Suzuki Quotes

“Spanning from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s, [D. T.] Suzuki's work played a major role in the constitution of a Zen discourse in Japan and the West. In the wake of Suzuki, a significant contribution to the elaboration of a Zen philosophy was made by the so-called Kyoto School, which was founded by Suzuki's friend Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945). Despite their different intellectual itineraries, both Suzuki and Nishida were still speaking from within the discursive arena opened by Western Orientalism. That is to say, their description of Zen is in many respects an inverted image of that given by the Christian missionaries, and they relied on Christian categories even when rejecting them.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The success of [D. T.] Suzuki's work was not related to its literary or philosophical qualities; it was rather the result of a historical coniuncture that prompted the emergence in the West of a positive modality of Orientalist discourse, which found in the image of Zen fostered by Suzuki a particularly appropriate object.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“[D. T.] Suzuki's success had also a lot to do with his undeniable personal charisma. As noted already, he did not leave his interlocutors indifferent, and most judgments on his work are influenced by personal reactions to his personality. It is therefore hard to dissociate the image of the man, with his genuine simplicity, warmth, and his status of enlightened layman, from the impression left by his assertions concerning the Chan/Zen tradition.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“[D. T.] Suzuki's obvious sincerity and his intense yearning for transcendence did not prevent his thinking from being ideologically flawed, informed as it was by his culture, his social status, and his sectarian affiliations. This, of course, raises the questions of the place whence he spoke and whether an enlightened person can assume any privilege with regard to historical determinations. Suzuki claimed this privilege for Zen masters, and by implication for himself.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Paradoxically, we may argue that precisely because of his biases Suzuki can be considered representative of Zen—as a sectarian tradition. The appeal to the "pure" tradition, to the "essence" of Zen, is indeed a typical feature of the sectarian attitude. This attitude was already exemplified by Dogen, for whom true Zen stood above the Zen school. Just as Dogen refused to call his teaching "Zen," Suzuki claims that Zen is "neither a religion nor a philosophy" or better that it is "the spirit of all religion and philosophy." The assumption that there is an "essence" of Buddhism, a kind of perennial Dharma to which only "authentic" masters would have access, is to be rejected as ideologically suspect.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The major contradiction in Suzuki's position, one of which he was acutely aware, is that he negated in actual practice what he advocated in theory, namely, that Zen "is a direct method, for it refuses to resort to verbal explanation or logical analysis, or to ritualism" (Ibid. 3:318).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“[D. T.] Suzuki's work is in some ways an attempt at a spiritual reconquista, and his "dialogue" with Christians may have the same motivations as [Francis] Xavier's conversations with Japanese Buddhists.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Downplaying sociocultural determinations, [D. T.] Suzuki argued that Zen consciousness and Christian consciousness are the same (Suzuki 1949–1953, 2: 304). In fact, he believed that, although a posterior interpretations of the mystical experience may differ, all "mysticisms" are fundamentally the same. Using the notion of mysticism as "the common denominator by virtue of which various traditions may be called religious" (Fader 1976, 184), Suzuki was able to compare Zen monks with Meister Eckhart or Zen passivity with Christian quietism: "Eckhart, Zen, and Shin thus can be grouped together as belonging to the great school of mysticism" (Suzuki 1969, xix).

This inclusive comparativism, however, has a hidden agenda—namely to prove that Zen is "mystically" superior to Christianity.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“In contrast to [Thomas] Merton, who hazarded "with diffidence" statements about Buddhism and was acutely aware that, as a Catholic priest and monk, he could not be sure that he had trustworthy insights into the spiritual values of a tradition with which he was not really familiar (Merton 1967, 5), Suzuki was always confident in his own judgment on Christianity. However, his interpretation of Christianity remained superficial and polemical. He argued, for example, that Christian tenets such as the crucifixion are merely symbolical, "while Buddhism is . . . free from the historical symbolism of Christianity" (Suzuki 1949–1953, 1: 152).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Suzuki also liked to compare Zen to Western philosophy, to Zen's advantage: "The philosopher according to whom cogito ergo sum is generally weak-minded. The Zen master has nothing to do with such quibbles" (Suzuki 1970, 408). We may also question the accuracy of his understanding of Western philosophy. If Meister Eckhart, despite (or because of) his undeniable spirituality, cannot be said to represent the entire Christian tradition, neither can the intellectualist strain emphasized by Suzuki be said to represent the entire Western philosophical tradition. From the pre-Socratics, Socrates and the Stoics, all the way to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy was a path of self-transformation, not merely the intellectual pastime that Suzuki describes.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Despite his nativist tendency, Suzuki relied heavily on the categories of nineteenth-century Orientalism. He simply inverted the old schemas to serve his own purposes to present Zen as the source and goal of all mystical experiences.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Although [D. T.] Suzuki's apparently free-floating, and certainly contradictory, discourse may be charitably interpreted as reflecting the "unlocalized" mind of the enlightened master, it can also appear as a situational reflex to "cash in" on both sides of every issue.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Suzuki seemed oblivious to Japan's responsibility for the war. In a footnote to Zen and Japanese Culture, he placed all the responsibility on Western intellectualism: "The intellect presses the button, the whole city is destroyed. . . . All is done mechanically, logically, systematically, and the intellect is perfectly satisfied. Is it not time for us all to think of ourselves from another point of view than that of mere intellectuality" (Suzuki 1970, 338). According to Suzuki, all this would not have happened if the Westerners had, like the Japanese, had more respect for nature. In another footnote, he wrote: "I sometimes wonder if any of the Great Western soldiers ever turned into a poet. Can we imagine, for instance, in recent times, that General MacArthur or General Eisenhower would compose a poem upon visiting one of those bomb-torn cities?" Apparently, Suzuki was unaware that perhaps the chief cause of war and its fuel were found in the same warrior mystique that he exalted in several previous chapters of the same book.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Their common interest in Western mystics like Meister Eckhart led both Nishida and Suzuki to misrepresent Christianity as some kind of inferior version of Mahayäna Buddhism, thus reversing the old schemas applied to the East by Westerners.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“With [D. T.] Suzuki, Zen coopted the whole field of Japanese culture and, imposing on Japanese ideology the myth of transparency, claimed the status of a transcendental spirituality. With Nishida [Kitarō] and the Kyoto school, Zen acquired a crosscultural philosophical status. Thus, through the work of Suzuki, Nishida and their successors, a new field of discourse was created—one that differs markedly from the earlier Chan/Zen discourse (s) it claimed to replicate or interpret.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights