![]() ![]() In many of his publications on Zen, Suzuki reprinted well-known works by Hakuin, Sengai Gibon, and other Zen painters from both Japan and China. Rayner FoundationĬage’s delayed, seemingly unprompted flash of insight is characteristic of Zen Buddhist encounters between master and student throughout the history of the religion, seemingly irrational and dialogic in nature and most fully embodied by the Zen koan, which Suzuki often invoked in his lectures, repeating Hakuin’s famed query: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Indeed, Winthrop Sargeant, in his lengthy New Yorker profile, declared the koan as “sufficiently baffling to unhinge the normal thinking person’s mind.” 7 For Suzuki, the koan was indelibly linked to the monk-painter Hakuin Ekaku, whose numerous koan paintings illustrate some of these baffling-yet profound-concepts (see cats. Betty Parsons, Maine 2, 1957, acrylic on linen, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by 2022, 2022.106. ![]() It was a week or so later, while I was walking in the woods looking for mushrooms, that it all dawned on me. While he was giving them I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he was saying. He never repeated what had been said during the passage of the airplane. When the weather was good, the windows were open, and the airplanes leaving La Guardia flew directly overhead from time to time, drowning out whatever he had to say. During this period most people now and then took a little nap. The two or three people who took the class for credit sat in chairs around the table. These were always filled with people listening, and there were generally a few people standing near the door. There were chairs around the table and next to the walls. ![]() The room had windows on two sides, a large table in the middle with ash trays. Finally he settled down on the seventh floor of Philosophy Hall. First he was in the Department of Religion, then somewhere else. 4ĭuring recent years Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki has done a great deal of lecturing at Columbia University. Not until 1949 was he hired as a lecturer at Columbia University. He supplemented his prolific translations and publications with lecture tours, beginning as early as 1906. 103), Suzuki was first sent to the United States in 1897 as a translator for a small publishing house in Illinois. A favored student of the Zen master Shaku Soen (who also continued the painting tradition of Zen monks (see cat. 3Īlthough Zen’s ascent in New York may have seemed sudden, and expressly foreign, as the writers’ frequent mentions of Suzuki’s Japanese appearance and manner suggest, Suzuki had been working for decades to disseminate his thoughts and writings on the subject. Titled “Great Simplicity,” the article refers to Zen as “a subject of considerable mystery to the relatively few people in the country who have heard of it at all” and also mentions that Zen had become something of an “intellectual fad,” especially popular with psychoanalysts and artists. The next month, Time published a two-page article on Zen and Suzuki, noting that a “Buddhist boomlet is underway in the US,” 2 and in August of that year, the New Yorker published a twenty-page profile by Winthrop Sargeant on the professor, complete with a cartoon portrait (fig. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s influence in the transmission and reception of Zen in American popular culture. ![]() This statement, in the January 15, 1957, issue of Vogue, was one of the earliest signs of Dr. Tom Funk, Header illustration, The New Yorker. ![]()
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