EARLY JAPANESE BUDDHISM TO EIHEI DOGEN
KING SEONG of Baekje (r. 523–54) was a devoted patron of Buddhism who made Buddhism his state religion. However, he had something other than merit in mind when he sent the gift of a Buddha statue to the emperor Kinmei (509–71) of Wa, the land across the eastern sea.
Along with the bronze, gilded statue of the Buddha, Seong sent Chinese Buddhist sutras, banners displaying Buddhist symbols, and a request to Kinmei to send troops. In the mid-sixth century Baekje was at war with its Korean Peninsula Three Kingdoms neighbors, first Goguryeo and then Silla, over disputed territory along the Han River.
The offering of Seong’s gifts to Kinmei’s court is regarded as the official introduction of Buddhism to Japan. According to Japanese records, Kinmei was enchanted with the gifts and accepted them with great solemnity. Even so, the request for troops appears to have gone unanswered. The date most often given for the arrival in Japan of Seong’s emissary is 552; Seong would be killed in battle in 554.
Affairs in the land of Wa were pulled this way and that by powerful clans. The Soga clan, known to have many contacts on the continent, supported the new religion. Others, notably the more insular Mononobe clan, feared their indigenous gods would be angered by veneration of a foreigner. Unsure of what to do, Kinmei asked the Soga to take the statue and worship it themselves, to see what happened. Unfortunately, a plague broke out, and Kinmei had the statue tossed into a canal.
Of course, this was not the end of Buddhism in Japan. The Soga clan still had a lot of pull in the court and continued to promote Buddhism. In 584 Soga aristocrats sponsored the first monastic ordinations in Japan, which happened to be of three nuns. The novice ordinations were conducted by a Korean monk and nun in compliance with the Vinaya. It’s recorded that the first Japanese monastic was an eleven-year-old girl whose dharma name was Zenshin. 1
In 587, the Mononobe incited a mob to riot and destroy the nuns’ temple; the nuns were publicly defrocked and beaten. Later that same year the Soga attacked the Mononobe and crushed them in battle. The three nuns traveled to Korea where they received full ordination. Zenshin and her dharma sisters returned to Japan in 590 to teach and ordain more nuns.
The ultimate triumph of the Soga came two years later, when a granddaughter of Soga no Iname, the head of the Soga clan, was enthroned as the empress Suiko (r. 592–628).
The rivalry between Buddhism and indigenous beliefs—loosely, what today is called Shinto—would be resolved in what much later came to be called the shinbutsu shugo, or “unity of spirits and buddhas.” Buddhism was adapted into indigenous beliefs, and indigenous beliefs—such as belief in spirits called kami —came to be accommodated by Buddhism. By the seventh century it wasn’t at all unusual to find Buddhist and Shinto practices mingled in the same temples.
As for the discarded statue, it is said to be housed at Zenko-ji, a temple in Nagano, although no one is allowed to see it. Make of that what you will.
Prince Shotoku
Prince Shotoku (572–622) is one of the most revered persons in Japanese history. He is remembered as a remarkable reformer and credited with establishing the template upon which Japan would develop as a nation. He even coined the motto “Land of the Rising Sun” for Japan, in a letter to the Sui emperor of China. He is also considered to be the true founder of Japanese Buddhism. Unfortunately, nearly everything we know about him is from histories written a century or more after his death, and we can’t know how accurate those are.
Shotoku was a nephew of Empress Suiko and a son of the emperor Yomei (r. 585–87), one of Suiko’s predecessors. Very early in her reign, the empress named Shotoku her regent, in charge of most of the administration of her government. The reign of the empress Suiko and her regent, Prince Shotoku, is remembered as one of peace and cultural advancement.
Suiko and Shotoku opened Japan to a flood of Chinese influences, Buddhism prominent among them. Shotoku is remembered as a promoter of Buddhism. He wrote a constitution that described the qualities needed in officials and subjects for harmonious government, and among those were reverence for the three treasures—the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Commentaries on three sutras are attributed to him—the Lotus Sutra, the Vimalakirti Sutra, and a tathagatagarbha sutra called the Shrimaladevi Simhanada Sutra, or the Lion’s Roar of Queen Shrimala.
Suiko and Shotoku also introduced Confucianism, to be used as guiding principles for government. These and other Chinese influences soon began to override much of the older culture of Wa, a development visible in the Chinese-inspired architecture of the many new Buddhist temples built by the ruling clans, especially the Soga.
This is not to say the establishment of Buddhism went smoothly. Religion in Japan was mostly about appealing to gods and spirits for good fortune and to control supernatural forces. Buddhism was quite a leap, and in this early period much of it was misunderstood. Although Prince Shotoku may have had a more sophisticated understanding, it appears that at first—and for a long time—the Japanese regarded the Buddha as a protector deity.
Nara Buddhism
In 710 the capital was moved to Nara. By then the Japanese court was besotted with the culture of Tang dynasty China, and the new capital was intended to be a copy of the imperial city of Chang’an. In that, the project fell a bit short. Even so, the building of Nara is credited with promoting a unified Japan and a stronger central government.
One of the jewels of the new capital was the Buddhist temple Todai-ji. The original temple complex covered sixteen city blocks. The current buddha hall at Todai-ji is considered the largest wooden building in the world today, yet the original is said to have been a third bigger.
Inside the buddha hall was a huge daibutsu, “great buddha,” estimated to have weighed hundreds of tons. The Nara Daibutsu was a seated Vairocana Buddha commissioned by the emperor Shomu (r. 724–49) to appease the gods after a smallpox epidemic. Shomu encouraged his people to take part in its construction, even if they could offer no more than a twig or a handful of dirt, and in this way he made the statue a national project.
Casting the fifteen-meter-tall statue in bronze was a huge technical challenge in eighth-century Japan, and several attempts failed. But eventually the figure was completed and covered in gold. Dignitaries and monastics came from India and China to attend the dedication ceremony in 752. Japanese Buddhism had arrived.
Shomu’s partner in the Nara project was his consort, the empress Komyo (701–60). The empress was personally involved in the work of Buddhist nuns to care for orphans and those who were sick and impoverished. After Shomu died, Komyo received nun’s ordination at Todai-ji, the temple she and Shomu had built together.
By the eighth century six schools of Buddhism had been introduced to Japan, including Huayan, which in Japan came to be called Kegon. There was also Hosso, based on a Chinese Yogacara school called Faxian, and Risshu (or Ritsu), which was the Vinaya school that specialized in preparing monks for ordination in the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya. These and the three other schools were headquartered in Todai-ji and tend to be lumped together as “Nara Buddhism.”
The Nara period ended in 794, when the capital was moved again. The emperor Kanmu (r. 781–806) appears to have thought the Nara Buddhist establishment was too meddlesome, and he wanted to create some distance. For his new capital he chose a village called Udo, which he renamed Heian-kyo, “capital of tranquility and peace.” Today the city is called Kyoto, and it would remain the official—if not always actual—capital of Japan until 1869.
The Heian Period
The Heian period of Japanese history, named after Heian-kyo, lasted until either 1185 or 1192, a discrepancy that will be explained in just a bit. Although Zen monastics and teachings reached Japan during this period, the standard date for the introduction of Zen to Japan is 1191, which was either the very end of the Heian period or the beginning of the Kamakura period, depending on whom you ask.
