This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'll thank you all for coming. I guess this is on and taping this for those who might want to hear it at another time. Before I launch into the topic for today, which is around Zen Center, San Francisco Zen Center, the person I refer to as the Other Suzuki. I thought I'd say a word or two about my connection with Zen Center and with Tatsahara. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Richard Jaffe, and I currently am an Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. in North Carolina. And I am a specialist in the history of Japanese Buddhism, particularly 18th, 19th, 20th century Japanese Buddhism.

[01:11]

And I spent a number of years at the Zen Center, where I ended up, after starting to sit zazen as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and ended up at Zen Center and was at Zen Center off and on between 76 and 79 and then from 79 up until 1985 when I headed off to graduate school at Yale University where I received my PhD in Japanese Buddhist studies, learning classical Chinese and Japanese and so on. My wife Elaine and I, who were both here at Tassajara together, spent three years in Japan. where I did the research for my first book, which I noticed is in the library here, and I'll say a bit about that in a second. But I have since started teaching in 1994, have been traveling back and forth to Japan once or twice a year, and been spending probably about a month a year in Japan, occasionally longer, for longer stretches, doing research.

[02:26]

is archivally based, so I am very reliant on trips to Japan to get the documents I need for the work I do. As an American Buddhist practitioner, a number of the topics in which I've been interested as a scholar have grown out of my own practice and experience of Buddhism and questions that have arisen for me as I practice. So my first book is entitled Neither Monk Nor Layman, and that is a look at the history of how Japanese Buddhists came to abandon the practice of clerical celibacy almost universally among the monks and nuns, resulting in the practice that we have here in the United States today, those people who are in Japanese lineage is where people who are ordained clerics can marry, have children, families, and live as householders.

[03:31]

So that particular topic arose. Actually, if those of you are familiar with Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I imagine a couple of you may be. Towards the end of the book, he says, you in America are neither monk nor layman. And he mentions about this, how this may be difficult for you. And I said in the introduction to my first book, that it was indebted to the other Suzuki, or the Suzuki, this is the other Suzuki, Shunyu Suzuki, because it was that passage that spurred my interest in that topic. The topic of today's talk similarly emerges from my own experience as a practitioner and a scholar of American Buddhism, but I think more as a practitioner. I want to talk about someone I just thought actually I should ask out of curiosity how many of you read some how many of you heard of DT Suzuki Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki and how many of you have read something by Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki so we're down to about a third of the people who raised their hands who'd heard of him how many of you are currently reading something by Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki

[04:56]

Okay. Oh, one person, okay, what are you reading? Correspondence between E. Suzuki and Alice Merton. Oh, okay, is that in one of Merton's books? Yeah, it's one of Merton's, well, it's just their... Just their correspondence? Yeah, they had a very rich correspondence, and I'll say a word or two about that in a minute. So, yeah, he's not that widely read. When I came in, To Jamesburg, I saw an old friend, Keith Meyerhoff, and Keith said, oh, I'm sorry, you know, I can't come in to hear the talk. Maybe he'll listen to this one evening or one midday soon. But Keith said to me, you know, Suzuki, I have a deep connection with Suzuki. That was the first thing I read when I decided to go and start practicing. He'd been a student in Iowa, then he went to Lutheran Seminary. So for many people of that generation of practitioner and the generation after that, there wasn't that much to read about Zen.

[06:10]

And Suzuki was the guy, D.T. Suzuki. Daisetsu is his Buddhist name. It means great simplicity. It was the name given to him by his teacher, a man named Shaku Soen, who was the incumbent or abbot of the temple Ngakuchi in Japan, where Suzuki practiced for, where DT practiced for many years. But, so many people, you know, he's not that widely read anymore, but As someone who's practiced, I think if we were to designate patriarchs for the American Buddhism to extend the ancestors' chant, I think there would be a reason to add him to that list. He's a little different than many of the people in our list of ancestors that we chant in the morning liturgy.

[07:15]

in that he was not a teacher himself, but he was essential in transmitting Buddhism, I think, from Japan to the United States and to Europe, to making Japanese Buddhism known more widely outside of Japan. So, It was in part in... I guess with a sense of gratitude and appreciation that as I was working, finishing up one project and moving on to another, I became more and more interested in D.T. Suzuki. Teitaro, by the way, I got a little sidetracked there mentally, but Teitaro is his given name. And he was a Buddhist... layman. He never was ordained as a cleric.

