 One final point on the question of membership: consideration should also be given to those who could be referred to as “related thinkers” or “associate members” of the Kyoto School. The widest understandings (or  misunderstandings[3])  of the Kyoto School include in it a number of thinkers who have a more or less peripheral relation to the inner circle of the School. On the one hand, there is the case of the well-known Zen figure, D. T. Suzuki (Suzuki Daisetsu) (1870–1966). Suzuki maintained a long personal relationship with Nishida since their days as schoolmates. Suzuki not only helped introduce the young Nishida to the practice of Zen, his articulation of Mahāyāna Buddhist thought is also acknowledged by Nishida as having influenced the formation of certain key ideas in his last essay on the philosophy of religion. But Suzuki—who is justifiably famous in his own right for, among other things, helping introduce Zen to the West—was neither trained as a philosopher nor was he associated with Kyoto University; and thus he is perhaps best thought of as a “closely related thinker” to the School.