d t suzuki essays in zen buddhism pdf

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Essays in Zen Buddhism : First series by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

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Essays in Zen Buddhism, first series

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• Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki, Volume I: Zen

In this Book

• Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki
• Published by: University of California Press

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright
• List of Illustrations
• pp. vii-viii
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• pp. xi-lviii
• Editorial Note
• pp. lvii-lviii
• 1. A Recommendation for Quiet Sitting
• 2. Zen and Meditation
• 3. On Satori—The Revelation of a New Truth in Zen Buddhism
• 4. The Secret Message of Bodhidharma, or The Content of Zen Experience
• 5. Life of Prayer and Gratitude
• 6. Dōgen, Hakuin, Bankei: Three Types of Thought in Japanese Zen
• 7. Unmon on Time
• 8. The Morning Glory
• pp. 104-112
• 9. The Role of Nature in Zen Buddhism
• pp. 113-135
• 10. The Awakening of a New Consciousness in Zen
• pp. 136-163
• 11. The Koan and The Five Steps
• pp. 164-188
• 12. Self the Unattainable
• pp. 189-195
• 13. Zen and Psychiatry
• pp. 196-201
• 14. Early Memories
• pp. 202-210
• pp. 211-234
• Glossary of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Terms
• pp. 235-248
• Bibliography
• pp. 249-254
• pp. 255-274

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D. T. Suzuki

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Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (鈴木 大拙 貞太郎 Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō ; he rendered his name "Daisetz" in 1894; [1] 18 October 1870 – 12 July 1966 [2] ) was a Japanese author of books and essays on Buddhism , Zen ( Chan ) and Shin that were instrumental in spreading interest in both Zen and Shin (and Far Eastern philosophy in general) to the West. Suzuki was also a prolific translator of Chinese, Japanese, and Sanskrit literature . Suzuki spent several lengthy stretches teaching or lecturing at Western universities, and devoted many years to a professorship at Ōtani University , a Japanese Buddhist school.

He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963. [3]

• 1.1 Early life
• 1.3 Marriage
• 2.1 Professor of Buddhist philosophies
• 2.2 Studies
• 3 Zen training
• 4.1 Zen-messenger
• 5 Bibliography
• 7 External links
• 10 References

D. T. Suzuki was born Teitarō Suzuki in Honda-machi, Kanazawa , Ishikawa Prefecture , the fourth son of physician Ryojun Suzuki. The Buddhist name Daisetsu , meaning "Great Humility", the kanji of which can also mean "Greatly Clumsy", was given to him by his Zen master Soen (or Soyen) Shaku . [4] Although his birthplace no longer exists, a humble monument marks its location (a tree with a rock at its base). The samurai class into which Suzuki was born declined with the fall of feudalism , which forced Suzuki's mother, a Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist, to raise him in impoverished circumstances after his father died. When he became old enough to reflect on his fate in being born into this situation, he began to look for answers in various forms of religion. His naturally sharp and philosophical intellect found difficulty in accepting some of the cosmologies to which he was exposed. [5]

Suzuki studied at the University of Tokyo . Suzuki set about acquiring knowledge of Chinese, Sanskrit , Pali , and several European languages. During his student years at Tokyo University, Suzuki took up Zen practice at Engaku-ji in Kamakura . [4] (See Zen Training section, below.)

Suzuki lived and studied several years with the scholar Paul Carus . Suzuki was introduced to Carus by Soyen Shaku (also written Soen Shaku), who met him at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893. Carus, who had set up residence in LaSalle, Illinois , approached Soyen Shaku to request his help in translating and preparing Eastern spiritual literature for publication in the West. Soyen Shaku instead recommended his student Suzuki for the job. Suzuki lived at Dr. Carus's home, the Hegeler Carus Mansion , and worked with him, initially in translating the classic Tao Te Ching from ancient Chinese. In Illinois, Suzuki began his early work Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism .

Carus himself had written a book offering an insight into, and overview of, Buddhism, titled The Gospel of Buddha . Soyen Shaku wrote an introduction for it, and Suzuki translated the book into Japanese. At this time, around the turn of the century, quite a number of Westerners and Asians (Carus, Soyen, and Suzuki included) were involved in the worldwide Buddhist revival that had begun slowly in the 1880s.