[08:17]

He practiced as a layman his whole life. He debated for quite a while when he was practicing intensively whether or not to become ordained. And I think that's something that comes up for a lot of practitioners. And he decided in the end that it would be more helpful for Buddhism and for Japanese Buddhism for him to contribute from the outside as a layman, as someone who would speak globally. And he did become, towards the end of his life, truly a global citizen. Now, I imagine you know some of you bits and pieces about him, But I thought what I would do today is talk a little bit about his life, which is absolutely incredible, the life that this man led.

[09:19]

It is truly an amazing life. And talk a little bit about his view of Buddhism in relationship to that biography, what he hoped to accomplish. And then tomorrow, I sent to Greg a packet of readings, which he put up in the library. But I also have, I made copies coming in, before I came in, of several short talks that Suzuki gave. And tomorrow, what I'd like to do is take a look and read here. I don't expect you to read them in advance, but you're welcome to. I'll put the copies up in the library, or maybe we can leave them down here in the dining room to take a look at those. And then tomorrow I would like to talk, read through a couple of these talks closely and talk about them. But today I would like to provide this background about Suzuki for you. There may be some redundancy for some of you, but I think much of what I have to say will be new for most of you.

[10:26]

I said it was an incredible life and indeed it was DT maybe I should just call him DT so we have no confusion here with the Suzuki's DT was born in 1870 in western Japan in a town castle town called Kanazawa beautiful town on the Japan sea coast which And this is somewhat important for understanding Suzuki and his group of amazing friends that he had. Very, very talented group of friends he emerged from Kanazawa with, alongside of. Kanazawa had a really stellar educational system dating back into the early modern period in Japan, what's called the Tokugawa or the Edo period. And when Japan became a modern nation-state beginning in 1868, the educational system in Kanazawa changed somewhat, but it remained a very, very high-quality educational system.

[11:49]

So Suzuki was born there. He lost his father at an early age. He lived until 1966, 96 years. Long life. And it was a long, healthy life. He was a very vigorous man for almost his entire lifetime, up until the time he died. He wrote his first book in 1896 and stopped writing in 1966, the year he died, shortly before his death. His collected works in Japanese runs to 40 volumes. And that does not include all the English language writings. He wrote in both English and he wrote in Japanese. He was incredibly productive that way.

[12:51]

Articles, books, his English language biography runs to something like 400, a little bit more than 400 items or so. You don't do that without a certain amount of recycling and redundancy. Scholars do that. And he was a man who lived by his wits. He had no formal degree until he received an honorary doctor of literature degree from a Buddhist university in Kyoto in the 1930s. He was self-educated. He had to drop out of high school as a young man. because his father had died when he was six and he could no longer afford, at a certain point the family could not afford, school tuition for him. So he had to drop out from school and he was basically self-educated. He came to the United States early on and was among the very first Buddhists to make an impression upon non-Japanese Zen Buddhists.

[14:03]

to make an impression upon non-Japanese audiences in both the United States and in Europe, where he also traveled. As this gentleman mentioned, he had the uncanny ability, and again, this is another incredible aspect of this man's life, the uncanny ability to move in circles of other fascinating religious and intellectual figures for almost his entire life. And in many ways to remain at the cutting edge, the avant-garde of religious and intellectual currents for almost six decades or more. from around 1900 on until his death.

[15:05]

What do I mean by that? Well, he was a contributor to his teacher's talk at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, which was a very important Congress, World Congress of religious teachers from around the globe that took place in Chicago. He came to Chicago in 1897 and remained in, well, LaSalle, Illinois, actually, a little bit west of Chicago, remained there until 1909 or so and worked with a very interesting German scholar of religion who had moved to the United States named Paul Karras, writing about religion, helping translate works like the Tao Te Ching, the way in its power. and other classics. He wrote an early book, The Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, during that period. In the 1920s, he began to publish, quite prolifically, books about Zen.

