The spread of Zen in the West is owed in large part to D. T. Suzuki, whose Essays in Zen Buddhism exerted a significant influence on the 1960s and its hippy counter-culture as well as fascinating the previous generation. Such was the renown of Suzuki that he was even nick-named the “St. François Xavier of Zen for the Western world.” Quite a fair turn of events, given that the missionary François Xavier sought to convert the Japanese in the sixteenth century.
Suzuki managed to convince his Western readers that Zen could rival the very best of Christian mysticism, or rather that it was, in fact, superior to all other forms of mysticism, both Oriental and Western, and as such constituted a unique historical phenomenon. Suzuki logically concluded that Zen is neither a philosophy nor a religion but is quite simply “the spirit of all religion or philosophy.” It is precisely for this reason that Zen can be practiced by anyone, whether Buddhist or Christian, “just as big fish and small fish are both contentedly living in the same ocean.” Through this metaphor, Zen is compared to the ocean while practicing Zen brings about what Romain Rolland called the “oceanic feeling” – the impression of fading away into the vast expanse of reality. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, saw this notion of oceanic feeling as a form of primary narcissism. Suzuki, on the other hand, has had a significant impact upon the psychoanalytical reinterpretation of Zen by translating “no-mind” or “no-thought” (wuxin in Chinese, mushin in Japanese) – the aim of Zen meditation – as “Unconscious.” By so doing, he deprived Zen of its religious nature and transformed it into a kind of therapeutic system. As we have seen, this same kind of misinterpretation has occurred in the case of Buddhism in general.
Faure: Unmasking Buddhism p.79
Submitted December 14, 2018 at 10:31AM by grass_skirt https://ift.tt/2QQ7HLL
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