In 1911, Suzuki married Beatrice Erskine Lane, a Radcliffe graduate and Theosophist with multiple contacts with the Bahá'í Faith both in America and in Japan. [6] Later Suzuki himself joined the Theosophical Society Adyar and was an active Theosophist. [7] [8] [9]

Professor of Buddhist philosophies

Besides living in the United States, Suzuki traveled through Europe before taking up a professorship back in Japan. Suzuki and his wife dedicated themselves to spreading an understanding of Mahayana Buddhism. Until 1919 they lived in a cottage on the Engaku-ji grounds, then moved to Kyoto , where Suzuki began professorship at Ōtani University in 1921. While he was in Kyoto, he visited Dr. Hoseki Shin'ichi Hisamatsu , a famous Zen Buddhist scholar, and they discussed Zen Buddhism together at Shunkō-in temple in the Myōshin-ji temple complex.

In 1921, the year he joined Ōtani University, he and his wife founded the Eastern Buddhist Society. [10] The Society is focused on Mahayana Buddhism and offers lectures and seminars, and publishes a scholarly journal, The Eastern Buddhist . [11] Suzuki maintained connections in the West and, for instance, delivered a paper at the World Congress of Faiths in 1936, at the University of London (he was an exchange professor during this year).

Besides teaching about Zen practice and the history of Zen (Chan) Buddhism, Suzuki was an expert scholar on the related philosophy called, in Japanese, Kegon , which he thought of as the intellectual explication of Zen experience.

Suzuki received numerous honors, including Japan's National Medal of Culture .

Still a professor of Buddhist philosophy in the middle decades of the 20th century, Suzuki wrote some of the most celebrated introductions and overall examinations of Buddhism, and particularly of the Zen school. He went on a lecture tour of American universities in 1951, and taught at Columbia University from 1952 to 1957.

Suzuki was especially interested in the formative centuries of this Buddhist tradition, in China. A lot of Suzuki's writings in English concern themselves with translations and discussions of bits of the Chan texts the Biyan Lu (Blue Cliff Record) and the Wumenguan (Mumonkan/Gateless Passage), which record the teaching styles and words of the classical Chinese masters. He was also interested in how this tradition, once imported into Japan, had influenced Japanese character and history, and wrote about it in English in Zen and Japanese Culture . Suzuki's reputation was secured in England prior to the U.S.

In addition to his popularly oriented works, Suzuki wrote a translation of the Lankavatara Sutra and a commentary on its Sanskrit terminology. Later in his life he was a visiting professor at Columbia University . He looked in on the efforts of Saburō Hasegawa, Judith Tyberg , Alan Watts and the others who worked in the California Academy of Asian Studies (now known as the California Institute of Integral Studies ), in San Francisco in the 1950s.

In his later years, he began to explore the Jōdo Shinshū faith of his mother's upbringing, and gave guest lectures on Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism at the Buddhist Churches of America .

D.T. Suzuki also produced an incomplete English translation of the Kyogyoshinsho , the magnum opus of Shinran , founder of the Jōdo Shinshū school. However, Suzuki did not attempt to popularize the Shin doctrine in the West, as he believed Zen was better suited to the Western preference for Eastern mysticism [ citation needed ] , though he is quoted as saying that Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism is the "most remarkable development of Mahayana Buddhism ever achieved in East Asia". [12]

Suzuki also took an interest in Christian mysticism and in some of the most significant mystics of the West, for example, Meister Eckhart , whom he compared with the Jōdo Shinshū followers called Myokonin . Suzuki was among the first to bring research on the Myokonin to audiences outside Japan as well.

Other works include Essays in Zen Buddhism (three volumes), Studies in Zen Buddhism , and Manual of Zen Buddhism . Additionally, American philosopher William Barrett compiled many of Suzuki's articles and essays concerning Zen into a volume entitled Zen Buddhism .