[16:13]

His essays in Zen Buddhism, he published three volumes. I should note, I went up to the library, and there are 20-odd, or 20 or more books by Diti Suzuki up there, including a first edition of his Essays in Zen Buddhism, which is a nice thing to have. You should take good care of that book, published in 1927. He continued to stay in touch with a whole series of religious teachers, important religious teachers, including people like Krishnamurti in the 1930s, when Krishnamurti was becoming well-known as a religious teacher. And then, in particular, after the end of the Second World War, he was able to enter into conversations with people like Thomas Merton, with people like Eric Frum, the psychoanalyst.

[17:15]

They did a very popular book that sold, I believe, as many as a million copies called Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. It was part of this conversation that took place between psychoanalysts and Suzuki, Zen Buddhists, I would say, but it was really one Zen Buddhist. It was D.T. Suzuki. Had conversations with people like Paul Tillich, the theologian, and a whole series of artists who came to his open lectures at Columbia University in the 50s. Artists, writers, people like... This one is not Absolutely certain. J.D. Salinger, possibly. But certainly John Cage, the painter Leonora Carrington, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, this group of psychoanalysists that included Karen Horney, who was one of the first post-Freudian feminist psychoanalysts, Eric Fromm, another neo-Freudian who became quite enamored with Suzuki.

[18:21]

Physicist Carl Jung is another one. Suzuki gave a number of lectures in Switzerland, the Aranos lectures. So when you think about a life, personally I have to say that one's not too shabby. It is a very impressive, productive life that he led. Now, he has fallen on somewhat hard times among scholars to a degree. And it was as part of an attempt to approach him with some appreciation rather than just from a perspective of critique that I embarked on a project to anthologize some writings of his that had been published before, but had weren't in wide circulation, to add some new writings, some translations from Japanese works of his that had never been translated.

[19:37]

And we are now, volume three is now in production. I brought for the library here volume one, and we'll be doing some readings from this. is Volume 1, The Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki. Volume 2, I'm the general editor of the four volumes in this series. Volume 2 is edited by a scholar named James Dobbins. It's on Suzuki's thinking about Pure Land Buddhism. That's already, it's sold out, but it's... I don't think they printed that many copies, so it's not very impressive that it's sold out. But it's sold out. But when I get a hold of a copy, I will donate one of those to Tassahara as well. This is for my Tassahara friends past, present, and future. So I said that Suzuki has fallen on somewhat of hard times with regard to the scholarly community. And I think in part that's because...

[20:38]

The way scholarship tends to work is one makes one's name through critique and attack more frequently than one does through appreciation. But I think there's room for a scholarship of appreciation and a scholarship that grows out of empathy. And I think having one without the other, you need to have balance there. both sides of it, critique and empathy, critique and appreciation. And it's with some sense, as I said, of gratitude and appreciation with which I approach this project. And as I reviewed the scholarship on Suzuki, and let me say at this point, you know, if you have a question, feel free to break in and raise your hand and ask me a question. You don't have to just sit there. If I say something that... make a jump or something and some point isn't clear, or you want me to expand on something, just let me know and I'll be happy to do that.

[21:45]

But in many ways, I think Suzuki has been misunderstood, not understood well. There are some myths about him that I attempted to, myths in the sense of things that are not true, that I attempted to correct, In the course of doing this project, my volume, which is the Zen volume, has a long introduction, about 60 pages or so. And I take on some of these misunderstandings about Suzuki and who he was and about his writings and so on. So what are these various misunderstandings? What are a couple of them that I want to set the record straight about? One is his relationship with Buddhism itself. Was Suzuki... How knowledgeable was he about Buddhism?

[22:52]

Was he a practitioner? Was he just an intellectual, a Japanese who was well-read and approached Buddhism as an intellectual? Anyone have any thoughts about that? hazard a guess. He had a very deep, long-running... Well, one of the critiques of him has been, let me put it this way, that he practiced for a short time at a place like Tassahara and Gakuji in North Kamakura, Japan, just southeast of Tokyo. Practiced there for a few years, like... Some of you may be at Tassajara, two, three years, and then go off. And he parlayed that, two or three years at Tassajara, into a career as a scholar of Buddhism.

