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Swedenborg: Buddha of the North. By D. T. Suzuki. Translated by Andrew Bernstein. Swedenborg Studies No. 5. West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation, 1996. Pp. xxxiv + 134.
The intriguingly titled Swedenborg: Buddha of the North is a useful work in comparative philosophy. The volume brings together Andrew Bernstein's English translation of D. T. Suzuki's Swedenborg (the centerpiece of the book), his translation of Suzuki's brief essay "Swedenborg's View of Heaven and 'Other-Power,"' an explanatory introduction by Bernstein, and a valuable Afterword by David Loy. (The Introduction and the Afterword were published earlier in issues of Arcana.) In his introduction, Andrew Bernstein puzzles over a twofold mystery: why did the eminent Buddhist scholar Suzuki latch onto the Swedish Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg so eagerly in the years between 1910 and 1924, and then seemingly lose interest, with only brief and incidental references to him in later works? He finds the answers in Suzuki's biographical and historical context. Suzuki must have been exposed to Swedenborg's thought during his years in the United States at the turn of the century, and on his return to Japan his distress at the rise of both soulless technological growth and introspective self-absorption there led him to advocate Swedenborg as a model for spirituality. Swedenborg's use of religious insights to build a better society was relevant and significant for Suzuki in the first two or three decades of this century in a way it was not later on, when, Bernstein argues, Suzuki's response to the increasingly militaristic Japanese mind-set was a retreat to private individualism. No longer did he quote approvingly Swedenborg's ideas about using religion as a moral force; instead he lauded an apolitical understanding of Zen. Furthermore, the congruence Suzuki found between Swedenborg and Buddhism led him away from explicit reference to Swedenborg's particular expression of spiritual insights and toward the universal truths that could be spoken of in Buddhist terms. For Suzuki, concludes Bernstein, Swedenborg "vanished into the thin air of Buddhahood." D. T. Suzuki's exploration of Swedenborg's thought begins with a biographical picture of Swedenborg as a nobleman and a brilliant scientist. (Swedenborg's elite social status was important for Suzuki, Bernstein had noted earlier, because Suzuki himself had taught the elite sons of Japanese nobles.) Swedenborg's training and...