During the Heian period many developments in Japanese Buddhism and society would impact Zen when it arrived. So first let’s look at those.
Tendai and Enryaku-ji
In 788, the story goes, a young Nara monk named Saicho (767–822) retired to a secluded spot on Mount Hiei after a bitter quarrel with his fellow monks. He was dissatisfied with the Nara schools and needed some time alone, to reflect and cool off. Sometime after the cooling off, the bright and industrious Saicho came to the notice of the emperor Kanmu (r. 781–806), who eventually sponsored the monk on a study trip to China by adding him to a diplomatic delegation to the Tang court.
Saicho found what he was looking for in the Guoqing Temple on Mount Tiantai, and he returned to Japan in 805 to establish the Japanese Tiantai school, called Tendai. He built his temple on Mount Hiei, on the spot where he had once sought seclusion. By happy coincidence, Mount Hiei is just northeast of Kyoto. It was believed that demons always attacked from the northeast, so the temple was perfectly positioned to protect the imperial capital.
It’s thought that Kanmu hoped to gain greater control over monks and ecclesiastical affairs by being a sponsor and patron of Buddhism rather than a supplicant. For his part, Saicho believed that religion should be a supportive auxiliary to political authority. From this beginning, Tendai gained the patronage of the court and great success.
The new temple, Enryaku-ji, for a time was the most important center of Buddhism in Japan. At its peak the complex housed and trained twenty thousand monks in its three thousand buildings. Its success was partly rooted in the syncretic nature of Tendai, which from its beginnings in China sought to fuse the many teachings of the many Buddhist schools into a coherent whole. The curriculum of Enryaku-ji included the teachings of all known schools, and it became something like Japan’s principal Buddhist university as much as a monastery.
A Break with the Vinaya
Saicho requested of the emperor that he be allowed to ordain his monks at Enryaku-ji using the precepts given in the Mahayana Brahmajala Sutra (Brahma Net Sutra) rather than the monastic rules of the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya. The Mahayana Brahmajala Sutra possibly was composed in China in the early fifth century and should not be confused with the Brahmajala Sutta of the Pali canon.
After Saicho’s death, permission was granted to undertake ordinations in this new way. This saved the monastics from having to spend time in the Ritsu Temple in Nara to be ordained, and it allowed Tendai considerable independence from the old Nara Buddhist establishment.
This development represented a significant break with the larger monastic sangha in the rest of Asia, which to this day only recognizes ordinations in one of the three extant versions of the Vinaya. The Mahayana Brahmajala Sutra lists only ten major and forty-eight minor precepts, whereas there are hundreds of monastic rules given in the Vinaya.
For those of you who are not Mahayana Buddhists, and because the issue of precepts and ordinations will continue to come up in this chapter, here for reference is a greatly condensed explanation of these precepts. Of the ten great precepts, the first five are based on the panca-shila of the Pali canon. 2 Since the time of early Buddhism, Buddhist laypeople as well as monastics have vowed to keep these.
1. Do not kill.
2. Do not take what is not given.
3. Do not misuse sexuality. (For laypeople, traditionally this has been interpreted as not violating local sexual mores, whatever they are; monastics are celibate.)
4. Be honest; do not lie or deceive.
5. Be aware; do not use intoxicants or any substance that clouds the mind. (The Mahayana Brahmajala version says not to sell intoxicants but doesn’t specifically say not to use them. However, one of the forty-eight minor precepts forbids drinking alcohol.)
The next five precepts possibly first appeared in the Mahayana Brahmajala:
6. Do not gossip about the faults and misdeeds of others in the sangha.
7. Do not praise yourself and speak ill of others.
8. Practice generosity; do not be stingy.
9. Practice forbearance; do not harbor anger.
10. Do not speak ill of the Buddha, the dharma, or the sangha.
Of the forty-eight minor precepts, along with the one that forbids drinking, there are prohibitions on human trafficking, eating meat, failing to visit the sick, commiting arson, fomenting war, and storing and selling weapons. Without the additional rules of the Vinaya, however, many issues—including monastic celibacy—were left uncovered.
Over time, the government stepped in to maintain monastic standards and passed laws that required monastics to be properly robed, shorn, and celibate. Violation of the celibacy law could result in beheading, although history gives us many examples of monastics getting away with violating it.
Whether this change signified a liberation from musty old procedures or a slacking of essential discipline is a matter of opinion, but in time it would profoundly affect the development of Zen and Japanese Buddhism generally. Because of the dominance of Tendai, and because so many new Buddhist schools would be founded by monks who had been ordained at Enryaku-ji, such simplified ordinations became widespread in Japan.
Kukai and Shingon
In 804, a monk named Kukai (774–835) got himself attached to the same diplomatic delegation to Tang China that included Saicho, although they were on different ships. Exactly how he did this isn’t certain, since Kukai was not known to have had any pull with the imperial court at the time.
In Chang’an, Kukai was initiated into the secret tantric practices and rituals of esoteric Buddhism by a revered master named Huiguo (746–805). Kukai advanced to the final initiation in only a few months and returned to Japan in 806 as the Eighth Patriarch of the Chinese esoteric school. He established a Japanese esoteric school called Shingon.
Although Kukai initially met with resistance from the court, eventually he gained the favor of the emperor Saga (r. 809–23). It’s said Kukai came to Saga’s attention because of his skills as a calligrapher. Through the emperor’s patronage Kukai was able to establish a temple complex on Mount Koya, or Koyasan, which is about fifty miles south of Kyoto. The emperor Junna (r. 823–33) further honored Kukai by giving him a temple in Kyoto, called To-ji. And the emperor Ninmyo (r. 833–50) allowed Kukai to build a Shingon chapel in the Imperial Palace.
Kukai persuaded the court that esoteric Buddhism could replace the ruling principles of Confucianism. Through correct rituals and mandalas, the court could tap into the power of Vairocana Buddha, the cosmic buddha from whom all reality emanates, Kukai said. Esoteric practices would continue to be part of imperial court life for some time, and Shingon would become a significant part of the Buddhist establishment in the centuries that followed.
Nyonin Kinsei: No Women Allowed
What we know of the very early culture of the people of Japan suggests that it was much less patriarchal than it came to be later. There are many ancient tales of women leaders and warriors, and as we’ve seen, the first Buddhist ordinations in Japan were given to women. Nevertheless, nyonin kinsei —“no admittance to women”—came to be a widespread sentiment in Heian-period Buddhism.
Nuns were barred from participating in public ceremonies and were not allowed to enter most areas of men’s monasteries, even just to take part in ceremonies. Women were considered “unclean” and incapable of realizing enlightenment. It’s not clear where nyonin kinsei originated—one suspects the influence of Confucianism—but it spread to Shinto and to other parts of Japanese culture.
Nevertheless, as we’ll see, the nuns’ orders survived through a combination of class privilege—many nuns’ temples were founded by high-ranking women—and great determination.