[23:54]

Yes, Greg. Question. Is Tokaji a sub-temple of Angakaji? Yes. And why do you ask about Tokaji? We saw the pieces of his gravesite, or where his ashes are interred. Yeah. So Greg is asking, the area where the Ngakuji is located is beautiful. Very hilly. It's a little bit Marin County-like. And was a real enclave 50, 60 years ago, and still is to a certain extent for artists who wanted to escape from Tokyo. It's right on the sea. It's beautiful. Hilly. Just a very, very... Nice location. And Ngakuji is located there. And right across the street from Ngakuji is a temple that used to be a temple, it was a convent for women who were divorced. Would go there and be ordained as nuns. And would practice there and would be in retreat from the world after they'd gone through a divorce.

[24:59]

At a certain point, sort of the end of the 19th century, maybe a little bit before that, it became... It was no longer a convent and became the temple where the retired incumbent of Ngaku-ji, the abbot of Ngaku-ji, would go and would become the incumbent at Toka-ji and run that temple. And there's a grave site there that is a real power spot, you know, sort of the Japanese... intellectuals, intelligentsia. A number of them have graves there. D.T. Suzuki, his teacher, Shaka Soen, who was an amazing and very talented man, went to Sri Lanka as a young man and learned Pali to a certain extent and had a Western education, one of the first Rinzai clerics to get a Western education at a Japanese university, a very important Japanese university. He was received... Inka permission to teach from his teacher, Imaki Kosen, who was Suzuki's, DT's first teacher, at a very young age.

[26:05]

He blasted through the koan, Rinzai koan system. He was quite a talented man, and he was very close with DT Suzuki. So his gravesite is at Tokeji for that reason, as is DT Suzuki's, as is a grave for Nishida Kitaro, who was a close friend of Suzuki and one of the foremost, probably the most famous 20th century Japanese philosopher. He was from the same hometown as Suzuki and they were friends as high school students and remained friends until Nishida died in 1945. He was part of this group of incredible individuals who came out of Kanazawa, Japan that I mentioned earlier. R.H. Blythe has his grave site there And he was deeply influenced by Suzuki and a close correspondent. He's another name I should have mentioned. I don't know how many of you are familiar with R.H. Blythe who wrote Zen and Haiku and Zen Buddhism and what is it?

[27:07]

And literature. Anyway, R.H. Blythe was close friends with Suzuki and he has a grave at Tokaji as well. So that's the connection there. And I don't know if you saw it when you were there, but D.T. Suzuki's archive, Pine Hill Library, the Matsugaoka Library, is up at the top of a hill overlooking Tokaji. And the reason it's there is because his teacher thought well enough of Suzuki and what he was doing as a scholar and a layman to provide him with the property on temple grounds to build a library and archive for his work. So... getting back to these misunderstandings about Suzuki, one misunderstanding is that he had this very short period of practice and that was it. And much of what he wrote was him parlaying that three years of practice at Ngakuji into a very good, prosperous, productive academic career.

[28:16]

I spent three years at Tassahara and I've done something similar. However, in Suzuki's case, it's wrong. DT continued to practice with his teacher, Shaka Soen. Shaka Soen was his second or third teacher. His first teacher was a man out in Kanazawa. He started practicing as a high school student. When he moved to Tokyo as a university student, he met someone who knew Imakita Kose, who was Shaku Soen's teacher. And just as long as this is here, I see Jane Hirschfield looks like preceded me using this thing. I see some haiku and asho and so on, so I imagine that's Jane. And I'll get out of the way here so you can see these names. Imakita Kose. And his student...

[29:19]

Shaku is Shakyumuni. And in the Meiji period, when the Japanese Buddhists were all ordered to take surnames, you abandoned your surname when you were ordained prior to the Meiji period. That's leaving home. You dropped your family name and you used your Buddhist name and you would say, I'm Soen from Engakuji. That's how you identify yourself. In the Meiji period, when the government said, everybody has to have every Japanese whether they're a Buddhist cleric or not, has to have a surname for tax purposes and to track the population and so on. As an act of rebellion, a lot of clerics took the surname Shaku, Shakyamuni, which is a practice that dates back to early Chinese Buddhism, but it wasn't common in Japan. Anyway, Shakusōen. Suzuki first practiced with Imakita and then practiced with Shakusōen So beginning in 1891 as a university student, he went to Tokyo to be a university student.

