#borup

Suzuki's "Zen" is not the Zen of the Zen sect (or school, Zenshu) as an institutional and living religion. "True Zen" is defined through its (classical) texts, taking them at face value to represent (an idealized) reality. Zen becomes a concept, a transcendent essence, underlying Buddhism and all religions in their different manifestations. Zen study therefore is the way to "Zen" (Kirita 1996, 114). Zen is the quintessence of the "religious consciousness of mankind" (1970A, preface), of "the human spirit" (1970C, 347) and - though Rudolf Otto seems to have been more inspired by Suzuki than the other way round - Zen gets a taste of "The Holy". "Zen is the ocean, Zen is the air ... Zen is man" (1969B, 45), and "the spirit of all religions and philosophies" (ibid., 44). Suzuki can therefore also find "Zen" in both Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Daoism and Confucianism (1956, 111) and among both Swedenborg, Emerson, Blavatsky, Eckhart and other western mystics. Suzuki found Zen perfectly suitable to modernity. Or rather, he found modernity perfectly suitable to Zen. But - like the spiritual theosophists, the romanticists, the mystical depth psychologists, the essentialist historians of religion - Suzuki could only sustain this spiritualism by rejecting or complementing modernity and universalism.

Pali-canonic Theravada Buddhism was, by others, baptized "Protestantism of the East" (Almond, 1988, 74), in opposition to the corrupt "Catholic" Mahayana Buddhism (and Hinduism) with all its folklore, magic, superstition and idolatry. To Victorian Protestants and the "Pali Text Society Spirit" (Faure 1991, 89), monastic life was not interesting, it expressed Catholic practice. Meditation was often seen to express ritualized (and thus legitimate) laziness. Perhaps the most important quality of Buddhism was its status as "dead": Actual living Buddhism was looked upon as a false folk-religion, degenerated from pure and only existing "real" textual Buddhism. Living Buddhists were not true Buddhists. They did not understand their own religion. Religious practice was considered to be a minor and false aspect of religious discourse. From the outset there were built-in dichotomies in the approach to Buddhism; original versus degenerated, theory versus practice, doctrine versus ritual, spiritual essence versus material manifestation etc - with the former part of the dichotomy having the hierarchical priority. Buddhism became an invented tradition, and a projected battlefield, reflecting the mind and culture of the 'discoverer'.

Borup, Oquendo and the City of New York