Chan Insights and Oversights Quotes

“The first encounter with Chan/Zen took place in Japan, where Francis Xavier arrived in August 1549. Xavier's stay in Japan was relatively short, and he had to rely in the beginning on the poor information provided by the Japanese convert Yajirō, who spoke some Portuguese. In contrast to Ricci's, Xavier's judgment reflects the sociopolitical importance of Buddhism in Japanese society prior to the anti-Buddhist repression of 1571, as well as the strong impressions left by his first encounters with Zen masters. Although Xavier and his confreres were puzzled by the many similarities between Buddhism and Christianity and first interpreted them as proof of a past knowledge, obscured in time, of Christian teachings, they eventually attributed them to the work of the devil (Schurhammer 1982, 224).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“It is precisely this [transcendental] privilege that Christian missionaries in China and Japan failed to relinquish when they spoke about Buddhism; but the same failure is found in such "na(t)ive" exponents of Zen as D. T. Suzuki, and it would perhaps be hard to decide which version of Zen, the negative or the idealized, is most misleading. Even if the degree of reductionism is not quite the same in both cases, both interpretations share responsibility for the strange predicament in which Westerners who approach Chan/Zen find themselves: they are unable to consider it a serious intellectual system, for the constraints of Western discourse on Zen cause them to either devaluate it as an Eastern form of either "natural mysticism" or "quietism" or to idealize it as a wonderfully exotic Dharma. In this sense, Zen can be seen as a typical example of "secondary Orientalism," a stereotype concocted as much by the Japanese themselves as by Westerners.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“There is probably no way for Westerners to understand Asian religions from a purely traditional
Indian, Chinese, or Japanese perspective, but perhaps is there no need either to do so.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“As the controversy between [D. T.] Suzuki and [Chinese historian] Hu Shih suggests, the history of Chan/Zen is the product of two distincts milieux, the Buddhist institutions and the academic world. Serving as relay stations between these two circles are Buddhist institutions such as Komazawa University in Tokyo and Hanazono College in Kyoto, respectively affiliated with the Sōtō and Rinzai sects.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“From a Western standpoint, one could have expected that the apocryphal nature of the works attributed to the "founders" Bodhidharma and Huineng, let alone the quasi-mythical nature of such figures, would considerably weaken a tradition that drew its legitimacy from them. Such was not the case, in part because the impact of historical demythification was attenuated by the shift that had already taken place, during the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, from a "hieratical" tradition relying on the ritual transmission of the Dharma and of its regalia (patriarchal robe, text, relics, portrait, transmission verses), to a more philosophically minded tradition, one therefore more detached from its human or material carriers.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“To what extent is Chan amenable to a historical approach, if it is indeed? Can this teaching, as [D. T.] Suzuki thought, traverse the claim of history in the name of its own temporal character? If not, to what extent is it threatened by the results of the historical inquiry?”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“As it is known to us through East Asian sources, Chan/Zen is the product of two traditions that sometimes overlap, sometimes contradict or ignore each other: namely, the Buddhist orthodoxy the
Sino-Japanese historiographical tradition.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“With [D. T.] Suzuki, Zen coopted the whole field of Japanese culture and, imposing on Japanese ideology the myth of transparency, claimed the status of a transcendental spirituality. With Nishida [Kitarō] and the Kyoto school, Zen acquired a crosscultural philosophical status. Thus, through the work of Suzuki, Nishida and their successors, a new field of discourse was created—one that differs markedly from the earlier Chan/Zen discourse (s) it claimed to replicate or interpret.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Their common interest in Western mystics like Meister Eckhart led both Nishida and Suzuki to misrepresent Christianity as some kind of inferior version of Mahayäna Buddhism, thus reversing the old schemas applied to the East by Westerners.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“If there is some truth in the Zen dictum that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, then it follows that the notion of pure experience is by no means the pure experience itself. Assuming that such an experience can be found, any attempt to characterize it, even the least reifying one, will betray it.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Nishida has been sharply criticized after the war for lending his support to the imperial (ist) ideology of the Japanese government, but these criticisms have not led—as in Heidegger's case—to a thorough questioning of his philosophy.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Without falling into sociopolitical reductionism, it remains necessary to protest against the prevailing tendency, among Western scholars, to read the works of Nishida [Kitarō] and the Kyoto school as expressions of a "pure philosophy" stemming from a "pure experience.