Zen training

While studying at Tokyo University Suzuki took up Zen practice at Engaku-ji in Kamakura studying initially with Kosen Roshi. After Kosen's passing, Suzuki continued with Kosen's successor at Engaku-ji, Soyen Shaku. [13]

Under Soyen Shaku, Suzuki's studies were essentially internal and non-verbal, including long periods of sitting meditation ( zazen ). The task involved what Suzuki described as four years of mental, physical, moral, and intellectual struggle. During training periods at Engaku-ji, Suzuki lived a monk's life. He described this life and his own experience at Kamakura in his book The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk . Suzuki characterized the facets of the training as: a life of humility; a life of labor; a life of service; a life of prayer and gratitude; and a life of meditation. [14]

Suzuki was invited by Soyen Shaku to visit the United States in the 1890s, and Suzuki acted as English-language translator for a book written by him (1906). Though Suzuki had by this point translated some ancient Asian texts into English (e.g. Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana ), his role in translating and ghost-writing aspects of Soyen Shaku's book was more the beginning of Suzuki's career as a writer in English. [15]

Later in life Suzuki was more inclined to Jodo Shin (True Pure Land) practice on a personal level, seeing in the doctrine of Tariki, or other power as opposed to self power, an abandonment of self that is entirely complementary to Zen practice and yet to his mind even less willful than traditional Zen. In his book Buddha of Infinite Light (2002), (originally titled, Shin Buddhism ) Suzuki declared that, "Of all the developments that Mahayana Buddhism has achieved in East Asia, the most remarkable one is the Shin teaching of Pure Land Buddhism." (p. 22)

Spread of Zen in the West

Zen-messenger.

Suzuki was the foremost important person in spreading Zen in the West. Philosopher Charles A. Moore said:

Suzuki in his later years was not just a reporter of Zen, not just an expositor, but a significant contributor to the development of Zen and to its enrichment.

This is echoed by Nishitani Keiji , who declared:

... in Dr. Suzuki's activities, Buddhism came to possess a forward-moving direction with a frontier spirit ... This involved shouldering the task of rethinking, restating and redoing traditional Buddhism to transmit it to Westerners as well as Easterners ... To accomplish this task it is necessary to be deeply engrossed in the tradition, and at the same time to grasp the longing and the way of thinking within the hearts of Westerners. From there, new possibilities should open up in the study of the Buddha Dharma which have yet to be found in Buddhist history ... Up to now this new Buddhist path has been blazed almost single-handedly by Dr. Suzuki. He did it on behalf of the whole Buddhist world. [ citation needed ]

Bibliography

These essays were enormously influential when they came out, making Zen known in the West for the very first time:

• Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series (1927), New York: Grove Press.
• Essays in Zen Buddhism: Second Series (1933), New York: Samuel Weiser, Inc. 1953–1971. Edited by Christmas Humphreys .
• Essays in Zen Buddhism: Third Series (1934), York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc. 1953. Edited by Christmas Humphreys.
• Dr. Suzuki also completed the translation of the Lankavatara Sutra from the original Sanskrit. Boulder, CO: Prajña Press, 1978, ISBN   0-87773-702-9 , first published Routledge Kegan Paul, 1932.

Shortly after, a second series followed:

• An Introduction to Zen Buddhism , Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Soc. 1934. Republished with Foreword by C.G. Jung, London: Rider & Company, 1948. Suzuki calls this an "outline of Zen teaching." [16]
• The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk , Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Soc. 1934. New York: University Books, 1959. This work covers a "description of the Meditation Hall and its life". [16]
• Manual of Zen Buddhism , Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Soc. 1935. London: Rider & Company, 1950, 1956. New York: Random House, 1960 and subsequent editions. A collection of Buddhist sutras, classic texts from the masters, icons & images, including the "Ten Ox-Herding Pictures". Suzuki writes that this work is to "inform the reader of the various literary materials relating to the monastic life...what the Zen monk reads before the Buddha in his daily service, where his thoughts move in his leisure hours, and what objects of worship he has in the different quarters of his institution." [16]

After WWII, a new interpretation:

• The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind ,London: Rider & Company, 1949. York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser 1972, ISBN   0-87728-182-3 .
• Living by Zen . London: Rider & Company, 1949.
• Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist: The Eastern and Western Way , Macmillan, 1957. "A study of the qualities Meister Eckhart shares with Zen and Shin Buddhism". Includes translation of myokonin Saichi's poems.
• Zen and Japanese Culture , New York: Pantheon Books , 1959. A classic.
• Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis , Erich Fromm , D. T. Suzuki, and De Martino. Approximately one third of this book is a long discussion by Suzuki that gives a Buddhist analysis of the mind, its levels, and the methodology of extending awareness beyond the merely discursive level of thought. In producing this analysis, Suzuki gives a theoretical explanation for many of the swordsmanship teaching stories in Zen and Japanese Culture that otherwise would seem to involve mental telepathy, extrasensory perception, etc.

