Yet Suzuki did not go unchallenged.　In 1953 Dr. Hu Shih, a one time President of the National Peking University, tackled him on the non-historicity of Zen and its being beyond intellectual understanding.　He gives a detailed account of the history of Chan and proposes historical reasons for the development of the idiosyncrasies apparent in Zen transmission which in his eyes have a rational, social if obscure basis.　Suzuki’s rebuttal is trenchant.

Hu Shih does not seem to understand the real significance of the “sudden awakening or enlightenment” in its historical setting . . . .  All the schools of Buddhism . . . owe their origin to the Buddha’s enlightenment experience . . . no other than a “sudden enlightenment.”

He goes on to argue that this Zen “way of looking at life may be judged to be a kind of naturalism, even an animalistic libertinism.” Quoting Spinoza, he argues:

This kind of intuition is absolutely certain and infallible and, in contrast to ratio, produces the highest peace and virtue of

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mind. . . .

History deals with time and so does Zen, but with this difference: While history knows nothing of timelessness, perhaps disposing of it as a “fabrication,” Zen takes time along with timelessness──that is to say, time in timelessness and timelessness in time.

Zen is thus seen to be apart from its historical setting.

Yet Hu Shih and Suzuki seem to be at cross purposes.　Suzuki is speaking of experience, Hu Shih of context.　They do not seem to be able to fit these together.　Suzuki always felt that his version of Rinzai Zen provided an ultimate vision beyond history.　His indeterminate status between monk and layman, between scholar and popularist, between practitioner and missionary, between Japan and America, led to a view in which all things remotely resembling Zen could be assimilated into one vision; and everything else rejected.　The Kyoto School of Philosophy created by Suzuki's friend Nishida has largely followed this line.　The result has been a kind of Suzuki monism closed to the usual forms of academic criticism through a direct appeal to an absolutism of the non-historical.

　　 From the same basis Suzuki argued strongly against “gradualism” which he saw as inherent in the Soto tradition (Tsao tung) of “just sitting” or “Silent illumination.”　He backs Ta-hui in his confrontation with Hung-chih (1091~1157) on this issue and emerges therefore as strongly partisan in his interpretation of practice and its meaning in Chan.　Leighton and Yi Wu (1991) have however shown that these two great contemporaries were actually friends who cooperated as teaching colleagues sending students to one another.　Ta-hui’s criticisms were not at Hung-chih personally but at those who used the “just sitting” methods without appropriate mindfulness.　He himself also “sat” and was aware that koans too have defects, leading in some cases to intellectually obsessive worrying over old stories.　Suzuki also ignores Dogen who

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warmly approved of both these old antagonists while favouring Hung-chih as the founder of his own practice.　Not surprisingly Suzuki’s lop-sided Zen has produced strange effects and a biased leaning in the transmission of Zen to European shores.

　　The key European philosophers of post-modernism, Wittgenstein, Austin, Derrida and others have all emphasized the importance of the role of language and culture in interpreting the significance of history in the understanding of metaphysical views.　Analysis of texts and their historicity shows that all propositions are context dependent in often very complex ways; not only on the economic structures underlying culture but also on the interpretations of religion and self within those cultures.　There is always a marked inter-dependence between philosophical statement, whether popular or sophisticated, and its cultural frame.　Even science is not free from this perspective as Thomas Kuhn (1962) in his analysis of scientific paradigms has shown.

　　 Western romanticism, closely linked to colonialism and the heroic exploration of cultures in far off lands, Jerusalem, Timbuktu or Lhasa, was having its last throw in the fifties when John Blofield translated Huang Po and interpreted him through the “romantic” vision of the time.　We need to assess Chan and Zen and what previous writers have said of them, anew if we are to discover its relevance to our Western selves in our contemporary scene (Wright 1998).　Zen, far from being independent from history, has, in its rich diversity, always been dependent upon it──as indeed the Buddha, in pronouncing his principle of co-dependent arising, would have suspected and as Suzuki in his later writing also began to understand.

Zen in Europe

　　 Much as we Westerners owe an initial understanding of Zen to the work of Daisetsu Suzuki, we are also indebted to him for considerable confusion.　It has not been easy to relate his

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