[30:27]

He was at a very good private university called what became Waseda University. Can you all see this? No? Anyway, Imakita Kosen Shakusoe. He very quickly, and again, I can identify with this. This is what happened to me when I went to the University of Michigan at 18. Suzuki got very interested in Zen practice. He started going down sitting a little bit at Ngakuji with Imakita, sitting Sashin. And it was hard to get down there. It's about an hour train ride today, and he was getting down there, sometimes on foot, walking through the night to get down there. Sitting Sashin, going back, trying to go to class, going to fewer and fewer classes, spending more and more time down at Ngakuji. And at a certain point, he just dropped out. And he went and he lived at Ngakuji. Imakita died fairly quickly. I think by 1892 or so, he passed away.

[31:30]

Suzuki was in the next room, and he heard Imakita was a big guy, big man, very powerful. Started out as a Confucian scholar, very powerful man, and he, Suzuki was in the next room, and he heard this thump, Imakita had fallen over, died of a heart attack right there in the next room. And this is, you know, we're talking about the sliding Japanese Fusuma doors there. So Imakita died earlier on, and his Dharma heir was Shakusōen. And Suzuki started practicing with him in 1892 or so. He went to America, as I said, in 1897, and worked... with Paul Karras, he improved his English, he started writing about Buddhism more generally, not Zen right away, but Buddhism more generally in English. He continued to communicate by mail with so on.

[32:31]

Very deep correspondence with his teacher. When Soen came over in 19... I believe it was 1906, after the Russo-Japanese War, Shaka Soen came to the United States and set up camp just outside San Francisco. Actually, it was in San Francisco, on Ocean Avenue, which was farm. It was dairy farm at the time, at the house of a woman named Ida Wallace. And he spent the better part of a year there with D.T. Suzuki as his interpreter, teaching Zen to a group of Americans who were living at this house out by Ocean Avenue in what is now San Francisco, where then it was considered the countryside, sort of like Daly City in the Maltese Falcon. There's nothing there. Suzuki went to Europe after his stay in the United States for a little while, translated Swedenborg, interestingly, into Japanese, called Swedenborg the Buddha of the North,

[33:32]

He returned to Japan, and immediately he got a job in Tokyo, but he started going back down to Kamakura every opportunity he had. Whenever there was a vacation, a break, a weekend, when he was free, he would take the train, which was quite good by then, down to Kita Kamakura and see his teacher. They co-edited a journal about Zen, and he continued to practice with Soen. Now, this is Rinzai Zen practice. with a formal koan system consisting of some 3,000-odd koan through which one has to pass to be considered a full-fledged teacher. But he continued to practice with Soen up until 1919, when Soen died. So, what is that? He started with Imakita in 1891 or so. That's nine years. 28 years of fairly formal Zen practice. Now, he was a layman, so his practice with Soen would have been somewhat different than a cleric, a monk.

[34:40]

The koan training would have been different. But nonetheless, it was a very, I think, very deep and profound connection that he had with his teacher. And he moved through a fair amount of the koan system, as best as I can tell, Suzuki did. Yes? These two teachers you're talking about and D.T. Suzuki, were they very close in heart and or intellectually with Shintoism? You know, they don't actually, as far as I know, write about Shinto very much, but as Japanese, I would imagine... They would pay reverence at a shrine and so on, like many Japanese do, you know, worship, pay reverence to the kami and so on.

[35:41]

But I don't think they had particularly a deep connection with Shinto, either of them. Yeah. So anyway, so that's one aspect of Suzuki's life. In fact, there's a... one of his confidants, a monk, a man named Akizuki Vyomin, who was a Rinzai cleric who received permission to teach from his teacher, had gone through the whole koan system. He became quite close with Suzuki towards the end of Suzuki's life. And Akizuki says that he believes had Soen lived, chances are Suzuki probably himself would have been given permission to teach at some point. But when Soen died, Suzuki ended his formal Zen practice. And when he met Aitken, Robert Aitken, in 1949 or 51 in Hawaii at the East-West Philosopher's Conference, people would often get confused about his role. Are you a teacher? Are you a scholar?

