And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work can be done.

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.