The Columbia Lectures That Gave the West a Zen Vocabulary

From 1952 to 1957, in his eighties, D.T. Suzuki held a standing seminar at Columbia University in New York that has since been credited as the single event that seeded the vocabulary of Zen in English for a general audience outside Asian studies departments. The room drew a startling cross section of American intellectual life: the composer John Cage sat beside the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, the painter Philip Guston, the philosopher Arthur Danto, the sculptor Ibram Lassaw and the writer Dorothy Norman among them, none of them Buddhologists, all of them carrying what they heard back into their own fields. Cage's later embrace of chance and silence in music, and Fromm's turn toward Zen in his own clinical writing, both trace directly to those Wednesday afternoons. Suzuki had met Alan Watts even earlier, in 1936 at the World Congress of Faiths in London, and Watts's own decades of popularizing lectures and books built on a vocabulary, satori, koan, zazen, mu, that Suzuki had already carried into English in his prewar Essays in Zen Buddhism and refined again at Columbia. In 1957 Suzuki and Fromm co-led a further seminar in Cuernavaca, Mexico, published as Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, formally joining Zen to the vocabulary of Western psychotherapy. Almost no one who sat in that Columbia room was a specialist in Buddhism, which is exactly why the words that reached them spread as far and as fast as they did.