Reviews of Zen Buddhism
"The decision to reprint of Heinrich Dumoulin’s classic study of Zen history, according to one of the original translators, James Heisig, “was not an easy one to make.” As a friend of mine said, '”I’m not sure what that tells us about the state of Zen studies in the West, but good luck with your review!” The problem lies, as Heisig warns us, in the explosion of Western scholarly work on Zen from the moment it appeared in English translation in 1988 that made Dumoulin’ study vulnerable to criticism. The problem was not that it soon became dated after its publication. It is also the fact that the entire methodological underpinnings to Dumoulin’s approach to his history came under a hermeneutics of suspicion by Bernard Faure, John McCrae and others among a new generation of Zen scholars.
So why read it, let alone review it? The new edition is valuable because of the fascinating introductions by John McRae and Victor Hori. For his part, McRae sees it as “an excellent reference work” that still should not be read as an authoritative history of Zen given advances in the field. Hori’s introduction, by contrast, is more sympathetic, arguing that critics who see Dumoulin “as a naïve historian who let himself be beguiled by Zen into promoting its deceptive self image” are being unfair as he told the history of Zen from the insider’s point of view. The remainder of Hori’s essay is a spirited attack of McRae’s critique of Dumoulin’s “romanticized image of Zen.” What both introductions do is to place the current controversy over the history of the field, methodological approaches, the insider/outsider problem, etc. before the reader for critical reflection. The result is a perfect framework for assessing not only the strengths and weaknesses of Dumoulin’s book, but also the state of the field of Zen studies."
—Mark MacWilliams, Religious Studies Review
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Originally Posted by Hans
