Dr. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870, Kanazawa, Japan - 1966; standard transliteration: Suzuki Daisetsu, 鈴木大拙) was a famous author of books and essays on Buddhism and Zen that were instrumental in spreading interest in Zen to the West.

Early Life

The Samurai class into which Suzuki was born having declined with the fall of feudalism in Japan, and his physician father having died, Suzuki was raised in impoverished circumstances by his mother. 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.

His brother, a lawyer, financed his life and education in Tokyo at Waseda University. During this time (1891), he also entered spiritual studies at Engaku-ji in Kamakura initially under Kosen Roshi, then after Kosen’s death, with Soyen Shaku. The studies were essentially internal and non-verbal. The task involved what Suzuki described as four years of mental, physical, moral, and intellectual struggle.

During training periods at Engaku-ji, Suzuki lived the monk's life. He described this life and his own experience at Kamakura in his book The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk. Suzuki was invited by Soyen Shaku to visit the United States in the 1890s. Suzuki acted as English-language translator for a book written by him (1906). Though Suzuki had by this point done some translation into English of ancient Asian texts, his role in translating and ghost-writing aspects of this book was more the beginning of Suzuki's career as a writer in English.

Career

While he was young, Suzuki had set about acquiring knowledge of Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, and several European languages. Soyen Shaku was one of the invited speakers at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893. When a German scholar who had set up residence in Illinois, Dr. Paul Carus, approached Soyen Shaku to request his help in translating and preparing Oriental spiritual literature for publication in the West, the latter instead recommended his disciple Suzuki for the job. Suzuki lived at Dr. Carus’s home 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.

Besides living in the United States, he traveled through Europe before taking up a professorship back in Japan. Suzuki married Beatrice Erskine Lane, a Theosophist and Radcliffe graduate, in 1911. Dedicating themselves to spreading an understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, they lived in a cottage on the Engaku-ji grounds until 1919, then moved to Kyoto, where Suzuki began professorship at Otani University in 1921.

In the same year he joined Otani University, he and his wife, Beatrice, founded the Eastern Buddhist Society; the Society is focused on Mahayana Buddhism and offers lectures and seminars, and publishes a Scholarly journal, The Eastern Buddhist. 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.

Still a professor of Buddhist philosophy in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Suzuki wrote some of the most celebrated introductions and overall examinations of Buddhism, and particularly of its Japanese Zen school. His reputation was secured in England prior to the U.S. Besides popular 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 Saburo Hasegawa, Judith Tyberg, Alan Watts and the others who worked in the California Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco in the 1950s.

Suzuki is often linked to the Kyoto School of philosophy, but he is not considered one of its official members. Suzuki took an interest in other traditions besides Zen. His book Zen and Japanese Buddhism delved into the history and scope of interest of all the major Japanese Buddhist sects. He also wrote a small volume about Shin Buddhism. And he took an interest in Christian mysticism and some of the noted off-beat mystics of the West.

D.T. Suzuki's books have been widely read and commented on by many important figures. A notable example is An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, which includes a thirty page commentary by famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Other works include Zen and Japanese Culture, Studies in Zen Buddhism, and Manual of Zen Buddhism. Additionally, Willam Barrett has compiled many of Suzuki's articles and essays concerning Zen into a volume entitled Studies in Zen.

Suzuki's Zen master, Soyen Shaku, who also wrote a book published in the United States (English translation by Suzuki), had emphasized the Mahayana Buddhist outlook of the Zen tradition. Contrasting with this, to a degree, was Suzuki's own view that in its centuries of development in China, Zen (or Ch'an) had absorbed much from indigenous Chinese Taoism.

Despite Suzuki's pioneering efforts, today he is sometimes considered a marginal figure, who was neither a formal Zen monk nor a serious historian. This may be a somewhat harsh view, since some clearly credible Western scholars, such as Heinrich Dumoulin, have acknowledged some degree of debt to Suzuki's published work. Nevertheless, Suzuki's view of Zen Buddhism, today judged to be an idealized portrayal, as well as his ambivalent position toward Japanese imperialism in the interwar years, have both come under much scrutiny.

References

These essays were influential when they came out; making Zen more widely known in the West.

• D T Suzuki. Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series, New York: Grove Press
• ---- Essays in Zen Buddhism: Second Series, New York: Samuel Wieser, Inc. 1953-1971. Edited by Christmas Humphreys.
• ---- Essays in Zen Buddhism: Third Series, York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc, 1953. Edited by Christmas Humphreys.

• ---- The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind
• ---- Living by Zen
• ---- Manual of Zen Buddhism, New York: Grove Press, 1960. A collection of Buddhist texts, images,including the "ten ox-herding pictures".
• ---- trans. of Lankavatara Sutra from the Sanskrit. Boulder, CO: Prajña Press, 1978, ISBN 0877737029, first published Routledge Kegan Paul, 1932.
• ---- Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist: The Eastern and Western Way, Macmillan, 1957. "A study of the qualities Meister Eckhart share with Zen and Shin Buddhism".
• ---- Swedenborg: Buddha of the North, West Chester, Pa: Swedenborg Foundation, 1996. Trans. by Andrew Bernstein of Swedenborugu, 1913.

External links

• Biography of D.T. Suzuki at Otani University (http://web.otani.ac.jp/EBS/dts.html)

• Eastern Buddhist Society (http://web.otani.ac.jp/EBS/)