The Contributions Of Asian Buddhists And The Popularity Of Zen

Among Asian Buddhists, Ceylonese monks such as the Venerable Narada Mahathera, the Venerable Walpola Rahula and the Venerable Piyadassi Thera have been well known for their devoted effort to disseminate the original basic doctrine of the Buddha in international public and academic circles through both literary and missionary activities. Dr. G.P. Malalasekera, K.N. Jayatilleke, Dr. Jayasuriya and some other leading lay Buddhists of Sri Lanka have contributed greatly to international Buddhist scholarship, the availability of firsthand knowledge of Buddhism to Western readers and the lively interpretation of the Buddha-Dhamma intelligible and meaningful to modern mind. A number of devoted Ceylonese Buddhists join as honorary workers in conducting the Buddhist Publication Society3 at Kandy. It is said that during the last twelve years this non-profit organization has printed over a million booklets on all aspects of the Buddha's teachings and distributed large numbers of them to addresses in seventy-one countries. Burmese Buddhism has been attracting Western people for a long time through its specialization in Abhidhamma studies and meditation. Burmese contributors in this field can be represented by the Mahathera Ledi Sayadaw, whose numerous writings show a deep penetration of the respective subjects derived from his meditative experience. The Burmese tradition of Abhidhamma studies is still continued and made accessible to the West by outstanding Burmese scholars, such as Mahasi Sayadaw, U Titthila and U Narada. In Thailand, the Bhikkhu Buddhadasa has been stimulating a growing interest in Buddhism among modern intellectuals and college students, and becoming more and more an interesting and attractive figure to the West through his original interpretation of the Buddha-Dharma. His oral teaching has been published under voluminous titles and an increasing number of these titles are being translated into English. One volume,1 "Toward the Truth," published in the United States, was translated by an American scholar as an attempt to contribute to an understanding of contemporary Theravada Buddhism. THE POPULARITY OF ZEN So far, however, the most famous of all contemporary Asian Buddhists who are well known in the West has probably been Dr. D.T. Suzuki, Zen's chief exponent in English. It is mainly through his writings that Zen has gained a newborn popularity in the West. This is a rapidly growing popularity which has been clearly described in these sentences: "Rarely in modern times has an alien way of life attracted a foreign people as suddenly and as strongly as Zen has attracted Westerners in the past few years. Scarcely a decade ago the word was all but unknown. Today, the word, though certainly not its meaning, is common knowledge."2 "Any psychologist, even twenty years ago, would have been greatly surprised - or shocked- to find his colleagues interested in a mystical religious system such as Zen Buddhism .........The reason for this change lies in factors ........... to be found in the development of psychoanalytic theory, in the changes that have occurred in the intellectual and spiritual climate of the Western world, and in the work of Dr. Suzuki, who, by his books, his lectures, and his personality, has made the Western world acquainted with Zen Buddhism."1 The popularity of Zen naturally adds to the growing public interest in Buddhism and Buddhist studies in general. In fact, even among scholars, Buddhism has, since the beginning of the present century, attracted the attention not only of philologists, Indologists and Orientalists but also of learned men of modern sciences. Some of the leading philosophers, scientists, historians, psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts of modern age such as H.G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, C.G. Jung and Erich Fromm made appreciative references to Buddhism in their writings and speeches or even accepted the superiority of Buddhism over modern science in their field of specialization.2

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