Through books
D. T. Suzuki's English writings, from the 1920s to the 1950s, presented Zen as direct experience beyond doctrine and beyond words, and found readers among artists, psychologists and philosophers. Alan Watts popularised it further. The Beat writers took what they wanted from it, which was not always what was offered.
Scholars now read Suzuki critically. His Zen was shaped by Japanese nationalism and by Western philosophical categories, and it played down the monastic discipline and ritual that any Japanese Zen temple is built around.
Then teachers
Practice arrived with people. Shunryū Suzuki, no relation, founded the San Francisco Zen Center in 1962 and taught plain sitting; his talks became Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Taizan Maezumi, Kōbun Chino and others established lineages in North America, and Sanbō Kyōdan teachers trained many Europeans, including Catholic priests.
Thích Nhất Hạnh, exiled from Vietnam for his peace work, settled in France and founded Plum Village in 1982, bringing a Vietnamese Zen rooted in mindfulness of ordinary life and in social engagement.
What it changed
Zen gave the West a vocabulary it still uses, and in some cases misuses: beginner's mind, just sitting, the koan as a puzzle. It shaped postwar poetry, ceramics, gardens and design, and it set the expectation that Buddhism means meditation. It also went through the painful work of institution building in a new culture, including several serious teacher scandals in the 1980s and after, which left Western Buddhist communities with far more caution about authority.
Why it matters
Zen shapes Western ideas of Buddhism, of meditation and of art.
History and tradition
What historians can say
Well documented in the centres' own records and in a substantial body of scholarship, including Rick Fields' narrative history of Buddhism in America and critical studies of how Zen was presented to the West.