Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki, Volume I by Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki

Author:Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki [Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitaro]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780520269194
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2020-03-30T09:31:44.360319+00:00

Unmon’s view of “timeless time” and Setchō’s view of Emptiness or Void (sunyata) after all point in the same direction, and when this direction is recognized we are all able to enjoy “a fine day,” which comes on us every day.

8

The Morning Glory

In the latter half of 1949 and 1950, Suzuki spent a great deal of time in the United States, lecturing at the University of Hawaii and subsequently at Claremont College. As evidenced by his letters and interview accounts from that period, the haiku central to this article, Chiyo’s “Asagao,” was a frequent topic of consideration for Suzuki. This reflection on the import of Chiyo’s haiku is representative in several important ways of much of Suzuki’s postwar writings on Asian religion and culture, the most prominent of which is Zen and Japanese Culture, which was published in 1959. (See Jaffe, “Introduction.”) As with much of Suzuki’s writing on Japanese culture, including “The Role of Nature in Zen Buddhism,” which is included in this volume, “The Morning Glory” shares the flaws that have been heavily criticized by the scholars who were mentioned in the introduction to this volume. In particular, those problems include Suzuki’s tendency to present Japanese culture in an overly idealized, essentialized, romantic, and static fashion in opposition to a technocentric, rational, and monolithic West. Without question, Suzuki’s claims about traditional Japanese culture must be weighed carefully and evaluated against the contexts in which Suzuki was writing, which include the push in the pre–Pacific War period to establish Shinto as the basis of Japanese identity, the devastation across Asia that culminated with Japan’s complete defeat in 1945, and the rise of comparative East-West philosophy in the postwar period that was stimulated by the East-West Conferences hosted by the University of Hawaii. Nonetheless, there is much of value that can be gleaned from Suzuki’s eloquent reflection on “The Morning Glory.” Read obliquely, not as a source of information about Japanese cultural history, but, rather, as an examination of the relationship between poetic language and religious experience as well as a reflection on the nature of awakening, we can learn much from this essay. For Suzuki the concision and tolerance for paradox characteristic of much poetry bear a close resemblance to the expressions of awakening in Buddhism, including Zen and Pure Land. In giving expression to one’s deep feelings, poetry, according to Suzuki, is similar to the language used in Zen. “Language, in case they [Zen masters] resort to words, serves as an expression of feelings or moods or inner states, but not of ideas, and therefore it becomes entirely incomprehensible when we search its meaning in the words of the masters as embodying ideas. Of course, words are not to be entirely disregarded inasmuch as they correspond to the feelings or experiences” (Suzuki, Zen Essays [First Series], 274). In his description in this essay of the noetic, conative, and affective dimensions of awakening, we have one of the most concise and clearest expressions of Suzuki’s thought concerning the nature of realization.

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