The Rise of the Military Class
The emperor Saga, said to have had forty-nine children by various mothers, found himself with a surplus of sons. It appears the Japanese did not develop the European concept of “illegitimate” children. An emperor might have several sons, half brothers to each other, in competition for his title, which was a situation not conducive to political stability. Providing all these sons with an inheritance also was a financial burden on the court. Daughters could be married off, but what does one do with surplus sons? Subsequent emperors had a similar problem.
The solution was to downgrade the sons of lesser mothers to the status of commoner and banish them from the court. Saga gave these children the surname Minamoto, meaning “origin.” His successor emperors likewise purged the court of surplus sons and nephews, giving them the surname Taira.
In this manner many ex-aristocrats were banished to the provinces, where they were hungry to claw their way back to importance. And the road to reenoblement was paved with military glory. They waged war against the Emishi people of northeastern Japan, who lived outside of imperial reach and whose territory was desired for the growing number of hereditary estates.
The Emishi were no pushovers. They fought on horseback, with curved swords designed for slashing. The Japanese soon adopted the curved sword style themselves, along with other elements of Emishi martial culture. As time passed, they also developed new loyalties that were less centered on Kyoto and the imperial court. By the end of the ninth century, warriors of the Minamoto and Taira clans had adopted a new name for themselves—samurai, “those who serve.”
“Warrior Monks”: The Sohei
The sohei, “monk militias” or “warrior monks,” were small armies in the service of large, powerful monasteries like Enryaku-ji.
There was plenty of precedent, going back at least to the ancient Chinese temple of Shaolin, for Buddhist monks to fight to defend their temples or country. But Japan took the concept of fighting monks to another level. Note that the term sohei wasn’t used until the eighteenth century; earlier, they were called shuto, “members of the congregation,” but that’s not terribly descriptive.
The original sohei probably were mercenaries hired to protect temples. Soon enough they began to live as monks when they weren’t fighting. They shaved their heads, wore monk robes, and abided by temple rules and schedules. Historians disagree about whether they received any sort of monastic ordinations. Since their jobs required that they openly and flagrantly violate the Mahayana Brahmajala precepts, one suspects they were not asked to take vows to keep them. More than one historian has described them as nothing but hired thugs.
The first sohei were in the service of Enryaku-ji, and soon Todai-ji and another temple in Nara, Kofuku-ji, employed them also.
There was another Tendai temple at the foot of Mount Hiei, officially named Onjo-ji but more commonly called Miidera. Miidera also employed sohei. The two temples of Mount Hiei developed a rivalry, and brawls between sohei escalated into fights to the death and the torching of temple buildings. The fights were nearly always about politics; unpopular appointments to temple offices were a common point of contention.
For example, in 1039, after a long period of truce, an abbot of Miidera was reassigned to Enryaku-ji. A mob of sohei surrounded the residence of the official who had made the appointment and kicked down his gate; samurai were summoned to protect him. In the end the appointment was changed.
A prolonged dispute over ordinations touched off a number of raids by Enryaku-ji sohei on Miidera. At some point the Miidera monks decided they wanted to be ordained in Nara at Todai-ji instead of at Enryaku-ji. When they pointed out that Saicho, the founder of Enryaku-ji, had been ordained in Nara, the enraged Enryaku-ji sohei descended on Miidera and burned it to the ground. For the record, it was rebuilt.
Twilight of the Heian Period
During much of the Heian period, the Fujiwara clan was the true power behind the Chrysanthemum Throne. Members of the clan served as regents to a succession of emperors, who were little more than figureheads. Eventually some imperial maneuvering broke the Fujiwara’s grip on power, but the central government was weaker as a result. And the Fujiwara were determined to make a comeback.
Meanwhile, out in the provinces, the wealth and power of the Minamoto and Taira clans grew. The lands they had won from the Emishi became a patchwork of Taira and Minamoto fiefdoms.
Matters came to a head in the twelfth century, a time marked by an abundance of legendary intrigues that would require several more books to explain properly. By 1156 the intrigues had broken out into open violence among Minamoto and Taira samurai and Fujiwara courtiers over the succession to the throne—or, more correctly, over who got to control the throne, as emperors themselves were becoming irrelevant. The 1156 episode ran its course in a few weeks with the Taira clan coming out on top. But nothing was really settled.
The Genpei War
The Genpei War (1180–85) was a civil war between samurai armies and a genuinely monumental event in Japanese history. The war is an endless source of stories about heroism, loyalty, betrayal, and romance that have been the subject not just of histories but of epic poems, novels, countless Noh plays, and an early film by Akira Kurosawa (Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi [The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail ], 1945). The martial arts of kendo (“way of the sword”) and kyudo (“way of the bow”) were significantly developed during the Genpei War. The art of samurai sword making was fully developed by then, and warriors rode into battle wearing the elaborate lacquered armor and antlered helmets many of us have gawked at in museums.
As fascinating to history buffs as these events may be, they unfolded before Zen reached Japan. The only part of the Genpei War that concerns us is that the Buddhist establishment sided with the Minamoto against the Taira, and sohei warriors made up a large part of the Minamoto forces. In retaliation, Taira generals ordered the destruction of temples, including Todai-ji in Nara. As the wooden buddha hall of Todai-ji burned, the massive, gilded Nara Daibutsu melted into a shapeless mass.
The Nara Daibutsu would be recast—more than once—but it is no longer gilded. The guidebooks all say “very little” of the original remains.
But the rebellion was not over. Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147–99) rallied Minamoto supporters to defeat the Taira. The end result of the war was that Minamoto no Yoritomo became the de facto leader of Japan. Although a new emperor was enthroned in Kyoto, Yoritomo ruled the nation from his estate in Kamakura, about thirty miles south of present-day Tokyo.
In effect, then, the Heian period ended and the Kamakura period began in 1185. However, in 1192 the figurehead emperor Go-Toba gave Yoritomo the title seii taishogun, which means “great general who subdues eastern barbarians.” Sometimes it’s said that the Kamakura period truly began in 1192, when Minamoto no Yoritomo became the first shogun of Japan.
The Degenerate Age
In the thirteenth century the Japanese Buddhist establishment faced major challenges that shook it to the core. The introduction of Zen was one of those challenges, but not the only one.
There is a persistent belief in Asian Buddhism that there will be a degenerate age in which people will lack the capacity to practice and realize enlightenment. The time frame for this degenerate age varies, but many Japanese believed it had begun in 1052.
The monk Honen (1133–1212) and his student Shinran Shonin (1173–1262) were Tendai monks who saw Pure Land practice as the best antidote to the degenerate age. Honen’s practice called for many repetitions of chanting Amitabha’s name. The popularity of this new practice got Honen into trouble with the Heian Buddhist establishment, and Honen and several of his disciples were forced into exile from Kyoto in 1207. (It was said two of Honen’s monks had spent the night in the ladies’ quarters of the emperor’s palace; one suspects they were framed.) Honen was forgiven, and a ban on Pure Land practices was lifted before his death in 1212. He is considered the founder of the Japanese school called Jodo, or Jodoshu.
Shinran also was forced into exile, during which time he left the monastic sangha and married. By the time he was pardoned in 1211, he had a wife and children. Going back to a monk’s life was not an option, so he promoted a Pure Land practice that laypeople could follow. Instead of hours of recitations, just one was enough if said with sincerity and faith, he decided. Shinran began to travel and teach, often to small groups gathered in people’s houses. What grew out of this was Jodo Shinshu, or Shin for short, a widely popular tradition led by noncelibate priests rather than by celibate monks.
