and what Suzuki meant to them would be an excellent entry point to exploring their books above in more depth.

In many ways, Suzuki’s life project and achievement was to rise to the role of a Zen authority and challenge and chastise the West for its excessive intellectualism and rationalizations, [. . .] he forced the west to take Zen and Buddhism seriously, to see it as presenting its own unique paradigm and philosophy that could never be easily reduced to traditional Western philosophical categories.—Rossa Ó Muireartaigh

Although D. T. Suzuki came to be an influential figure, particularly in the United States, for translating Zen works and making them accessible to audiences outside of Japan, he remained critical of the attempts of ‘Western’ scholars to write about and practise Zen Buddhism. He frequently asserted that ‘Westerners’ were limited in their understanding of Zen Buddhism and satori. These classifications were legitimised through his assertions of a particular ‘Eastern Way of Seeing’ and a unique Japanese spirituality, ideas that build on and reflect a binary distinction of the world into ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ and that assign to them philosophical capacities and traditions. Repeatedly, Suzuki put forward the claim that the philosophy of ‘the West’ relies on a division of the world in subject and object, while ‘Eastern’ philosophy transcends this distinction.