Just who was Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō 鈴木大拙貞太郎 (1870–1966), a.k.a. D. T. Suzuki? Daisetsu is a Buddhist “householder name”; his given name was Teitarō. A “householder” is a lay person who excels in Buddhist knowledge; Daisetsu was never a monk. If not a monk, then was he a scholar? He dropped out of the Dai Yon Kōtō Chūgakkō 第四高等中学校 (Fourth Upper-Level Middle School) in Kanazawa in his 8rst year. Daisetsu continued a deep friendship with his classmate Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945), another dropout who later became a philosopher, until the latter’s death. Daisetsu 8rst worked as a primary school assistant and instructor in charge of English. He went on to enter the philosophy departments at Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō 東京専門学校 (Tokyo Vocational School; later Waseda University) and Teikoku Daigaku Bunka Daigaku 帝国大学文科大学 (Teikoku University of Science and Technology; later University of Tokyo Faculty of Letters), but graduated from neither. Daisetsu’s 8nal academic credentials were elementary and middle school graduation. He was born in 1870 and died in 1966, and thus lived through nearly a century of tumultuous history. His growth, and the growth of modern Japan, proceeded in parallel, and in a sense, to inquire into one is to ask questions about the other. Since Daisetsu was excluded from the modern institutions of politics, economics, and education, and was forced to live outside the system, so to speak, to inquire into Daisetsu is to interrogate Japan’s modern age from the outside.
目次
Translator and Interpreter 17 American Daisetsu and Daisetsu’s America 21 Eastern Buddhism 25 $e In)nite Womb of Nothingness 30 Abbreviation 33 References 33
