D. T. Suzuki

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Essays in Zen Buddhism, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism and Zen and Japanese Culture.

Satori

Zen as Suzuki teaches it stands or falls on one experience. Satori, he says, is the raison d'être of Zen, and without it Zen is no Zen. He defines it as an intuitive looking into the nature of things, in contrast to the analytical or logical understanding of them, and calls it the acquiring of a new viewpoint: the same world is seen, but seen as if for the first time, from its centre and not from outside. The sitting, the koans, the discipline of the monastery and the words of the masters are all means to it, and Zen is no philosophy and no religion in the usual sense: it has no God to worship, no rites to keep, no heaven to aim at and no soul to be saved by another.

He gives satori eight marks. It is irrational, beyond the reach of reasoning; it is intuitive insight; it is authoritative, final for the one who has it; it is affirmation, a yes to all that is; it carries a sense of the beyond; it has an impersonal tone; it brings a feeling of exaltation; and it is momentary, coming abruptly, all at once.

The koan and the great doubt

The koan, in his account, is not a riddle with a clever answer. The master gives the student a case, such as Zhaozhou's Mu, and the student holds it until the whole of the mind is gathered into a single question that can be neither answered nor put down. This is the great doubt, a mass of doubt that fills the student; when it is ripe, some sound or touch breaks it open, and the breaking is satori. The masters' strange words, the shout of Linji and the stick of Deshan, serve the same end: to cut off the student's reliance on concepts and turn them back to their own nature at the moment it can be seen.

The forms of the Zen hall, the sitting, the koan and the interview, are taught in full in the branch Zen of The mystics; what is Suzuki's own is this account of what they are for.

No-mind

Behind satori he sets prajna, the transcendental wisdom of the Mahayana, and the state the old masters called no-mind. No-mind is not blankness. It is the mind that does not stop or stick anywhere, that meets each thing fully and lets it go, working as the hands of a craftsman work when long training has made thinking unnecessary. In Huineng's teaching, as he reads it, seeing into one's own nature is this no-mind awake.

The sword and the stopping mind

Zen and Japanese Culture shows the same teaching in the arts. He gives the letter of the Zen master Takuan to a teacher of swordsmanship on the mind that stops. When an opponent strikes, the eyes catch his sword and the mind follows it, and in that moment one ceases to be master of oneself and is beaten. The mind must see the sword and not stop there, nor plan a counterstroke, but move on freely, as water flows; the immovable mind is the one that never stops anywhere. The same freedom is what every art of Japan seeks, from archery to calligraphy.

Tea, wabi and sabi

The tea ceremony, he teaches, rests on four principles: harmony, reverence, purity and tranquillity. Its spirit is wabi, which means poverty: not to depend on worldly things, wealth, power and reputation, and yet to feel inwardly the presence of something of the highest value, content with a little hut, like Thoreau's cabin, and a dish of vegetables from the field. Sabi is the beauty of rustic unpretentiousness and archaic imperfection, an object that seems simple and effortless and is rich in associations; the word means loneliness, and the tea utensils are prized for it.

Basho's haiku of the old pond and the frog that jumps in is not, he says, a picture of mere tranquillity. The sound of the water opened something in the poet, and only one whose spirit is in accord with the spirit of the world could hear it so.

The life of the monastery

In the monastery the training is a whole life, and he names its parts: a life of humility, a life of labour, a life of service, a life of prayer and gratitude, and a life of meditation. The monks beg their food, work in the fields and the kitchen, sit in the meditation hall and meet the master alone; the virtues most prized are the hidden ones, good done without being seen.

The scriptures behind Zen

Though Zen will not stand on words, he translated and studied the scriptures behind it. The Lankavatara Sutra, which he translated, teaches that all is mind only, and that freedom is a turning-about in the deepest seat of consciousness, where the store of seeds that makes the world appear is turned back toward its source. The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana teaches the one mind with two aspects: the mind as suchness, which is unborn and undying, and the mind as birth and death, in which suchness and ignorance are mingled. Enlightenment is original to the mind, and practice is its recovery.