Miscellaneous:

• An anthology of his work until the mid-1950s: Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki , Doubleday, New York: 1956. Edited by William Barrett.
• Very early work on Western mystic-philosopher. Swedenborg: Buddha of the North , West Chester, Pa: Swedenborg Foundation, 1996. Trans. by Andrew Bernstein of Swedenborugu , 1913.
• A Miscellany on the Shin Teaching of Buddhism ; Kyōto, Shinshū Ōtaniha, 1949.
• Shin Buddhism ; New York, Harper & Row, 1970.
• Gutoku Shaku Shinran, The Kyōgyōshinshō, The Collection of Passages Expounding the True Teaching, Living, Faith, and Realizing of the Pure Land , translated by Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki (ed. by The Eastern Buddhist Society); Kyōto, Shinshū Ōtaniha, 1973.
• Collected Writings on Shin Buddhism (ed. by The Eastern Buddhist Society); Kyōto, Shinshū Ōtaniha, 1973.
• Transcription of talks on Shin Buddhism. Buddha of Infinite Light . Boston: Shambhala Publications , 1998. Edited by Taitetsu Unno .
• 'Tribute; anthology of essays by great thinkers. D. T. Suzuki: A Zen Life Remembered . Wheatherhill, 1986. Reprinted by Shambhala Publications .
• See also the works of Alan Watts , Paul Reps et al.
• Buddhist modernism
• Buddhism and Theosophy
• Japanese Zen

External links

• Biography of D.T. Suzuki at Otani University at the Wayback Machine (archived 4 February 2005)
• Eastern Buddhist Society
• Shunkoin Temple
• Matsugaoka Bunko Dr. Suzuki's Zen institute
• D.T. Suzuki Documentary
• D. T. SUZUKI MUSEUM
• Biographical Sketch
• "An ambassador of enlightenment: The man who brought Zen to the West" , The Japan Times , Thursday, 16 Nov 2006.
• Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited by Robert H. Sharf
• The Question of God: Other Voices: D.T. Suzuki , PBS series, WGBH , Boston, September 2004.
• Japanese Spirituality （『日本的霊性』1944）, translated by Norman Waddell(1972)

Search for videos:

• Search YouTube for: D. T. Suzuki Buddhism

Selected videos:

