Essays in Zen Buddhism

ESSAYS IN ZEN BUDDHISM
BY DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI Professor of Zen Buddhism at Otani Buddhist College, Kyoto
(FIRST SERIES)
LONDON LUZAC AND COMPANY 46 Great Russell Street Published for The Eastern Buddhist Society, Kyoto, Japan 1927
ALL RIGHTS OF REPRINTING AND TRANSLATION RESERVED BY THE AUTHOR
Made in Great Britain and printed at The Vincent Works, Oxford
THE most fruitful growth of Buddhism in the Far East has resulted in the development of Zen and Shin. Zen attained its maturity in China and Shin in Japan. The vigour and vitality which Buddhism still has after more than two thousand years of history, will be realised when one comes in contact with these two branches of Buddhism. The one appeals to the inmost religious consciousness of mankind, while the other touches the intellectual and practical aspects of the Oriental mind, which is more intuitive than discursive, more mystical than logical. If Zen is the ultra “self-power” wing of Buddhism, Shin represents the other extreme wing known as the “other-power,” and these two extremes are synthesised in the enlightened Buddha-consciousness.
Of course, great mistake it would be if one should ever take the notion even for a moment that Zen could be mastered from its philosophical presentation or its psychological description; but this ought not to mean that Zen is not to be intelligently approached or to be made somewhat accessible by our ordinary means of reasoning. I need not mention that my attempts in the following pages are anything but adequate for the rational treatment of the subject. But as a tentative experiment to present Zen from our common-sense point of view and as a direct lineage of Buddhist faith as first proclaimed or rather realised by the Buddha, I hope I have worked towards removing some of the difficulties usually besetting us in the mastery of Zen thought. How far I have succeeded or how utterly I have failed,—this is naturally for the reader to judge.
The book is a collection of the Essays originally published in The Eastern Buddhist except one on the “History of Zen Buddhism” which was written specially for this volume; but all of them have been thoroughly revised and in some parts entirely re-written and new chapters added. The book will be followed by a second series of Essays before long, in which some more of the important points in the constitution of Zen will be treated.