[MD] Zen at War

[david buchanan]

Dave Thomas said:
...The D.T. Suzuki mentioned negatively on this website published "Zen and Japanese Culture" in 1938 which was is based on lectures given in America and England in 1936. It was republished for the mass market in English in 1959. ...



dmb says:
It might interest some people to know that William James knew D. T. Suzuki and talked with him about "pure experience" (aka DQ) and Suzuki is considered to have been "the foremost explainer of Zen to the West". Alan Watts was his star student. 

According to the author of "SCIOUSNESS AND CON-SCIOUSNESS: WILLIAM JAMES AND THE PRIME REALITY OF NON-DUAL EXPERIENCE," Jonathan Bricklin,...

"Suzuki, for his part, immediately saw the connection between James’s pure ex- perience and Zen, and introduced James’s writings to his teacher Kitaro Nishida. Nishida not only directly appropriated James’s analysis, but also his expression ‘‘pure experience’’ in seeking to translate the direct-experience satori upon which Zen is based. Suzuki, too, appropriated the phrase ‘‘pure experience’’ to define ‘‘this most fundamental experience . . . beyond differentiation’’


ABSTRACT: William James’s radical empiricism of ‘‘pure experience’’ both anticipated and directly influenced the transmission of Zen in the West. In this centennial reconstruction, the author shows how the man called both the ‘‘father of American Psychology’’ and the ‘‘father of transpersonal psychology’’ was also the father of a Western approach to enlightenment. Relying mainly on introspection and ether- induced states, James made a crucial distinction between con-sciousness (consciousness-with-self) and sciousness (consciousness-without-self). Prime reality, he maintained, is not revealed through the subject- object divide, but in the ‘‘sciousness’’ of non-dual experience. The coherence of organized experience (both static and successive) is accounted for without an organizing ‘‘I.’’ The ‘‘I’’ itself is seen not as the foundation of consciousness, but as a reverberation within it: a palpitating core of welcoming and opposing emotions.