A third Tendai monk who called for reform in response to the degenerate age was Nichiren (1222–82). Instead of chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha, Nichiren believed that chanting to evoke the mystical powers of the Lotus Sutra would enable one to realize enlightenment in this life. Nichiren had a more progressive view of gender equality than most Japanese of his day, and he encouraged the practice of women.
Nichiren also had an alarming habit of issuing blistering condemnations of other schools of Buddhism and blaming them for a series of natural disasters, which caused the Kamakura shogunate to send him into exile twice. In spite of his being perpetually at odds with the government and the Buddhist establishment, Nichiren’s teachings spread and are the basis of a number of branches of Japanese Buddhism today.
The Bodhidharma School
A monk named Dainichibo Nonin (d. ca. 1196) founded the Darumashu, or “Bodhidharma school,” in the twelfth century and claimed it to be part of the Chan tradition that was dominating Song China at the time. Nonin was not a proper lineage holder, however, because he had never studied with a Zen teacher. Instead he sent two of his disciples to China with letters and gifts, and they were able to procure a certificate and a robe giving Nonin authority to teach.
The Bodhidharma school was influential for a time, but it was a Zen school in name only. Nonin had no experience with Zen meditation and seems not to have thought it important. He appears to have accepted a prevailing Tendai belief that inherent enlightenment required no actualization. According to his critics, he also saw no need for the precepts or the Zen monastic codes of discipline that were standard in China.
The school did not survive long after Nonin’s death, but a significant number of Darumashu adherents gravitated to authentic lineage holders when they began to arrive in Japan, which would impact early Japanese Zen history.
Zen Comes to Japan
The traditional story of Zen in Japan begins with Myoan Eisai (1141–1215), a Japanese monk who brought the Linji school to Japan in 1191. Eisai is also credited with introducing green matcha tea to Japan.
Eisai originally was a Tendai monk at Miidera. But by that time—the 1160s or so—Tendai suffered from a laxness of discipline and the corruption that comes with power. Further, the curriculum at Miidera and Enryaku-ji consisted mostly of either doctrinal or esoteric studies.
In 1168 Eisai made a pilgrimage to Mount Tiantai in Song dynasty China, probably hoping to explore the Chinese roots of Tendai. Instead, he found Zen and was intrigued. But he returned to Japan after only six months and continued to serve the Tendai school.
Eighteen years passed before Eisai returned to China, shortly after the conclusion of the Genpei War. He studied intensively with Linji teachers and received transmission from Xuan Huaichang (ca. 1125–95).
It appears Eisai had no plans to establish a new school when he returned to Japan in 1191. More likely, he simply wanted to teach Zen within the context of Tendai. Although the Tendai establishment tried to suppress his efforts, Eisai quickly attracted students from among the aristocracy and eventually from the shogunate in Kamakura. In 1202 he was named abbot of Kennin-ji, a temple in Kyoto, and he taught Zen there when he wasn’t busy performing Tendai-style esoteric rituals at court. When he died in 1215, his student Ryonen Myozen (1184–1225) took over as head of Kennin-ji.
Eihei Dogen and Soto Zen
The traditional story of Zen in Japan may have begun with Eisai, but for many of us who practice Zen today, Japanese Zen itself began with Dogen. This is not only because Dogen’s was the first Zen lineage established in Japan that survives to this day but also because of the significant impact he made and continues to make on the understanding and practice of the religion.
Dogen is the founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen, which today is the largest school of Zen in Japan. I believe it may be the largest school of Zen in the West as well, but authoritative numbers are hard to find. The name Soto is a Japanese approximation of the Chinese Caodong, constructed from Sozan and Tozan, which are the Japanese names for Caoshan Benji and Dongshan Liangjie. 3
Biographers say that Eihei Dogen (1200–1253, sometimes called Dogen Kigen) was born to aristocratic parents in Kyoto. It’s widely proposed that Dogen’s father was Minamoto no Michichika, a high official of the court. His mother, Ishi, has been identified as a daughter of Fujiwara no Motofusa, another high official. His parents probably were not married. But no two sources agree on all of this. Whoever they were, it’s roundly accepted that Dogen’s father died when Dogen was two years old, and his mother died when he was seven. Dogen would later say that the death of his mother taught him the truth of impermanence and set him on the Buddhist path.
According to some accounts, the orphaned Dogen was adopted by his mother’s brother, Fujiwara no Moroie, who saw to it that the boy received a first-rate education. It’s said the childless Moroie groomed Dogen to succeed him as daimyo (clan head) of the Fujiwara clan. But Dogen was determined to be a monk. In 1212 he visited another of his mother’s brothers, Ryokan, a senior monk of Miidera, and asked for his help. Dogen was ordained at Enryaku-ji the following year, when he was thirteen years old.
Figure 10. Dogen watching the moon. Portrait, ca. 1250, at Hokyo-ji, Fukui Prefecture, Japan.
The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.
Dogen’s Question
Young Dogen immersed himself in a systemic study of the scriptures in Enryaku-ji’s substantial library. In time, a nagging question arose in his mind. His studies told him that all beings are endowed with buddha-nature. If that is the case, why did the buddhas of the past need to work so hard to seek enlightenment?
You might recognize that this is the central question explored and answered in Awakening of Faith —enlightenment is inherent, but for it to manifest and be experienced it must be actualized through practice and realization. Yet no one at Enryaku-ji could answer Dogen’s question to his satisfaction. The abbot of Miidera also could not provide an answer, although—according to legend—he suggested Dogen seek out old Eisai at Kennin-ji and ask him.
The question was unanswerable because, during the late Heian period, the Tendai school had arrived at an interpretation of inherent enlightenment, or hongaku, that left out the actualization part. Very simply, enlightenment was no longer viewed as means to liberation from samsaric existence. In its place was a mere intellectual affirmation that all beings are inherently enlightened. 4 One scholar explains this view this way:
Not only human beings, but even ants and crickets, mountains and rivers, grasses and trees, are all innately Buddhas. Indeed, the whole phenomenal world is the primordially enlightened Tathāgata. Seen in their true light, all forms of daily conduct, even one’s delusive thoughts, are, without transformation, the expressions of original enlightenment. 5
Yet many of the sutras and commentaries Dogen must have read describe enlightenment as the fruit of a great struggle. Clearly, something was off.
It’s not certain exactly when Dogen first went to Kennin-ji. Some sources have him meeting Eisai, who died in 1215. Other sources say he didn’t arrive until about 1217. I suspect the latter date is more likely. And from 1217 to 1223, Dogen studied Zen with Myozen at Kennin-ji, after which the two of them left together for China.
Dogen in China
Dogen and Myozen traveled to China with two other monks. This trip has been a matter of controversy in academia because of inconsistencies in Dogen’s writings over the years about what he did there. But sometimes there are legitimate, or at least understandably human, reasons for not telling the same story the same way every time, and Dogen scholars appear to have mostly agreed that the trip to China was a real event. 6
The ship crossed the South China Sea and docked at Ningbo. Myozen and the other monks left the ship and were admitted to the great Tiantong Monastery, where Hongzhi Zhengjue had once taught. But Dogen remained on the ship for a time, possibly with a case of dysentery.
