The Zen Buddhist Philosophy of D. T. Suzuki

Strengths, Foibles, Intrigues, and Precision

Rossa Ó Muireartaigh

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350246157
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofía
• Categoria: Filosofía oriental

D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) reached global fame for his writings on Zen Buddhism. In this introduction to his theories of self, knowledge, and the world, Suzuki is presented as a Buddhist philosopher in his own right. Beginning with a biography of his life providing the historical context to his thought and discussing Suzuki's influences, chapters cover the Zen notion of the non-self and Suzuki's Zen view of consciousness, language, and religious truths. His ideas about philosophy and radical views on rationality and faith come to life in two new complete translations of The Place of Peace in our Heart (1894) and Religion and Science (1949), which helps us to understand why Suzuki's description of Zen attracted the attention of many leading intellectuals and helped it become a household name in the English-speaking world. Offering the first complete overview of Suzuki's approach, reputation, and legacy as a philosopher, this is for anyone interested in the philosophical relevance and development of Mahayana Buddhism today.

1

Self

Introduction

D. T. Suzuki’s view of the self follows the traditional Mahāyāna Buddhist¹ approach, which is to assert the ultimate non-existence of the self and in so doing offer a more complicated picture of our everyday experiences of the world through time. This explanation does not deny our actual everyday experiences of selfhood (that inner feeling that you exist) but argues that these experiences, if not understood properly, lead to the false notion that you have a coherent, unchanging, inner core self that moves around in a world that is completely external and distinct from it. It is this idea of an essentialized self acting in a world that is out there that Suzuki and Mahāyāna Buddhism attack.

To appreciate the full force of Suzuki and Zen’s view of the self, it is probably best to start with the conventional view of the self against which Zen makes its argument. The power of the Zen view of the self is that it can deal with the contradictions and mysteries that arise when our own selfhood and consciousness is fully explored and considered. As such, I will spend the next few sections discussing the traditional philosophical problems that haunt considerations of the self and consciousness before presenting how Suzuki’s alternative viewpoint works to reconfigure these apparent “problems” of the self as, in fact, manifestations and confirmations of the Zen philosophy of the mind, self, and consciousness.

The Problem of One’s Self

We experience the world through our own self-conscious selfhood. We think therefore we are. Only you experience the world as you. Even God (as God) does not have your experiences of selfhood. You see the world through one pair of eyes and the world out there does not deny you exist. You can bang against random objects and feel the pain, you can watch animals bound away in fear when you approach, and you can see other humans seeing you. It is impossible to ignore that you are in the world as another moving animate object. Who could ever deny this? And yet, with some reflection, the existence of the self cannot be so easily assumed. There are problems with the self.

To have a self, one needs a coherent consciousness. This is the difference between having a self and being just another object in the world. However, the problem with consciousness is that it is not at all coherent. We do not remember when we first became a self. Our earliest memories are vague events and do not give us any idea of our starting point in time. Similarly, our consciousness does tend to come and go even as we are living in the world. We sleep, we lose focus, our memories fade. All this points to the fact that selfhood is not coherent through time. It is not a lump of material existing from one moment to the next in space. To liken it to ripples in the ocean is a better metaphor, but here too the comparison to phenomena in nature is misleading. Waves in an ocean, as we see them, arise as part of the linear movement of mechanical cause and effect. We can sit with a stopwatch and time a wave coming and going. Thoughts and sensations in the mind do not have the same connection with time. A conscious experience is always in the now. It cannot be timed. To time a conscious experience would be to tangle oneself in the most excruciating webs of self-reflection and infinite regresses. I can time a wave because I, a detached observer, can see it rippling out there. To time my thoughts would immediately mean I have lost my thoughts. I would be timing something that is not there anymore. The thought that a thought has finished is a different thought to the thought that has finished.

To say, then, that consciousness takes place in the now, and not in linear time, is to say that notions of selfhood are attached to something—the consciousness—that does not actually exist in time. The self, in terms of linear time, never happens. But not only is the self never happening (the problem of self in time), it is also nowhere happening. There is a problem of the self in space. Again, this problem arises from the fact that we ascribe the existence of the self to the existence of a consciousness in the material world with all the consistency and coherence we assume any material object will have. If I want to see if a material object exists, I merely have to locate it in the physical world. The problem here is that there is no actual material place or point at which consciousness can be located “physically.” We do know that there are parts of the body, i.e., the brain and neurological system, which are the site of consciousness since consciousness does not operate without these. But neurons are not consciousness. As has been famously pointed out by Leibniz and others, if we were to expand the size of a brain to that of a giant machine or mill, and could walk around it, we would still not be able to see the thoughts, ideas, sensations, and memories that run through the mind.²

