D.T. Suzuki

Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki (鈴木 大拙 貞太郎) was born on 18 October 1870 in Honda-machi, Kanazawa, in Japan's Ishikawa Prefecture, into a family of physicians of samurai descent that had been impoverished by the Meiji Restoration. He studied at Waseda University and the Imperial University of Tokyo, where he acquired the unusual command of Chinese, Sanskrit, Pāli, English, French, and German that would later define his career as a translator and interpreter of the Zen tradition for Western readers^[1].

During his Tokyo years Suzuki began zazen at Engaku-ji in Kamakura under Imakita Kōsen, and after Kōsen's death in 1892 he continued under Kōsen's heir Soyen Shaku, undergoing what he later described as "four years of mental, physical, moral, and intellectual struggle" before receiving the lay name Daisetsu — "Great Simplicity" — from his teacher. Suzuki never took monastic ordination; his entire career was as a lay (koji) Zen practitioner and scholar, a status that was decisive in shaping how Zen would later be presented to the West^[1][2].

In 1897, on Soyen's recommendation, Suzuki travelled to LaSalle, Illinois, to assist the German-American philosopher Paul Carus at Open Court Publishing. Over the next eleven years he translated the *Tao Te Ching*, Aśvaghoṣa's *Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana* (Open Court, 1900), and produced *Outlines of Mahāyāna Buddhism* (Luzac, 1907) — the first systematic English presentation of the tradition. After returning to Japan he married the American Theosophist Beatrice Erskine Lane in 1911 and took up a chair in Buddhist philosophy at Ōtani University in Kyoto in 1921, where the couple founded the journal *The Eastern Buddhist*^[1].

The works that made Suzuki the single most influential interpreter of Zen for the twentieth-century West appeared in a sustained burst from London publisher Luzac and later Rider: *Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series* (1927), *Second Series* (1933) and *Third Series* (1934); *An Introduction to Zen Buddhism* (1934), for which C. G. Jung wrote his celebrated foreword; *The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk* (1934); and *Manual of Zen Buddhism* (1935). After the war he produced *Zen and Japanese Culture* (Princeton/Bollingen, 1959, an expansion of his 1938 *Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture*), *Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist* (Harper, 1957), and the late *Shin Buddhism* lectures^[1].

From 1952 to 1957 Suzuki taught at Columbia University, where his open seminars drew John Cage, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, the psychoanalyst Richard DeMartino, Thomas Merton and a circle of Beat writers including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The 1957 conference in Cuernavaca that produced *Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis* (Harper, 1960, with Fromm and DeMartino), together with his earlier exchanges with Jung at the Eranos meetings, fixed his idiosyncratic reading of Zen — emphasising satori, "pure experience" in the manner of his Kyoto School friend Nishida Kitarō, and the irrational over the institutional — as the West's default image of the tradition. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963, he died in Kamakura on 12 July 1966; his pupils Masao Abe and Mihoko Okamura carried his interpretive project forward through *The Eastern Buddhist* and the thirty-two-volume *Suzuki Daisetsu Zenshū*^[1][3].