• Algeo, Adele S. (July 2005), "Beatrice Lane Suzuki and Theosophy in Japan", Theosophical History , XI  
• Algeo, Adele S. (January–February 2007), "Beatrice Lane Suzuki: An American Theosophist in Japan" , Quest , 95 (1): 13–17  
• Andreasen, Esben (1998). Popular Buddhism in Japan: Shin Buddhist Religion & Culture . University of Hawaii Press. ISBN   0-8248-2028-2 .
• Fields, Rick (1992). How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America . Shambhala Publications. ISBN   0-87773-631-6 .
• Faure, Bernard (1996), Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition , Princeton University Press  
• Hori, Victor Sogen (2005), "Introduction", in Dumoulin, Heinrich, Zen Buddhism: A History. Volume 2: Japan (PDF) , World Wisdom Books, pp. xiii–xxi, ISBN   978-0-941532-90-7  
• Hu Shih (January 1953), "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China. Its History and Method" , Philosophy East and West , 3 (1): 3–24, doi : 10.2307/1397361  
• McMahan, David (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism , Oxford: Oxford University Press  
• McRae, John (2001), Religion as Revolution in Chinese Historiography: Hu Shih (1891–1962) on Shen-hui (684–758). In: Cahiers d'Extreme-Asie 12: 59–102  
• McRae, John (2003), Seeing Through Zen. Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism , The University Press Group Ltd, ISBN   978-0-520-23798-8  
• Sato, Kemmyō Taira (2008), "D. T. Suzuki and the Question of War." (PDF) , The Eastern Buddhist , 39 (1): 61–120, archived from the original (PDF) on 25 October 2014  
• Sharf, Robert H. (August 1993), "The Zen of Japanese Nationalism" , History of Religions , 33 (1): 1–43, doi : 10.1086/463354  
• Sharf, Robert H. (1995), Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited (PDF)  
• Stirling, Isabel (2006). Zen Pioneer: The Life & Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki . Shoemaker & Hoard. ISBN   978-1-59376-110-3 .
• Tweed, Thomas A. (2005), "American Occultism and Japanese Buddhism. Albert J. Edmunds, D. T. Suzuki, and Translocative History" (PDF) , Japanese Journal of Religious Studies , 32 (2): 249–281  
• Victoria, Brian Daizen (2006), Zen at war (Second ed.), Lanham e.a.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.  
• Victoria, Brian Daizen (2010). "The "Negative Side" of D. T. Suzuki's Relationship to War" (PDF) . The Eastern Buddhist . 41 (2): 97–138. Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 November 2014.  
• ↑ D. T. SUZUKI MUSEUM , accessed 2012.2.17; Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, D.Litt, "Manual of Zen Buddhism", Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc. set in PDF , 2005, accessed 2012.2.17; A ZEN LIFE : THE D.T.SUZUKI DOCUMENTARY PROJECT, accessed 2012.2.17
• ↑ Stirling 2006, pg. 125
• ↑ Nomination Database
• ↑ 4.0 4.1 Fields 1992, pg. 138.
• ↑ D. T. Suzuki "Introduction: Early Memories" in The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk . New York: University Books. 1965
• ↑ Tweed 2005 .
• ↑ Script error: The function "harvard_core" does not exist.
• ↑ the Eastern Buddhist Society
• ↑ The Eastern Buddhist Archived 18 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine .
• ↑ D.T. Suzuki Buddha of Infinite Light: The Teachings of Shin Buddhism: the Japanese Way of Wisdom and Compassion Boulder: Shambhala; New Ed edition. 2002 ISBN   1-57062-456-9
• ↑ Andreasen 1998, pg. 56
• ↑ D.T. Suzuki The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk . New York: University Books. 1965.
• ↑ Fields 1992 Chapter Ten
• ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Suzuki, D. T. (1978). Manual of Zen Buddhism . Random House. p. 11.  
• Buddhism in the United States
• Buddhist philosophers
• Translators
• Buddhist writers
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• Zen Buddhism writers
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• Pages with script errors
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• Use dmy dates from October 2013
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• Articles with unsourced statements from February 2007
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Zen Master D.T. Suzuki on What Freedom Really Means and How to Break Free of the Ego-Shell That Imprisons Us

By maria popova.

In the early 1920s, spurred by the concern that Zen masters are “unable to present their understanding in the light of modern thought,” Suzuki undertook “a tentative experiment to present Zen from our common-sense point of view” — a rather humble formulation of what he actually accomplished, which was nothing less than giving ancient Eastern philosophy a second life in the West and planting the seed for a new culture of secularized spirituality.

But by 1940, all of his books had gone out of print in war-torn England, and all remaining copies in Japan were destroyed in the great fire of 1945, which consumed three quarters of Tokyo. In 1946, Christmas Humphreys, president of London’s Buddhist Society, set out to undo the damage and traveled to Tokyo, where he began working with Suzuki on translating his new manuscripts and reprinting what remained of the old. The result was the timeless classic Essays in Zen Buddhism ( public library ), originally published in 1927 — a collection of Suzuki’s foundational texts introducing the principles of Zen into secular life as a discipline concerned first and foremost with what he called “the reconstruction of character.” As Suzuki observed, “Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul.” His essays became, and remain, a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.

Suzuki begins at the beginning, laying out the promise of Zen in our everyday lives:

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. By making us drink right from the fountain of life, it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world. […] This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies. When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows mouldy and withers away or is warped and expresses itself abnormally. It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled. This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts. Generally, we are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another. All the struggles that we see around us come from this ignorance… When the cloud of ignorance disappears… we see for the first time into the nature of our own being.

