42 Facts About DT Suzuki

DT Suzuki was a scholar and author of books and essays on Buddhism, Zen and Shin that were instrumental in spreading interest in both Zen and Shin to the West.

DT Suzuki was a prolific translator of Chinese, Japanese, and Sanskrit literature.

DT Suzuki spent several lengthy stretches teaching or lecturing at Western universities, and devoted many years to a professorship at Otani University, a Japanese Buddhist school.

DT Suzuki was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963.

The samurai class into which DT Suzuki was born declined with the fall of feudalism, which forced DT Suzuki's mother, a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, to raise him in impoverished circumstances after his father died.

DT Suzuki set about acquiring knowledge of Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, and several European languages.

DT Suzuki lived and studied several years with the scholar Paul Carus.

DT Suzuki was introduced to Carus by Soyen Shaku, who met him at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893.

DT Suzuki lived at Dr Carus's home, the Hegeler Carus Mansion, and worked with him, initially in translating the classic Tao Te Ching from ancient Chinese.

In Illinois, DT Suzuki began his early work Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism.

Soyen Shaku wrote the introduction, and DT Suzuki translated the book into Japanese.

Later DT Suzuki himself joined the Theosophical Society Adyar and was an active theosophist.

Besides living in the United States, DT Suzuki traveled through Europe before taking up a professorship back in Japan.

In 1909, DT Suzuki became an assistant professor at Gakushuin University and at the Tokyo University.

Until 1919 they lived in a cottage on the Engaku-ji grounds, then moved to Kyoto, where DT Suzuki began professorship at Otani University in 1921.

DT 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.

Besides teaching about Zen practice and the history of Zen Buddhism, DT Suzuki was an expert scholar on the related philosophy called, in Japanese, Kegon, which he thought of as the intellectual explication of Zen experience.

DT Suzuki received numerous honors, including Japan's National Medal of Culture.

DT Suzuki went on a lecture tour of American universities in 1951, and taught at Columbia University from 1952 to 1957.

DT Suzuki was especially interested in the formative centuries of this Buddhist tradition in China.

DT Suzuki was 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.

DT Suzuki's reputation was secured in England prior to the US.

DT Suzuki looked in on the efforts of Saburo Hasegawa, Judith Tyberg, Alan Watts and the others who worked in the California Academy of Asian Studies, in San Francisco in the 1950s.

DT Suzuki produced an incomplete English translation of the Kyogyoshinsho, the magnum opus of Shinran, founder of the Jodo Shinshu school.

However, DT Suzuki did not attempt to popularize the Shin doctrine in the West, as he believed Zen was better suited to the Western preference for Eastern mysticism, though he is quoted as saying that Jodo Shinshu Buddhism is the "most remarkable development of Mahayana Buddhism ever achieved in East Asia".

DT Suzuki took an interest in Christian mysticism and in some of the most significant mystics of the West, for example, Meister Eckhart, whom he compared with the Jodo Shinshu followers called Myokonin.

DT Suzuki was among the first to bring research on the Myokonin to audiences outside Japan as well.

DT Suzuki's contrasting view was that, in its centuries of development in China, Zen had absorbed much from indigenous Chinese Taoism.

DT Suzuki believed that the Far Eastern peoples were more sensitive, or attuned, to nature than either the people of Europe or those of Northern India.

DT Suzuki subscribed to the idea that religions are each a sort of organism, which is subject to "irritation" and having a capacity to change or evolve.

DT Suzuki is often linked to the Kyoto School of philosophy, but he is not considered one of its official members.

Under Roshi Soyen, the first master to teach zen Buddhism in America, DT Suzuki's studies were essentially internal and non-verbal, including long periods of sitting meditation.

The task involved what DT Suzuki described as four years of mental, physical, moral, and intellectual struggle.

DT Suzuki described this life and his own experience at Kamakura in his book The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk.

DT Suzuki characterized the facets of the training as: a life of humility; a life of labor; a life of service; a life of prayer and gratitude; and a life of meditation.

DT Suzuki was invited by Shaku to visit the United States in the 1890s, and DT Suzuki acted as English-language translator for a book by Shaku.

Later in life, DT Suzuki was, on a personal level, more inclined to Jodo Shin practice, seeing in the doctrine of Tariki, or other power as opposed to self-power, an abandonment of self that is entirely complementary to Zen practice and yet to his mind even less willful than traditional Zen.

Obviously, DT Suzuki's approach captured the imaginations of generations of readers.

DT Suzuki has been criticised for defending the Japanese war-efforts, though Suzuki's thoughts on these have been placed in the context of western supremacy in the first half of the 20th century, and the reaction against this supremacy in Asian countries.

DT Suzuki helped his friend Suzuki introduce Zen Buddhism to the West.

The fact that DT Suzuki himself was able to do so was largely the invention of New Buddhism.

DT Suzuki pictured Zen as a unique expression of Asian spirituality, which was considered to be superior to the western ways of thinking.