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Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki Biography
D. T. Suzuki was born on 18 October 1870, as Teitarō Suzuki in Honda-machi, Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, the fourth son of physician Ryojun Suzuki (he later changed his given name on becoming a Zen monk). Although his birthplace no longer exists, a monument marks its location.
The Samurai class into which Suzuki was born declined with the fall of feudalism, which forced Suzuki's mother to raise him in impoverished circumstances after his father died. When he became old enough to reflect on his fate in being born into this situation, he began to look for answers in various forms of religion. His naturally sharp and philosophical intellect found difficulty in accepting some of the cosmologies to which he was exposed.
His brother, a lawyer, financed his education in Tokyo at Waseda University. During 1891 he also entered spiritual studies at Engaku-ji in Kamakura, initially under Kosen Roshi; then, after Kosen's death, with Soyen Shaku. Soyen was an exceptional Zen monk.
Suzuki left Waseda University and shifted his focus to Zen practices. His friend Kitaro Nishida invited him to study philosophy at Tokyo University. While Suzuki continued Zen practices, he studied Western philosophy intensely for three years.
Under Soyen Shaku, Suzuki's studies were essentially internal and non-verbal, including long periods of sitting meditation (zazen). The task involved what Suzuki described as four years of mental, physical, moral, and intellectual struggle.
During training periods at Engaku-ji, Suzuki lived a monk's life. He described this life and his own experience at Kamakura in his book The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk. Suzuki was invited by Soyen Shaku to visit the United States in the 1890s.
Suzuki acted as English-language translator for a book written by him in (1906). Though Suzuki had, by this point, translated some ancient Asian texts into English, his role in translating and ghostwriting aspects of this book marked the beginning of Suzuki's career as a writer in English.
While he was young, Suzuki had set about acquiring knowledge of Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, and several European languages. Soyen Shaku was one of the invited speakers at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893.
When a German scholar who had set up residence in Illinois, Dr. Paul Carus, approached Soyen Shaku to request his help in translating and preparing Oriental spiritual literature for publication in the West, the latter instead recommended his disciple Suzuki for the job. Suzuki lived at Dr. Carus’s home and worked with him, initially in translating the classic Tao Te Ching from ancient Chinese. In Illinois, Suzuki began his early work Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism.
Carus himself had written a book offering an insight into and overview of Buddhism, titled The Gospel of Buddha. Soyen Shaku wrote an introduction for it, and Suzuki translated the book into Japanese. At this time, around the turn of the century, quite several Westerners and Asians (Carus, Soyen, and Suzuki included) were involved in the worldwide Buddhist revival that had begun slowly in the 1880s.
Besides living in the United States, Suzuki traveled through Europe before taking up a professorship back in Japan. Suzuki married Beatrice Erskine Lane in 1911, a Theosophist and Radcliffe College graduate.
Dedicating themselves to spreading an understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, they lived in a cottage on the Engaku-ji grounds until 1919, then moved to Kyoto, where Suzuki began professorship at Otani University in 1921. While he was in Kyoto, he visited Dr. Hoseki Shinichi Hisamatsu, a famous Zen Buddhist scholar, and discussed Zen Buddhism with him at Shunkoin temple in the Myoshinji temple complex.
In the same year he joined Otani University, he and his wife, Beatrice, founded the Eastern Buddhist Society; the Society is focused on Mahayana Buddhism and offers lectures and seminars, and publishes a scholarly journal, The Eastern Buddhist. Suzuki maintained connections in the West and, for instance, delivered a paper at the World Congress of Faiths in 1936, at the University of London (he was an exchange professor during that year).
Besides teaching about Zen practice and the history of Zen (or Ch'an) Buddhism, Suzuki was an expert scholar on the related philosophy called, in Japanese, Kegon, which he thought of as the intellectual explication of Zen experience.
Suzuki wrote some of the most celebrated introductions to and overall examinations of Buddhism, and particularly of its Chinese Chan school (though he usually referred to this sect by the term "Zen," which is the Japanese pronunciation of its name). He went on a lecture tour of American universities in 1951 and taught at Columbia University until 1957.
