Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki was a leading world authority on Zen Buddhism. Born in Japan in 1870, he received his training as a Buddhist disciple at the great Zen monastery at Kamakura and was a professor of Buddhist philosophy at Otani University in Kyoto. Dr. Suzuki was the author of more than 100 works on Zen and Buddhism in both Japanese and English. A Buddhist himself and scholar of great renown, he studied the works of Buddhism in their original versions. He also possessed a thorough knowledge of Western thought, thus enabling him to become one of the most articulate interpreters of Zen to the West. During his long life he produced many books, among them original translations of important Buddhist texts and a great many illuminating essays. He died in 1966.
摘要
“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,” writes D. T. Suzuki. In fact, until 1927, when he published the first volume of his Essays in Zen Buddhism, the Western world has little knowledge of this unique school of spiritual development which uses many systems of philosophy, psychology, and ethics in its own technique for self-understanding and self-enlightenment.
Included in this volume are his famous study, “Enlightenment and Ignorance,” a chapter on “Practical Methods of Zen Instruction,” the essays “On Satori—The Revelation of a New Truth in Zen Buddhism” and “History of Zen Buddhism from Bodhidharma to Hui-Nêng (Yeno),” and his commentary on “The Ten Cow-herding Pictures’ which have long been used in Zen to illustrate the stages of spiritual progress.
