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FOREWORD I by HUSTON SMITH ITradition has it that. it w s in the sixth century A.D., with thejourney of Bod.hidharma from India to China, that Zen Buddhismfirst moved east. Six hundred years later, in the twelfth century,it traveled east again, to Japan. Now that more than another sixhundred years have elapsed, is it to take a third giant stride eastward,this time to the West?No one knows. Current Western interest in Zen wears the guise ofthe fad it in part is, but the interest also runs deeper. Let me cite theimpression Zen has made on three Western minds of some note,those of a psychologist, a philosopher, and a historian. The book C. G.Jung was reading on his deathbed was Charles Luk's Ch'an and ZenTeachings: First Series, and he expressly asked his secretary to writeto tell the author that "he was enthusiastic .... When he read whatHsu Y un said, he sometimes fe lt as if he himself could have said exactlythis! It was just 'it' !"1 In philosophy, Martin Heidegger is quotedas saying: "Ifl understand [Dr. Suzuki] correctly, this is what I havebeen trying to say in all my writings."2 Lynn White is not the molderof modem thought that Jung and Heidegger have been, but he is afine historian, and he predicts: "It may well be that the publicationof D. T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism _in 1927 will seem in1 From an unpublished letter from Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz to Charles Lukdated September 12, 1961.2 In William Barrett (ed.), Zen Buddhism: Seleded Writings of D. T. Suzuki(Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. xi.xi