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Suzuki seemed oblivious to Japan's responsibility for the war. In a footnote to Zen and Japanese Culture, he placed all the responsibility on Western intellectualism: "The intellect presses the button, the whole city is destroyed. . . . All is done mechanically, logically, systematically, and the intellect is perfectly satisfied. Is it not time for us all to think of ourselves from another point of view than that of mere intellectuality" (Suzuki 1970, 338). According to Suzuki, all this would not have happened if the Westerners had, like the Japanese, had more respect for nature. In another footnote, he wrote: "I sometimes wonder if any of the Great Western soldiers ever turned into a poet. Can we imagine, for instance, in recent times, that General MacArthur or General Eisenhower would compose a poem upon visiting one of those bomb-torn cities?" Apparently, Suzuki was unaware that perhaps the chief cause of war and its fuel were found in the same warrior mystique that he exalted in several previous chapters of the same book.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Although some religious traditions may promote inner detachment vis-à-vis political systems, most religions tend to be politically conservative and nationalistic and Zen has been no exception in this regard.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“With Suzuki, the commonsensical approach that would see Zen as a product of Japanese culture is inverted, and Japanese culture becomes a multifaceted expression of a unique phenomenon, or rather of a metaphysical principle named Zen.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Although [D. T.] Suzuki's apparently free-floating, and certainly contradictory, discourse may be charitably interpreted as reflecting the "unlocalized" mind of the enlightened master, it can also appear as a situational reflex to "cash in" on both sides of every issue.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Despite his nativist tendency, Suzuki relied heavily on the categories of nineteenth-century Orientalism. He simply inverted the old schemas to serve his own purposes to present Zen as the source and goal of all mystical experiences.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Suzuki also liked to compare Zen to Western philosophy, to Zen's advantage: "The philosopher according to whom cogito ergo sum is generally weak-minded. The Zen master has nothing to do with such quibbles" (Suzuki 1970, 408). We may also question the accuracy of his understanding of Western philosophy. If Meister Eckhart, despite (or because of) his undeniable spirituality, cannot be said to represent the entire Christian tradition, neither can the intellectualist strain emphasized by Suzuki be said to represent the entire Western philosophical tradition. From the pre-Socratics, Socrates and the Stoics, all the way to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy was a path of self-transformation, not merely the intellectual pastime that Suzuki describes.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The relation between Christianity and Buddhism is compared by [D. T.] Suzuki to that between wine and tea: whereas tea is tasteless but stimulating, wine "first
excitates and then inebriates" (Suzuki 1970, 273). This line of argument led Suzuki to the conclusion that Zen is neither a philosophy nor a metaphysics nor a religion, but it is, rather, "the spirit of all religion or philosophy." Suzuki went so far as to assert that "if there is a God, personal or impersonal, he or it must be with Zen and in Zen" (Suzuki 1969, 347). Implicit in such statements is an almost Protestant view of religion as a reality that has nothing to do with cults, dogmas, or collective beliefs, but rests on the "inner experience" of the individual. However, owing to the atypical character of such "mystical" experiences, their extreme rarity, and the Christian theology they often presuppose, it seems illegitimate to derive from them a general (if not always explicit) theory of religion, as Suzuki and Nishida, following William James, have done.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“In contrast to [Thomas] Merton, who hazarded "with diffidence" statements about Buddhism and was acutely aware that, as a Catholic priest and monk, he could not be sure that he had trustworthy insights into the spiritual values of a tradition with which he was not really familiar (Merton 1967, 5), Suzuki was always confident in his own judgment on Christianity. However, his interpretation of Christianity remained superficial and polemical. He argued, for example, that Christian tenets such as the crucifixion are merely symbolical, "while Buddhism is . . . free from the historical symbolism of Christianity" (Suzuki 1949–1953, 1: 152).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Downplaying sociocultural determinations, [D. T.] Suzuki argued that Zen consciousness and Christian consciousness are the same (Suzuki 1949–1953, 2: 304). In fact, he believed that, although a posterior interpretations of the mystical experience may differ, all "mysticisms" are fundamentally the same. Using the notion of mysticism as "the common denominator by virtue of which various traditions may be called religious" (Fader 1976, 184), Suzuki was able to compare Zen monks with Meister Eckhart or Zen passivity with Christian quietism: "Eckhart, Zen, and Shin thus can be grouped together as belonging to the great school of mysticism" (Suzuki 1969, xix).

