During the first half of the 20th century, D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966), a Japanese Buddhist scholar and thinker, wrote numerous essays and books in English to introduce Zen ideals to Western audiences. Suzuki was born just after Japan began to adopt Western technology in an effort to catch up with Europe and America. He was strongly influenced by 19th-century Japanese Buddhist reformers who sought to cast off what they saw as the feudal social structures of the Tokugawa period and who advocated a more modern vision of Buddhism that could compete successfully with Christianity. Suzuki spent 11 years in the United States (1897–1908) as an assistant to Paul Carus (1852–1919), a German who had earned a doctorate in theology and philosophy before emigrating to America. Carus published a magazine to promote what he called the “Science of Religion,” a new religion compatible with science. During this period, Suzuki was also influenced by contemporary intellectual currents, such as the ideas of the German Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who had identified irrational intuition and feeling as the essence of religion, and of the American philosopher William James (1842–1910), who posited the possibility of nondualistic knowledge via “pure experience” as overcoming the dualism inherent in empiricism.

Suzuki interpreted the episodes of spiritual awakening depicted in Zen public cases as proof of humankind’s ability to suddenly break through the boundaries of common, everyday, logical thought to achieve a nondualistic, pure experience in which distinctions such as self/other and right/wrong disappear. He characterized this experience as an expression of the irrational intuition that underlies all religions and all acts of artistic creation, regardless of culture or historical period, and that achieved its highest expression in the secular arts of Japan. Suzuki, therefore, interpreted Zen not as a form of Buddhism but as a Japanese cultural value with universal relevance. His use of Western theological and philosophical concepts to explain the Zen experience in modern ways influenced Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and other members of the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy. In the early 20th century, many Japanese intellectuals described Zen as the underlying essence of Japanese culture or as the unique form of Japanese spirituality. As Japanese society became increasingly militaristic during the 1930s and ’40s, descriptions of Zen became more warlike, frequently invoking loyalty to the state, fearlessness, and mental tranquillity in the face of death. In 1938, for example, Suzuki described Zen as “a religion of will power” and identified Zen training with Bushido (the code of conduct of the Japanese warrior class) and Japanese swordsmanship.

When Suzuki’s books were reprinted after World War II, they found a ready audience in the United States and Britain among ex-servicemen who had acquired an interest in Japanese culture and among youths dissatisfied with postwar society. In particular, members of the new American literary and artistic movement known as the Beats looked to Zen for inspiration. In popular culture the word Zen became an adjective used to describe any spontaneous or free-form activity. Since the heyday of the Beat movement in the 1950s, however, academic studies of Zen have grown in complexity and sophistication, examining the role of Zen practices and Zen institutions in the religious lives of Buddhists in East Asia. In 1953 the Chinese Nationalist historian and diplomat Hu Shih (1891–1962) published an important essay on the history of Zen in China, in which he challenged Suzuki’s characterization of Zen as irrational and beyond logical understanding. Hu argued that Zen must be understood as a human institution and that scholarly descriptions of it must be based on verifiable historical evidence, not on psychological interpretations of the religious stories found in Zen’s public cases.

Since 1953 a new generation of scholars has completely rewritten the history of Zen. They have made major strides both in documenting the historical development of the Zen school in East Asia and in understanding the religious and cultural contexts within which Zen literature, such as public cases, functioned as guides to spiritual truth. During the 1980s and ’90s, some Zen scholars and Zen priests in Japan advocated what they called “Critical Buddhism” in an effort to denounce any connection between Zen and illogical thought and any association between Zen institutions and social problems such as religious discrimination, cultural chauvinism, and militarism. Regardless of the ultimate fate of Critical Buddhism, it is clear that efforts to create a new Zen compatible with the demands of modern society will continue.