But this is not to say that consciousness is not connected to the brain. Indeed, we know from science that consciousness, and in turn the self, can be physically manipulated and changed. With the modern tools of neuroscience, or even just a bottle of whiskey, we can demonstrate an essential point in the philosophy of the mind: that our coherent selfhood undergirded by a continuous consciousness with an inherent personality can radically alter when tampered with by external physical stimuli. However, fascinating and all as these experiments with the brain are, they still do not actually physically locate consciousness. They merely locate those things that can affect consciousness second hand. The problem is that physical stimuli on the brain, and the tools of science that observe them, are out there in the material world. They are part of the third-person experience of the world, that which is detached from us and can be observed by us as something different to us. But consciousness is an “I” experience. Again, just as it is impossible to time conscious experience, it is also impossible to see it. To see it would mean to see it as a third-person experience, not as an “I” experience. To see consciousness as an “I” experience means that you are actually that experience, you are doing the seeing, you are the eyes which sees, which means that you cannot see it. An eye never sees itself. In a word, consciousness is nowhere. It cannot be located in material nature. Only its shadow, the third-person view of consciousness can be observed, which must never be confused for the first-person sight of consciousness.

Problems of consciousness are problems of the self. The consciousness being nowhere and never there makes the self, itself, something that is nowhere and never there. But there is an even further complication, and that is the issue of our freewill. We experience the self as a free-willing agent. We must constantly make decisions and never have the luxury of having the cosmos make our decisions for us. Even if we decide to relinquish our freewill, become completely still and immobile, do nothing and just blow in the wind, we have still decided to do this and so are not really giving up freewill. Freewill is not a choice. We are cursed with it. And yet to argue for freewill is to argue for the existence of a self that is not subject to the laws of cause and effect. A rock rolling down a hill does not decide to roll down that hill. It is pushed and pulled down by the forces of nature. My decision to roll a rock down a hill cannot be so automatic. I have to decide: push or don’t push. I could close my eyes and pray to the cosmos to make my mind up for me but this is just shoving the freewill problem onto other actions. The point is, the universe does not have control over my selfhood. I am a chink in the chain of cause and effect. A cosmic error.

Science and social science are able to pinpoint those aspects of the wider world which will influence our decisions more than others. It is possible to manipulate the decision-making of another. But this is not the point, for no matter how much our decisions may be manipulated we are still experiencing ourselves as making them. When I decide to push a rock down a hill I may be acting due to a multitude of external stimuli, influences, and controls. Whether I push the rock or not may depend upon my age, my social status (some people just never push rocks down hills), or strange internal subconscious urges. But my need to make the decision to push the rock or not push the rock never goes away whether I like it or not, no matter the social and psychological contexts.

To summarize: We know we have a self because we experience it. But it is a mystery how nature can produce this self. In turn the self cannot be located anywhere in nature, and does not exist as a coherent unit. Furthermore, the self has the unusual ability to break the laws of nature by making decisions outside of the automatic, mechanical flow of the universe. In other words, the self comes from nowhere, the self is nowhere, the self is nothing, and the self is bound to nothing. For D. T. Suzuki, though, these are not problems but solutions. As Suzuki states:

Thus, as the Self moves from zero to infinity and from infinity to zero, it is in no way an object of scientific studies. As it is absolute subjectivity, it eludes all our efforts to locate it at any objectively definable spot. As it is so elusive and cannot be taken hold of, we cannot experiment with it in any scientific way. We cannot entrap it by any objectively constructed media. With all scientific talents this can never be performed, because it is not in the nature of things within their sphere of operation. The Self when properly adjusted knows how to discover itself without going through the process of objectification.³

Self in the Philosophy of Buddhism

How does Buddhist philosophy square the self with the cosmological circle? One way it does so is by embracing (as expostulated in the Lankāvatāra Sutra⁴) the concept of “no-birth” and rejecting the idea of cause and effect entirely in the world. To quote the Sutra (as translated by Suzuki):

Nothing is born; being is not, non-being is not, nowhere is being -and-non-being; except that where there is a system, there is the rising of things and their dissolution. It is only in accordance with general convention that a chain of mutual dependence is talked of; birth has no sense when the chain of dependence is severed.⁵

This makes sense when we considered that all that happens at one moment is happening at the same time. Hence nothing is really causing anything else. The chain of mutual dependence through linear time that we see masks the fact that absolutely all phenomena arise together in a state of absolute codependence. When a rock rolls down a hill nothing has caused this. Gravity does not pull it. The hill does not push it. The hill is just there, as is the force of gravity. If we seek causes for such events, we run into absurdities as each cause presumes a prior one. If we say that the slope of the hill causes the rock to roll, we must also say that the movements of the Earth’s tectonic plates, which caused the hill to slope, also caused the rock to roll. But tectonic features of the planet were caused by the positioning of the Earth at the distance it is from the Sun. When we try to include every cause we will end up having to describe absolutely everything that has ever happened up until the moment the rock rolls down the hill. In other words, everything causes everything. Everything is the result of everything. Everything happens with everything else. It all arises codependently.