This inclusive comparativism, however, has a hidden agenda—namely to prove that Zen is "mystically" superior to Christianity.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“[D. T.] Suzuki's work is in some ways an attempt at a spiritual reconquista, and his "dialogue" with Christians may have the same motivations as [Francis] Xavier's conversations with Japanese Buddhists.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The major contradiction in Suzuki's position, one of which he was acutely aware, is that he negated in actual practice what he advocated in theory, namely, that Zen "is a direct method, for it refuses to resort to verbal explanation or logical analysis, or to ritualism" (Ibid. 3:318).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“It is an interesting feature of the Chan tradition (and of all similar iconoclastic trends) that its radical language, aimed at debunking an orthodoxy, soon becomes the sign or emblem of a new orthodoxy.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Paradoxically, we may argue that precisely because of his biases Suzuki can be considered representative of Zen—as a sectarian tradition. The appeal to the "pure" tradition, to the "essence" of Zen, is indeed a typical feature of the sectarian attitude. This attitude was already exemplified by Dogen, for whom true Zen stood above the Zen school. Just as Dogen refused to call his teaching "Zen," Suzuki claims that Zen is "neither a religion nor a philosophy" or better that it is "the spirit of all religion and philosophy." The assumption that there is an "essence" of Buddhism, a kind of perennial Dharma to which only "authentic" masters would have access, is to be rejected as ideologically suspect.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“[D. T.] Suzuki's obvious sincerity and his intense yearning for transcendence did not prevent his thinking from being ideologically flawed, informed as it was by his culture, his social status, and his sectarian affiliations. This, of course, raises the questions of the place whence he spoke and whether an enlightened person can assume any privilege with regard to historical determinations. Suzuki claimed this privilege for Zen masters, and by implication for himself.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“[D. T.] Suzuki's success had also a lot to do with his undeniable personal charisma. As noted already, he did not leave his interlocutors indifferent, and most judgments on his work are influenced by personal reactions to his personality. It is therefore hard to dissociate the image of the man, with his genuine simplicity, warmth, and his status of enlightened layman, from the impression left by his assertions concerning the Chan/Zen tradition.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The success of [D. T.] Suzuki's work was not related to its literary or philosophical qualities; it was rather the result of a historical coniuncture that prompted the emergence in the West of a positive modality of Orientalist discourse, which found in the image of Zen fostered by Suzuki a particularly appropriate object.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Spanning from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s, [D. T.] Suzuki's work played a major role in the constitution of a Zen discourse in Japan and the West. In the wake of Suzuki, a significant contribution to the elaboration of a Zen philosophy was made by the so-called Kyoto School, which was founded by Suzuki's friend Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945). Despite their different intellectual itineraries, both Suzuki and Nishida were still speaking from within the discursive arena opened by Western Orientalism. That is to say, their description of Zen is in many respects an inverted image of that given by the Christian missionaries, and they relied on Christian categories even when rejecting them.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Perhaps the impossibility in which we are to rid ourselves of cultural and epistemological constraints does not prevent us from understanding other cultures, as long as we remain conscious of these constraints and consider them as providing the necessary perspective for any "thick description.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights