The Great Suzuki

The Great Suzuki October 18, 2016

dtsuzukiTeitaro Suzuki was born on this day in 1870. He was born into a Samurai family, his father a physician. His father’s death plunged the family into penury. The questions that rise out of seeing the vagaries of life drove him into a deep spiritual quest.

He entered the University of Tokyo studying classical Buddhist languages while at the same time beginning to sit at Engakuji Rinzai Zen temple. He became the student of the master there, Imakita Kosen, under whom he had his first experiences of kensho.

Later, when Soyen Shaku, Kosen Roshi’s successor as the master of Engakuji was in America for the World Parliament of Religions he became friends with the publisher and scholar Paul Carus. Carus asked the roshi if he would stay and help him with translating and publishing Zen Buddhist texts into English. Shaku Roshi declined, but recommended his lay student Daisetsu (his dharma name, meaning “great humility,” possibly was aspirational) Teitaro Suzuki.

With that Suzuki moved to Illinois and into the Carus household, where he assisted in translating the Tao Te Ching, and began work on what would become Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism. There Suzuki also met, fell in love with, and married Beatrice Erskine Lane.

The couple returned to Japan where Suzuki took up a professorship at Otani University. At that time he also met Shinichi Hisamatsu and became connected, although not formally with the Kyoto School of Buddhist philosophers. He would teach in Japan and the united States for the rest of his life, and for a number of years later in his career as a visiting professor at Columbia.

Suzuki would travel widely, lecturing across North America and Europe. And most importantly, perhaps, he wrote, in good time, over a hundred books. Much of these efforts focused on Zen. His circle of influence included the psychologist Carl Jung, the Catholic monk, peace activist and mystic, Thomas Merton, poets like Gary Snyder and Alan Ginsberg, and, perhaps most importantly Alan Watts, whose own books on Zen were essentially popularizations of Suzuki’s work, and which reached the general educated English speaking readership like an atomic bomb.

There are many reasons to criticize D. T. Suzuki, some of them even deserved. As far as Zen is concerned he presented a not fully historical, romanticized version of the Zen dharma that subsequent scholars and teachers have had to work with, against, and around.

But, let me be clear. If there were no Suzuki, Zen in the West even vaguely as we experience it, would not exist.

So, incense and bows!

And, endless gratitude…


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