Chapter Five traces a postwar history of Zen as it emerged as a compelling and useful matrix for a Cold War era spiritual, social, political, and artistic conditions. Our present-day “Zenny Zeitgeist,” as I call it, developed in large measure from this period. But careful examination of the postwar Zen boom—in its varied manifestations, including serious Zen teaching and practice, Beat Zen and various countercultural Zen creative movements—reveals that Zen was by no means singular (if it ever was), solely related to religion, strictly serious, and exclusive to Japan or East Asia. Moreover, Zen and Zen inspired art became the focus of debate and even venomous attack. Public intellectuals and Zen teachers including D. T. Suzuki, Hu Shih, Philip Kapleau, Arthur Koestler, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki wrestled with each others representations of Zen and sought to resolve questions of authenticity and value, history and practice.
“Straight out of the button-molder’s own ladle”: On the complexity of characters in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night