ABSTRACT
According to Heinrich Dumoulin, a historian of Zen Buddhism, the first Western contact with Zen came in the sixteenth century, when Christian missionaries visited Japan. There they encountered the doctrine of nothingness, had conversations with roshis, were impressed with the tea ceremony, and, according to their reports, made conversions even among the roshis. Since then there has not been much contact between the West and Zen Buddhism. Certainly there has not been contact with Zen Buddhism in Japan until recently, for the doors of Japan were closed to the West for two hundred and fifty years before 1854. Finally, in the story of the coming of Zen to the Occident, there was the interest that Nyogen Senzaki showed in the poetry of roshi in Japan, Soen Nakagawa. As a result of correspondence that developed between them, Soen Nakagawa paid his first visit to the United States early in the 1950's, when he came to call on Senzaki in Los Angeles.
