Publication spotlight: Richard Jaffe on “Spreading Indra’s Net”

Professor Richard M. Jaffe’s research focuses on the broader transformations of Buddhism as it moved across borders. His most recent publication, Spreading Indra’s Net: The Columbia Lectures of D. T. Suzuki, is the product of a deep investigation into the ways in which Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki (1870–1966) reframed Zen Buddhism for American audiences and played a pivotal yet understated role in the post-war “Zen boom” through which Zen entered mainstream Western consciousness in the mid-twentieth century. Suzuki’s influence in the U.S. reached its peak during his final tenure at Columbia University in New York, where he delivered a series of public lectures. 

Although Suzuki was in his eighties by this time, his talks attracted an array of prominent philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and artists, including Erich Fromm, Arthur Danto, Carolyn Brown, Thomas Merton, Sari Dienes, Phillip Guston, Ibram Lassaw, Dorothy Norman, and John Cage. Suzuki’s clear and engaging explanations of Zen concepts such as satori (enlightenment) and mu (emptiness) helped demystify Buddhist philosophy for Western audiences. As Jaffe notes in his introduction, “Spreading Indra’s Net conveys in detail Suzuki’s career-culminating interpretation of how the awakened/enlightened mind is conceived in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Suzuki endeavors to describe the nature of awakening and delusion from the perspective of his own Zen practice and more than a half-century of studying Buddhism.” During his time at Columbia, Suzuki emphasized direct experience and intuition over doctrine, concepts which resonated with postwar American interest in existentialism, psychology, and personal liberation. 

Suzuki’s seminars and their influence on numerous members of the New York intelligentsia in the 1950s are often mentioned in histories of the era. Until very recently, however, little was known about the content of Suzuki's seminars, which took place from 1952–1957. The release of manuscripts of Suzuki's lectures, diligently transcribed and compiled by Elizabeth Mary Thomas, offer a detailed look at the seminars for the first time. By tracing the intellectual, institutional, and cultural channels through which Japanese Buddhist teachings spread across the world in the early and middle parts of the 20th century, Jaffe provides insight into Suzuki's presentation of Buddhism, the audience at the seminars, and the supporting factors that made the ongoing lectures possible. 

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In particular, Jaffe shows how Suzuki’s translations of Buddhist ideas into English, along with his combination of Buddhist, Western-philosophical, and Christian mystical vocabularies, helped shape American perceptions of Zen as experiential, inter-cultural, and modern. Describing his research to the National Humanities Center in 2024, Jaffe explained that “... careful assessment of Suzuki’s life and career will correct the numerous inaccuracies undergirding … earlier perspectives on his work. In particular, I believe we need to abandon the position that there was some pure Zen that Suzuki was distorting and fully accept the sort of twentieth-century developments in the Buddhist tradition that Suzuki helped catalyze as another stage in the long evolution of Buddhism in its global spread.”

Jaffe’s latest publication situates Suzuki as a bridge between East and West, between intellectual Buddhism and popular spirituality in both Japan and the U.S., and between Japanese modernization of Zen and its American reception. Viewed in this light, readers begin to understand that the adoption and expansion of Buddhism in the United States was more than a direct importation of Asian ideas. The lectures themselves reflect Suzuki’s distinctive claim that Zen is not a mere exotic religious practice but a living mode of experience and insight in dialogue with modern thought. Jaffe notes, “Suzuki was a convinced perennialist much indebted to William James’s view that religion, first and foremost, was about profound mystical experiences that were rare but similar for practitioners across religious boundaries.”

Through his writings and lectures, Suzuki shifted the perception of Buddhism in the U.S. from an exotic religion into a practical philosophy of life. As Jaffe points out, “One of the compelling aspects of the lectures for the attendees must have been the way Suzuki interlaced material from European and American writers, philosophers, theologians, and scientists with his disquisitions on Buddhist doctrine.” Suzuki’s lectures therefore represent a complex yet critical juxtaposition of translation, institutionalization, cultural adaptation, and personal encounters that paved the way for later developments such as the rise of lay Zen practice in the West and the living discipline of mindfulness and insight that is eminently applicable to modern life and spirituality.

About the editors:

Richard M. Jaffe is a professor of religious studies at Duke University. He is the general editor of the Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki and the author of Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism and Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism.

Shigematsu Sōiku is abbot of the Rinzai Zen temple Shōgenji in Shizuoka, Japan. He is the editor-translator of A Zen Forest: Sayings of the Zen Masters and the cotranslator of D. T. Suzuki's Columbia University Seminar Lectures into Japanese.

Tokiwa Gishin is emeritus professor at Hanazono University. He is the translator of Zen and the Fine Arts and the cotranslator of D. T. Suzuki's Columbia University Seminar Lectures into Japanese. 

Elizabeth Mary Thomas (1907-1986) was an accomplished Egyptologist who regularly attended Suzuki's seminars. The manuscript that she compiled based on her remarkably detailed class notes forms the basis of this book.