Meister Eckhart

Eckhart and Zen

Eckhart has had an odd afterlife. Condemned for heresy in his own century, he became, in the twentieth, one of the main doors Japanese philosophers used to talk to the Christian West. The man most responsible for that is D. T. Suzuki, and the conversation he started was carried on by two philosophers of the Kyoto School, Nishitani Keiji and Ueda Shizuteru.

This page explores how closely Eckhart's teaching resembles Zen, not whether he was secretly a Buddhist. He was a Dominican friar who preached Christ crucified and read Augustine and Aquinas his whole life. The comparison with Zen is real, old, serious, and worth understanding on its own terms, including the places where it strains.

Suzuki's Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist

D. T. Suzuki (1870 to 1966) did more than anyone to bring Zen into English. Late in his life he wrote Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957), a short book built around a direct comparison of Eckhart with Zen and with the Pure Land teacher Saichi.

Suzuki's aim in the book is stated plainly in its opening pages. In his words, the project is to call attention to how close Eckhart's way of thinking comes to that of Mahayana Buddhism, and of Zen in particular.

What drew Suzuki to Eckhart was not the sermons on moral life or the Trinity but the passages where Eckhart pushes past ordinary God-language: the Godhead beyond God, the soul's ground, the birth of the Word in silence. Suzuki read lines like these from Sermon 15 and heard something close to the Zen language of emptiness and no-mind.

God is to be sought in opposites. In unknowing knowing we shall know God, in forgetting ourselves and all things, even down to the naked essence of the Godhead.
Sermon 15: Why no word or thought can reach God

Suzuki was not a theologian and did not pretend to be one. He read as a Zen master reading a foreign but recognisable text, looking for the place where Eckhart's words point past words. The book is uneven and sometimes impressionistic, jumping between Eckhart, koans, and the folk Buddhism of Saichi's journals without much signposting. But it opened a door that has stayed open for seventy years: Eckhart became the Christian mystic Buddhist readers were told to start with.

Nishitani Keiji and absolute nothingness

Nishitani Keiji (1900 to 1990) held the chair in philosophy of religion at Kyoto University and is usually named as the central figure of the Kyoto School's middle generation. His major work, Religion and Nothingness (1961 in Japanese, 1982 in English translation by Jan Van Bragt), takes up Eckhart directly as part of a larger argument about nihilism and what Nishitani calls the field of emptiness.

Nishitani's argument has a particular shape. He thinks the modern West is caught in nihilism, the collapse of any ground beneath the self, and that most religious answers to this are too thin because they still operate inside the subject-object split that produced the nihilism in the first place. He finds in Eckhart someone who dug underneath the personal God into something harder to hold onto.

A short gloss on Nishitani's reading of Eckhart puts it this way: "Absolute nothingness signals, for Eckhart, the point at which all modes of being are transcended", including the modes of divine being such as Creator or Divine Love.

For Nishitani, Eckhart's move of distinguishing God from the Godhead, the bare ground behind the Persons of the Trinity, is the most radical example of negative theology the West produced. He draws directly on Eckhart's own vocabulary, including the idea of a life lived ane warumbe, without a why, a phrase central to sermons like Sermon 13 and the page on living without a why.

Nishitani is careful, in a way readers sometimes miss, to mark a limit. He notes that Eckhart's Godhead is still described in language that is, in his own words, markedly distant from orthodox Christian faith, and he treats it as a limit case within Christianity rather than a secret Buddhism. The resemblance to Zen's emptiness (sunyata) is real but it is a resemblance he has to argue for, not an identity he assumes.

Ueda Shizuteru's closer reading

Ueda Shizuteru (1926 to 2019) studied under Nishitani and later held the same chair at Kyoto University. Unlike Suzuki or Nishitani, Ueda trained as an Eckhart scholar in the ordinary academic sense: he earned a doctorate at the University of Marburg with a dissertation on Eckhart, later published in German as Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur Gottheit (The birth of God in the soul and the breakthrough to the Godhead), a study that puts Eckhart's mystical thought into direct confrontation with Zen.

Ueda's reading tracks two distinct moments in Eckhart: the birth of God in the soul, where the Son is born in the ground of the person, and what Eckhart calls the breakthrough, where the soul goes further still and lets go even of God as Father, Son, and Spirit to reach the bare Godhead. Ueda treats the breakthrough, not the birth, as the real point of contact with Zen.

