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Dogen
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Dogen Zenji (????; also Dogen Kigen ????, or Eihei Dogen ????, or Koso Joyo Daishi) (19 January 1200 – 22 September 1253) was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyoto, and the founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan. He was a leading religious figure of his time, as well as being an important philosopher. Dogen is most known for the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma or Shobogenzo, a collection of ninety-five fascicles concerning Buddhist practice and enlightenment.
n was born into a noble family.
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Dogen Zenji (????; also Dogen Kigen ????, or Eihei Dogen ????, or Koso Joyo Daishi) (19 January 1200 – 22 September 1253) was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyoto, and the founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan. He was a leading religious figure of his time, as well as being an important philosopher. Dogen is most known for the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma or Shobogenzo, a collection of ninety-five fascicles concerning Buddhist practice and enlightenment.
Early life
Dogen was born into a noble family. His father may have been Koga Michichika, a high-ranking minister in the imperial court, while his mother was likely the daughter of Fujiwara Motofusa, who had once been a regent in the court. Dogen's father died when Dogen was three years old, and his mother when he was eight, which strongly impressed Dogen with the Buddhist notion of impermanence .
Early training
At the age of thirteen, affected by this early glimpse of impermanence and faced with the possibility of a career as part of the aristocratic Fujiwara family, Dogen decided to become a monk. Initially, he went to Mount Hiei, the headquarters of the Tendai school of Buddhism. While there, he studied the Buddhist sutras, and became possessed by a single question:
This question was, in large part, prompted by the Tendai concept of "original enlightenment" (?? hongaku), which states that all human beings are enlightened by nature and that, consequently, any notion of achieving enlightenment through practice is fundamentally flawed.
As he found no answer to his question at Mount Hiei, Dogen left to seek an answer from other Buddhist masters. Dogen went to visit Koin, the Tendai abbot of Onjoji Temple, asking him this same question. Koin said that, in order to find an answer, he might want to consider studying Chán in China. Koin sent Dogen to Myoan Eisai in Kyoto, a leading Tendai monk who had been to China and brought back the practice of Rinzai Zen in 1191. In 1214, Dogen went to study with Eisai at Kennin-ji Temple, and—upon Eisai's death the following year—he continued his study under Eisai's successor, Myozen. In 1221, Myozen conferred Dharma transmission upon Dogen, acknowledging that he had learned the teachings. Two years later, Dogen decided to make the dangerous passage across the East China Sea to China to try to find an answer. His teacher Myozen accompanied him on the trip.
Travel to China
In China, Dogen first went to the leading Chan monasteries in Zhèjiang province. At the time, most Chan teachers based their training around the use of gong-àns (Japanese: koan). Though Dogen assiduously studied the koans, he became disenchanted with the heavy emphasis laid upon them, and wondered why the sutras were not studied more. At one point, owing to this disenchantment, Dogen even refused Dharma transmission from a teacher. Then, in 1225, he decided to visit a master named Rújìng (??; J. Nyojo), the thirteenth patriarch of the Cáodòng (J. Soto) lineage of Zen Buddhism, at Mount Tiantóng (??? Tiantóngshan; J. Tendozan) in Níngbo. Rujing was reputed to have a style of Chan that was different from the other masters whom Dogen had thus far encountered.
Under Rujing, Dogen realized liberation of body and mind upon hearing the master say, "Cast off body and mind" (???? shen xin tuo luò). This phrase would continue to have great importance to Dogen throughout his life, and can be found scattered throughout his writings, as—for example—in a famous section of his "Genjokoan":
Shortly after Dogen had arrived at Mount Tiantong, Myozen had passed away. In 1227, Dogen received Dharma transmission and inka from Rujing, and remarked on how he had finally settled his "life's quest of the great matter".
Return to Japan
Dogen returned to Japan in 1227 or 1228, going back to stay at Kennin-ji, where he had once trained under Eisai. Among his first actions upon returning was to write down the (?????; "Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen"), a short text emphasizing the importance of and giving instructions for zazen, or sitting meditation. However, tension soon arose as the Tendai community began taking steps to suppress both Zen and Jodo Shinshu, the new forms of Buddhism in Japan. In the face of this tension, Dogen left the Tendai dominion of Kyoto in 1230, settling instead in an abandoned temple in what is today the city of Uji, south of Kyoto. In 1233, Dogen founded the Kannon-dori-in in Uji as a small center of practice; he later expanded this temple into the Kosho-horinji Temple. In 1243, Hatano Yoshishige offered to relocate Dogen's community to Echizen province, far to the north of Kyoto. Dogen accepted due to the ongoing tension with the Tendai community, and his followers built a comprehensive center of practice there, calling it Daibutsu Temple. While the construction work was going on, Dogen would live and teach at Yoshimine-dera Temple (Kippoji, ???), which is located close to Daibutsuji. In 1246, Dogen renamed Daibutsuji, calling it Eihei-ji. This temple remains one of the two head temples of Soto Zen in Japan today, the other being Soji-ji.
