A short television interview from the 1970s, preserved in the French INA archives, in which a journalist puts the most basic question about Zen to the man then introducing it to Europe, and gets an answer that refuses the premise.
Is Zen a discipline, a religion or a philosophy? Deshimaru's reply moves in two directions at once. Soto Zen is a religion, he says, it is the religion. And immediately: because it is beyond religion. Beyond religions, beyond philosophies, beyond nationalisms, beyond psychology. It is one of the clearest recorded statements of his refusal to let Zen be filed away as one option among others on a shelf of spiritual goods.
The journalist presses on the practical question: how is a Westerner supposed to approach something so foreign? Deshimaru's answer is flat and unglamorous. The same way as anyone else. It is the same for everybody, and it is possible for everybody, through zazen.
Asked what the way actually consists of, he gives the explanation he returned to again and again in his European teaching, and which sets him apart from teachers who spoke in purely traditional terms. Through zazen, the intellectual brain and the primitive brain are harmonised. Modern civilisation, he argues, has split the material from the spiritual, and that split runs straight through the human brain, whose two parts are now in open contradiction. Sitting brings them back into balance. His claim is deliberately large: only zazen can heal this crisis of modern civilisation, and the balance it restores is what he calls inner peace and true freedom.
The interview runs only a few minutes, filmed in the plain style of French current-affairs television of the period, and it is valuable precisely because of that compression. There is no dojo setting, no ceremony, no translator softening the edges. A reporter asks ordinary questions and a Zen master answers them in his own imperfect French, with the abruptness everyone who met him remembers.
Some context helps. Deshimaru arrived in Paris in 1967, at his master Kodo Sawaki's request, and spent the next fifteen years teaching zazen to whoever turned up. By the time French television came to him with a microphone, he had founded the Association Zen Internationale and a growing network of dojos, and he was being asked to explain himself to a public that had mostly encountered Zen through books, koan anthologies and the counterculture.
For a first encounter with Deshimaru, this is a good place to begin. It shows what he thought he was doing in Europe: not importing an exotic religion, and not offering a philosophy to be discussed, but proposing a physical practice as the answer to a civilisational problem he considered urgent.