D. T. Suzuki 1870 – 1966

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki was a Japanese author, scholar, and translator who did more than any other figure to introduce Mahayana Buddhism, especially Zen, to the English-speaking world. After early years of practice and study at Engaku-ji in Kamakura, he spent more than a decade in the United States as a translator and editor, then taught at Otani University in Kyoto and at Columbia. Through Essays in Zen Buddhism, Zen and Japanese Culture, and many translations, he shaped the reception of Buddhism by Heidegger, Jung, the Beat poets, and a generation of Western readers.

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki was born in 1870 in Kanazawa to a samurai family of physicians who had lost their stipends in the Meiji Restoration. After his father's early death he supported himself as an English teacher, studied at Waseda and at Tokyo Imperial University, and undertook Zen training under Imakita Kosen and his successor Shaku Soen at the Engakuji monastery in Kamakura, attaining a recognition of awakening in 1896.

From 1897 to 1909 he worked in La Salle, Illinois with the philosopher and editor Paul Carus at Open Court Publishing, translating East Asian texts into English. After his return he married Beatrice Lane in 1911, taught at Otani University in Kyoto from 1921, and founded the journal The Eastern Buddhist. His Essays in Zen Buddhism (three series, 1927-1934), Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, Zen and Japanese Culture, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, and the translation of the Lankavatara Sutra introduced Mahayana and Zen to English-speaking audiences.

After the war Suzuki lectured at Columbia and across the United States and Europe, exerting a far-reaching influence on Western intellectuals from Erich Fromm and Karen Horney to John Cage, the Beat writers, and the early generation of American Zen students. His readings of Zen have been criticized for their selectivity, but their cultural impact is undisputed. He died in Tokyo in 1966.