[36:42]

Because of the way he presented himself, he was a very confident, very humble, very charismatic man, Suzuki, D.T. Suzuki. Aitken asked him, are you a teacher or a scholar? And Suzuki's reply, D.T. Suzuki's reply to Aitken was, I'm a talker, not a teacher. So he never took on that role, although he would teach people Zazen. And he taught many Americans, introduced many Americans to Zazen, and served as a go-between for many Americans. People like Philip Kaplow, Richard DiMartino, Bernard Phillips, Robert Aitken. They all came through Suzuki and were introduced to various teachers in Japan, Rinzai teachers in Japan, by him. He played a very pivotal role in that sense of introducing Albert Stunkert, who was around the Zen Center and was pretty close with Ananda Dahlenberg and Suzuki Roshi, was another person who first began practicing Zen through an introduction to

[37:57]

D.T. Suzuki, by a Class A war criminal imprisoned in Sugamo prison that Albert Stunkard was attending to as a doctor after the war, after the Second World War. And he saw this man named Baron, he was a Baron, Baron Hiranuma, sitting Zazen, and was quite impressed by his demeanor and asked him about Zen. And Hiranuma introduced Stunkard to Suzuki. So Suzuki was in the 50s, He was the go-to guy for questions about Zen and to get contact for Americans and Europeans who wanted to practice in Japan. In many ways, I guess, I should have said this earlier, but for a time, particularly in the post-war period, D.T. Suzuki had a profile similar to that of the Dalai Lama today, in that if you heard the word Buddhism, the face you thought of was his.

[39:02]

The name you thought of was his. There was a profile of him in the New Yorker magazine, for example. A very big profile of D.T. Suzuki in the 50s. An NBC documentary in the 50s about D.T. Suzuki that was shot in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. So let me change gears a little and talk a bit about Suzuki's view of Buddhism and his approach to practice. I should sum up and say, you know, so from my perspective, when you read his work, and I think it's worth reading, it's not an easy read. His stuff is not easy. It's older. But there is a lot in there that's worth... considering by people who are practicing. So I wanted to talk a little about his approach to Buddhism, his view of Buddhism, for the next 15 minutes or so, for the last part of today's session.

[40:11]

So what is his view of practice? What is his view of Zen? How did he view Buddhism? And what was his strategy for talking about Buddhism and why? The frontispiece I chose for this collection of his writings is a piece of his calligraphy. It's the character Myo. It's written somewhat differently than it usually is written. It has the, well, anyway. You know, Shogun, the guy who drives the stage, the second character of his name, that's the right side of this character. It's not normally written this way. It's normally written with the character for woman, Nyo. But Suzuki wrote it this way. It's some of an unusual way of writing it.

[41:18]

This, as he saw it, this was, Nyo, it means wondrous. wondrous. And in a word, he thought Zen was about the wondrous. And as an epigraph for this volume, I chose two epigraphs for my introduction. One of them is from something he wrote very early on, and this stayed with Suzuki for his whole career. He said, to sum things up in a word, Zen is wondrous. Myo. Searching for Zen apart from the wondrous is more stupid than looking for fish in the trees. It's an old Japanese expression. Someone who's stupid looks for fish in the trees. So that was one of the epigraphs I took. Because for Suzuki, that sums up his understanding of Zen.

[42:20]

And he was captivated by that notion. This was written in... 1898, that particular quote. But towards the end of his life, he wrote a small article about that word myo and its relationship to the practice of Zen. So, I think some of you probably associate Suzuki with the notion of satori, I imagine, or awakening. Is that correct? Is that... the impression some of you have about him? How so? Yeah, a lot of people talk about this emphasis he has on... Satori, I was talking to Steve Weinberg about this.

[43:24]

And he said, oh, I remember reading that. It's all these people having these Satori experiences and screaming and crying and running out of the room and so on. And that was his impression of Suzuki. And certainly that is there. As a Rinzai guy, he emphasizes this notion of Kensho, of passing through and understanding one's first koan. Very early on, he describes how, in an autobiograph, well, actually, one of the pieces I gave you in that packet is a piece called Early Memories, which is a retrospective, him reflecting in the 1960s about his early life and his early practice with Imakita and Shaxon. But early on, before he came to America, He passed through, he says, his first, he was given the koan mu. And he passed through that koan shortly before coming to America.

