Zen and Japanese Culture

Rating:
Summary: A road worth travel
Review: Great book and loaded with information about Zen in Japanese culture. I especially like the little folk tales he adds to enhance the book's overall appeal. Just doesn't get much better than this folks.

Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended!
Review: I was perhaps, more or less, curious when I picked this book up at a used book store a few years ago. As I read it - this curiosity was very deeply rewarded - and I fell in love with Suzuki's style of writing - and his presentation of Zen - which for me (a westerner) pieced together a rather loose understanding I had at the time and gained something of a background into the great mysteries of Asian (esp. Japanese) culture and ways of life. This book enlightened new ideas of embracing simplicity and poverty - not usually seen in the west (where we long for belongings). Another thing Suzuki stresses is dicipline - something lacking in many western interpretations of Zen.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Book, But Don't Believe the Hype
Review: OK, enough effusion from other reviewers. This book is good, but it's not that good. It contains a lot of information about Zen, and I'm glad I read it. Zen was and still is an important aspect of Japanese culture, and Suzuki knew a lot about it. He's a good writer, and his command of English, though nonnative, is still quite good. I learned a lot from this book, as can anyone who's interested in Zen, Japan, or both. However, I'd recommend a few grains of salt with the book, as follows:

First of all, Suzuki is a good writer, but he's not writing in his native language and it shows. The prose is informative but often meanders, having trouble staying focused on whatever particular topics the chapter seems to be addressing. Maybe this is "mystical." Still, Suzuki writes clearly and is easy to understand, even if his digressions often detract from the point he's trying to make.

And the points he's trying to make are, well, not always backed up very well. He goes out of his way to show how Zen is intimately tied to bushido and study of confucian classics in Japan, for example. Frankly, though, pure land buddhism was also a powerful force among the warrior classes, and Confucian thinking and study was well established in Japan before the arrival of Zen. That's not to say he's completely wrong: Zen does become identified with these and other aspects of Japense culture. It was a powerful force in Japanese society, but Suzuki apparently wants it to be the only force (and in Chinese culture, too, when he claims original Chinese philosophy began only under the aegis of Cha'an; previously it had been either Indian in origin or the "unphilosophical" thought of people like Confucius or Lao-Tzu).

Above all, just don't take everything he says at face value. He's often correct, but he also exaggerates or makes up a lot of the things he says. He wrote the book during the 1930s, when Japan was experiencing a huge surge of nationalism, and it shows. Japan and Zen in this book are apparently responsible for anything of cultural significance that ever happened in East Asia, either originating it or preserving it when its originators (often the Chinese) were too dumb or disorganized to do it themselves. Suzuki was knowledgable, but he wasn't unbiased, and I have grave doubts about his supremely enlightened Zen master status, too.

So if you're really interested in Japan and Zen, this is a good book to read, but it shouldn't be the only book. It's filled with too many errors and fabrications for it to really be useful by itself.

Rating:
Summary: Borrow, not buy...
Review: There are two chapters in this book regarding zen and swordsmanship which made picking up the book (as in borrowing from the library) worthwhile. I skimmed through the book as I was more interested in zen's relationship to bushido and samurai.

In short, borrow it from the library first for the two chapters on zen and swordsmanship, and then determine if you really want to read the rest of it. I found that those two chapters were all I needed from the book.

Rating:
Summary: Borrow, not buy...
Review: There are two chapters in this book regarding zen and swordsmanship which made picking up the book (as in borrowing from the library) worthwhile. I skimmed through the book as I was more interested in zen's relationship to bushido and samurai.

In short, borrow it from the library first for the two chapters on zen and swordsmanship, and then determine if you really want to read the rest of it. I found that those two chapters were all I needed from the book.

Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece...
Review: This enchanting book examines the deep influence of Zen Buddhism on the central aspects of Japanese culture and gracefully illustrates that the two are linked in profound ways. Suzuki has that mysterious ability as a writer to explain extremely abstract notions in elegant though simplistic language. Zen is a difficult subject to demonstrate because, by its very nature, it defies normative modes of rational thought.
Suzuki manages to gently clear our rationally conditioned patterns of thought like a gentle spring rain, and astonishingly we come to discover that Zen is simpler than anything else we've encountered before. One comes away from the reading with a soothing, calm and certain understanding of the nature of Zen. And one is certain that the man behind the words is a master.

