[MD] Zen at War

[david buchanan]

Dave Thomas said:
... I still have seen nothing that you have posted and nothing in any of the James online archives that there was direct face to face discussion(s) or direct communications between them.  Are you just making this up? The first source you quoted quite clearly indicates with, "Yet had he [James] consulted D.T.Suzuki,..." that he doesn't seem think they consulted with each other. 

dmb says:
I concede the point. I misread "had he consulted" as "he had consulted". 

But the larger point remains the same. They did exchange ideas, even if it wasn't directly or in person. and there is an affinity between their ideas, especially the affinity between Zen satori and James's pure experience. Both of these will shed light on Pirsig's DQ. This little bit of history is the early part of the story of Zen in America. I think these connections and comparisons are valuable as a way to appreciate Pirsig's brand of American Buddhism. 


D. Thomas said:
...But, what would James say of their attachment of their work to his, if he was alive? I suggest that he would be highly critical on a whole range of issues, not the least of which was his nearly complete distrust of "absolute monism's" such as Taoism, Zen, and the MoQ.

dmb says:
Well, the absolute monism that concerned James was Hegelian Idealism, which is very different from Taoism or the MOQ. 



Dave Thomas said:
My guess is that your thesis strongly down played this oblivious conflict, or had some very clever rhetoric to twist it, disguise it, or ignored it completely. That my "friend" is "conformational bias" at its lowest.  I'm working on a post which will address some of these issues. Don't get your titties in a twist, it may take a while.

dmb says:
You GUESS my thesis is full of confirmation bias? That's hilarious. Maybe you ought to read it before you use it to confirm your bias. Hilarious.



> 
> 
> On 10/22/13 2:54 PM, "David Buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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."
> > 
> > 
> >  
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