Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

10

AMERICAN ZEN AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

An ongoing dialogue

Katherine V.Masís

Introduction

Zen made its way into the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In the 1860s, an early wave of Chinese immigrants came to California to work in the
gold mines and on the Central Pacific Railroad (Fields 1992; Prebish 1999). Chinese,
Taoist, Confucian, and some Buddhist temples were soon established on the Pacific
coastline, some of these possibly housing Zen priests. Several schools of Buddhism,
including Zen, were represented at the World Parliament of Religions, which took
place at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Present at that Parliament were several
key figures in the teaching, dissemination, and development of Zen in the United
States: Shaku Soen, Nyogen Senzaki, and Shaku Sokatsu, who were ordained Zen
priests and teachers, as well as the scholar and author D.T.Suzuki (Fields 1992;
Prebish 1999).
In the early 1900s, D.T.Suzuki traveled throughout the United States with Shaku
Soen, translating his lectures. In the 1950s, Suzuki taught courses on Zen philosophy
at Columbia University. A prolific writer, his books did much to disseminate Zen
teachings in academia and throughout the Beat generation. In 1960, he co-authored
the well-known Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm and Richard
DeMartino (Suzuki et al. 1960). Shaku Soen, Shaku Sokatsu and Nyogen Senzaki
established meditation halls and taught Zen meditation to some Americans, mostly
in California and New York, and left successors to carry on their work.
The 1960s, however, was the decade that spawned the establishment of several
practice-oriented Zen centers, mostly in California and New York. The majority of
Zen meditation practitioners were baby-boomers in their young adulthood who no
doubt felt attracted to the progressive counter-culture and cosmopolitan
environments in these locations. These centers multiplied in the 1970s and 1980s
and bred American successors. By the 1970s and 1980s, the number of Zen centers
throughout the United States had increased dramatically.