But what about free-willing humans? What if a human pushes the rock down the hill? Can we not say that this is the cause of the rock rolling? Only if you think that humans are not part of nature, that humans are in the realm of the divine, that which can move without a mover. But if we see us mortal humans as part of this world, then we must see humans, too, as part of the co-dependent arising of the cosmos. When I push that rock down the hill, biological evolution (which gives me the arms to push) and the movement of tectonic plates (which ensured both that organic life could evolve, and that the hill doth slope) are also causing it. We are back to the same conclusions. Everything causes me to push the rock. So synchronized is the cosmos that at the moment I push the rock I am not even really pushing it all, I am merely moving as the rock moves.

We can talk, of course, about necessary causes versus contingent causes. If I was not there the rock would not roll. I am necessary. The hill is contingent since it alone does not cause the rock to roll. But the necessary versus contingent distinction is a fiction. A necessary fiction as we would not be able to describe our world without it. But in the end both I and the hill need to exist together for the rock to roll. To distinguish the two is to carve out a story that ignores the effectively indescribable cosmic wholistic and holistic narration where hill, rock, and I move as one.

Similarly, the self is a necessary fiction.⁶ As Suzuki writes, “Individuality is merely an aspect of existence; in thought we separate one individual from another and in reality too we all seem to be distinct and separable. But when we reflect on the question more closely we find that individuality is a fiction, for we cannot fix its limits, we cannot ascertain its extent and boundaries, they become mutually merged without leaving any indelible marks between so-called individuals.”⁷ We usually think our lives are lived upon a stage full of props and other players, upon which we move, consciously acting out the drama of our lives. But really our lives are in a movie that has been already made, inscribed on a roll of celluloid, one frame moving to the next with nothing actually moving, merely each photographed instance simply looking different to the one prior. Who is watching this movie of the cosmos that has already been made and in which you are moved? Is it God? No, that is not the Buddhist answer. The Buddhist answer is “you.” You are watching the movie of the cosmos that has already been made. To have assigned this role to a trans-historical God would have been to suppose two separate beings. But Buddhism will constantly emphasize non-duality, that is, the idea that there ultimately is never two. The cosmos of co-dependent arising is self-contained and there is nothing outside except your experience of it.⁸

However, this may seem to be making the argument that there are two “you-s.” There is the “you” in nature (as in, the you acting in the “movie,” to continue with my metaphor) which is haunted by the curse of decision-making it can never escape. This is the hassled everyday “you” that does not feel itself at all to be part of a great harmonious co-dependently arising cosmos. And then there is the “you” that is detached, watching it all flow. Two “you-s”: the you that is another object of nature and the you (or “I”) that stands outside of the push and pull of nature. But, we must remember, Buddhist psychology is never dualistic, and these two “you-s,” two minds, two consciousnesses, will always have to be remerged into one in any final description. And so, as with any psychological theorizing, it is with metaphors that we must precede.

In The Awakening of Faith, a fundamental Mahāyāna text ascribed to Aśvaghoṣa,⁹ translated by D. T. Suzuki at the turn of the twentieth century, we read the following neat metaphor (or simile to be exact):

Though all modes of consciousness and mentation are mere products of ignorance, ignorance in its ultimate nature is identical and not-identical with enlightenment a priori; and therefore ignorance in one sense is destructible, while in the other sense it is indestructible. This may be illustrated by [the simile of] the water and the waves which are stirred up in the ocean. Here the water can be said to be identical [in one sense] and not-identical [in the other sense] with the waves. The waves are stirred up by the wind, but the water remains the same.” [square brackets in the original]¹⁰

What is being illustrated here is that a wave, a disturbance, is something that comes and goes, while the water remains the same. So too, the mind is disturbed by our thoughts and concerns, which can give rise to the idea that it is these individual thoughts and concerns that are the mind when really the mind is something that is just there, like water, irreducible to surface and secondary manifestations. These disturbances on the water are likened to the “defilement” of the mind, which, as Suzuki explains, “is the product of the evolution of the âlaya-vijnâna.”

Âlaya-vijnâna itself is an intriguing metaphor, meaning literally “storehouse consciousness,”¹¹ although Suzuki uses the translation “all-conserving mind.” What is stored in the âlaya-vijnâna? The answer is bīja, or “seed-forms.” When unleashed they bec...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Self
• 2 Knowledge
• 3 World
• Conclusion
• Translations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint