Zen and Plato

I've been enjoying Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind lately and have found in it resonances with Western philosophy, namely Plato. Consider this sentence from the introduction.

Zen mind is one of those enigmatic phrases used by Zen teachers to make you notice yourself, to go beyond the words and wonder what your own mind and being are.

Each function noted has an analogue in Plato's thought.

Both Zen and Platonism ask us to reconsider the world without jumping to conclusions. Suzuki says it succinctly, In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few. As for Socrates, the old man makes a living out of questioning people who think they know what a particular concept is, when they in fact don't.

But is Zen a philosophy, in the sense of philos + sophia, a love of wisdom? Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? can help us here.

To know oneself, to learn to think, to act as if nothing were self-evident – wondering, "wondering that there is being" – these, and many other determinations of philosophy create interesting attitudes, however tiresome they may be in the long run, but even from a pedagogical point of view they do not constitute a well-defined occupation or precise activity.

Despite the similarities between Plato and Zen, Deleuze and Guattari remind us that Zen's attitude does not make up a philosophy, and Suzuki tells us as much in the chapter Experience, Not Philosophy.

But whether Buddhism is philosophically deep or good or perfect is not the point. To keep our practice in its pure form is our purpose. Sometimes I feel there is something blasphemous in talking about how Buddhism is perfect as a philosophy without knowing what it actually is.

The Buddha himself was reticent to answer metaphysical questions. Hence, Zen is a practice, or an experience, long before it turns into philosophy. Or, we may even call it anti-philosophy.