An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

D.T. Suzuki

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802198747
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Budismo

The highly influential book that helped bring Eastern spiritual principles to the Western world. One of the world's leading authorities on Zen Buddhism, and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, D.T. Suzuki was the author of more than a hundred works on the subject in both Japanese and English, and was most instrumental in bringing the teachings of Zen Buddhism to the attention of the Western world. Written in a lively, accessible, and straightforward manner, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism is illuminating for the serious student and layperson alike. Suzuki provides a complete vision of Zen, which emphasizes self-understanding and enlightenment through many systems of philosophy, psychology, and ethics. With a foreword by the renowned psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung, this volume has been acknowledged a classic introduction to the subject. It provides, along with Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism and Manual of Zen Buddhism, a framework for living a balanced and fulfilled existence through Zen.

FOREWORD

by Dr. C. G. Jung

DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI’S works on Zen Buddhism are among the best contributions to the knowledge of living Buddhism that recent decades have produced, and Zen itself is the most important fruit that has sprung from that tree whose roots are the collections of the Pali-Canon.¹ We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the author, first for the fact of his having brought Zen closer to Western understanding, and secondly for the manner in which he has achieved this task. Oriental religious conceptions are usually so very different from our Western ones that even the very translation of the words brings one up against the greatest difficulties, quite apart from the meaning of the ideas exposed, which under certain circumstances are better left untranslated. I have only to mention the Chinese “Tao”, which no European translation has yet achieved. The original Buddhist writings themselves contain views and ideas which are more or less unassimilable by the average Western understanding. I do not know, for example, just what spiritual (or perhaps climatic?) background or preparation is necessary before one can deduce any completely clear idea from the Buddhist Kamma. In spite of all that we know about the essence of Zen, here too there is the question of a central perception of unsurpassed singularity. This strange perception is called Satori, and may be translated as “Enlightenment”. Suzuki says (see page 65), “Satori is the raison d’être of Zen, and without it there is no Zen.” It should not be too difficult for the Western mind to grasp what a mystic understands by “enlightenment”, or what is known as “enlightenment” in religious parlance. Satori, however, depicts an art and a way of enlightenment which is practically impossible for the European to appreciate. I would point out the enlightenment of Hyakujo (Pai-chang Huai-hai, A .D. 724-814) on page 59, and the legend on pages 62-3 of this book.

The following may serve as a further example: A monk once went to Gensha, and wanted to learn where the entrance to the path of truth was. Gensha asked him, “Do you hear the murmuring of the brook?” “Yes, I hear it,” answered the monk. “There is the entrance,” the master instructed him.

I will be content with these few examples, which illustrate clearly the opacity of the satori experiences. Even if we take example after example, it is still extremely hazy how such an enlightenment comes and of what it consists; in other words, by what or about what one is enlightened. Kaiten Nukariya, who was himself a Professor at the So-To-Shu Buddhist College in Tokyo,² says, speaking of enlightenment:

“Having set ourselves free from the misconception of Self, next we must awaken our innermost wisdom, pure and divine, called the Mind of Buddha, or Bodhi, or Prajna by Zen Masters. It is the divine light, the inner heaven, the key to all moral treasures, the source of all influence and power, the seat of kindness, justice, sympathy, impartial love, humanity, and mercy, the measure of all things. When this innermost wisdom is fully awakened, we are able to realize that each and every one of us is identical in spirit, in essence, in nature with the universal life or Buddha, that each ever lives face to face with Buddha, that each is beset by the abundant grace of the Blessed One, that He arouses his moral nature, that He opens his spiritual eyes, that He unfolds his new capacity, that He appoints his mission, and that life is not an ocean of birth, disease, old age and death, nor the vale of tears, but the holy temple of Buddha, the Pure Land, where he can enjoy the bliss of Nirvana.

Then our minds go through an entire revolution. We are no more troubled by anger and hatred, no more bitten by envy and ambition, no more stung by sorrow and chagrin, no more overwhelmed by melancholy and despair,” etc.

That is how an Oriental, himself a disciple of Zen, describes the essence of enlightenment. It must be admitted that this passage would need only the most minute alterations in order not to be out of place in any Christian mystical book of devotion. Yet somehow it fails to help us as regards understanding the satori experience described by this all-embracing casuistry. Presumably Nukariya is speaking to Western rationalism, of which he himself has acquired a good dose, and that is why it all sounds so flatly edifying. The abstruse obscurity of the Zen anecdotes is preferable to this adaptation: ad usum Delphini; it conveys a great deal more, while saying less.

