Manual of Zen Buddhism

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Manual of Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki serves as a comprehensive guide to Zen philosophy and practice, offering profound insights into the essence of Zen teachings. Suzuki, a renowned scholar of Zen Buddhism, explores key concepts such as mindfulness, meditation, and the direct experience of reality. Through clear and insightful prose, he elucidates the historical and philosophical foundations of Zen, making this book an invaluable resource for both beginners and seasoned practitioners seeking to deepen their understanding of Zen Buddhism's transformative principles and its relevance in contemporary life.

In my Introduction to Zen Buddhism (published 1934), an outline of Zen teaching is sketched, and in The Training of the Zen Monk (1934) a description of the Meditation Hall and its life is given. To complete a triptych the present Manual has been compiled. The object is to inform the reader of the various literary materials relating to the monastery life. Foreign students often express their desire to know about what the Zen monk reads before the Buddha in his daily service, where his thoughts move in his leisure hours, and what objects of worship he has in the different quarters of his institution. This work will partly, it is hoped, satisfy their desire. Those who find my Essays too bulky or too elaborate may prefer these smaller works on Zen.

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, D. Litt., Professor of Buddhist Philosophy in the Otani University, Kyoto, was born in 1870 and died in 1966. He was probably the greatest living authority on Buddhist philosophy during his life time, and was certainly the greatest authority on Zen Buddhism. His major works in English on the subject of Buddhism numbered a dozen or more and of his works in Japanese, as yet un- known in the West, there are eighteen or more. He was, moreover, as a chronological bibliography of books on Zen in English clearly shows, the pioneer of the subject outside Japan, for except for Kaiten Nukariya's Religion of the Samurai (Luzac and Co., 1913) nothing was known of Zen as a living experience, save to The Eastern Buddhist (1921- 1939), until the publication of Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series) in 1927.

Dr Suzuki writes with authority. Not only had he studied original works in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese and Japanese, but he had an up-to-date knowledge of Western thought in German and French as well as in English (which he wrote and spoke so fluently). He was, moreover, more than a scholar; he was a Buddhist. Though not a priest of any Buddhist sect, he was honoured in every temple in Japan, for his knowledge of spiritual things, as all who have sat at his feet bear witness, was direct and profound. When he spoke of the higher stages of consciousness he spoke as a man who dwelt therein, and the impression he made on those who entered the fringes of his mind was that of a man who looked for the intellectual symbols wherewith to describe a state of awareness which lies indeed 'beyond the intellect'.

To those unfit to sit at the feet of the Master his writings must be a substitute. All these, however, were out of print in England by 1940, and all remaining stocks in Japan were destroyed in the fire which consumed three-quarters of Tokyo in 1945.