Born in 1870 as the fourth son of the physician Suzuki Ryojun in Kanazawa, Kaga Province (today Kanazawa, Ishikawa). His original name was Teitaro. At the Fourth Higher Middle School he became classmates with Nishida Kitaro and made a lifelong friend of him. In 1891, while enrolled at Tokyo Imperial University, he trained at the Engaku-ji in Kamakura under Imakita Kosen and Shaku Soen, and received the lay Buddhist name 'Daisetz.' In 1893, when his master Shaku Soen spoke at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago, he handled the English translation. In 1897, on Soen's recommendation, he went to the United States and for eleven years did editorial and translation work at the Open Court Publishing Company in LaSalle, Illinois. During this time he mastered English, German, Sanskrit, and classical Chinese and established a distinctive vantage-point bridging East and West. He returned to Japan in 1909, served as a lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University and professor at Gakushuin, and from 1921 taught Buddhist studies as professor at Otani University (until 1960). In 1927 he published 'Essays in Zen Buddhism' in English, the first thorough introduction of Zen to the West. He spoke in London in 1936, and after the war served as a visiting professor at Columbia University (1949–58), continuing to lecture and write in the West and exerting deep influence on Western intellectuals such as Erich Fromm, Thomas Merton, and John Cage. Many writings, including 'Japanese Spirituality,' 'Zen and Japanese Culture,' and 'Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism.' He died in Kamakura in 1966 at 95.

A man of quiet bearing and sharp insight. He moved freely between East and West and made it his life's mission to speak of 'what Zen is' in the intellectual language of the West. When explaining Zen in his English writings, he did not merely translate but used his own method of drawing out the distinctive logic of Zen in contrast with Western philosophy. He lived to the great age of 95, keeping up writing and lecturing to the last — an intellectual endurance. He was bound in deep ties to his American wife Beatrice, and his English papers were often co-authored with her.

Daisetz's body of English writings directly triggered the postwar 'Zen boom' in the world. The 'Beat Zen' movement in 1950s America (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others), the music of John Cage, the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, even the thinking of Steve Jobs — his influence was vast and deep. His mark is strong in the psychologist Erich Fromm's 'Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis,' the writings of the Trappist Thomas Merton, and in the historian Arnold Toynbee as well. As an introducer of Japanese philosophy and Buddhist studies to the West, he was a figure without peer in the latter half of the 20th century. The D. T. Suzuki Museum in Kanazawa, a memorial standing on the site of his birth, draws visitors from Japan and abroad. He was buried in the cemetery of Tokei-ji in Kamakura.