Dogen was disadvantaged by his lack of ordination in the Vinaya. Myozen and the other monks on the journey had, apparently, received a traditional ordination in Nara. But Dogen had only received the watered-down ordination given at Enryaku-ji, which was not recognized in China. Throughout his trip, Dogen found himself subordinate to the youngest novice monks, and Tiantong refused to admit Dogen for several months. At one point he filed a challenge to the official ranking system; it was denied.
The twenty-three-year-old Dogen must have been warned about the ordination issue before he left Japan. Perhaps the son of Kyoto aristocrats hadn’t heeded the warnings because he had taken privilege and the deference of others for granted. Or perhaps there simply wasn’t time to master the Vinaya before the ship left for China. Now he found himself in the lowest rank of monks, with doors closed in his face. The experience must have been educational.
Dogen and the Cook
While Dogen was still living on the docked ship—it seems he had nowhere else to go—an elderly monk from Ayuwang Monastery, where Dahui Zonggao once taught, boarded in search of Japanese mushrooms. Dogen offered him some tea. The old man talked about his life as a monk and his position as cook at Ayuwang. He had walked thirty-four or thirty-five li (about ten miles), he said, hoping to find Japanese mushrooms—a delicacy—to put into a noodle soup.
Dogen suggested the older monk take a break. Have dinner here, he said, so we can talk some more. You can return to the temple in the morning.
“Oh, no,” the monk said. “If I don’t oversee preparations for tomorrow’s meal, it will not turn out well.”
“Aren’t there others at your temple who could do the job?” asked Dogen.
“This is my responsibility,” the monk said. “It is this old man’s pursuit of the way. How could I hand it over to others?”
At this point in the conversation, Dogen didn’t understand how cooking could be anyone’s pursuit of the way. Cooking was mere labor, he thought.
But the old cook laughed at this idea. “Dear foreigner, you don’t understand the way, and you don’t know about written words.”
Dogen was taken aback. “What are written words? What is the practice of the way?” he asked. And the cook said, “Look into those questions deeply; then you’ll be someone who understands.” Then the monk, promising they could talk again some other time, took his leave. We do not know if he ever found the Japanese mushrooms.
Seven months after his arrival in China, Dogen finally was admitted to Tiantong. One day the old monk from Ayuwang came to visit. Dogen asked again about words and practice.
“If you want to understand words you must look into what words are. If you want to practice, you must understand what practice is,” the monk said.
Dogen asked, “What are words?”
The monk said, “One, two, three, four, five.”
Dogen asked, “What is practice?”
“In the entire world, nothing is hidden,” the monk said.
Dogen would write about his conversations with the cook in 1237, ten years after he returned to Japan from China, in a famous essay called the “Tenzo Kyokun” (“Instructions for the Cook”). Clearly, he cherished the memory.
Why were his conversations with the cook significant? Dogen was a word guy; he had spent much of his young life studying words. It seems the wisdom of “no reliance on words and letters” had not been part of his training. After China he was still a word guy, but he had looked deeply into what words are and related to words in a different way.
Dogen left us a large body of written work that is treasured by the Soto school. His genius was to communicate in a way that liberates language from concepts to present the dharma directly. If, occasionally, the reader finds some language that seems to support a conceptual model of enlightenment, Dogen will snatch it away a few lines later.
Further, before Dogen went to China he had thought of monastic practice as meditation, study, and ritual. The monk from Ayuwang taught him that practice is life. Practice is everything we do. The way we cook. The way we tie our shoes. The way we relate to others. The way we respond to both opportunity and frustration, both of which Dogen had found in China.
In “Instructions for the Cook,” which is literally a job description for a temple cook, Dogen described cooking as a sacred activity. He advised the cook to handle pots and spoons with reverence and treat each grain of rice with as much care and attention as if it were his own eyeball. “Taking up a vegetable leaf manifests the Buddha’s sixteen-foot golden body,” he wrote. “Take up the sixteen-foot golden body and reveal it as a vegetable leaf. This is the power of functioning freely as the awakening activity which benefits all beings.” 7 While in China Dogen sometimes left Tiantong to visit renowned teachers of other temples, but he was unimpressed with them. Based on his own recollections, he appears to have gained just as much from interactions with rank-and-file monks as from teachers, with one exception.
Rujing: Drop Body and Mind
In early fall of 1224 the abbot of Tiantong, Wuji, died. Wuji had taught in the Linji tradition. He was replaced by Rujing (1162–1228), a Caodong teacher and dharma descendant of Furong Daokai. (Tiantong was a “public” monastery, meaning it was open to monks of all schools, and the abbacy was an imperial appointment.)
There is a famous story of the summer retreat of 1225, when the monks of Tiantong were assembled in meditation, still and silent, in the predawn of the monastics’ hall. The monk seated next to Dogen was asleep. Rujing noticed this. “In meditation you must drop body and mind,” Rujing bellowed. “What’s the use of sleeping?” Dogen had a profound enlightenment experience.
Many commentaries have been written about Rujing’s “drop body and mind.” I notice that academics sometimes translate the Chinese phrase as “cast off body and mind,” which seems wrong. “Cast off” presumes a subject that does the casting off. My teacher Jion Susan Postal told me that it’s important to leave person out of the phrase; it’s not “I drop body and mind” or “you drop body and mind” (never mind what Rujing is said to have said). Body and mind drop of themselves; there is no one to cast them off. To appreciate why this is so, there is no substitute for body and mind dropping.
But the story is controversial today. Many scholars doubt that the enlightenment episode in the monastics’ hall really happened. 8 There are credible arguments it was added to Dogen’s account of his time in China later. There are also credible arguments that it did happen. 9
Whatever happened, or not, in the monastics’ hall, in the spring of 1227 Rujing recognized Dogen as a dharma heir. Rujing retired shortly after Dogen’s transmission, and he died either later in 1227 or sometime in 1228. Dogen returned to Japan with the ashes of Myozen, who had died in 1225.
Dogen’s Manifesto
Dogen returned to Kennin-ji in 1227 after four years in China. That fall he wrote the first version of “Fukanzazengi,” or “general advice of the principles of zazen, Zen meditation.” A revised version of “Fukanzazengi,” composed in 1233, is often chanted in Soto Zen temples. The scholar Hee-Jin Kim calls the text “the manifesto of Dōgen’s ‘new’ Buddhism vis-à-vis the established Buddhism of Japan.” 10
“Fukanzazengi” begins, “The way is basically perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent upon practice and realization?” This was Dogen’s original question. Then he provided an answer, clearly arguing against the stagnant view of inherent enlightenment held by the Japanese Buddhist establishment at the time.
Enlightenment is inherent, Dogen continued, yet our own delusions get in the way and separate us from buddha-mind. It should be clear that we are bound to samsaric existence by our mental discriminations, our delusions, our selfishness. The historical Buddha himself sat in meditation for six years; Bodhidharma faced a wall in a cave for nine years. Why do we not practice in the same way?
