[MD] Zen at War

[david buchanan]

Dave Thomas to dmb:
May I suppose that this is where James meets Suzuki?  "Yet had he consulted D. T.Suzuki, destined to become the foremost explainer of Zen to the West, and employed at the time as a translator by a philosopher friend of James, he might have done otherwise." Or perhaps you have some other reference, because I can find no source suggesting direct talks or correspondence between James and Suzuki.


dmb says:
Yes, Eugene Taylor writes about their connection too. 

"First, while working for Carus, Suzuki came into contact with the pragmatic American philosophy of William James and Charles S. Peirce. James and Carus were correspondents, while Peirce had published his pioneering series of cosmological essays in Carus' journal in the early 1890s. Pragmatism in James's hands was fast unfolding as the hallmark of the Progressive Era during the time Suzuki worked in Illinois. Thus, to have been introduced to this philosophy at the turn of the century was for Suzuki to have the key that would later give his ideas entrance into a more mature phase of modern American popular consciousness.
In addition, Suzuki began to introduce his teacher Nishida to Jamesian philosophy, writing to him just after publication of James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The Varieties contained a very important statement on the pragmatic test of mystical experience that Suzuki no doubt found attractive; namely, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." In addition, there is clear evidence that James's essay "A World of Pure Experience," (1904), a cornerstone of James's metaphysics of radical empiricism, was read by Nishida. Nishida, in turn, incorporated James's ideas into Zen no Kenkyu (1911), a treatise on pure experience that marked a new era in modern Japanese philosophy. Suzuki was, in turn, inspired to increase his discussion of religious experience with Westerners by his own reading of James."

There is also this interesting bit of trivia: "Suzuki got married to an American woman. His wife was Beatrice Erskine Lane, a Radcliffe graduate and a Theosophist who had been a student of William James, Josiah Royce, and George Herbert Palmer."

And the paper's final paragraph concludes:

"There can be little doubt that the writings of Swedenborg and the Jamesian interpretation of pragmatism, built as it was on a Swedenborgian foundation, defined for Suzuki the standard by which he would first introduce zen to the west, namely, not as a religion but as a spiritual psychology that had obvious and practical consequences. It is but one example out of numerous others, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Dean Howells, to Helen Keller and Carl Gustav Jung, which suggests the important influence of Swedenborg's ideas, not only on the philosophy of pragmatism, but also on the larger spiritual history of American social thought."