[44:28]

He never called it a satori because, at that time, because calling it a satori would be utre in Japanese Zen circles. You didn't talk about your practice in that way. I passed my koan. You didn't say that to other people. 90 years later or so, 80 years later or so, he was willing to go on the record that way. But this is a description of his experience during a sesshin, practicing Nengakuji with all his might before he departs for America. He was slated to depart 1896, early 1897. And it was at the Rohatsu Sesshin, I believe, that he... had passed through his first koan, the Koan Mu. And in writing a letter to Nishida, his friend Nishida, the philosopher from America a year or two later, this is what he wrote.

[45:29]

He had just read William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. I don't know if any of you are familiar with that book. It was published in 1902. It was the Gifford Lectures given in Scotland by William James, the philosopher. And Suzuki had read this book, and he wrote back very excitedly to Nishida saying, I think I understand how to talk about religion after having read William James. We don't need to think about religion in scientific terms, and we don't have to think about it psychologically. It's a realm unto itself that is focused on direct experience This is what he gets from James. That practice is focused on direct experience. Now that's there in Hakuin as well. Hakuin, important reviver of Rinzai Zen in Japan in the 18th century. But he gets this from William James while he's in America.

[46:37]

And he writes back very excitedly to Nishida. What this... analysis of religious experience brings to mind is when formerly I was in Kamakura one night at the end of scheduled Zazen, I left the Zendo. Returning to my residence at Kigenin, which is a small sub-temple on the Ngakuji grounds, in the moonlight I passed amid the trees. When near the main temple gate I started to descend, suddenly it was as if I forgot myself, or rather I was totally forgotten. However, the appearance of the different length shadows of the trees in the moonlight was just like a picture. I was a person in the picture and there was no separation between me and the trees. The trees were me. I had the clear thought that this was my original face. Even after finally returning to the hermitage, I suddenly realized I was not the least bit hindered and somehow was suffused with the feeling of joy.

[47:40]

Now it is difficult for me to describe in words my state of mind at the time. So that's him describing this deepening of his practice that took place before he came to America. From this, he came to consider this kind of experience, this sort of deep, profound understanding of non-dualism. And that's important. That's another... sort of synonym for Suzuki, with myo, the wondrous. Non-dualism is central for understanding his thought, the emphasis on the non-dual, of moving past white and black, good and evil, all dualism. And I will talk about that more in a little bit and then tomorrow. But he said about this kind of experience, as I conceive it, Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy and religion. It's not just particular to Zen, but at its heart, all religion is about this.

[48:46]

Every intellectual effort must culminate in it, or rather must start from it, if it is to bear any practical fruits. Every religious faith must spring from it, if it has to prove at all efficiently and livingly workable in our active life. Therefore, Zen is not necessarily the foundation of Buddhist thought and life alone. It is very much alive also in Christianity, Mohammedanism, in Taoism, and even in positivistic Confucianism. What makes all these religions and philosophies vital and inspiring, keeping up their usefulness and efficiency, is due to the presence in them of what I may designate as the Zen element. Mere scholasticism or mere sacerdotalism will never create a living faith. Religion requires something inwardly propelling, energizing, and capable of doing work. So for Suzuki, he saw that kind of experience as central. And although there are a lot of scholars who take issue with this, that at the core, every religion has the same fundamental experience at its core, this notion of perennialism, it is what enabled Suzuki to have very deep and profound dialogues with people like Merton,

[50:07]

They saw this as a place where they could meet, this profound place. Now, part of Suzuki's project was to explain, and I should just as background here say, Another fascinating aspect of his life is he was writing at a time when there was almost nothing else in English about Buddhism and even less about Zen. The English reading and speaking public was pretty much a tabula rasa when it came to Buddhism. And what people did know about Buddhism was Theravada Buddhism, largely. And increasingly, that kind of Buddhism was viewed as the original, the true Buddhism.