You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest. 11
The “backward step” echoes a line from Hongzhi Zhengjue’s writings, which no doubt had been available to Dogen at Tiantong. “Turn around the light to shine within” is a line from Shitou Xiqian’s “Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage.” “Original face” is a huatou found in the Gateless Barrier that probably originated with Huangbo Xiyun in the ninth century. Clearly, Dogen still was a reader. And he clearly disagreed with the prevailing Tendai notion that all forms of daily conduct, even one’s delusive thoughts, are, without transformation, the expressions of original enlightenment.
The phrase “without transformation” is problematic, because Zen had long taught that the realization of enlightenment doesn’t transform beings into something they weren’t already. Nor does the nature of reality change. But that doesn’t mean actualization is insignificant. “An ancient Buddha said, ‘Mountains are mountains, waters are waters,’ ” Dogen wrote, many years after the China trip. “These words do not mean mountains are mountains; they mean mountains are mountains.” 12
So, then, what’s the difference? “To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening,” Dogen explained. 13
Yet it must be said that Dogen’s view of buddha-nature and enlightenment did not entirely line up with Awakening of Faith either. For example, that text proposed that enlightenment is actualized when it is integrated with identity. But Dogen wrote in 1233,
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 actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly. 14
This suggests enlightenment is actualized when identity drops away. And, as we’re about to see, Dogen also proposed that actualization doesn’t always depend upon our conscious awareness of it.
The Beginnings of Soto Zen
Dogen remained at Kennin-ji for three years. His teachings attracted attention, not all of it favorable. Kennin-ji was, officially, a Tendai temple, and Dogen was challenging the Tendai establishment.
In 1230, at the age of thirty, Dogen left Kennin-ji. According to some accounts he was forced out. He moved into An’yoin, an abandoned temple a few miles south of Kyoto. “For now I will live alone, moving from place to place like a cloud or duckweed, and follow the way of the ancient sages,” he wrote in an essay titled “Bendowa” (“to put our whole energy into practicing the Way” 15 ), from 1231.
“Bendowa” is the second essay he wrote after returning from China. The Zen teacher Brad Warner calls it a “Zen FAQ.” 16 It even includes an extensive question-and-answer section, mostly about meditation. “Bendowa” also can be read as a defense of Zen against Tendai criticism.
Among the themes introduced in “Bendowa” is the unity of practice and enlightenment. Dogen described practice and enlightenment as being a circle, not a line that begins and ends. Process and goal are not two. Translator, author, and calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi explains, “At the moment you begin taking a step you have arrived, and you keep arriving each moment thereafter. In this view you don’t journey toward enlightenment, but you let enlightenment unfold.” 17
To fully and mindfully engage in practice, to sit in meditation, to keep the precepts, to prepare a meal as a sacred offering and not as a chore, is to step into the circle of practice/enlightenment where enlightenment is ever unfolding. This circle is not our journey alone; the unity of practice/enlightenment is the journey of all buddhas and practitioners—past, present, and future. When we join, our practice supports and is supported by the practice of all throughout space and time. The circle is unbroken, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it.
One suspects some of these practice/enlightenment teachings were aimed at the several former Bodhidharma school students who flocked to Dogen. Some of them remained stuck in the old heresy that because I am already enlightened, everything I do is an expression of enlightenment. Dogen is explaining that even without conscious realization, there is a difference between a life of practice and a life of stumbling around in ignorance, being pulled this way and that by desire and aversion.
Shikantaza
Dogen’s meditation practice is called shikantaza, which is often translated “just sitting.” I have read, however, that shikan also means “pure” and ta indicates a strong moving activity, such as a strike. Za is “sitting.” Taigen Dan Leighten writes that “just sitting” should be understood as a verb rather than a noun; it is “the dynamic activity of being fully present.” 18
In “Bendowa,” Dogen wrote that shikantaza was the same meditation practiced by the historical Buddha. In this, I am told, Dogen was mistaken. Nevertheless, I believe the meditation tradition that evolved from Hongren to Hongzhi to Dogen has deeply ancient roots. It’s also the case that there are aspects of shikantaza that are widely misunderstood.
Soto students are often warned not to have any goal in mind while they sit, including the goal of gaining enlightenment. As a Soto student of many years, I can attest that “no goal” doesn’t mean there is no enlightenment to be realized. Rather, sitting with a goal-object creates a separation that becomes a barrier to realization. Put another way, sitting with an object to be gained reinforces the illusion of a self that might gain it.
For this reason, Dogen was critical of kensho, the Japanese name for the “sudden awakening” experience of insight that takes one beyond conceptual understanding and into realization. Kensho is highly prized in the Linji/Rinzai school. My reading of Dogen is that he was not opposed to kensho itself. If the monastics’ hall story is true, he’d had his own kensho. His issue was that the word kensho means “to see one’s nature,” which sets up a dichotomy between the seer and an object of seeing.
Likewise, it’s a bit phony to describe the difference between the Soto and Rinzai schools as the difference between “gradual” and “sudden” enlightenment; it happens both ways, in both schools. The passage of time is not the critical issue. The difference is that Rinzai takes a goal-oriented approach, and Soto doesn’t.
What does one do with thoughts? There is a common misunderstanding that thoughts must be stopped, but this is neither true nor possible. To put it in modern terms, the human brain secretes thoughts the way the pancreas secretes enzymes; stopping thoughts is unnatural, even if you could do it. 19
Dogen brought a koan back from China that features Shitou Xiqian’s student Yaoshan Weiyan; it originally appeared in the Jingde Lamp Record. As Yaoshan sat in meditation, a monk asked him, “What are you thinking?”
Yaoshan answered, “I think not thinking.”
The monk asked, “How do you think not thinking?”
Yaoshan answered, “Nonthinking.”
I’m told that the passage might also be translated as:
The monk asked, “How do you direct your thoughts?”
Yaoshan answered, “I direct my thoughts by not directing my thoughts.” 20
Not directing thoughts means just being aware of them. Imagine mind as a mirror, and thoughts are reflections on the mirror. Just watch the mirror. The twentieth-century teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi updated this advice to imagining a big, white movie screen. Something is projected on the screen, but what’s important is to watch that big, white screen, without getting caught up in the projections. The reflections leave no mark on the mirror; the projections leave no mark on the screen. This is not directing thoughts.
Put another way, instead of trying to stop or suppress the thoughts or getting caught up in them, simply be aware of them, just as you’d be aware of a cool breeze. Then thoughts pass through awareness gently, without causing disturbance.
Although there are many instructions for shikantaza available in books and on the web, the best way to learn is directly from a teacher, in a zendo with other meditators.
A Note on Dogen, Soto, and Koans
There is an ongoing argument among Western Zen students about whether Dogen engaged in and taught koan contemplation. Koan language permeates Dogen’s writing, one argument goes. He brought a collection of koans back from China, and he discussed them in his sermons and essays. Therefore, some say, Dogen must have used koans as objects of meditation.
The koan curriculum approach Rinzai uses today had not yet been invented in Dogen’s day. It’s assumed that Dogen engaged in huatou contemplation when he was a student of Myozen. But in all his voluminous writing about zazen he does not discuss working with huatou. He does, however, discuss not directing throughts.
