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From: david@star2.cm.utexas.edu (David Sigeti)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Are Zen enlightened people superior?
Message-ID: <1991Jan5.233524.25527@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 5 Jan 91 23:35:24 GMT
References: <1991Jan4.010410.2482@nas.nasa.gov>
	<1991Jan5.015335.1058@nas.nasa.gov>
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This is just a note to clear up a common confusion between two
well-known personalities in American Zen.  

In article <1991Jan5.015335.1058@nas.nasa.gov> 
tp0x+@CS.CMU.EDU (Thomas Price) writes:

   Perhaps I misunderstood my copy of Shunryu Suzuki's "Living By Zen"

and later,

   Or, John Cage's story about Suzuki giving a lecture:

I am pretty sure that John Cage's story is about D.T. Suzuki.
D.T. Suzuki was a student of Rinzai Zen who wrote many books
about Zen and "Zen Culture" in the first half of the twentieth
century and who lectured and taught (in the academic sense)
widely in the United States.  He was at Columbia U. for some
time.  His writings were very influential in bringing Zen to the
attention of Western intellectuals and played a major role in the
so-called "Zen boom" in the fifties in the U. S.  He was not a
roshi and I don't think that he ever taught anyone how to do
zazen.  In fact, he somehow managed to avoid the topic almost
completely in his books.  Maybe he thought that Westerners just
weren't up to it.  D.T. Suzuki died sometime in the mid to late
fifties (he was in his nineties).

Shunryu Suzuki was someone else.  He was a roshi in the Soto
school who came to the U.S. in 1959 to minister to a immigrant
Japanese Zen congregation in San Francisco.  He attracted many
(non-Japanese) American students and eventually settled in the
U.S., establishing the San Francisco Zen Center and Tasajara
Monastery.  He taught zazen and Zen practice to hundreds or
thousands of students and his teaching line in the U.S. may
include as many students as all other lines put together.  His
only book that I know of is "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" (highly
recommended if you are practicing zazen).  Perhaps "Living by
Zen" is a recent compilation of talks and stories?  Shunryu
Suzuki died in 1971 when he was in his mid sixties.

--
David Sigeti    david@star2.cm.utexas.edu    cmhl265@hermes.chpc.utexas.edu