Zen: What freedom means (D.T. Suzuki)

Maria Popova (brainpickings.org); Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Illustration by Andrea Dezso for fairytales of the Brothers Grimm (brainpickings.org)

Buddhist prayer flags (illustration by Lizi Boyd from "Flashlight," brainpickings.org)

D.T. Suzuki on What Freedom Really Means and How Zen Can Help Us Cultivate Our Character

“The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.”

Alan Watts may be credited with popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, but he owes the entire trajectory of his life and legacy to a single encounter with the Zen Buddhist sage D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) — one of humanity’s greatest and most influential stewards of Zen philosophy.

At the age of 21 Watts attended a lecture by Suzuki in London, which so enthralled him that he spent the remainder of his life studying, propagating, and building upon Suzuki’s teachings.

Legendary composer John Cage had a similar encounter with Suzuki, which profoundly shaped his life and music.

Cats who don't meditate are jealous and mean.

In the early 1920s, spurred by the concern that Zen masters were “unable to present their understanding in the light of modern thought,” Suzuki undertook “a tentative experiment to present Zen from our common-sense point of view” — a rather humble formulation of what he actually accomplished, which was nothing less than giving ancient Eastern philosophy a second life in the West and planting the seed for a new culture of secularized spirituality.

Kittens love sincere meditation teachers.

But by 1940 all of his books had gone out of print in war-torn England, and all remaining copies in Japan were destroyed in the great fire of 1945, which consumed three quarters of Tokyo.

In 1946, London Buddhist Society President Christmas Humphreys set out to undo the damage and traveled to Tokyo, where he began working with Suzuki on translating his new manuscripts and reprinting what remained of the old. The result was the timeless classic Essays in Zen Buddhism (public library), originally published in 1927 — a collection of Suzuki’s foundational texts introducing the principles of Zen into secular life as a discipline concerned first and foremost with what he called “the reconstruction of character.”

As Suzuki observed, “Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul.” His essays became and remain a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.

Suzuki begins at the beginning, laying out the promise of Zen in our everyday lives:

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. By making us drink right from the fountain of life, it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world. ...

This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies. When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows moldy and withers away or is warped and expresses itself abnormally. It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled. This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts. Generally, we are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another. All the struggles that we see around us come from this ignorance… When the cloud of ignorance disappears… we see for the first time into the nature of our own being.

One of Suzuki’s most overlooked yet essential points — and one particularly prescient in the context of what modern developmental psychology has found in the decades since — has to do with the crucial role of adolescence as a pivotal point in moral development.

The teenage years, he argues, are when we begin “deeply delving into the mysteries of life” and when we are “asked to choose between the ‘Everlasting No’ and the ‘Everlasting Yea’” — a notion young Nietzsche intuited half a century earlier when he resolved, “I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!”

At this fork in the road of existence, Suzuki insists, mastering the principles of Zen can make the critical difference in leading us toward a meaningful and fulfilling life. He writes:

Life is after all a form of affirmation… However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it.

Much of that blindness, he admonishes, comes from our attachment to the ego. Paradoxical as it may sound to any parent or teacher of a teenager, Suzuki suggests that adolescence is the time most fruitful for the dissolution of the ego:

We are too ego-centered. The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow… We are, however, given many chances to break through this shell, and the first and greatest of them is when we reach adolescence. More