Search Results

D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) was a scholar who published extensively in Japanese and English and achieved international recognition as an authority and proponent of Buddhism in the 20th century. He was one of a generation of young progressive Buddhists in Japan seeking to rehabilitate the religion and ensure its survival by interpreting it in a modern idiom. Suzuki grew up in humble circumstances but managed to attend Tokyo Imperial University for several years. At the same time, he received Zen training as a lay practitioner at Engakuji monastery in Kamakura. Through an introduction by his Zen master, who had international connections, Suzuki was able to travel to America in 1897 to assist in English translation projects on Asian religions. There he lived for eleven years working for Open Court Publishing in Illinois, all the while absorbing Western scholarship on religion and philosophy. During this time, Suzuki began to publish his own works on Buddhism and Asian religions. He returned to Japan in 1909 and took a position as an English professor in the preparatory school of Gakushūin in Tokyo. In 1921 Suzuki moved to Ōtani University in Kyoto as a professor of English and Buddhist studies. Over the next twenty years, he published some of his most influential works in English, many of which introduced Europeans and Americans to Zen. After living in semi-retirement in Kamakura during the war years, Suzuki again had the opportunity to travel overseas in 1949. He spent almost a decade in America, affiliated first with the University of Hawai‘i, then with Claremont Graduate School in California, and, finally, most prominently, with Columbia University in New York. During this period Buddhism, particularly Zen, became wildly popular in America and Europe, and Suzuki quickly rose to the status of a celebrity intellectual. After retiring to Japan in 1958, he continued to write and make appearances. When he died in 1966 at the age of ninety-five, Suzuki was renowned worldwide for his advancement of Zen and Buddhism generally. Suzuki’s scholarship on Buddhism focused particularly on Zen, Mahayana, and Pure Land. In Zen, he singled out satori, or Zen enlightenment, as the pivotal element in its religious life and practice. In Mahayana, he emphasized the ideas of nonduality and the interpenetration of all things and sought to spread knowledge of Mahayana in Western circles to counterbalance the better-known Theravada tradition. In Pure Land, he shifted the focus from enlightenment after death in Amida Buddha’s paradise to religious fulfillment in the present world and present life. In all these forms of Buddhism, Suzuki applied the concepts of religious experience and mysticism, which were widely recognized in Western scholarship. His success in presenting Buddhism to Western readers resulted in the widespread adoption of his interpretations by mainstream thinkers and counterculture movements alike in America and Europe. His ideas also commanded great respect in mid-20th-century Japan as part of Buddhism’s modern revitalization.

D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) was a renowned scholar, proponent, and popularizer of Buddhism in the 20th century. He grew up in modest circumstances in Kanazawa, Japan, and was a strong student in primary and secondary school. Though he was forced to withdraw before graduation, he managed to enter Tokyo Imperial University in 1892 as a special student and received instruction in Western philosophy and literature. At the same time, Suzuki began intensive Zen training as a lay practitioner at Engakuji monastery in nearby Kamakura. His master, Shaku Sōen, who had international connections, later recommended him to Open Court Publishing in the United States to assist in its projects on Asian religions. Suzuki lived in Illinois for eleven years, working mostly in translation, editing, and proofreading while also absorbing Western scholarship on religion and philosophy. During this time he began publishing his own works on Buddhism and Asian religions. He returned to Japan in 1909 and took a position as an English professor in the preparatory division of Gakushūin in Tokyo. He also resumed Zen practice with Shaku Sōen in Kamakura and collaborated with him on Japanese publications on Zen. By this time Suzuki had produced an array of works on Buddhism in English and Japanese. In 1921 Suzuki was appointed professor of English and Buddhist studies at Ōtani University in Kyoto. There he launched the journal The Eastern Buddhism, co-edited with his American wife Beatrice Lane Suzuki (1875–1939), which became an important international venue for scholarship on Mahayana Buddhism. Over the next twenty years Suzuki published some of his most influential books in English, many of which introduced Europeans and Americans to Zen. He also produced important works on Mahayana and Pure Land Buddhism. After his wife died in 1939, he went into semi-retirement in Kamakura and spent the war years publishing in Japanese on Zen, Pure Land, and Japan’s spirituality. After World War II, Suzuki emerged as a public figure in Japan. This was also the time when Western interest in Buddhism increased dramatically. In 1949 Suzuki went overseas again and spent almost a decade in the United States, primarily on the faculty of Columbia University. During this period he gave countless lectures and talks in the United States and Europe, and met frequently with prominent Western thinkers. Suzuki quickly rose to fame as a celebrity intellectual. After retiring to Japan in 1958, he continued to write and make appearances throughout his remaining years. When he died in 1966 at the age of ninety-five, Suzuki was acclaimed worldwide as the foremost proponent of Zen and as an authority on Buddhism.

