“The arts of Zen are not intended for utilitarian purposes or for purely aesthetic enjoyment,” Suzuki wrote, “but are meant to train the mind, indeed, to bring it in contact with ultimate reality.”

This raises the stakes even higher. Not only is Zen inherently allied with the arts, but its vision of art is even better than that of regular art, even great regular art. Where does that leave Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Beethoven? Could Suzuki’s idea of Zen art shed any light on their work? It is hard to see how.

In 1953, Suzuki endorsed Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery with an introduction. The book was destined to become not just an international bestseller but an enduring classic—even if it was a classic of misinterpretation. It purports to trace how Herrigel’s training in kyudo, the “art” or “way” of archery, was simultaneously a training in Zen. But in the years since its publication, various problems in his account have come to light, many of which have been chronicled by the scholar Shoji Yamada in his illuminating book Shots in the Dark. Herrigel’s archery teacher, for example, far from being a Zen master, was actually a Shin Buddhist, had undergone no Zen training, and was explicitly critical of Zen. Herrigel’s Japanese was not very good, and he misunderstood much of what he was told, always in favor of greater spiritual mystique. Moreover, Herrigel’s conception of Zen was similarly based on a romantic notion gleaned from D. T. Suzuki, rather than any direct engagement with traditional Zen practice. Nevertheless, the confabulation of the book was swallowed whole, worldwide, and even in Japan, where it was a smash.

Shoji Yamada has also conducted an exhaustive study of the history of attitudes to the famous “Zen garden” at Ryoanji in Kyoto. What soon becomes clear from his analysis of textbooks on Japanese culture is that it was only in the years immediately after World War II that the garden came to be regarded as an embodiment of Zen. Previously it had been variously ignored, criticized, or appreciated simply as the fine work of a temple gardener—but not as somehow encapsulating a Zen view of things. In fact, Yamada argues that the shepherding of Japanese rock gardens into the Zen fold was only part of a broader attempt to restore national pride after the disasters of the war, by creating a national myth in which Zen was a central characteristic of the Japanese people, finding expression in various cultural forms, such as gardens, archery, and tea ceremony.

This process coincided with the growing appetite for Zen in the West, and neatly carried the arts along with it. In other words, by a general distillation of the term, “Zen” was freed up for all kinds of associations that have little to do with its original monastic manifestation. It became such a multivalent designation that it was easy to ally to almost any activity—a case of the Japanese reabsorbing a notion of Zen that they themselves had so successfully proselytized in the West.

Perhaps, though, the notion of Zen arts, despite its legacy of misleading interpretation, still might have something to teach us. It might, for starters, serve as a corrective or counterpoint to some of the assumptions common in the West about art and artists.