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Brief Lives

Daisetsu Suzuki (1870-1966)

Brian Morris contemplates the ‘ultimate reality’ of a Zen Buddhist philosopher.

According to Christmas Humphreys, the founder in 1924 of the Buddhist Society in London, Zen Buddhism is the ‘apotheosis’ – the divine culmination – of Buddhism. Humphreys on to describe Zen as a practical, non-intellectual method of directly experiencing ‘ultimate reality’. If so, then Zen should be of interest to phenomenologists, Kantians and all the other Western philosophers who have argued about our ability to apprehend reality. But was he right?

Humphreys derived most of his ideas about Zen from his friend, the Japanese scholar Daisetsu T. Suzuki (1870-1966), who has been well described as the man who brought Zen to the West.

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