One of Suzuki’s most overlooked yet essential points — and one particularly prescient in the context of what modern developmental psychology has found in the decades since — has to do with the crucial role of adolescence as a pivotal point in moral development. The teenage years, he argues, are when we begin “deeply delving into the mysteries of life” and when we are “asked to choose between the ‘Everlasting No’ and the ‘Everlasting Yea’” — a notion young Nietzsche intuited half a century earlier when he resolved, “I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!” At this fork in the road of existence, Suzuki insists, mastering the principles of Zen can make the critical difference in leading us toward a meaningful and fulfilling life. He writes:

Life is after all a form of affirmation… However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it.

Much of that blindness, he admonishes, comes from our attachment to the ego. Paradoxical as it may sound to any parent or teacher of a teenager, Suzuki suggests that adolescence is the time most fruitful for the dissolution of the ego:

We are too ego-centered. The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow… We are, however, given many chances to break through this shell, and the first and greatest of them is when we reach adolescence.

And yet the “loss of the mental equilibrium” produced by the polar pull of “Everlasting No” and “Everlasting Yea,” which causes “so many cases of nervous prostration reported during adolescence,” can also derail and anguish us at any point in life. In a sentiment that once again calls to mind Nietzsche and his beliefs about the constructive role of suffering , Suzuki writes:

The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts.

Those ego-stripping struggles, Suzuki points out, can be of the intimate, most nonmaterial kind — the kind Rilke had articulated so beautifully two decades earlier in his letter on the burdens and blessings of love . Suzuki writes:

Love makes the ego lose itself in the object it loves, and yet at the same time it wants to have the object as its own… The greatest bulk of literature ever produced in this world is but the harping on the same string of love, and we never seem to grow weary of it. But… through the awakening of love we get a glimpse into the infinity of things… When the ego-shell is broken and the ‘other’ is taken into its own body, we can say that the ego has denied itself or that the ego has taken its first steps towards the infinite.

Although he takes care to note the invaluable role of the intellect in day-to-day life, Suzuki argues that the intellect is what keeps us from the infinite:

Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to book-knowledge. The nature of one’s own being where apparently rages the struggle between the finite and the infinite is to be grasped by a higher faculty than the intellect… For the intellect has a peculiarly disquieting quality in it. Though it raises questions enough to disturb the serenity of the mind, it is too frequently unable to give satisfactory answers to them. It upsets the blissful peace of ignorance and yet it does not restore the former state of things by offering something else. Because it points out ignorance, it is often considered illuminating, whereas the fact is that it disturbs, not necessarily always bringing light on its path.

How poignant the latter remark is in the context of contemporary intellectual life. So much of our higher education is premised on the spirit of tearing things down rather than building things up — on how intelligently a student can criticize and counter an argument — which has, unsurprisingly, permeated the fabric of public discourse at large. We have a culture of criticism in which critics, professional and self-appointed, measure their merit by how intelligently they can eviscerate an idea, a work of art, or, increasingly and alarmingly, a person. We seem to have forgotten how to acquire what Bertrand Russell called, just a year before Suzuki’s essays were published, “a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy” in his magnificent meditation on why construction is more difficult yet more rewarding than destruction .

Similarly, Suzuki’s point is that the intellect is best at pointing out what doesn’t work, and as such can be a force of destruction, but when it comes to what does work, to the art of moral construction, we must rely on a wholly different faculty of the human spirit. He points to the lineage of philosophy — a discipline that continues to rely heavily on Descartes’s ultimate slogan for the intellect, cogito ergo sum — as evidence of the intellect’s insufficient powers in illuminating the path:

The history of thought proves that each new structure raised by a man of extraordinary intellect is sure to be pulled down by the succeeding ones. This constant pulling down and building up is all right as far as philosophy itself is concerned; for the inherent nature of the intellect, as I take it, demands it and we cannot put a stop to the progress of philosophical inquiries any more than to our breathing. But when it comes to the question of life itself we cannot wait for the ultimate solution to be offered by the intellect, even if it could do so. We cannot suspend even for a moment our life-activity for philosophy to unravel its mysteries. Let the mysteries remain as they are, but live we must… Zen therefore does not rely on the intellect for the solution of its deepest problems.

