Quotes from Bernard Faure

After the eviction of the Jesuits from China, and until the early twentieth century, most information available in the West on Chan and Zen was provided casually, as part of material on China or Buddhism. In that period little attention was paid to Chan/Zen doctrine as such, for Chinese Buddhism, unlike Indian Buddhism, was not considered worthy of serious study.

Perhaps the impossibility in which we are to rid ourselves of cultural and epistemological constraints does not prevent us from understanding other cultures, as long as we remain conscious of these constraints and consider them as providing the necessary perspective for any thick description.

The success of [D. T.] Suzuki's work was not related to its literary or philosophical qualities; it was rather the result of a historical coniuncture that prompted the emergence in the West of a positive modality of Orientalist discourse, which found in the image of Zen fostered by Suzuki a particularly appropriate object.

D. T.] Suzuki's success had also a lot to do with his undeniable personal charisma. As noted already, he did not leave his interlocutors indifferent, and most judgments on his work are influenced by personal reactions to his personality. It is therefore hard to dissociate the image of the man, with his genuine simplicity, warmth, and his status of enlightened layman, from the impression left by his assertions concerning the Chan/Zen tradition.

D. T.] Suzuki's obvious sincerity and his intense yearning for transcendence did not prevent his thinking from being ideologically flawed, informed as it was by his culture, his social status, and his sectarian affiliations. This, of course, raises the questions of the place whence he spoke and whether an enlightened person can assume any privilege with regard to historical determinations. Suzuki claimed this privilege for Zen masters, and by implication for himself.

It is an interesting feature of the Chan tradition (and of all similar iconoclastic trends) that its radical language, aimed at debunking an orthodoxy, soon becomes the sign or emblem of a new orthodoxy.