Victor Sōgen Hori

Victor Sōgen Hori is associate professor (retired), Japanese Religions, at McGill University. He brings to his work the dual perspectives of the objective academic scholar and the committed religious practitioner. After taking a PhD in Western philosophy at Stanford University in 1976, he was ordained as a Rinzai Zen monk in the temple of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, Japan and did Zen monastic training for thirteen years. In 1990, he resumed the academic life and taught at several universities, including Stanford University and Harvard University, before settling down at McGill University in 1994. His research interests include Zen Buddhism, Japanese Religion, the Kyoto School of Philosophy and Buddhism in the West.

 

Hori’s most important research contribution was the publication of Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Zen Kōan Practice (2003). A koan such as “Two hands clap and make a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” is paradoxical, nonsensical. In Zen Sand  Hori explained how meditation on the paradoxical koan constituted Rinzai religious practice and for the first time gave Western readership an account of the capping phrase (jakugo) practice. Zen Sand also contained an English translation of Japanese jakugo handbooks, thus making it possible for Westerners who cannot read a kanji text to do the Rinzai Zen jakugo practice.

 

Hori also translated The Ten Oxherding Pictures: Lectures by Yamada Mumon Rōshi (2004) and edited several volumes on Buddhism in the West, with John Harding and Alexander Soucy: Wild Geese: Buddhism in Canada (2010): Flowers on the Rock: Global and Local Buddhism in Canada (2014) and Buddhism in the Global Eye (2020). During his tenure as Roche chair, he was busy composing Little Jade: Language and Experience in Zen. Now at age 82, with Parkinson his accomplice, he awaits the great matter of Zen.