The Field of Zen

D.T. Suzuki's 1969 posthumous essay collection on Zen

Tradition: Japanese Zen Buddhism

Suzuki's 1969 posthumous essay collection on Zen

The Field of Zen (1969, posthumous) is a collection of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki's (1870-1966) late essays edited by Christmas Humphreys (1901-1983) — Cambridge-educated barrister, Buddhist Society of London founder (1924), and Suzuki's principal English literary executor. The collection draws together short essays, lectures, and articles Suzuki published in The Middle Way (the Buddhist Society's journal) and in other Western venues during his last decades — the 1930s through his death in 1966. Themes: the practice of Zen sitting (zazen); the role of the koan in Rinzai training; the relation between Zen and Pure-Land (Suzuki was uniquely receptive to Shinshū Pure Land alongside his Rinzai orientation, through his Pure-Land-believing mother and his friend D. T. Saichi); the dialogue between Zen and Western mysticism (Eckhart, John of the Cross, Boehme); the place of Zen in modern Japan and the postwar globalising West. The collection's contribution is that it shows late Suzuki — the figure most responsible for the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone reception of Zen — moving beyond his earlier more-polemical defenses (Essays in Zen Buddhism vols I-III, 1927-34) toward a more pluralist, comparative, and ecumenical voice. Suzuki's influence ran through the Beat poets (Snyder, Ginsberg, Kerouac), the John-Cage and avant-garde art scenes (Cage took Suzuki's Columbia seminars 1950-51), the Eranos lectures (where Suzuki engaged Jung, Eliade, Corbin, Scholem), and the broader 'Zen boom' of the 1950s-60s. The Field of Zen is also the document of his late friendship with Humphreys, Erich Fromm, Thomas Merton, and Karl Jaspers.