The fact that Dogen clearly appreciated koans seems a big deal to today’s Zen practitioners because of a relatively recent notion that koans belong to the Rinzai school, and Soto has nothing to do with them. This idea seems to have originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at a time when Soto and Rinzai were in a heated rivalry, and each was struggling to define what made it different from the other. But in Dogen’s day there were no such assumptions about the ownership of koans, and there was nothing at all revolutionary about someone in the Caodong school making use of them.
That said, for a time, the Soto school after Dogen did make some use of koan contemplation for advanced students, although by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was more common for Soto monastics to not meditate much at all.
The Kosho-ji Years
In 1233 Dogen moved to another temple that had been maintained by the Fujiwara clan—his mother’s family—for generations. In other words, the temple was not assigned to the Tendai or any other sect. This first Zen temple in Japan was on the outskirts of Kyoto, and he renamed it Kannondori Koshohorin-ji, although it is more common called Kosho-ji.
Also in 1233, Dogen gave his earliest-dated sermon, a commentary called “Makahannya haramitsu” on the Heart Sutra. He also revised “Fukanzazengi” and wrote “Genjokoan,” Actualizing the Fundamental Point, a letter to a lay Zen student named Koshu Yo.
In 1234 Dogen was joined by Koun Ejo (1198–1280), who would become his chief disciple and dharma heir. Before Dogen, Ejo had studied in several sects—Tendai, Shingon, Pure Land, Hosso, plus some others. For a time he was a student of Kakuan, a disciple of Nonin of the Bodhidharma school, until Tendai sohei burned down Kakuan’s temple.
As Dogen’s disciple, Ejo was the author of the Shobogenzo zuimonki (Treasury of the true dharma eye, record of what was heard), which are the notes Ejo took on Dogen’s talks and instructions. Much of it deals with institutional structure and training. Ejo also did much of the work of transcribing and editing Dogen’s lectures so that we can read them today as essays.
In 1235 Dogen began raising funds to build a Chinese-style monastics’ hall (sodo ). The monastics’ hall of Dogen’s time differed from today’s zendo, or meditation hall. The sodo was where monks ate and slept as well as meditated on their assigned tatami mats. Platforms for mats lined the walls, and the raised altar was in the center of the room. The sodo at Kosho-ji, completed in 1236, is believed to have been the first built in Japan. The dharma hall (hatto ), in which Dogen gave formal talks, was completed a year later. The buddha hall (butsudan ), used for liturgy services, already existed from the temple’s earlier incarnation as a family temple.
“Dōgen opened his monastic community for everyone, regardless of intelligence, social status, sex, or profession,” writes Hee-Jin Kim. 21 He taught laypeople as well as monastics, although he believed monasticism was the ideal path to enlightenment. He gave no hint that practice needed to be dumbed down to accommodate the “degenerate age.”
Yes, he repudiated nyonin kinsei and taught laywomen and nuns. He wrote in “Raihai tokuzui” (“Bowing and Acquiring the Essence,” 1240),
But whether we are looking at it from a secular or a Buddhist point of view, nuns should not be banned from places that farmers and others can enter. This tiny country of ours still maintains such disgraceful customs. It depresses me that although the venerable daughters of the compassionate Buddha have come to this little country, they will find the gates of such places barred to them. 22
He went on to berate monks who would not recognize the spiritual accomplishments of women. If a nun has attained the Way, Dogen said, a monk who is seeking the Way should become her disciple, request the teachings, and prostrate himself before her.
Dogen’s records give us the names of two nuns who were his long-term students: Ryonen and Egi. A laywoman named Myochi is remembered as a supporter and student of both Myozen and Dogen. Myochi’s daughter Ekan became a nun and founded two temples, and her grandson Keizan Jokin was one of Soto Zen’s most revered teachers.
The years at Kosho-ji were productive ones for Dogen. He wrote several of his most well-known essays there. And, of course, much of what he wrote irritated the establishment on Mount Hiei. It is believed—although there is no historical evidence—that Dogen and his followers were harassed and threatened by sohei. There also was a new Zen rival, a Linji/Rinzai teacher named Enni Ben’en, who had established a temple nearby. In any event, something happened to cause Dogen to abandon Kosho-ji.
The Eihei-ji Years
One of Dogen’s devoted followers, a high-level official of the shogunate named Hatano Yoshishige, offered Dogen his own property for a new temple. The property was out in the country, in Echizen Province on the west coast and a comfortable distance from Kyoto politics and the Tendai establishment. The temple was originally named Daibutsu-ji, “Great Buddha Temple,” but then renamed Eihei-ji, “temple of eternal peace.” It was dedicated in 1244.
After the move, Dogen no longer taught lay students. It’s not certain why.
In the new temple much of Dogen’s attention was turned to establishing disciplinary rules and moral guidelines. He wrote what amounted to several manuals that are referred to collectively as the Eihei shingi, or “rules of purity for Eihei-ji.” These covered everything from the daily chores to the responsibilities of temple officers to proper deportment and decorum. The latter included, for example, how a monk ought to properly manage his robe while using a latrine.
At some point Dogen determined that monks would be ordained using the ten great precepts from the Mahayana Brahmajala Sutra, the three refuges (taking refuge in Buddha, dharma, and sangha), and the three pure precepts (briefly, to do no evil, to do good, and to save all beings). 23 These came to be called the sixteen bodhisattva precepts in both Rinzai and Soto Zen.
Before he died of a prolonged illness in 1253, Dogen named Ejo as the next head of Eihei-ji.
The Soto School after Dogen
The eternal peace of Eihei-ji did not long survive without Dogen. The historical record strongly hints at considerable stress, in fact. Eventually an episode that would be called the sandai soron, or “third-generation differentiation,” caused the Soto school to splinter.
After Dogen’s death, Ejo struggled to hold the Soto community at Eihei-ji together. He had been a devoted disciple but was not a natural leader. He retired in 1267, citing ill health, and turned the abbacy over to one of his dharma heirs, Tettsu Gikai (1219–1309).
The Eihei-ji monastic sangha became embroiled in pro- and anti-Gikai factions. In 1272, after serving as abbot for five years, Gikai constructed a small hermitage on temple grounds and began to spend most of his time there, taking care of his aging mother and effectively withdrawing from his job as abbot of Eihei-ji. According to Heinrich Dumoulin, Ejo (whose health had improved in retirement) came back to lead the community. 24 Other historians say that in 1272 the position was filled by another of Ejo’s dharma heirs, Gien (d. ca. 1313).
The rifts in the Eihei-ji sangha continued to widen. Gikai appears to have returned to abbot duties, or at least to a senior leadership position, for a time after Ejo died in 1280, but he left Eihei-ji for good in 1287, leaving the job to Gien.
After all this time it’s hard to know what strained the Eihei-ji sangha. Dumoulin puts much of the blame on Gikai as a weak leader who made changes from the way Dogen had managed things. For example, Gikai attempted to introduce Shingon rituals that Dogen had explicitly denounced. 25 In his book Sōtō Zen in Medieval Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2008), William M. Bodiford of UCLA is somewhat more sympathetic to Gikai. Bodiford points out that even before Dogen died there had been tension within the monastic sangha, particularly with a faction of ex-Darumashu monks, over a variety of doctrinal and procedural issues.