While the intellect may portend to fight illusion, Suzuki argues, it often does the opposite, creating different illusions that take us further from the truth of life rather than closer to it. He writes:

As nature abhors a vacuum, Zen abhors anything coming between the fact and ourselves. According to Zen there is no struggle in the fact itself such as between the finite and the infinite, between the flesh and the spirit. These are idle distinctions fictitiously designed by the intellect for its own interest. Those who take them too seriously or those who try to read them into the very fact of life are those who take the finger for the moon.

For anyone who has ever experienced the soul-squeezing sense of not-enoughness — and in a consumerist culture, most of us have, for the task of consumerism is to rob us of our sense of having enough and sell it back to us at the price of the product, over and over — Suzuki’s words resonate with particular poignancy:

Life as it is lived suffices. It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop to live and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something. Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream. If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow. The fact of flowing must under no circumstances be arrested or meddled with… […] The great fact of life itself … flows altogether outside of these vain exercises of the intellect or of the imagination. […] No amount of wordy explanations will ever lead us into the nature of our own selves. The more you explain, the further it runs away from you. It is like trying to get hold of your own shadow.

What Zen offers, Suzuki suggests, is a gateway into precisely that elusive nature of the self:

Zen … must be directly and personally experienced by each of us in his inner spirit. Just as two stainless mirrors reflect each other, the fact and our own spirits must stand facing each other with no intervening agents. When this is done we are able to seize upon the living, pulsating fact itself. Freedom is an empty word until then.

In a sentiment that the wise and wonderful Parker Palmer would come to echo decades later in his courageous call for “inner wholeness,” Suzuki adds:

The ultimate standpoint of Zen, therefore, is that we have been led astray through ignorance to find a split in our own being, that there was from the very beginning no need for a struggle between the finite and the infinite, that the peace we are seeking so eagerly after has been there all the time.

More than a century before Alan Lightman so elegantly assuaged our yearning for permanence in a universe of constant change , Suzuki writes:

We are all finite, we cannot live out of time and space; inasmuch as we are earth-created, there is no way to grasp the infinite, how can we deliver ourselves from the limitations of existence? … Salvation must be sought in the finite itself, there is nothing infinite apart from finite things; if you seek something transcendental, that will cut you off from this world of relativity, which is the same thing as the annihilation of yourself. You do not want salvation at the cost of your own existence… Whether you understand or not, just the same go on living in the finite, with the finite; for you die if you stop eating and keeping yourself warm on account of your aspiration for the infinite… Therefore the finite is the infinite, and vice versa. These are not two separate things, though we are compelled to conceive them so, intellectually.

Suzuki argues that the ultimate essence of Zen lies in its promise, both practical and profound, to “deliver us from the oppression and tyranny of these intellectual accumulations” and to offer, instead, a foundation of character at once solid and transcendent:

Zen may be considered a discipline aiming at the reconstruction of character. Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul… We are … made to live on the superficiality of things. We may be clever, bright, and all that, but what we produce lacks depth, sincerity, and does not appeal to the inmost feelings… A deep spiritual experience is bound to effect a change in the moral structure of one’s personality.

And yet this “reconstruction of character”” is no cosmetic tweak:

Being so long accustomed to the oppression [of the intellect], the mental inertia becomes hard to remove. In fact it has gone down deep into the roots of our own being, and the whole structure of personality is to be overturned. The process of reconstruction is stained with tears and blood… It is no pastime but the most serious task in life; no idlers will ever dare attempt it. […] Zen goes straight down to the foundations of personality.

In the remainder of Essays in Zen Buddhism , Suzuki goes on to equip us with the necessary tools of character and spirit for undertaking this task of a lifetime. Complement it with Alan Watts on life, reality, and becoming who you really are and the story of what John Cage’s journey into Buddhism reveals about the inner life of artists .

— Published January 30, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/01/30/d-t-suzuki-essays-in-zen-buddhism/ —

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