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- Convenor:
-
Shoji Yamada
(NICHIBUNKEN)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
John Breen
(Nichibunken (retired))
- Discussant:
-
Shoji Yamada
(NICHIBUNKEN)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Location:
- Lokaal 0.4
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to broaden perceptions of D.T. Suzuki by exploring his engagement with religions other than Buddhism, with avant-garde art, and with popular culture in the West. We will demonstrate the need for researchers and educators to update their perspectives on Suzuki, Zen, and Buddhism.
Long Abstract:
D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) captivated audiences in Japan and in the West throughout his eventful life. Scholars are now asking probing questions about Suzuki, but the fact remains that his writings and lectures have long shaped Westerners' understanding of Zen and Japanese culture as a whole. The publication of Suzuki’s diaries and a collection of his English works is now complete, and we are as a result in a position to offer a more comprehensive review than ever before of his engagement with Japanese religion, society, and culture. This panel aims to broaden perceptions of Suzuki further by exploring his engagement with religions other than Buddhism, with avant-garde art in Europe and Japan, and with popular culture in the United States.
The first paper discusses Suzuki's take on Shinto and its evolution from the Meiji period through the Taisho and Showa years to its culmination in a face to face encounter with a renowned Shintoist in the early postwar period.
The second paper notes Suzuki's framing of the aesthetics of calligraphic ink media as (the ahistorical religio-artistic entity of) "Zen art," and pursues its international impact. It impacted first on a group of European abstract artists in the early post-WWII period. Subsequently, "Zen art" reached the innovative Kyoto-bred artist Inshō Domoto, and resulted in his production of abstract Japanese Buddhist temple art.
The third paper analyzes Suzuki's influence on popular detective fiction. The presenter discusses H.R. Keating's Zen there was Murder (1963), one of the first crime mysteries which features a figure modelled on Suzuki. His close reading of the "Zen detective novel" genre sheds new light on Suzuki's impact on popular Western imaginings of Zen and Japan.
The panelists and the commentator – himself the author of a recent study of Suzuki’s lyricist son, Alan – hope to demonstrate here the need for researchers and educators of Japanese culture to revisit and update their perspectives on Suzuki, Zen, and Buddhism.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -John Breen (Nichibunken (retired))
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore Suzuki's merciless assault on Shinto, the great evil, in 1945. I locate the origins of his Shinto understanding to an early essay he penned in America in 1897. I trace its maturation through to a bruising encounter with the Shinto scholar, Ono Sokyō, in Kamakura in 1946.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation explores Suzuki Daisetsu’s evolving “take” on Shinto, a subject that has received next to no critical attention. I begin by laying bare the structure of his merciless assault on Shinto in 1945, with the outcome of the Pacific War plain for all to see. Shinto, for Suzuki, lacked any vestige of "compassionate and merciful" "spirituality." Shinto was rather the great evil, responsible for bringing about the ruin not only of Japan but of Asia, too. Shinto was "a religion of power" defined by "an infantile nationalism, steeped in politics and rigid with exclusivism." Japan’s postwar redemption, according to Suzuki, depended on nothing so much as ridding Japan of Shinto. I locate the origins of Suzuki’s arguments on Shinto – and the emperor – in an early Japanese essay which he penned while studying in America in 1897, and in an English essay he wrote in 1923 while a professor at Otani University. I trace the maturation of Suzuki’s Shinto critique through his 1945 writings on Japanese spirituality to a bruising encounter with the Shinto scholar, Ono Sokyō, that took place in Kamakura in 1946.
Yasuko Tsuchikane (Cooper Union)
Paper short abstract:
While Suzuki’s influence on avant-garde art through his friendship with John Cage in the early post-WWII period is well-known, this presentation explores untold aspects of the impact which his framing of “Zen art” had on abstract artists in Europe and on Inshō Domoto in Kyoto.
Paper long abstract:
Suzuki Daisetsu’s aesthetic influence over avant-garde art in the early post-WWII period has been well-known through his friendship with John Cage, the American experimental music composer and visual artist; their friendship was forged in New York City in the 1950s. This presentation will explore unstudied areas of Suzuki’s impact on avant-garde art beyond the circle of his immediate contacts. The key here was his framing of the aesthetics of calligraphic ink media as (the ahistorical religio-artistic entity of) "Zen art." I propose that Suzuki’s conceptualization of Zen art travelled far beyond the scope of his direct influences during the same period, since his publications, such as Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture (1938) and its revised version, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959), were translated into several languages including Japanese, and they were widely read, and discussed among artists across national borders.
Suzuki’s framework of Zen art exercised special appeal for avant-garde artists due to its implied adaptation of his conceptualization of Zen’s spiritualism as transcending formalism, conventionalism, ritualism, and the East-West divide. These characterizations presented strong affinities with the quest of globally-minded abstract artists to break away from the traditional mode of representational art. Suzuki’s idea of Zen art impacted first on a group of European abstract artists, called Informel. Subsequently, through contact with the innovative Kyoto-bred artist Inshō Domoto, Suzuki’s religio-aesthetics inspired Inshō’s production of abstract Japanese Buddhist temple art. Informel’s leader and art critic, Michel Tapié, and Inshō together developed their own visions of Zen art, which were interpreted as a new-age abstract art saturated with the type of cross-cultural metaphysical spirit inherent in Suzuki’s Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957). Suzuki’s extensive impact on the international landscape of avant-garde art produced unique conceptual contexts for new abstract art that freely mixed Zen with Christian mysticism and existentialism, among other discourses popular among early postwar intellectuals.
Ben Van Overmeire (Duke Kunshan University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I draw attention to a virtually unstudied English detective novel, H.R. Keating's *Zen there was Murder* (1963). I use the analysis of this novel as a starting point for a broader examination of the "Zen detective novel," a type of detective story that uses Zen tropes and ideas
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I draw attention to a virtually unstudied English detective novel in which a figure modelled on DT Suzuki appears in a crime mystery. That novel is H.R. Keating's _Zen there was Murder_ (1963). His “Utamaro” clearly is a representation of (the popular perception of) Daisetz Suzuki, from his physical appearance (especially the “bushy black eyebrows”) to his refusal to answer any question directly. He always appears in a black kimono, claims that Zen is no religion, quotes liberally from koan collections and stories, denies that Zen is about ethics, and, as if this was not enough, he is also a martial artist. Clearly, Keating is satirizing the popular representation of DT Suzuki that Jane Iwamura has characterized as the “oriental monk.” But he does more than satirize Zen. He also establishes a connection between solving koan, the riddles the Rinzai Zen curriculum is structured around, and solving a crime. Police questioning, for example, is understood as a koan interview. This connection would prove to be an influential one is subsequent iterations of what I call “Zen detective fiction,” a type of detective story that uses Zen tropes and ideas. As I show, prominent Zen detective authors, such as the prodigious Janwillem van de Wetering, also used ideas from Daisetz Suzuki in their writing. As a type of world literature, the detective novel then is one very important way Zen ideas were diffused and continue to be diffused to reading audiences across the world.