Dōgen

Eihei Dōgen was born in 1200 to the Koga family, an aristocratic line connected to the imperial court in Kyoto. His father died when he was two; his mother when he was seven. The traditional accounts trace his early Buddhist orientation to the experience of watching incense smoke rise at his mother’s funeral and the recognition, in that moment, of the impermanence of all conditioned things — an experience he later said determined the course of his entire life.

He was ordained as a Tendai novice at Mount Hiei at age thirteen, took full ordination shortly after, and spent his late adolescence and early twenties in increasingly dissatisfied study at the principal Buddhist monasteries of Kyoto. The question that drove him — and that the available Tendai answers did not resolve — was this: if all beings already possess Buddha-nature, as the Mahāyāna tradition teaches, why is practice necessary at all? Why train? What would training accomplish that the original Buddha-nature does not already supply?

The journey to China

Unable to find a satisfying answer in Japan, Dōgen traveled to China in 1223 with his teacher Myōzen. He spent four years there, studying initially without finding a teacher whose understanding satisfied him, finally meeting Tiantong Rujing (1163–1228) of the [[soto-zen|Caodong]] (Chinese Sōtō) lineage at Mount Tiantong. Under Rujing’s guidance — and through a famous moment in which a fellow monk, dozing during meditation, was rebuked by Rujing with the phrase to study the Buddha-way is to drop body and mind, which struck Dōgen with sudden recognition — he had his decisive awakening experience. He received Dharma transmission from Rujing and returned to Japan in 1227 carrying the lineage.

Eihei-ji and the founding of Japanese Sōtō

His early years back in Japan were spent teaching first near Kyoto (at Kennin-ji, then at the small temple Kōshō-ji) before — facing increasing institutional hostility from the established Tendai and Rinzai institutions — he relocated in 1243 to remote Echizen province (modern Fukui prefecture) and founded Eihei-ji in 1244. The monastery remains today one of the two head temples of Japanese Sōtō Zen (along with Sōji-ji near Yokohama) and is one of the largest continuously operating Buddhist monasteries in the world.

Shikantaza — just sitting

Dōgen’s distinctive contemplative emphasis is shikantaza — literally nothing but precisely sitting. Where the Rinzai tradition centers contemplative practice on the kōan — short paradoxical questions worked on intensively by the student — Sōtō under Dōgen centers practice on zazen itself, with no specific object of attention beyond the act of seated awareness. The crucial move is the recognition that zazen is not a means to attain enlightenment; it is rather the enactment of awakening itself. The traditional articulation: practice and enlightenment are one. The dichotomy that drove his original question — if Buddha-nature is already present, why train? — is dissolved by the recognition that training does not aim at acquiring Buddha-nature; training is Buddha-nature actualizing itself.

The Shōbōgenzō

The work for which Dōgen is best known is the Shōbōgenzō — Treasury of the True Dharma Eye — a collection of essays composed between 1231 and his death in 1253. The various traditional editions contain ninety-five, seventy-five, or sixty fascicles, depending on the redaction. The text is remarkable for several reasons:

• Written in vernacular Japanese. Contemporary Buddhist scholarship in Japan was conducted in literary Chinese; Dōgen’s decision to write in Japanese (with substantial Chinese-character lexicon, but in Japanese syntax) was unusual and made the work substantially more accessible to non-scholastic readers.
• Philosophical depth. Several of the fascicles — particularly Uji (Being-Time), Genjōkōan (Actualizing the Fundamental Point), Bendōwa (A Talk on Pursuing [[daoism|the Way]]), Busshō (Buddha-Nature) — are among the most philosophically substantive Buddhist texts in any tradition. Uji in particular develops a treatment of the inseparability of time and being that has been compared (anachronistically but informatively) to Heidegger’s Being and Time.
• Stylistic intensity. Dōgen’s prose is dense, paradoxical, and substantially original — he frequently re-reads classical Chinese phrases against their conventional sense to bring out the contemplative point. To study the Buddha-way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things — one of the Genjōkōan’s most-quoted passages — is characteristic.

The death poem and the lineage

Dōgen died in Kyoto in 1253, where he had traveled seeking medical treatment. His traditional death poem:

Fifty-four years lighting up the sky. A quivering leap smashes a billion worlds. Aha! Entire body looks for nothing. Living, I plunge into Yellow Springs.

His Dharma successor Koun Ejō carried the lineage forward. The Sōtō school subsequently became — alongside Rinzai — one of the two principal Japanese Zen schools, and today is the larger of the two by monastic and lay membership.

In the modern West

The 20th-century transmission of Sōtō Zen to the West has been substantial. [[shunryu-suzuki|Shunryu Suzuki]] Roshi (1904–1971), a Japanese Sōtō priest in Dōgen’s lineage, founded the [[san-francisco-zen-center|San Francisco Zen Center]] in 1962; his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970) is the most widely read American Zen book and is in many ways an accessible articulation of Dōgen’s Sōtō posture. Kosho Uchiyama, Taizan Maezumi, and many others carried the lineage to substantial American and European communities. The Sōtō contemplative emphasis on shikantaza — sustained, unobjectified seated attention — has substantially shaped the modern Western Zen tradition.

What he gives

A philosophical-contemplative writer of unusual depth working in an unusual language register — vernacular Japanese rather than literary Chinese, eight hundred years ago, with prose that continues to reward sustained re-reading. The articulation of shikantaza as the central Sōtō practice — a contemplative method that takes the body’s stillness and the mind’s openness as themselves the actualization of awakening, not as preparation for some other state. And, through the Eihei-ji lineage and its Western inheritors, a continuing transmission of Sōtō Zen that remains one of the substantial contemplative traditions of the modern world.

See also

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• Subset of: [[zen]]
• Parallels: [[thich-nhat-hanh]] · [[shunryu-suzuki]]
• Member of: [[person]]