As for the sandai soron, Bodiford explains that the clashing histories of the altercation we have today were recorded in the fourteenth century by rival factions—dharma heirs of Gikai and Gien—over which distinguished patriarch was the proper third abbot of Eihei-ji. It might be wise to ignore the whole mess.
Whatever the cause of the antagonism, the result was that, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, Soto was left with five lineage factions, four of which had left Eihei-ji.
Soji-ji and the Spread of Soto Zen
The Gikai lineage would become the mainstream of Soto Zen. In time Gikai became abbot of another monastery, Daijo-ji in Ishikawa. Several students joined him there, including Keizan Jokin (1268–1325). Keizan, who has been called the Second Patriarch of Soto Zen, succeeded Gikai as abbot of Daijo-ji.
Keizan is remembered as a warm-hearted fellow whose dharma presentations were less mystical and more down-to-earth than Dogen’s. He was the author of the Denkoroku, a widely read “transmission of the lamp” text. But his primary contribution to the Soto school was to grow it. He left Daijo-ji to a disciple and established several Soto monasteries, most notably Yoko-ji and Soji-ji. 26 In 1322 the imperial court sanctioned Yoko-ji and Soji-ji as official monasteries, which amounted to recognition of Keizan’s lineage of Soto as an independent Zen institution.
Keizan’s lineage included nuns. Records tell us he had at least thirty nuns as students, and there could have been many more. Keizan gave the first Soto dharma transmission to a woman, the nun Ekyu. Unfortunately, little about Ekyu was recorded.
Keizan considered Yoko-ji to be his main temple, and he went to unusual lengths to ensure that it remain in Soto hands after he was gone. This wasn’t always the case; Daijo-ji, for example, had been a Shingon temple before Gikai became abbot, and in time it would be led by Rinzai teachers. Keizen obtained contracts from his patrons stating that only teachers of his lineage would lead Yoko-ji. Inevitably, it would seem, after Keizan was gone a rivalry developed between Yoko-ji and Soji-ji. Soji-ji eventually was recognized as the head temple of the Soto school and the administrative center of a growing number of satellite temples.
Several of Keizan’s heirs are credited with Soto’s expansion throughout Japan; these included Gasan Joseki (1275–1365) and Taigen Soshin (d. ca. 1371), whom Soto students will recognize as the next names after Keizan’s in the ancestor chant. Soto monastics proselytized in rural areas and gained a following among laypeople and local elites, growing communities that would sustain Soto through the centuries. It was often the case, however, that these communities were more focused on memorial rites and other ceremonies than on the kind of practice Dogen taught.
A rivalry continued between Eihei-ji and Soji-ji until the late nineteenth century, when the administrators of the two temples grudgingly agreed to coheading the temple.
The Legacy of Dogen’s Writing
The first Zen sermon I ever heard, by the late John Daido Loori, was on Dogen’s “Sansui Kyo,” generally known in English as the “Mountains and Waters Sutra.” I understood little of it, but I was hooked anyway. In “Sansui Kyo,” Dogen presents the suchness of the natural world. In “Uji” (“The Time-Being”) he presents the suchness of time and being. In “Jinshin Inga” (“Deep Faith in Cause and Effect”) he presents the suchness of cause and effect. And there’s so much more. Dogen’s work is a treasure of the world’s philosophical and religious literature. I have read that Western philosophy academics are starting to take an interest in it. That might be gratifying if I didn’t fear what Western philosophy academics with no background in Zen will do with it.
Throughout the Kosho-ji and Eihei-ji years, Dogen worked on a collection of sermons and essays he called Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye ), which should not be confused with Ejo’s Shobogenzo zuimonki. He had hoped to make it a one-hundred-essay collection but died before it was completed. After Dogen’s death, Ejo compiled a collection of twelve texts from the later years of Dogen’s life. A dharma heir of Dogen’s named Senne (n.d.) collected seventy-five texts into what is now called the seventy-five-fascicle Shobogenzo. Another student of Dogen’s named Kyogo (n.d.) wrote commentaries collectively called the Gosho that are considered invaluable guides to Dogen’s unique idioms.
Despite these efforts to order and preserve the master’s works, as Soto Zen spread through Japan, Dogen’s scrolls were carried to new temples and then stored away and forgotten. Many of his best works were lost for centuries. Within very few generations Dogen’s writing had been forgotten by nearly everyone except a few monks at Eihei-ji.
During the late Edo period of Japanese history, all Buddhist sects were required by the Tokugawa shogunate to define themselves and explain their basic teachings. To fulfill this requirement, the monk Kozen compiled all the work of Dogen he could find into the ninety-five-fascicle Shobogenzo, published in 1690. This collection begins with “Bendowa,” which had recently been rediscovered. In 1703, the shogunate ordered the Soto school to base its practices on Dogen’s teachings. More importantly, the rediscovery of Dogen’s work sparked a renewed dedication to his approach to Zen, which continues to this day.
The standard academic work on what Dogen wrote and how it came to be collected is Stephen Heine’s Did Dōgen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It. Here I will present a very simple, very basic guide to the collections you are most likely to encounter in a Soto temple library.
Putting aside the Shobogenzo zuimonki, which is considered Ejo’s work, there are two “Shobogenzos,” called the Kana Shobogenzo and the Mana Shobogenzo. A volume that is just called “Shobogenzo” is probably the Kana Shobogenzo .
There are several versions of the Kana Shobogenzo. These various versions are distinguished by the number of individual texts, or fascicles, they contain. When people talk about “the” Shobogenzo, usually they are referring to one with ninety-five fascicles. There are many fine English translations of individual fascicles, but for translations of the entire ninety-five-fascicle Shobogenzo , I recommend either the work of Kazuaki Tanahashi or that of Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross.
There are two more volumes you are likely to find in a Soto library. One is the Mana Shobogenzo, sometimes also called the Shinji Shobogenzo, which is a collection of koans Dogen found in China. He used many of them as illustrations in his talks. While I was Daido Loori’s student, he began the task of adding commentaries and capping verses to the koans, a work eventually published as The True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Three Hundred Kōans.
The other volume is the Eihei Koroku (Eihei extensive record). It includes Dogen’s formal instruction to his monks, informal talks, and commentaries on koans as well as the famous instructions for the cook.
Dogen’s oeuvre would be a remarkable achievement just as literature, for its lyric beauty, or as philosophy, for its presentation of Buddhist teachings. But Dogen’s Zen is the Zen of practice, and its deepest value is found in its illumination of the unity of practice and enlightenment.
“Practice should not be undertaken in the mistaken notion that it has a purely instrumental value, as a means to a separate—and presumably greater!—end,” wrote Frances Dojun Cook. “To believe that one does zazen now in order to acquire enlightenment later is to merely perpetuate the very dualities that lie at the root of the human problem.” 27
This teaching is easily and often misunderstood. We are accustomed to interpreting reality through the conceptual filters of dualities, and reality not sorted into this and that is hard to imagine. It’s a slander to speak of Dogen’s teaching as “gradual enlightenment,” as many do, because gradual versus sudden is a duality that has no basis in ultimate reality. Enlightenment is already present. The function of practice is to embody it.