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“Analogously, the cultural appropriation of "Zen" in the popular culture of the West has often been as superficial as it has been enthusiastic. However, in Western universities these days the pendulum has swung in the other direction; the current academic trend is to use historical and philological scholarship to criticize the idealized spiritual and romantic image of Zen fashioned by earlier generations of writers. In erudite books with clever titles like Chan Insights and Oversights and Seeing Through Zen this this critical—and sometimes polemical—debunking is aimed not only at the ways in which authors like D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts have presented Zen to Westerners; it is also aimed at the traditional self conceptions and self-presentations of the Zen tradition throughout its fifteen-hundred-year history in Asia.” — Bret W Davis