Publishing Eastern Buddhism: D. T. Suzuki’s Journey to the West

Abstract

The now widely used category “Eastern Buddhism” , tentatively proposed here by Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966) in his ground-breaking work Outlines of the Mahāyāna (1907), would later be institutionalized through his prolific publications in both English and Japanese. The Eastern Buddhist, the journal of the society he and his American born wife, Beatrice Lane Suzuki (1875–1939), founded in 1921, continues as a flagship journal of Mahāyāna Buddhist studies. The term is, however, a modern one, coined in 1893 by Japanese delegates to the World’s Parliament of Religions at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago; the object it denotes, shaped by the rationalizations of Meiji Buddhist revival and Japanese negotiations with an already well-established Western discourse on Buddhism.² The delegation to Chicago had attempted to intervene in the discourse, to claim the right to speak on the subject, and to share in the esteem that Buddhism enjoyed in certain Western intellectual circles at the time. By creating Eastern Buddhism, a new category, they aimed to attach to the Mahāyāna Buddhism of Japan all that the West admired of “Pure Buddhism” , the orientalist construct resulting from the philological study of the Pāli texts of Theravāda Buddhism (Southern Buddhism), and to distance it from the then widespread denigration of other forms of Mahāyāna Buddhism (Northern Buddhism).³

We have some schools in China and Japan whose equivalent or counterpart cannot be found in the so-called Northern Buddhism Therefore it may be more proper to divide Buddhism into three, instead of two, geographical sections: Southern, Northern and Eastern.¹