I take it that the aim of Suzuki's many works in English has been to draw the West toward Zen and the non-rational approach which, like all forms of religious experience, Zen demands. No one could deny that in this task he has been eminently successful. The current interest in and comfort derived from Zen in America and Europe are due almost solely to his long series of writings. Hu, on the other hand, writes primarily as a historian, as one who is passionately interested not only in finding out what really happened but also in discovering the sequence in which things-happened.
Religious writers are sometimes apt to forget how much they owe to secular scholars.
In the present case it was Hu, after all, who first discovered the T'ang Dynasty Zen writings in the Pelliot collection and who set going the whole train of research which has made clear to us what the early history of the Zen sect in China, long falsified by Zen writers themselves, really was. If this were really so, the proper course for Suzuki to take would seem to be to avoid history altogether. Instead, he has always given the reader a great deal of history. It seems to me that this separation of the mundane and the transcendental, of the finite from the infinite, comes of an attitude that almost every one of the old Zen writers has warned us against. Surely the whole burden of their teaching is that Buddha does not exist apart from the World, nor the World apart from Buddha.