"Seeking Suzuki's Zen" or "What it Sounds Like When Meredith BS's a Paper"

Prompt: explain why the West found Suzuki's ideas about Zen so compelling.

Estimated Time Spent Writing: < 1 hour.

Estimated Grade for my Pass/No Pass Art History Class: Definately Pass.

We live today in an age of cultural awareness. Whether accurate or not, most Americans try to be understanding and knowledgeable about the ways of other people groups. Not only does it make us feel smarter, and therefore more powerful since “knowledge is power,” Americans are known for spiritual diversity, especially since recent trends in Hollywood and elsewhere encourage people to seek out and develop their own patchwork religion. In the early 20^th century, the first ideas about Zen were promoted by several missionaries from Japan to the West. One of the foremost writers and proponents of Zen was a man by the name of Suzuki Diasetsu. While his ideas were not especially well-read in Japan, those in the Occident devoured his teachings, as their desire to learn about Zen and incorporate it into their lives, grew.

In a culture steeped in the Christian tradition, the Zen ideas Suzuki presented about enlightenment seemed like an easy way to achieve understanding. Sharf explains in his essay that the beauty of Buddhism is that it adjusts for all types of adherents (145), which means that Christians in the west could adapt the ideas of Zen in order to compliment their own religious views. One of the common frustrations about the Bible is that Jesus himself, along with many of the book’s writers, explains that there are certain aspects of God that the world may never understand. Even for those interested in pastoring a church, a typical seminary education requires three years of study as a masters program, following the expected four year college career. These exceptionally educated persons must devote a significant portion of their lives to the study of the Bible in order to understand it. So for a lay person, this type of “religious mysticism” is certainly compelling. And if Zen is truly “the foundation for all authentic religious insight” (Sharf 127), understanding it would certainly be beneficial.

Psychologically, Zen seems even more attractive toward the latter part of Suzuki’s career as he begins to argue that Zen is a uniquely Japanese idea. Though he knows that the origins of Zen are from China, Suzuki explains that there is something inherently “Zen” in the way of life of the Japanese (Sharf 128). In this way, he presents the Japanese as the Jews of Buddhism, the “chosen people” of Zen. In this West, this denunciation of their ability to understand Eastern concepts would provide further reason to examine and master Zen ideas—if for no other reason than to prove their adequacy at obtaining knowledge.

Innately prideful, the West clamors for understanding of Zen to boost their own spiritual and intellectual standing. For example, explaining Japanese gardens in terms of Zen is just one way to solidify the parameters of Japanese culture, to fit the Orient into an explainable box of information to be consumed by the West. In fact, many of the arts of Japan are critiqued in terms of Zen. This is not necessarily because they are inherently purposed by their creators as expressions of Zen philosophy, but because at some point, someone found enlightenment through these vessels and decided to share that knowledge with others. Loraine Cup’s interpretation of the garden at Nioyanji is a good example of this, as she describes the groupings of rocks as a “sermon in stone” which expresses the harmony of the universe (Sharf 134 and lecture notes, part two). In actuality, this is remarkably similar to someone from the Christian faith defining a literary character as a “Christ figure.” While this may not be the intent of the author, a person of faith may take notice of certain characteristics that remind him or her of the person of Jesus from the Bible. Likewise, those who view the world through Zen-colored glasses may read their philosophy into a work of art. In the same way, a Western culture trying to understand their Japanese neighbors would find it easier to appreciate Japanese art if they could explain it in terms of a philosophical or religious view. In this way, Westerners do not feel artistically inept but can appreciate work that they cannot really understand, explaining it in terms of a lovely expression of religious views.

Certainly, it is easy to understand the Western obsession with Zen, as it seems to fit neatly into their desire for further knowledge and understanding about the world around us. Even if Americans did not “acknowledge the ideological and rhetorical dimensions of the Zen of men like Suzuki” (Sharf 145), their desire to relate to other cultures, though less-than-admirably motivated, resulted in the diffusion of Oriental ideas like those of Suzuki Daisetsu.