Quote from Zen Master Who?

Zen Master Who? A Guide to the People and Stories of Zen

by James Ishmael Ford

Wisdom Publications, Boston, Massachusetts, 2006.     262 pages

Except for parts of the late Rick Field’s pioneering study How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America and Thomas Tweed’s The American Encounter with Buddhism, there has been no book-length look at the many people, ancient and modern, who have helped shape the institution that has become Western Zen.  I hope this book will help to fill this niche. (p. xiii)

Our common ancestor in the foundation of Western and particularly American Zen is without a doubt Soyen Shaku. He was born in 1856. He spent three years at Krio University, which was highly unusual for a Zen priest at that time. This was the first of his many experiences outside the norms of Japanese priesthood. An adventurous young man, he traveled to Ceylon to study Theravada monasticism - possibly the first Japanese priest to do so. In 1880, he was named a Dharma successor to Imagita Kosinski, abbot of the prominent Rinzai training monastery Engakuji, in Kamakura, and became a master of Engakuji when his teacher died.

When he received an invitation to speak at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, most of Soyen Roshi’s associates, priests, students, and prominent laypeople discouraged him from attending. America was, after all, uncivilized and unspeakably barbaric. But he was adventurous and asked one of his lay students who spoke English, D.T. Suzuki, to draft his letter of acceptance. . . (p. 62)

-- quote submitted by Matthew M.

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