Zen is anything but a philosophy in the Western sense of the word.³ This is the opinion expressed by Rudolf Otto in his introduction to Ohasama’s book on Zen, when he says that Nukariya has fitted the magic oriental world of ideas into our Western philosophic categories, and confused it with these. If psychophysical parallelism, the most wooden of all doctrines, is invoked in order to explain this mystical intuition of Not-twoness (Nichtzweiheit) and Oneness and the coincidentia oppositorium, one is completely ejected from the sphere of koan and kwatsu and satori.⁴ It is far better to allow oneself to become deeply imbued beforehand with the exotic obscurity of the Zen anecdotes, and to bear in mind the whole time that satori is a mysterium ineffabile, as indeed the Zen masters wish it to be. Between the anecdotes and the mystical enlightenment there is, for our understanding, a gulf, the possibility of bridging which can at best be indicated but never in practice achieved.⁵ One has the feeling of touching upon a true secret, not something that has been imagined or pretended; this is not a case of mystifying secrecy, but rather of an experience that baffles all languages. Satori comes as something unexpected, not to be expected.

When within the realm of Christianity visions of the Holy Trinity, the Madonna, the Crucifixion or the Patron Saint are vouchsafed, one has the impression that this is more or less as it should be. That Jacob Boehme should obtain a glimpse into the centrum naturae by means of the sunbeam reflected in the tin plate is also understandable. It is harder to accept Master Eckehart’s vision of “the little naked boy”,⁶ or even Swedenborg’s “man in the red coat” who wanted to wean him from overeating, and whom, in spite of this or perhaps because of it, he recognized as the Lord God.⁷ Such things are difficult to accept, bordering as they do on the grotesque. Many of the satori experiences, however, do not merely border on the grotesque; they are right there in the midst of it, sounding like complete nonsense.

For anyone, however, who has devoted considerable time to studying with loving and understanding care the flowerlike nature of the spirit of the Far East, many of these amazing things, which drive the all too simple European from one perplexity to another, fall away. Zen is indeed one of the most wonderful blossoms of the Chinese spirit,⁸ which was readily impregnated by the immense thought-world of Buddhism. He, therefore, who has really tried to understand Buddhist doctrine, if only to a certain degree—i.e. by renouncing various Western prejudices— will come upon certain depths beneath the bizarre cloak of the individual satori experiences, or will sense disquieting difficulties which the philosophic and religious West has up to now thought fit to disregard. As a philosopher, one is exclusively concerned with that understanding which, for its own part, has nothing to do with life. And as a Christian, one has nothing to do with paganism (“I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as other men”). There is no satori within these Western bounds—that is an Oriental affair. But is it really so? Have we in fact no satori?

When one examines the Zen text attentively, one cannot escape the impression that, with all that is bizarre in it, satori is, in fact, a matter of natural occurrence, of something so very simple⁹ that one fails to see the wood for the trees, and in attempting to explain it, invariably says the very thing that drives others into the greatest confusion. Nukariya¹⁰ therefore is right when he says that any attempt to explain or analyse the contents of Zen with regard to enlightenment would be in vain. Nevertheless, this author does venture to say of enlightenment that it embraces an insight into the nature of self, and that it is an emancipation of the conscious from an illusionary conception of self.¹¹ The illusion regarding the nature of self is the common confusion of the ego with self. Nukariya understands by “self” the All-Buddha, i.e. simply a total consciousness (Be-wusstseinstotalität) of life. He quotes Pan Shan, who says, “The world of the mind encloses the whole universe in its light,” adding, “It is a cosmic life and a cosmic spirit, and at the same time an individual life and an individual spirit.”¹²

However one may define self, it is always something other than the ego, and inasmuch as a higher understanding of the ego leads on to self the latter is a thing of wider scope, embracing the knowledge of the ego and therefore surpassing it. In the same way as the ego is a certain knowledge of my self, so is the self a knowledge of my ego, which, however, is no longer experienced in the form of a broader or higher ego, but in the form of a non-ego (Nicht-Ich).

Such thoughts are also familiar to the author of Deutsche Theologie¹³: “Any creature who is to become conscious of this perfection must first lose all creaturelikeness (Geschopfesart), something-ness (Etwasheit) and self.” If I take any good to myself, that comes from the delusion that it is mine, or that I am Good. That is always a sign of imperfection and folly. Were I conscious of the truth, I would also be aware that I am not Good, that Good is not mine and is not of me.” “Man says, ‘Poor fool that I am, I was under the delusion that I was it, but I find it is and was truly God’.”

