ESSAYS IN ZEN BUDDHISM ESSAYS IN ZEN BUDDHISM BY DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI _Professor of Zen Buddhism at Otani Buddhist College, Kyoto_ (FIRST SERIES) [Illustration] LONDON LUZAC AND COMPANY 46 Great Russell Street Published for The Eastern Buddhist Society, Kyoto, Japan 1927 ALL RIGHTS OF REPRINTING AND TRANSLATION RESERVED BY THE AUTHOR _Made in Great Britain and printed at The Vincent Works, Oxford_ PREFACE The most fruitful growth of Buddhism in the Far East has resulted in the development of Zen and Shin. Zen attained its maturity in China and Shin in Japan. The vigour and vitality which Buddhism still has after more than two thousand years of history, will be realised when one comes in contact with these two branches of Buddhism. The one appeals to the inmost religious consciousness of mankind, while the other touches the intellectual and practical aspects of the Oriental mind, which is more intuitive than discursive, more mystical than logical. If Zen is the ultra “self-power” wing of Buddhism, Shin represents the other extreme wing known as the “other-power,” and these two extremes are synthesised in the enlightened Buddha-consciousness. Since the publication of my short note on Zen Buddhism in the _Journal of the Pali Text Society_, 1907, nothing of importance has been published in English on the subject except Professor Kwaiten Nukariya’s _Religion of the Samurai_, 1913. In fact, even in Japanese or Chinese, this branch of Buddhism has received very slight attention from modern writers of Buddhism. This is due to the peculiar difficulties which accompany the study of it. The “Goroku”[f1][1] (sayings) is the only literary form in which Zen expresses itself; and to understand it requires some special practical training in Zen, for mere knowledge of the Chinese, classical and historical, is far from being enough; even with the masterly understanding of the philosophy of general Buddhism, Zen is found quite hard to fathom. Some of such scholars sometimes try to explain the truth and development of Zen, but they sadly fail to do justice to the subject.