Zen Buddhism

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

Page 62

THE BIRTH OF ZEN BUDDHISM 41 the following two volumes, and the later works as listed in the Bibliography at the end of this volume, have now made Zen available, to the extent that it can ever be conveyed in print, to the English-speaking world. It is right to add that Dr. J. B. Pratt, who in 1928 produced his monumental work The Pilgrimage of Buddhism, seems to have acquired his knowledge of Zen without reference to these Essays of Dr. Suzuki's, though as he adds the latter's name to those who had helped him, it is probable that he had read the volumes of The Eastern Buddhist from which the Essays were more or less compiled. By 1932 the three main Sutras used in Zen were available in English. William Gemmell had translated The Diamond Sutra in 1912. The Sutra of Wei Lang reached England in 1930, and Dr. Suzuki's Studies in the Lankávatára Sutra and the translated text, The Lankávatára Sutra, appeared in 1930 and 1932 respectively. To these must be added the Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind (trans. Chu Ch'an) and other Zen Sutras now being published by the Buddhist Society in London as fast as members in China can send them in competent translation.
From 1930 onwards books and articles on Zen began to increase in quantity, yet all of them were influenced by, if not entirely based upon, the works of Dr. Suzuki. A section in my What is Buddhism? (1928), Mrs. Adams Beck's very lovely work, The Garden of Vision (1929), Dwight Goddard's The Buddha's Golden Path (1930), these and the steady output of Dr. Suzuki made Zen increasingly known. Then came the war, but after it, when I found the Professor, hale and hearty at seventy-six, in his house in Engakuji at Kamakura, he told me of eighteen further volumes on Buddhism which he had written