Buddhist institutions were first established in the Japanese archipelago in the 6th century ce. In the same period, the ruling families incorporated Chinese-style medicine and Daoist ritual healing techniques into Japanese culture and society. By the 8th century, Buddhism had become a dominant cultural force in Japan. The Japanese Buddhist textual tradition was shaped by translations from Sanskrit into classical Chinese, and Chinese texts remained paramount for all branches of scholarship. In the ensuing centuries, a rich and hybrid ritual, material, and intellectual culture emerged from combining these various religious and scholarly traditions, as well as elements of the local tradition of kami神 (gods) worship. This also resulted in a distinct tradition of Buddhist medicine, which blossomed in the Kamakura period (1185–1333). The esoteric (or tantric) tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism with its idea of mutual empowerment (kaji加持) and unification of the ritualist and a buddha, bodhisattva, or other Buddhist deity, directing their power to heal, protect, etc., was the prevailing paradigm. Other traditions developed over the course of the centuries, too, notably Pure Land, Nichiren, and Zen Buddhism, and the vinaya restoration movement (Shingon Ritsu). These also had an impact on the ideas and practices of healing and medical care. All shared the aim of providing the means for salvation and ultimate liberation from sickness and suffering. Lay patrons in early and medieval Japan funded the construction of hospitals and other care facilities as well as medicinal gardens. The Japanese monastics who studied the classical Chinese medical texts and treated their patients following the ideal of the compassionate bodhisattva were also familiar with basic ideas from Indian Āyurveda from translated sutras and commentaries. As such, etiology and diagnosis in the Japanese Buddhist context included epistemic and cosmological thought from both China and India. In the Buddhist context, rituals such as elaborate fire-offering ceremonies (goma護摩) were commonly used to take care of patients of all ages. Buddhist treatments also included empowered medicines, acupuncture, and moxibustion. Buddhist priests provided palliative care, and deathbed rituals were conducted to protect the dying from evil forces and prepare them spiritually for a good death and future birth. Buddhist medical practitioners not only included monastic doctors, usually called sōi僧医 in modern literature, but also various kinds of exorcists and healers. These groups produced talismans and amulets, and offered protective rituals within the paradigmatic framework of Japanese Buddhism. Pilgrimage to sacred sites at Buddhist temples provided a way for monastics and lay people to find healing and support. The external treatment of afflictions often went hand in hand with internal, mental, or cognitive methods such as various forms of meditation. These methods were primarily practiced by the monastically trained, but some, such as naikan内観, “internal observation,” were practiced by a wider circle of practitioners. Buddhistic methods were also used to treat animals.

The Buddhist religion has a long and rich tradition of biographical literature. This literature has functioned to unify distinct and often contradictory elements of Buddhist ritual, practice, and doctrine, adjusting these elements to specific historical situations. Scholarship on the function of literary characters in making narrative worlds coherent supports this argument: when readers engage characters, they draw together textual and non-textual data to construct beings that are similar to themselves. This connection of a specific situation with a larger whole, a connection that is at the same time an organization, can be observed in how Buddhist biographies are built. Biographies of Shakyamuni, for example, contain many traces of changes motivated by local conditions. The body of Shakyamuni is used to authorize these changes: the local is situated at the heart of Buddhism. Biographies of Chinese Buddhist saints attest to the same process, as can be seen in the shifting representation of Indian saints in China or the literary transformations of the Patriarchs of the Chan school. While these changing representations reflect changes in historical Buddhist communities, they can also produce attitudes and regulate behaviors. The debate on the portrayal and effects of women and animals in Indian Buddhist texts provides an illustration of this, as does scholarship on how saintly ideals regulate behavior. The case of Buddhist autobiography, a genre at times so closely connected to biography that it is nearly indistinguishable from it, provides a final example of how identity is structured in Buddhist biography.