Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki

D.T. His mother, a devout Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist, raised him in poverty after his father died, and the boy went looking early for answers religion hadn’t yet given him. While a student in Tokyo he took up Zen practice at Engaku-ji in Kamakura under Kōgaku Sōen, who gave him the Buddhist name Daisetsu, “Great Simplicity” (sometimes glossed as “Greatly Clumsy”). He belonged to a Rinzai lineage running back through Sōen to Imakita Kōsen and, further still, to Hakuin Ekaku.

Sōen introduced him to the scholar Paul Carus, whom Sōen had met at Chicago’s 1893 World Parliament of Religions, and Suzuki spent several years living and working with Carus in LaSalle, Illinois, translating and preparing Eastern texts for Western readers. He later held a long professorship at Ōtani University, a Jōdo Shinshū institution, where he and his wife Beatrice Lane Suzuki founded the journal The Eastern Buddhist in 1921, publishing on Zen, Shin, and Mahayana thought more broadly (per Higashi Honganji USA). It’s worth pausing on this: Suzuki is remembered almost entirely as a Zen popularizer, but he wrote on Shin Buddhism his whole life, and that dual commitment says something about how false the walls between traditions really are. Ideas travel if you let them; his career is proof.

He had a profound religious experience at 26 that shaped his interpretation of Buddhism for the rest of his life. Gary Snyder later called him, without much exaggeration, “probably the most culturally significant Japanese person in international terms, in all of history.” Suzuki was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963 and died on 12 July 1966, at 95.