A Zen Life: D.T Suzuki

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From one angle, the impact of Eastern philosophy on Western society might be gleaned from a contemporary billboard advertising Zen MP3 players. Zen, in one form or another, is part of the cultural vocabulary and scene. And yet much of the interest in the subject over the last half-century or more, MP3 players aside, has much to do with the career and talents of one man, Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki. The Japanese-born and globetrotting Buddhist author and translator whose life spanned nearly an entire, historically fraught century from 1870 to 1966, acted as a highly influential bridge between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions in the aftermath of World War II's unprecedented catastrophe and the ominous birth of the Cold War and the atomic age. Impressing leading Western thinkers and artists as varied as Alan Watts, Martin Heidegger, Alan Ginsberg, Carl Jung, Thomas Merton, Erich Fromm, and John Cage, Suzuki's public talks, lectures, and writings (including his classic An Introduction to Zen Buddhism) ensured Buddhism "burst like a bomb on America" (in religious scholar Huston Smith's somewhat unfortunate, if apt, phrase) and left a decided impact on art, philosophy, psychoanalysis, Christianity, and the shape of the culture at large (not least via the dissident subculture of the Beats).[1]

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