Robert Merton

Avant-garde musician John Cage, Catholic mystic Thomas Merton, Beat writers Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Psychotherapists Carl Jung and Erich Fromm, Zen teachers Robert Aitken and Philip Kapleau, Philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, 20th century giants, all have one thing in common — they were deeply influenced by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a gentle scholar-practitioner from Japan. This litany of names is merely suggestive of the massive impact that D. T. Suzuki had on western culture — an influence that is documented in a new film, A Zen Life — because so far we haven’t mentioned the 100 or so books that have found their way (by now) into the hands of millions of people throughout the world, works that include classics such as A Manual of Zen Buddhism, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, and The Essence of Buddhism. Simply put, the Buddhist world would be very different today had D. T. Suzuki not come to the west. Suzuki was in fact a “kalyana mitra” (spiritual friend / teacher) to an entire generation.