BUDDHISM COMES WEST 303nomenology in particular-grappled with this issue; by mid-century, Gestalt
psychotherapy was experimenting with methods to bring the mind back to a
pure state of cognition, free from social and psychological structures. Mean-
while, Asian Buddhists who were aware of these trends had begun proselytiz-
ing in the West, presenting Buddhist meditation as an alternative route in the
search for an awareness untainted by culture.
In 1905, Shaku So en (see Section 10 .8), the New Rinzai delegate to the
World's Parliament of Religions, had been invited to return to America to
teach Zen. The visit resulted in three of his closest disciples' coming to Amer-
ica. One, Nyogen Senzaki, founded Zen groups from the 1920s to the 1950s
on the West Coast. The second, Sokei-an, founded a Zen group in New York
City in 1930 (the Buddhist Society of America, which became the First Zen
Institute of America). The third, D. T. Suzuki (see Section 10.8), became-
through his writings and personal influence-the primary interpreter of Zen
to the West during his lifetime. His influence is felt to the present day. Suzuki's
writings on Zen fell into two contradictory categories: one that insisted that
Zen could not be properly understood or practiced outside of the Buddhist
context, and one that maintained that the essence of Zen was transcultural or,
as he put it, that "Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy-that final psychic
fact that takes place when religious consciousness is heightened to extremity.
Whether it comes to pass in Buddhists, in Christians, or in philosophers, it is
in the last analysis incidental to Zen." The essence of Zen, in this light, lies in
an aesthetic and spiritual realization of the beauty and perfection innate in
each fleeting moment, no matter how ordinary that moment may seem to
common perception (see Section 10.7).
This second category of Suzuki's writings was by far the more influential.
His separation of Zen from Zen Buddhism gave rise to the impression that
Zen might hold the answer to the search for pure, unfettered experience. From
this it followed that Zen's connections with aspects ofBuddhist doctrine that
were more problematic to the modern, relativistic Western mind-such as the
teachings on karma and rebirth, the seeming nihilism of nirvaJ:?.a, and the role
of ethics on the Path-were simply cultural baggage that could be dispensed
with at will. This opened the Buddhist fold to a group of thinkers and artists
who felt little or no allegiance toward the Buddhist tradition per se. At the
same time, Suzuki's portrayal of meditation as the realization of the beauty to
be found in the midst of the ordinary has had an overwhelming influence on
how meditation has been taught in the West-an influence that has extended
not only to Rinzai Zen, but also to Soto, Son, Thi~n, Dzogchen, and even
Theravadin vipassana.
In the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn's landmark book The Structure <if Scientific Rev-
olutions (1962) furthered the crisis of cultural relativism by advancing the thesis
that even the physical sciences are not purely empirical, but are shaped by in-
tellectual presuppositions, called paradigms, that determine how empirical
data are selected and ignored. At the same time, the rise of the drug culture
exposed large numbers of westerners to aspects of expanded consciousness
and intensified perception that went beyond standard paradigms in psychology