Suzuki was especially interested in the formative centuries of this Buddhist tradition in China. Many of Suzuki's writings in English concern themselves with translations and discussions of bits of the Chan texts the Biyan Lu (Blue Cliff Record) and the Wumenguan (Gateless Passage), which record the teaching styles and words of the classical Chinese masters.
He was also interested in how this tradition, once imported into Japan, had influenced Japanese character and history, and wrote about it in English in Zen and Japanese Culture. Suzuki's reputation was secured in England before he became well known in the U.S.
In addition to his popularly oriented works, Suzuki wrote a translation of the Lankavatara Sutra and a commentary on its Sanskrit terminology. Later in his life he was a visiting professor at Columbia University. He looked in on the efforts of Saburo Hasegawa, Judith Tyberg, Alan Watts and the others who worked in the California Academy of Asian Studies (now known as the California Institute of Integral Studies), in San Francisco in the 1950s.
Often linked to the Kyoto School of philosophy, Suzuki he is not considered one of its official members. He took an interest in other traditions besides Zen. His book Zen and Japanese Buddhism delved into the history and scope of interest of all the major Japanese Buddhist sects. He also wrote a small volume about Shin Buddhism, and he took an interest in Christian mysticism and some of the noted mystics of the West.
Suzuki's books have been widely read and commented on by many important figures. A notable example is An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, which includes a thirty page commentary by famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Other works include Essays in Zen Buddhism (three volumes), Studies in Zen Buddhism, and Manual of Zen Buddhism. Additionally, William Barrett has compiled many of Suzuki's articles and essays concerning Zen into a volume entitled Studies in Zen.
It was Suzuki's contention that a Zen satori (awakening) was the goal of the tradition's training, but that what distinguished the tradition as it developed through the centuries in China was a way of life radically different from that of Indian Buddhists.
In India, the tradition of the mendicant (holy beggar, bhikku in Pali) prevailed, but in China social circumstances led to the development of a temple and training-center system in which the abbot and the monks all performed mundane tasks. These included gardening or farming, carpentry, architecture, housekeeping, administration (or community direction), and the practice of folk medicine. Consequently, the enlightenment sought in Zen had to stand up well to the demands and potential frustrations of everyday life.
Suzuki received numerous honors, including Japan's National Cultural Medal. Suzuki was a distinguished Zen scholar in his own right. His published works in Japanese and English numbered over 100 volumes and included studies on Zen, Pure Land, other Buddhist classics, Lao-tzu, and others.
Suzuki played a key role in developing scholarly communication between the East and the West. He presented the teachings of Zen, Pure Land, and Taoism together with their cultural manifestations, which constituted the background of Far Eastern thought and culture, not as esoteric religious teachings but as systems of philosophical thought. He explicated Buddhist teachings while relating them to Western thought and tradition.
D. T. Suzuki Died at St. Luke’s International Hospital, Kamakura on July 12th, aged 95.
Works
• 1895 Japanese translation of Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha
• 1896 New Religious Theory
• 1898 Japanese translation of Paul Carus, Karma
• 1900 Asvaghosha's Discourse on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana (English translation)
• 1910 Japanese translation of Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and its Wonders and Hell
• 1913 Swedenborg – Buddha of the North
• 1916 Studies in Zen Buddhism
• 1927 Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series (Second Series 1933, Third Series 1934)
• 1938 Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture
• 1939 Mushin to yukoto [On “No-mind”]
• 1944 Japanese Spirituality
• 1948 Tōyō to Seiyō ［East and West］
• 1949 Living by Zen
• 1959 Zen and Japanese Culture (Revision of Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture)
• 1963 Tōyō-teki na mikata［The Eastern Way of Seeing Things］
• 1965 Tōyō no kokoro［The Eastern Thinking］
• 1968 Collected Works of Suzuki Daisetz, 30 volumes, first edition (-1971)
• 1980 Collected Works of Suzuki Diasetz, 32 volumes, second edition (-1983)
• 1999 Collected Works of Suzuki Diasetz, 40 volumes, third edition (-2003)
Sources
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._T._Suzuki
• https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/D._T._Suzuki
• https://www.kanazawa-museum.jp
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