--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "emptybill" <emptybill@...> wrote:
> 'Is Zen a religion? It is not a religion in the sense that the term is > popularly understood; for Zen has no God to worship, no ceremonial rites to > observe, no future abode to which the dead are destined, and, last of all, > Zen has no soul whose welfare is to be looked after by somebody else and > whose immortality is a matter of intense concern with some people. Zen is > free from all these dogmatic and "religious" encumbrances.' > This sounds a bit like Alan Watts Zen and would be a disputable assertion for most Zen practitioners. Zen is firmly established in the Buddhist tradition and reflects those assumptions. <snip> The quote, as I mentioned incompletely in my post was from Daisetzu Teitaro Suzuki's 1934 book 'Introduction to Zen Buddhism'. He wrote some 100 works on the subject. The book was compiled from earlier articles written about 1914, quite a bit before Mr. Watts. Mr. Suzuki was born in 1870. He was a practitioner of Zen before its Western popularity. He is reputed to have achieved enlightenment before 1900. Apparently he met Alan Watts in 1936, and Watts published his first work on Zen about a year later, so maybe there is some influence there. As a scholar and also an English teacher, Suzuki became one of those that brought knowledge of Zen to the West.