[51:10]

And everything in China, Japan, and Korea was seen as a, and Tibet, as a kind of degeneration of Buddhism. It wasn't real Buddhism. It was some degenerate form that had done either added deities and tantrism, or had done away with everything, like Zen. But it was degenerate. And so Suzuki found himself in a position where he had to explain what Mahayana was about and how Mahayana Buddhism was real Buddhism. How do you read these sutras that are so different from the texts you see in the Pali canon? Something like the Abhatamsaka, the Kegongyo, with all of these multiple universes in millions upon millions of bodhisattvas and mahasattvas, or something like the Vimalakirti, with all of these bodhisattvas crowding into a room. Or in the Kegon Sutra, the tower of Vairochana that's dazzling with gems, or the Pure Land Sutras, the descriptions of the Pure Lands.

[52:22]

How are we to understand this kind of material, this Mahayana material? So Suzuki's first project was to explain this. And one of the reasons I think he's worth reading is because although it's not an easy lift, there are places where he hits his stride. And he's not a native speaker of English. I mean, it's amazing how much he wrote in English and how good his English was. But he was not a native speaker of English. But when he hits his stride, I think the material is well... It makes the... sort of machete work along the way, worth its while. So how does he explain Zen? How does he explain Mahayana in relationship to the Buddhist tradition?

[53:23]

He says that Chinese Buddhism, the Chinese, and he was, you know, living at a time when people thought in terms of national characteristics, and that was a limitation of his time. But he says, the Chinese have no aptitude like the Indians to hide themselves in clouds of mystery and supernaturalism. He's talking about Zen texts. The Chinese genius was to demonstrate itself in some other way. When they began inwardly to assimilate Buddhism as the doctrine of enlightenment, the only course that opened to their concrete practical minds was to produce Zen. when we come to Zen after seeing all the wonderful miracles displayed in the Indian Mahayana writers, and after the highly abstracted speculations of Mahajamaka thinkers, what change of scenery do we have here? No rays are issuing from the Buddha's forehead. No retinues of bodhisattvas reveal themselves before you. There is indeed nothing that would particularly strike your senses as odd or extraordinary.

[54:28]

or is beyond intelligence, beyond the ken of logical reasoning. The people you associate with all are ordinary mortals like yourselves. No abstract ideas, no dialectical subtleties confront you. Mountains tower high towards the sky, rivers all pour into the ocean. Plants sprout in spring and flowers bloom in red. When the moon shines serenely, poets grow mildly drunk and sing a song of eternal peace. How prosaic, how ordinary, we may say. But here was the Chinese soul and Buddhism came to grow into it. And then attributing, continuing on and attributing, citing a verse that's attributed to Laman Pong to express the Extraordinary Realms of Indian Mahayana Sutras, Suzuki writes, how wondrously supernatural.

[55:34]

How miraculous this. I draw water. I carry fuel. When we have this shift in perspective, and here again I'm quoting Suzuki, Samantrabhadra's arms raised to save sentient beings become our own, which are now engaged in passing the salt of to a friend at the table. And Maitreya's opening the Vairocana Tower, that's in the Avatamsaka Sutra, in the Gandabyuha section, for Sudhana, that beautiful jewel tower, is our ushering a caller into the parlor for a friendly chat. And then to conclude, he says, The Indian genius makes it develop into a dharmadhatu which is so graphically depicted in the form of the Vairajshana tower with all its yuhas and alankaras, all of its glorious characteristics. In the Chinese mind, the heavenly glory is resplendent with supernatural lights, so wonderfully described in the Ganda, that's in the Kegon Sutra, which is one of the grand flights of Mahayana literature.

[56:49]

are reduced more into the colors of this gray earth. Celestial beings are no more here, but hard-toiling men of the world. But there's no sordidness or squalor in Zen, nor is there any utilitarianism. In spite of its matter-of-factness, there is an air of mystery and spirituality in Zen, which is later on developed into a form of nature mysticism. Hushur, the Chinese scholar, with whom Suzuki had an ongoing debate for decades, thinks Zen is of the revolt of Chinese psychology against abstruse Buddhist metaphysics. But the fact is that it is not a revolt, but a deep appreciation. Only the appreciation could not be expressed in any other way than in the Chinese way. So that's how Suzuki sees the way in which Mahayana has been interpreted in the form of Zen. So it's 4.30, and I guess for now we should stop there.

[57:53]

We can, those of you who wish, continue tomorrow, and we'll take a look at a couple of things that Suzuki wrote and actually read them aloud here. So thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[58:25]

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