You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child.

While Suzuki seems to endorse this identification since he wrote the introduction to the post-war edition of Herrigel's book he wrote later that "Herrigel is trying to get to Zen but he hasn't grasped Zen itself". In July 1929 he returned to Germany and was given a chair for philosophy at the University of Erlangen. Among his papers were found voluminous notes on various aspects of Zen.

In July 1929 he returned to Germany and was given a chair for philosophy at the University of Erlangen. Eugen Herrigel (20 March 1884 in Lichtenau Baden – 18 April 1955 in Partenkirchen Bavaria) was a German philosopher who taught philosophy at Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai Japan from 1924-1929 and introduced Zen to large parts of Europe through his writings.