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Introduction: 1967-A Very Good Year
The year 1967 was indeed a very good year in the development of Zen Buddhist studies on both sides of the Pacific, as evidenced by the publication of two monumental works that forever changed the course of scholarly approaches to the history of Zen. In Japan, Yanagida Seizan issued what has remained the single most important book on the formation of early Zen writings in China, cast in a social-historical context, Shoki Zenshu shisho no kenkyu (Study of the historical writings of the early Chan school). This work lifted studies by Japanese scholars out of the traditional sectarian approach to Zen scholarship and into the arena of contemporary critical theoretical studies by challenging many of the myths and fabrications as well as highlighting the sheer creativity and inventiveness that characterized the self-definitions of the early Zen school.
Meanwhile, in America, Philip Yampolsky, who worked with Yanagida on translation projects-and, along with his Japanese colleague as well as Masatoshi Nagatomi and Stanley Weinstein, among others, helped train a generation of Western scholars-produced a translation with a substantial historical introduction and handy bilingual critical edition of one of the main Zen texts, the Platform Sutra by sixth patriarch Hui-neng. While by no means the first solid Western piece of academic work on Zen in an era still dominated by the popular writings of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and Eugen Herrigel, as well as European scholarship by Demieville, Gernet, and Zurcher, Yampolsky set a new standard for what a translation and book-length study in the field should accomplish. His work has for years been widely read and consulted by specialists and nonspecialists alike. It was in 1967 that the page was turned, and mature Zen Buddhist studies was born.
It is not surprising to find that both books, while still well distributed, have been criticized for an out-of-date or old-fashioned approach, especially for unintentionally supporting a romantic, idealized view of Zen masters and ideology that the historical method they represented was supposed to be critiquing and undermining. Nevertheless, their impact will remain strong and continue to cast long shadows over other recent and future publications that struggle to capture the spirit of innovation and evoke the originality and authority of Yampolsky and...