Daisetz T. Suzuki - Zen and Japanese Culture – Comment.

 

This enchanting book examines the deep influence of Zen Buddhism on the central aspects of Japanese culture and gracefully illustrates that the two are linked in profound ways. Suzuki has that mysterious ability as a writer to explain extremely abstract notions in elegant though simplistic language. Zen is a difficult subject to demonstrate because, by its very nature, it defies normative modes of rational thought.  

Suzuki manages to gently clear our rationally conditioned patterns of thought like a gentle spring rain, and astonishingly we come to discover that Zen is simpler than anything else we have encountered before. One comes away from the reading with a soothing, calm, and certain understanding of the nature of Zen. And one is certain that the man behind the words is a master.  

He begins the narrative with insightful remarks on Japanese culture, touching on Zen's history and how the military classes, the Samurai, embraced the religion. The discussion moves onto Zen and its relation to Confucianism and the connection with the cultivation of a nationalistic spirit in Japan. 

 Most of the text is devoted to three central areas: Zen and Swordsmanship, Zen and Haiku, Zen, and the Art of Tea, and lastly, the Japanese love of nature and its manifestations through art. 
 

Suzuki's argument is that Zen and its teachings have had such an enormous influence on the Japanese, that the culture as we know it would not exist without it. One needs to understand this influence to have any comprehension of the culture. He proposes that one does not exist without the other:  

"...without a full appreciation of it not a page of the history of Japanese poetry, Japanese arts, and Japanese handicrafts would have been written. Not only the history of the arts, but the history of the Japanese moral and spiritual life would lose its deeper significance, if detached from the Zen way of interpreting life and the world." (P.364)  

This is an extraordinary book because it opens the way towards a fundamental understanding of Zen Buddhism and the foundations of Japanese culture, illustrating that the two are inextricably interlinked. The text is also beautifully enhanced with poetry, paintings, calligraphy, and examples of architecture. If one is interested in either of these subjects, this book is a masterpiece and an important and enlightening experience.