That already states a considerable amount regarding the contents of enlightenment. The occurrence of satori is interpreted and formulated as a breakthrough of a consciousness limited to the ego-form in the form of the non-ego-like self. This conception answers to the nature of Zen, but also to the mysticism of Master Eckehart.¹⁴ The master says, in his sermon on “Blessed are the poor in spirit”: “When I came out from God, all things said, ‘There is a God!’ But that cannot make me blissful, for with it I conceive myself to be a creature. But in the break-through,¹⁵ when I wish to remain empty in the will of God, and empty also of this will of God and of all his works, and of God himself—then I am more than all creatures, for I am neither God nor creature: I am what I am, and what I will remain, now and forever! Then I receive a jerk, which raises me above all the angels. In this jerk I become so rich that God cannot suffice me, in spite of all that he is as God, in spite of all his Godly works; for in this break-through I perceive what God and I are in common. I am then what I was,¹⁶ I grow neither less nor more, for I am an immovable being who moves all things. Here God no longer abides in man, for man through his poverty has won back what he has always been and will always be.”

Here the master is actually describing a satori experience, a release of the ego through self, to which “Buddha-Nature”, or godly universality, is added. Since, out of scientific modesty, I do not here presume to make any metaphysical declaration, but mean a change of consciousness that can be experienced, I treat satori first of all as a psychological problem. For anyone who does not share or understand this point of view, the “explanation” will consist of nothing but words which have no tangible meaning for him. He is not then able to make of these abstractions a bridge to the facts related; in other words, he cannot understand how the perfume of the blossoming laurel (pp. 60-1) or the tweaked nose (p. 57)should affect such a considerable change of consciousness. The simplest thing would be, of course, to relegate all these anecdotes to the realm of amusing fairy stories, or at least, if one accepts the facts as they are, to dispose of them as instances of self-deception. (One would also willingly use here the expression “auto-suggestion”, that pathetic white elephant from the store of spiritual inadequacies!) A serious and responsible examination of the strange phenomena cannot lightly pass over these facts. We can of course never decide definitely whether a person is really “enlightened” or “redeemed”, or whether he merely imagines it. We have no criteria for this. Moreover, we know well enough that an imaginary pain is often far more painful than a so-called real one, in that it is accompanied by a subtle moral suffering caused by the gloomy feeling of secret self-accusation. It is not, therefore, a question of “actual fact” but of spiritual reality; that is to say, the psychic occurrence of the happening known as satori.

Every spiritual happening is a picture and an imagination; were this not so, there could be no consciousness and no phenomenality of the occurrence. The imagination itself is a psychic occurrence, and therefore whether an “enlightenment” is called “real” or “imaginary” is quite immaterial. The man who has enlightenment, or alleges that he has it, thinks in any case that he is enlightened. What others think about it can determine nothing whatever for him with regard to his experience. Even if he were to lie, his lie would be a spiritual fact. Yes, even if all religious reports were nothing but conscious inventions and falsifications, a very interesting psychological treatise could still be written on the fact of such lies, with the same scientific treatment with which the psychopathology of delusions is presented. The fact that there is a religious movement upon which many brilliant minds have worked over a period of many centuries is sufficient reason for venturing at least upon a serious attempt to bring such happenings within the realm of scientific understanding.

Earlier on I raised the question of whether we have anything like satori in the West. If we except the sayings of our Western mystics, a superficial glance discloses nothing that could be likened to it in even the faintest degree. According to our thinking, the possibility that there are steps in the development of consciousness does not exist. The mere thought that there is a tremendous psychological difference between the consciousness of the existence of an object and the “consciousness of the consciousness” of an object borders on a subtlety which can scarcely be answered. One could hardly bring oneself to take such a problem so seriously as to take account of the psychological conditions of the setting of any such problem. It is characteristic that the posing of such and similar questions does not as a rule arise from any intellectual need, but where it exists is nearly always rooted in a primitive religious practice. In India it was Yoga and in China Buddhism which supplied the motive power for these attempts to wrest oneself from the bonds of a certain state of consciousness which was felt to be incomplete. As far as Western mysticism is concerned, its texts are full of instructions as to how man can and must release himself from the “I-ness” (Ichhaftigkeit) of his consciousness, so that through the knowledge of his being he may raise himself above it and reach the inward (godlike) man. Ruysbroeck makes use of an image which is also known to Indian philosophers, namely the tree that has its roots above and its top below,¹⁷ “And he must climb up into the tree of belief, which grows downwards, since it has its roots in the godhead.”¹⁸ Ruysbroeck also says, like Yoga, “Man shall be free and without images, freed from all attachments and empty of all creatures.”¹⁹ “He must be untouched by lust and suffering, profit and loss, rising and falling, concern about others, enjoyment and fear, and he shall not cling to any creature.”²⁰ It is in this that the “unity” of the being consists, and this means “being turned inwards”. This means “that a man is turned inwards, in his own heart, so that thereby he can feel and understand the inner working and the inner words of God”.²¹ This new condition of consciousness, arising from religious practice, is distinguished by the fact that outward things no longer affect an ego-like consciousness, whence a reciprocal attachment has arisen, but that an empty consciousness stands open to another influence. This “other” influence will no longer be felt as one’s own activity, but as the work of a non-ego which has consciousness as its object.²² ...