INTRODUCTION

One of the most noteworthy facts about D.T. Suzuki is the remarkable success of his writings in English. As has often been pointed out, these varied and numerous works were almost single-handedly responsible for the rise of an interest in Zen among leading Western philosophers and psychologists of the prewar period, as well as for the much more widespread ‘Zen boom’ among artists, writers, and eventually the public at large from the 1950s onwards. The major contemporary American poet Gary Snyder has described Suzuki as the ‘most cosmopolitan Japanese thinker of the 20th century’ and asked: ‘Can you think of any Japanese person who has done as much as he has to affect the rest of the world?’

How can we account for this remarkable success? It seems to me that Suzuki was ideally suited to be a cultural translator – that is, a translator not just in the narrow linguistic sense, of particular texts, but, in a much wider sense, a translator/interpreter/transmitter of ideas, of cultural values, of spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities, and of the many other immaterial elements that constitute a complex and ancient cultural tradition. More than any other scholar and writer of the age, he was able to bridge the wide cultural gap which existed between Japan and the West in the early twentieth century. It was an achievement that required a rare combination of talents, abilities and even life experiences: not only a profound practical and scholarly knowledge of Zen Buddhism and its vast cultural-historical context, an equally wide and deep knowledge of Western culture, and a consummate mastery of English prose style, but also a prolonged period of residence in a Western country, prolonged enough to give him an intimate feel for the way Westerners think and express themselves. All these factors came together to enable him to create works in English that had enormous appeal to Western readers.

Another relevant factor no doubt was the cultural milieu of the early twentieth century, especially what has been called the ‘inward turn’ of Western culture, as manifest in the rise of the psychological novel, symbolist poetry, the psychology of the unconscious, the modernist stream-of-consciousness novel, surrealism, and so on. The moment was obviously right for an interest in Zen as another, and indeed very direct and methodical, form of ‘inward-turning’.