Beatrice Lane Suzuki was the American born wife of renowned Zen scholar Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. Until very recently, nothing beyond this had been written about her. She was, however, also a very significant figure in introducing Japanese Buddhism to the West, a partner in the mission to mak...
Allan Bennett was one of the first British people to be ordained as a Buddhist monk (bhikkhu) in Asia, taking the name Ananda Metteyya. He was a liminal figure who stretched across different nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. He was well-educated but experienced poverty and chro...
Dōgen can without any doubt be considered one of the most important Japanese thinkers of all times. An aristocrat by birth, he entered the head monastery of the Tendai school favoured by the nobility at an early age, left it when he did not find satisfactory answers to his questions, later st...
In addition to being the founder of the influential Shingon school of Japanese Buddhism, Kūkai (774–835) was one of Japan’s greatest calligraphers, a masterful scholar of pre-Tang dynasty classical Chinese literature, a ritual innovator, and an institutional builder who developed influential ...