D.T. Suzuki

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.

Suzuki described Zen as a direct, timeless experience prior to language and doctrine, satori grasped in an instant rather than reached through history, and for decades that description was taken largely on his own authority, since he was one of very few voices writing about Zen in English at all. Later historians of Buddhism, Robert Sharf prominent among them, argue this presentation was not a neutral transmission of a Japanese tradition but Suzuki's own synthesis, shaped by nineteenth century Japanese Buddhist modernism and by Western categories, William James's psychology of religious experience among them, that he was writing for an American and European readership already primed to hear Zen that way. His actual training was lay rather than fully monastic: he sat with the Rinzai teacher Soen Shaku and underwent the discipline seriously, but he did not hold the formal transmission of an ordained Zen master, a fact his own Western readers rarely knew to ask about. A separate and more serious line of criticism concerns his wartime writings, in which he associated the discipline of Zen practice with Japanese martial and national character in ways historians including Brian Victoria read as lending intellectual cover to Japan's war effort, a record his postwar reputation as a bridge builder tends to obscure rather than resolve. The atlas records both halves: the reach of his popularizing was real and lasting, and so is the case that what reached the West was Suzuki's Zen rather than simply Zen.