D. T. Suzuki

Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966) was a Japanese philosopher, scholar, essayist and translator, and one of the most influential figures in making Zen Buddhism known in the West. Through his many books, essays and lectures on Zen and on the Shin tradition, he introduced Western readers to Far Eastern spirituality, and his work prepared the ground for later Zen teachers to reach an international audience.

Born in Kanazawa, in Ishikawa Prefecture, he was the fourth son of a physician. The decline of the samurai class after the fall of feudalism left the family impoverished, and after his father's death his mother, a follower of Jōdo Shinshū, raised him in hardship. As a young man he searched for answers in various religions, though his sharp mind struggled to accept some of the cosmologies he encountered. His brother, a lawyer, paid for his education in Tokyo. He entered Tokyo University but was drawn to Zen, studying at Engaku-ji in Kamakura first with Imakita Kosen and, after his death, with Soyen Shaku, under whom he practised for years in a largely inward, non-verbal way, with long periods of zazen.

In 1893 Soyen Shaku attended the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where he recommended his disciple Suzuki to the German scholar Paul Carus, who needed help translating Eastern spiritual literature. From 1897 to 1909 Suzuki lived in Illinois, working as a translator and editor for The Open Court Publishing Company. There he worked on the Tao Te Ching and wrote the first outlines of his work on Mahayana Buddhism. After returning to Japan he taught in Tokyo and, from 1921, at Otani University in Kyoto. With his American wife, the theosophist Beatrice Erskine Lane, he founded the Eastern Buddhist Society and its journal, The Eastern Buddhist.

His best-known Western writing concerns Chinese Zen, especially texts such as the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Gate, and the way Zen shaped Japanese culture, as in Zen and Japanese Culture. He also engaged with the Shin Buddhism of his childhood and produced an incomplete English translation of Shinran's Kyogyoshinsho, though he did not seek to popularise that teaching in the West, believing Zen suited Western tastes better. His interest in Christian mystics, above all Meister Eckhart, led him to compare them with Shin thought.

From 1952 to 1957 he taught at Columbia University, where his reputation grew in the United States. His influence reached the Beat generation and many students of Eastern spirituality, and he remains a standard reference for the study of Zen.