Dogen spent the remainder of his life teaching and writing at Eiheiji. In 1247, the newly installed shogun's regent, Hojo Tokiyori, invited Dogen to come to Kamakura to teach him. Dogen made the rather long journey east to provide the shogun with lay ordination, and then returned to Eiheiji in 1248. In the autumn of 1252, Dogen fell ill, and soon showed no signs of recovering. He presented his robes to his main apprentice, Koun Ejo, making him the abbot of Eiheiji. Then, at Hatano Yoshishige's invitation, Dogen left for Kyoto in search of a remedy for his illness. In 1253, soon after arriving in Kyoto, Dogen died. Shortly before his death, he had written a death poem:
- Fifty-four years lighting up the sky.
- A quivering leap smashes a billion worlds.
- Hah!
- Entire body looks for nothing.
- Living, I plunge into Yellow Springs.
Dogen's Zen
At the heart of the variety of Zen that Dogen taught are a number of key concepts, which are emphasized repeatedly in his writings. All of these concepts, however, are closely interrelated to one another insofar as they are all directly connected to zazen, or sitting meditation, which Dogen considered to be identical to Zen, as is pointed out clearly in the first sentence of the 1243 instruction manual "Zazen-gi" (???; "Principles of Zazen"): "Studying Zen ... is zazen". In referring to zazen, Dogen is most often referring specifically to shikantaza, roughly translatable as "nothing but precisely sitting", which is a kind of sitting meditation in which the meditator sits "in a state of brightly alert attention that is free of thoughts, directed to no object, and attached to no particular content".
Oneness of practice-enlightenment
The primary concept underlying Dogen's Zen practice is "oneness of practice-enlightenment" (???? shusho-itto / shusho-ichinyo). In fact, this concept is considered so fundamental to Dogen's variety of Zen—and, consequently, to the Soto school as a whole—that it formed the basis for the work Shusho-gi, which was compiled in 1890 by Takiya Takushu of Eihei-ji and Azegami Baisen of Soji-ji as an introductory and prescriptive abstract of Dogen's massive work, the Shobogenzo ("Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma").
For Dogen, the practice of zazen and the experience of enlightenment were one and the same. This point was succinctly stressed by Dogen in the Fukan Zazengi, the first text that he composed upon his return to Japan from China: "To practice the Way singleheartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life". Earlier in the same text, the basis of this identity is explained in more detail:
The "oneness of practice-enlightenment" was also a point stressed in the Bendowa (??? "A Talk on the Endeavor of the Path") of 1231:
Writings
Dogen's masterpiece is the aforementioned Shobogenzo, talks and writings—collected together in ninety-five fascicles—on topics ranging from monastic practice to the philosophy of language, being, and time. In the work, as in his own life, Dogen emphasized the absolute primacy of shikantaza and the inseparability of practice and enlightenment.
While it was customary for Buddhist works to be written in Chinese, Dogen often wrote in Japanese, conveying the essence of his thought in a style that was at once concise, compelling, and inspiring. A master stylist, Dogen is noted not only for his prose, but also for his poetry (in Japanese waka style and various Chinese styles). Dogen's use of language is unconventional by any measure. According to Dogen scholar Steven Heine: "Dogen's poetic and philosophical works are characterized by a continual effort to express the inexpressible by perfecting imperfectable speech through the creative use of wordplay, neologism, and lyricism, as well as the recasting of traditional expressions".
Legacy
Dogen's immediate pupils were Koun Ejo, Sokai, Senne, but his most notable successor was Keizan (??; 1268–1325), founder of Sojiji Temple and author of the Record of the Transmission of Light (??? Denkoroku), which traces the succession of Zen masters from Siddhartha Gautama up to Keizan's own day. Together, Dogen and Keizan are regarded as the founders of the Soto school in Japan.
External links
- Message from Dogen
- Translations of Dogen and other works by Anzan Hoshin.
- , texts written by Dogen (annotated English translations)
- incomplete, an ongoing project by the Soto Zen Text Project
- by Gudo Nishijima
- by John Daido Loori
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