Zen Buddhism

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

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ZEN
BUDDHISM
Chicago published Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot by Soyen Shaku, then the Lord-Abbot of Engakuji at Kamakura, the monastery where Dr. Suzuki, his pupil, is living and writing today. These reported sermons, together with a translation by Dr. Suzuki of the Sutra of 42 Sections, were the first information for the West on the subject of Zen. In the following year Dr. Suzuki wrote a paper for the Journal of the Pali Text Society of London which, so far as I know, was the first presentation to England of the meaning as distinct from the mere existence of Zen Buddhism. In 1913, Luzac and Co. of London published The Religion of the Samurai by Kaiten Nukariya, an admirable textbook about Zen, though purely on the plane of the intellect. E. J. Harrison's The Fighting Spirit of Japan, published in London in the same year, has a chapter on Zen, but the subject is treated without understanding.
In 1921 Dr. Suzuki founded and edited The Eastern Buddhist, for which he wrote between that date and its final issue in 1939 a great many articles on Zen, many of which were used as the basis for his later books. The circulation in England, however, was never large, and the same presumably applied to a thirty-page booklet written by Arthur Waley in 1922 on Zen Buddhism and its Relation to Art. To all intents and purposes, therefore, the general public had only The Religion of the Samurai for their study of Zen until Dr. Suzuki began, in 1927, the publication of his long series of works which the Buddhist Society, London, are now in the process of republishing in England.
The first volume of Essays in Zen Buddhism opened a new world of vision for the many thousands who read it, and