One summary of this side of Ueda's work describes the soul's task, in its approach to the breakthrough, as needing to "take leave of God" and "become void of God", what Eckhart calls extreme solitariness or fundamental death.

This is close to the territory of Sermon 96, where Eckhart describes Paul's own willingness to leave God for God, and to the page on the Godhead beyond God on this site.

Ueda's distinctive contribution, and the place where he is more exact than Suzuki, is to mark where the parallel breaks. Scholarship on the Kyoto School notes that Ueda, despite his appreciation for Eckhart's nearness to Zen, concludes that Eckhart's nothingness still points toward an inexpressibly higher being, where Zen's emptiness does not. That is a careful, technical difference, and it matters.

What the comparison gets right

The comparison is not forced. Eckhart really does use a vocabulary of unknowing, emptiness, and the annihilation of self that sounds, in translation, close to Zen. He tells his hearers that the soul must become a desert, that true knowledge of God is a kind of agnosia, an unknowing, and that the self that clings to its own willing and knowing is exactly what stands in the way.

We must sink into forgetting and not-knowing. In this silence, this quiet, the Word is heard. There is no better way to approach this Word than in silence, in quiet: we hear it and know it rightly in unknowing. To one who knows nothing it is clearly revealed.
Sermon 2: The birth of God in the ground of the soul

He also insists, again and again, that the ordinary subject-object structure of experience, the self here knowing a God over there, is not the final word. In sermon after sermon he presses past it: in Sermon 97 he says plainly that God cannot be made an object of understanding in any ordinary sense.

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And there is the matter of living without a why, Eckhart's word for action that has let go of purpose, reward, and even the idea of God as a thing to be gained. This resembles, at least on the surface, the Zen suspicion of goal-directed striving, the idea that enlightenment sought as an object recedes the more it is chased.

So the Kyoto School philosophers were not inventing a resemblance out of nothing. Eckhart's language, more than almost any other medieval Christian writer, gives a reader coming from Zen something to recognise.

What it flattens

The comparison works best at the level of a few key phrases, lifted out of their setting. Put back in context, the differences start to show.

Eckhart's Godhead is the Trinity's own depth, the womb from which Father, Son, and Spirit come forth, not a free-standing absence. Eckhart never stops using Trinitarian and Christological language even in his boldest passages. The birth of the Word in the soul that he preaches on in sermon after sermon, from Sermon 1 through Sermon 17, is specifically the birth of the second Person of the Trinity, not an impersonal event. Ueda's own distinction between birth and breakthrough is a way of taking this seriously rather than skipping past it.

Eckhart was a working preacher inside a specific institution, answerable to a Dominican order and eventually to Rome. He preached mostly to nuns and ordinary laypeople in Strasbourg and Cologne, in German, inside a world of sacrament, scripture, and the liturgical year. Twenty-eight of his propositions were condemned by the papal bull In agro dominico in 1329, and he spent his final years defending himself as a loyal son of the Church, not someone trying to found a new path. None of that maps onto Zen's institutional history of lineage and koan practice.

There is also a difference in what the unknowing is for. In Eckhart it still serves union with a God who is love, who acts, who is addressed in prayer even by someone like Eckhart who tells his hearers to pray for nothing. Zen's emptiness is not pointed at union with a personal God in that sense at all, which is exactly the limit Ueda names when he says Eckhart's nothingness still gestures toward a higher being.

Suzuki's book, for its own part, has been criticised even by sympathetic readers for being closer to a devotional reading of Eckhart through a Zen lens than a careful comparative study. One reviewer's complaint, that his claim about Eckhart's God being close to Buddhist emptiness is surface level and does not consider the challenge of carrying concepts across very different traditions, is a fair one to keep in mind.

None of this means the comparison is worthless. It means it is a real conversation between two different traditions, each with its own center of gravity, and the interesting part is exactly where they do not quite meet.

Reading Eckhart without the Zen lens

If you came to this page from Zen or from a general interest in nonduality, it is worth reading a few of Eckhart's sermons without reaching for the comparison at all. Sermon 2 and Tractate 9 on detachment are good places to start. See what holds up as Eckhart's own argument, inside his own Christian frame, before deciding what it resembles.

For his place in an older philosophical lineage, see Eckhart and Neoplatonism.