He begins the narrative with insightful remarks on Japanese culture, touching on Zen's history and how the military classes, the Samurai, embraced the religion. The discussion moves onto Zen and its relation to Confucianism and the connection with the cultivation of a nationalistic spirit in Japan. The majority of the text is devoted to three central areas: Zen and Swordsmanship, Zen and Haiku, Zen and the Art of Tea, and lastly, the Japanese love of nature and its manifestations through art.

Suzuki's argument is that Zen and its teachings have had such an enormous influence on the Japanese, that the culture as we know it would not exist without it. One needs to truly understand this influence in order to have any comprehension of the culture. He proposes that one does not exist without the other:

"...without a full appreciation of it not a page of the history of Japanese poetry, Japanese arts, and Japanese handicrafts would have been written. Not only the history of the arts, but the history of the Japanese moral and spiritual life would lose its deeper significance, if detached from the Zen way of interpreting life and the world." (P.364)

This is an extraordinary book because it opens the way towards a fundamental understanding of Zen Buddhism and the foundations of Japanese culture, illustrating that the two are inextricably interlinked. The text is also beautifully enhanced with poetry, paintings, calligraphy and examples of architecture. If one is interested in either of these subjects, this book is a masterpiece and an important and enlightening experience.

Rating:
Summary: Book of a Lifetime!
Review: This is a towering book of scholarship, born of a profound experience, from the mind of a Japanese Zen master with an almost mystical mastery of English prose. In my view, one need not be a student of Buddhism, or even particularly interested in the history of Zen and its historical impact, in order to benefit mightily from reading this book. It is a beautiful work of art. The passages (in two generous chapters) on Zen and Swordsmanship contain some of the most exquisite writing I have encountered in all of English literature. Suzuki's perspective is broad and inclusive, if entirely his own, and includes the historic and intrinsic relationship of Zen to nature, art, haiku, and even, more narrowly, to the Japanese Tea Ceremony. To my mind, Suzuki remains more a bountiful writer than a succint personal teacher; in the same way that one may not consult a work of scholarship in order to obtain practical spiritual guidance, "Zen and Japanese Culture", while providing food to the hungry, indeed spends its effort on another plane altogether, illuminating the idea of the religious and the asethetic nature of Buddhism, and ultimately of human life. It is a magnificent book that can be read again and again. A book of infinite depth and light, transparency and permanence, indeed the book of a lifetime, and one to be cherished for its sagacity and its uncommon clarity.

Rating:
Summary: Down, Suzuki, down!
Review: This is perhaps Suzuki's most concise work on Zen and Japanese culture available, in English or otherwise. The only thing one could fault this book with would be four points. The first is Suzuki's insistance that Zen and Buddhism "created" Japanese culture, which in certain cases it could said to have, but not in every case he states (such as Zen and the Japanese love of nature). Second is his references to Christianity, which are not bad per-se, but tend to be more Suzuki's own slant on Christianity rather than what could even be called stereotypical Christianity. Third, which has more to do with the revised edition rather than the 1938 (?) original, is there is no reference to what was IN the original printing. It would be interesting to have been able to see how Suzuki's thinking changed post-war, in contrast to what he told people overseas in the late 30's. Last, he leaves out his references for far too much. The poems he quotes are all famous, but having their works of origin listed would have helped people to trace back Suzuki's line of thinking (if a person wanted to go that far). This would be a good book to read along side other works on, for example, Shinto, in order to maintain a balanced view of Japanese culture.

Rating:
Summary: BEST book on Japanese thought by far!
Review: While some over-intellectualized reviewers are asking for the moon with this book, it delivers a tidy escapade through Japanese thought as seen through the lens of Zen Buddhism. True, there were other types of Buddhism in Japan but it can be easily argued that Japanese culture had a majority of contributions from Zen. In short, because the Samurai class dominated the history of this nation. If the book was titled just Japanese Culture, then I would expect to hear more of Shinto and its role, but its about Zen.
I study Iaido and Buddhism in Japan, and this book has been the most helpful in understanding how Japanese think and learn martial arts, especially hard to come to terms with items like Seppuku, ritualized suicide. The chapters on Haiku are excellent also, and should not be missed (even though some martial artists just read the parts on swordsmanship).
If you want to understand Zen, then come to Japan and learn Japanese, otherwise this book will provide a glimpse into a vast field of writing, legend, and thought on a contributor to Japanese thought. If you are a Buddhist then be grateful for this gift that the author has given to the world and do not be so hasty to find faults!