D. T. Suzuki

Abstract

D. T. Suzuki (Daisetz [Daisetsu] Teitarō Suzuki, b. 1870–d. 1966) was a Japanese scholar of Buddhism who published extensively in both Japanese and English and who emerged as a famous thinker and public intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in the Meiji period (1868–1912) when Japan was rapidly modernizing, Suzuki was one of many young intellectuals who sought to revitalize and reinterpret Buddhism for the modern age. He excelled in English and studied Western thought at Tokyo Imperial University in the early 1890s, but at the same time dedicated himself to Zen practice at Engakuji monastery in nearby Kamakura, an experience that made an indelible mark on his thinking. In 1897 Suzuki traveled to America to become a translator and editorial assistant at Open Court Publishing in LaSalle, Illinois. He spent eleven years there working, studying, and publishing on Buddhism and other Asian topics. Upon returning to Japan in 1909, he became an English professor in the preparatory division of the Peers School, Gakushūin, in Tokyo for twelve years. In 1911, Suzuki married Beatrice Lane (b. 1875–d. 1939, previously thought to be born in 1878), a highly educated American with an abiding interest in Asian religions whom he had met overseas and who subsequently assisted him with his English publications. In 1921 Suzuki became a professor of Buddhist studies at Otani University in Kyoto and there launched the journal The Eastern Buddhist with his wife as coeditor. During his long career at Otani, Suzuki published many of his most important works on Zen, Mahāyāna, and Pure Land Buddhism. After his wife’s death in 1939 and throughout the war years, Suzuki lived in semi-retirement in Kamakura, continuing to write and publish. During the American occupation of Japan after the war, Suzuki gained prominence because of his familiarity with America and his efforts to articulate a postwar vision for the country. In 1949, when Suzuki was almost eighty, he had an opportunity to live in America again—first in Honolulu, then Los Angeles, and finally New York. Working as a traveling lecturer and guest professor, he remained in America until 1958 (except for brief visits back to Japan). During this period, there was burgeoning interest in Buddhism in the West, and Suzuki was perfectly poised to answer this demand. His earlier English writings were republished, and he emerged as a Buddhist authority in the eyes of Western scholars, artists, psychoanalysts, and the reading public. When Suzuki returned to Japan in 1958, he was arguably the most prominent spokesman for Buddhism in the West. During his remaining years he was in high demand for publications, translations, interviews, and lectures, and when he died in 1966 he was celebrated as one of Japan’s foremost Buddhist thinkers. In the years after his death, there was widespread respect and appreciation for Suzuki’s works. But in the 1990s a strong critique of Suzuki appeared in Western scholarship. He was identified as a Japanese nationalist who supported the war effort, and was also criticized for presenting Buddhism inaccurately to the West—weaving Western ideas into it while at the same time aggrandizing Japan as spiritually superior. These criticisms provoked rebuttals by Suzuki’s defenders, and the controversies over him continue even today. Suzuki might best be seen not as an unbiased transmitter of Buddhism to the West, but as a modern interpreter of it for both Japan and the West—sometimes explaining its ideas conventionally and other times subjectively and idiosyncratically.