Summary by Zak Madrone. Edited by Mark Unno, 3/10/02.

Bernard Faure, "Rise of Zen Orientalism," Chan Insights and Oversights, 52-67.

Secondary Orientalism: Bernard Faure claims that D.T. Suzuki's scholarship and presentation of Zen demonstrates a secondary Orientalism where Western Orientalist stereotypes are turned back upon and against themselves. Faure states, "[Suzuki's] description of Zen is in many respects an inverted image of that given by the Christian missionaries"" (p. 53).

Suzuki's Contradictions: Faure claims that Suzuki's representation of Zen is sectarian and full of contradictions. Suzuki in his presentation of an ahistorical and essential Zen is actually presenting a highly sectarian Zen that privileges the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism and its practices while simultaneously criticizing Soto Zen and its practices. Suzuki's discussion of Zen practice, Faure thinks, reveals the contradiction inherent in Suzuki's brand of Zen. For example, Suzuki privileges koan practice as upaya but at the same time claimed that realization in Zen transcended all "verbal explanation" and "ritualism"(p.61). This is only one of the many complex contradictions Faure invokes to demonstrate that Suzuki, while he claimed a type of universal Zen predicated upon transcendent mystical insight, is instead over-determined by his sectarian biases and historical/cultural situatedness.

Suzuki's "Militant Comparativism": Suzuki, Faure claims, reduces and simplifies the Christian tradition in his comparison of Zen mysticism to an inferior Christian mysticism (p.61). Suzuki does this by creating a higher category for Zen mysticism that it alone occupies. Furthermore, Suzuki claims that Zen is neither a philosophy nor a religion bound to, as Faure explains, ""cults, dogmas, or collective beliefs"" but is in contrast to Christianity transcendent of such cultural accretions (p.62). Faure states, "He simply inverted old schemas to serve his own purposes-to present Zen as the source and goal of all mystical experience" (p.64). Suzuki's comparison of Zen to Christianity exemplifies how Suzuki's Zen represents secondary Orientalism.

Faure's Portrait of D.T. Suzuki: Faure renders an image of Suzuki where we are to understand Suzuki's scholarship as poor and his intellectual life fraught with irreconcilable tensions. Faure claims that Suzuki's scholarship was only successful because of the historical moment it was a part of and Suzuki's own personal charisma (p.54). Faure provides us with the explanation that Suzuki's Zen and its respective scholarship might possibly be a result of a "boundary anxiety": "someone always marginal to the Zen tradition, living as he did on the borderline between lay and clerical life, between Zen and Pure Land sects, between tradition and modernization, between Japanese and Western culture"(p. 65).